Crimson dragonflies mated in the air. Doubledeckered. Deft. One admiring policeman watched and wondered briefly about the dynamics of dragonfly sex, and what went into what. Then his mind clicked to attention and Police Thoughts returned.
Onwards.
Past tall anthills congealed in the rain. Slumped like drugged sentries asleep at the gates of Paradise.
Past butterflies drifting through the air like happy messages.
Huge ferns.
A chameleon.
A startling shoeflower.
The scurry of gray jungle fowl running for cover.
The nutmeg tree that Vellya Paapen hadn’t found.
A forked canal. Still. Choked with duckweed. Like a dead green snake. A tree trunk fallen over it. The Touchable Policemen minced across. Twirling polished bamboo batons.
Hairy fairies with lethal wands.
Then the sunlight was fractured by thin trunks of tilting trees.
Dark of Heart neS~&-tiptoed 4fl to the Heart of Darkness. The sound of stridulating crickets swelled.
Gray squirrels streaked down mottled trunks of rubber trees that slanted towards the sun. Old scars slashed across their bark. Sealed. Healed. Untapped.
Acres of this, and then, a grassy clearing. A house.
The History House.
Whose doors were locked and windows open.
With cold stone floors and billowing, ship-shaped shadows on the walls.
Where waxy ancestors with tough toe-nails and breath that smelled of yellow maps whispered papery whispers.
Where translucent lizards lived behind old paintings.
Where dreams were captured and re-dreamed.
Where an old Englishman ghost, sickled to a tree, was abrogated by a pair of two-egg twins—a Mobile Republic with a Puff who had planted a Marxist flag in the earth beside him. As the platoon of policemen minced past they didn’t hear him beg. In his kindmissionary voice.
The History House.
Where, in the years that followed, the Terror (still-to-come) would be buried in a shallow grave. Hidden under the happy humming of hotel cooks. The humbling of old Communists. The slow death of dancers. The toy histories that rich tourists came to play with.
It was a beautiful house.
White-walled once. Red-roofed. But painted in weather-colors now. With brushes dipped in nature’s palette. Mossgreen. Earthbrown. Crumbleblack. Making it look older than it really was. Like sunken treasure dredged up from the ocean bed. Whale-kissed and barnacled. Swaddled in silence. Breathing bubbles through its broken windows.
Deep verandah ran all around. The rooms themselves were recessed, buried in shadow. The tiled roof swept down like the sides of an immense, upside-down boat. Rotting beams supported on once-white pillars had buckled at the center, leaving a yawning, gaping hole. A History-hole. A History-shaped Hole in the Universe through which, at twilight, dense clouds of silent bats billowed like factory smoke and drifted into the night.
They returned at dawn with news of the world. A gray haze in the rosy distance that suddenly coalesced and blackened over the house before it plummeted through the History-hole like smoke in a film running backwards.
All day they slept, the bats. Lining the roof like fur. Spattering the floors with shit.
The policemen stopped and fanned out. They didn’t really need to, but they liked these Touchable games.
They positioned themselves strategically. Crouching by the broken, low stone boundary wall.
Then together, on their knees and elbows, they crept towards the house. Like Film-policemen. Softly, softly through the grass. Batons in their hands. Machine guns in their minds. Responsibility for the Touchable Future on their thin but able shoulders.
They found their quarry in the back verandah. A Spoiled Puff. A Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo. And in another corner (as lonely as a wolf)—a carpenter with blood-red nails.
Asleep. Making nonsense of all that Touchable cunning.
The Surprise Swoop.
The Headlines in their heads.
DESPERADO CAUGHT IN POLICE DRAGNET.
For this insolence, this spoiling-the-fun, their quarry paid. Oh yes.
They woke Velutha with their boots.
Esthappen and Rahel woke to the shout of sleep surprised by shattered kneecaps.
Screams died in them and floated belly up, like dead fish. Cowering on the floor, rocking between dread and disbelief, they realized that the man being beaten was Velutha. Where had he come from? What had he done? Why had the policemen brought him here?
They heard the thud of wood on flesh. Boot on bone. On teeth. The muffled grunt when a stomach is kicked in. The muted crunch of skull on cement. The gurgle of blood on a man’s breath when his lung is torn by the jagged end of a broken rib.
Blue-lipped and dinner-plate-eyed, they watched, mesmerized by something that they sensed but didn’t understand: the absence of caprice in what the policemen did. The abyss where anger should have been. The sober, steady brutality, the economy of it all.
They were opening a bottle.
Or shutting a tap.
Cracking an egg to make an omelette.
The twins were too young to know that these were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness.
Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.
Men’s Needs.
