Free Bitter Eden: A Novel by Tatamkhulu Afrika Page B

Covertly I study him – sensing that he senses that I am – see, not the black boxer shorts, but a leprous whiteness of pampered skin, see a wildness of true innocence chained and tamed, say, ‘Danny,’ and he turns to me and I say, ‘Take off the shorts,’ and his eyes flicker out of focus as at a blow, and then a blackness beyond their blackness is gathering in them and he is raging as at the touch of a defiling hand.
    ‘No!’ I insist. ‘ No! You do not understand,’ and our eyes clash with the passionate intensity of the dumb and I shake a little as he slips out of the shorts, casually as though they were but a shirt or vest, and laughs, ‘Jesus! I nearly clobbered you there!’ but there is a brokenness to the laugh that wakes an echo in me that stays.
    I am thinking I must leave now because I’m beginning to feel like a real rookie under the towel, but I fear that to summarily break off after the just past wordless crisis would give the impression of a fleeing as from a scream, and I cast around for a way to return to the mundane. It is then that I remember my concern about a blower-stove. ‘You made you a blower yet?’ I ask, reining my tone in as best I know how.
    ‘You mean those things like fire engines without wheels that you guys wank around with all day?’
    ‘None other,’ I affirm, his description easing me into an easy laugh.
    ‘Wouldn’t know where to start,’ he confesses without shame. ‘Where do I get tools and stuff?’
    ‘Have you got empty Red Cross tins?’
    ‘Some. I shoved them under my bunk. I got a bottom bunk, thank Christ.’
    ‘You give me your hut number and I’ll come tomorrow after chow and show you how to hammer out the tins and fix them together to make you a stove.’
    He looks at me with an unexpected hesitancy and I think, ‘What now ?’ Then he says, ‘Maybe I should tell you I’m only a one-striper, but you, I’m guessing, are a sergeant or a staff.’
    ‘A sergeant. But what’s that got to do with me making you a stove?’
    ‘Well, we poms have got iron up our arse when it comes to ranks and my hut’s all poms. Sergeants and above, which means I get to eat a lot of shit most times. So they might think you’re a one-striper too or, if they find out the truth, that you’re a traitor to your rank, and either way you’re not going to feel much like you’re home from home.’
    But I say, ‘Fuck them!’ and he tells me the number of the hut and I leave him with the conscious unceremoniousness of old friends, then have to hurry back to pick up my shorts, and Danny is already deeply asleep, his breathing light and even as an untroubled child’s.
    There is nothing of the child about the genitals, though. Adult, aggressive, shrewd, they lie sprawled as though scattered by a heedless hand and I am considering them fully for the first time. But they do not add to any intimacy between us, alienate, rather, because they are the forbiddenness in even this sad Eden, the ultimately untouchable zone before which our shared maleness wields as ultimate a blade. Does the sun, as the sun will, already bloat the listless penis, persuading it to that other shape that will shame him when he wakes, arouse a laughter in those who see? Should I lay the shorts beside him over his loins, act the possessive – jealous? – male, risk his anger for a meddling that may not be needed, is motivated by impulses I would prefer stayed unnamed?
    I leave him as he is, face a second crisis of the absurd as I near our hut, the shorts he has given me in my hand. What will Douglas think of such a gift? Save for his hostility towards the interloper between our bunks, he has always seemed magnanimous and tolerant, one who, to myself, I have summarized as big , but now I am no longer sure and the shorts hang heavily as infidelity from my hand. Should I throw them away? The thought is obscene and I sleepwalk into the hut, still not knowing what to say.
    ‘What have we there?’ Douglas asks