fiction: Taman Shud
Taman shud
His head rests on the seawall, his ankles are crossed and his toes point towards the ocean. On this southern bottoming out of the country, the waves want to pull him under, fold him into the earth. Maybe in Sydney, or on the other side of Australia, in Perth, they would have wanted to play with him, stretch him out to South America or toss him up to India. But in Adelaide, when he looks out the sea it is as if he is already leaning down into the curve of the shoreline, the weight of the end of the world an extra pound of gravity that presses his neck into the sand. Or is it the sand pressing into his neck?
Harold has been here for hours. Martha told him to meet her at Somerton beach, just a few blocks down Moseley Street, across from the Crippled Children’s Hospital, at 17 hours. He waited standing, pacing for the first hour or so, anxiously pulling from his box of Army Club cigarettes, sucking smoke into his lungs through tight fingers. He could have sworn he had more than three cigarettes left.
Sweating under an unwise number of layers, he removed his double-breasted jacket several times, only to quickly replace it when he thought he saw her walking through the sand. After what had to be two hours, he had his shoes shined by a dark-skinned young man across the road who hadn’t made a dime all evening. He gave the kid all the money he had on him, some loose change that jangled gently in his pockets.
It was not prudent in their profession to be early or late. In the years he’d known her, she had never been either. But this was different, he thought. Maybe it took her longer than expected to get her affairs in order. Maybe she was having trouble making arrangements for Robert.
Just before sunset, his muscles begin to feel heavy and warm, like thickening broth under his skin. He feels more exhausted than he’s been in years, and a nauseating tickle creeps from his stomach up to his throat, coating the sides of his mouth with saliva. He lets his knees bend gently into the sand, and leans backwards, letting the seawall form a headrest, and, quite a pleasant view of the sunset. I should’ve drunk more water this afternoon, he thinks. After all, he is not accustomed to the strong Aussie sun.
After a while, he barely notices the rocky wall pressing into the back of his head. He watches the sun dive towards the horizon and tells himself once more that she will arrive soon, flustered and apologetic, with some explanation or another.
He imagines himself stuck up against the underside of the planet, the forces of the universe pegging his limbs deep into the wet sand that lies a couple of feet below him. The drier, smaller specks of sand that bounce around on the top layer of the beach are less immune to gravity’s dull push, as they glide over and around any space they feel free to, forming clean lines that pool into circles above his collarbones, flow in ribbons down the creases in his jacket with each slight movement, until they make their descent to their final resting place.
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Harold woke up to an empty train car. He thought it was just seconds before that a small child and his nanny sat across from him while the bleak countryside passed by. But now the train idled in the Adelaide station, shaking with an urgency that made him rise to his feet. He retrieved his suitcase from the luggage car, and walked through the station with a cloud of sleep still hovering between his ears. He watched the departure times and cities of Southeastern Australia flutter down the timetable, recurring waves of letters and numbers. The incessant clicking reminded him of the rapid fire tapping of typewriter keys back at the Office. A noise that often provided the soundtrack to his dreams, and then nightmares.
As trained, he carried and wore nothing that could identify or even be traced back to him. He wore a featherstitched grey and brown coat, finely tailored trousers, a knitted woolen pullover, and collared shirt with a red-white-and-blue tie, all of the tags delicately snipped out. The contents of his suitcase included red and black checkered pajamas, brown velvet slippers, a stenciling kit from his days as a third officer on merchant ships, and weapons in the form of household items—a sharpened kitchen knife, a screwdriver, table scissors with sharpened points.
Harold was the sharpest dressed man in Adelaide Station, and no one noticed him. When he bought his train ticket to Glenelg, the station clerk didn’t even make eye contact, and when he checked his suitcase into the cloakroom, the attendant barely glanced at him. These slights were not avoidances, nor were they intentional; Harold just had the kind of face that you forgot the second you looked away from it.
After all, he was not chosen for his charm or his intelligence, and his fluency in French was nothing more than a professional advantage. He was chosen for his ability to go about completely unseen, a muted presence that neither attracted nor repelled. That, and his aptitude for careful observation.
When Harold turned 18, he secured his first job on a cargo ship. His mother beamed.
“You’re a man now, Harold,” she told him. She paused, then, and shook her head. “Not that you ever really were a child,” she said. He exhaled, and prepared himself for the rote parlor conversation exercise she’d practiced in sitting rooms across southwestern England.
“You rarely smiled,” she reminded him. “Barley ever, you see. And the way you would look at things—I mean really look at them, as if they were going to disappear into thin air if you looked away!” She cackled at these memories. “You were quite content to just sit and observe. I always wondered what you were thinking about, staring at poor folks as if they were aliens.” Her head would arch back in feverish laughter, and he thought he could almost see the pungent red of her lipstick vibrating into the air.
Harold never could find this anecdote humorous, and at times when he heard his mother telling family friends and uninterested acquaintances, he still felt trapped in his childhood brain, unable to solve the enigma of his young eye’s severe gaze.
The way people talked of youth, carefree and blinded by ignorance, was a foreign concept to Harold. He never recalled a time in which the days seemed endless, the future seemed full of hope, and the world was a place to be trusted. Everything he had ever encountered or would encounter in life was marked by a blemish, some shade of sadness that made it incomplete, unreliable.
Martha was no exception. But the wretchedness that she held inside her was no match for the delightful nausea he felt at her sheer presence, or for the uninterrupted and unfettered path her memories had traced through the wrinkles of his brain. Harold had retraced this path so many times, it was now smooth and effortless. His thoughts would wander to her and flow like soft water through freshly polished steel pipes. Often he would linger on one moment, unsure if it was a memory or a dream, perhaps a little of both. Long tortured by this uncertainty, he had decided years ago that it simply couldn’t matter. And so the water flowed, memories dissected and retraced until there was nothing left to remember, and then transformed into imaginary conversations that they never had and never would have.
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Martha heard a knock on her front door, and the way her heart jumped inside her chest it might as well have been an air raid siren. She wasn’t accustomed to visitors, just the occasional nosy neighbor offering some plain and horrid welcome gift. And she hadn’t expected him so soon.
She opened the door cautiously, as one does when they fear what’s on the other side. Three feet apart, Martha and Harold looked at each other and felt the distance that only the sickening ache of years spent apart can create. To her, he looked surprisingly clean-shaven and well-dressed; to him, she looked jittery and drained.
“Winthrop,” she said.
“ Jestyn,” he replied. He remembered the way he used to wait for her in his dimly lit second-story apartment in Paris. Martha Thomson, field name Jestyn, was a courier back then, one of the few dodgier jobs given to young ladies because they were deemed less suspicious than men at border crossings, delivering memorized messages that would be insecure transmitted by radio. Harold always waited by the window, watching as she walked with purpose down the city street manned by enemy soldiers. The Germans wore grey, she wore black.
“I’m so terribly sorry,” she said, filling the long moment with vacant words. “I look such a mess.” She wandered through the front parlor and let him follow her in. “I’ll just freshen up a stitch if you don’t mind,” she called from her bedroom.
He should’ve told her she looked lovely, that she didn’t need to freshen up for him, that she would’ve been stunning in a bathrobe, but she was already up the stairs. He stood, unmoving in a rectangle of sunlight that shone through the large window, sweating under grey wool.
She sauntered back in, silently commending herself for the cool and breathy way she moved around the room, unflappable.
“Take off your coat,” she suggested, hoping this didn’t come off as too obvious. She brought the coat to the kitchen, which if he found strange, he didn’t comment on, thank goodness.
“Sit, sit,” she said, gesturing towards the sofa. She turned towards the mirror, the only wall hanging in the spacious room, and spoke to his reflection. “You’ll have to forgive me, I was just getting ready to go out.”
“It’s not a problem.” He kept a subtle watch as she layered and patted down beige powder over a cream base, the skin of her face suffocating in the heat of an early afternoon in late fall. Summer’s sun had left its color in her skin, and the shade of foundation was a breath too light. A slight crease on the chin, a line on the forehead, she was a porcelain doll whose maker ran out of paint. She brushed away beads of sweat that had finally pushed through all three layers of her cream and powder complexion.
“Where are you off to then?” he asked, keenly aware that her careful primping was not for his benefit. She studied at his reflection in the mirror, unable to turn. How many times had she spoken to a ghost of this man? In her mind, in her sleep, he was always turning up out of thin air, an ungraceful yet somehow elegant thing of a man.
Sometimes she squeezed her eyes shut so hard it would make the skin on her forehead strain against her hairline, expecting him to be standing in front of her when she opened them. Sometimes when she returned home from long, aimless drives along the beach, she imagined him sitting on her sofa, waiting for her in the darkness. It was almost disappointing when the radio transmission delivered news of the impending arrival of H.C. Reynolds, field name Winthrop.
“To fetch Robert,” she told her own reflection, brushing her eyelashes into black curls above her heavy eyelids. She assumed he had found out by now who Robert was.
Lipstick always last, and for this final mark Martha didn’t dare look away from her lips. She thought it improper to look a man in the eye when applying red lipstick; it dared to suggest something acidic. He watched her all the same, and knowing this was enough to let an extra drop of sweat seep through the seams of her foundation. Her face reddened without applying a touch of rouge as she pinned her loose ringlets into tight rolls that fashioned a snug frame of curls around her head.
“There we are then.” The shock must have drained from her face when she took her seat across from him in the parlor.
“They told you I was coming?” Harold asked.
“No,” Martha answered, too quickly. Perhaps she was a bit flappable, only ever with him. “They…we thought you were dead.”
This was true, in part. She thought often of his death. It wasn’t uncommon in their profession. She had buried little pieces of him all over the world, settling his bones and her unspoken longings into shadowed alleyways and high tower windows. Death was the most plausible explanation. That, or a menial desk job in KGB intelligence, somewhere mid-ranking in command, providing research on cases that were low priority and leaving the office every day at the same time as the secretaries. Death or stagnation, it made little difference. She knew he deserved a life of substance, but would demand neither life nor substance when given the chance.
“You still work for the Office?” he interrupted her thoughts.
She nodded. “Of course.”
“Oh, I just thought—” he stopped, not wishing to offend. “You work from here?” She looked outside to her dozy neighborhood. Many of the homes that surrounded her own were lifeless and boarded up this time of year, summer beach houses for Adelaide’s upper class.
“The Office wanted to establish stronger networks with Australian intelligence,” she said, reciting stock language. She didn’t mention the clandestine intelligence-gathering site a few towns over, or the leaking of top-secret materials to the Soviet embassy in Canberra last year. Perhaps he knew these things already.
Martha and Harold stared at different sections of the parlor room rug in silence.
“I’m terribly sorry,” she said suddenly, shaking her head in an angry fit of laughter. “What is it that you expected coming here?”
This was his opening, his platform for the speech he had prepared, little by little, every night before falling asleep for the last 12 months.
“Martha,” he said softly. “When I left London, I know it felt like I’d left you alone. I’ve never felt so alone in my life. But I felt the walls closing in—you know how the Brits get so spooked at any spot of Red. The other Cambridge chaps, they were losing it—drinking till they couldn’t walk and having nervous breakdowns right there in the office. The pressure was killing them. I had to get out while I could—I didn’t want Robert to have a drunk or madman for a father. Moscow was the only safe place I had left to go. They thought I was really working for them, see. But everything I did, I did it for us. I did it for him. You remember back in Paris? The nights we spent playing cards and smoking cigarettes until we thought we’d die?” He smiled and his eyes twinkled. “It’ll be just like that, only now we won’t have to worry about the damn Germans finding us and torturing us to death.”
No, Martha thought. Just the KGB.
“Look, if we leave now, we’re free, the way I see it. They haven’t caught on to me yet, see, we still have time. We’ll take the train back to Adelaide, then up to Sydney, take it one day at a time, you know? We can go anywhere. We can be anybody we want to be.” He took her hand in his, just the way he’d imagined, but the over-rehearsed words fell limply into the stuffy parlor room air.
Martha did her best to look convinced. She did her best to look in love. Not that she didn’t love him still; she never did understand how to simply stop loving someone after you’ve begun. But it was an unfinished love, the most painful sort. Not unrequited, just incomplete, the kind of love that does not warm but rather burns with its fire.
She stared back at him through the thick veil of makeup that she could feel sitting on top of her face like spilled ice cream on hot pavement. Her eyes stared in between a forest of black lashes, heavy lashes that stuck together a quarter of a second after each blink.
Don’t blink, she thought, and say something.
Goddamnit, say something.
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The agents always left one by one, 17 or 24 or sometimes even 39 minutes apart, as not to arouse suspicion. Alfred departed first that night, gifting Harold a precious 17 minutes with Martha alone. This was the night that he’d known he loved her. Baker Street was notorious for its lurid affairs between older Cambridge and Oxford-educated men and young code breakers or flirtatious couriers. But this was no garish romance, and the alcohol that buzzed through his veins that evening gave him the nerve to leave the basement room just 2 minutes after her, following the path he knew she’d take back to the safe house.
Snow had been falling throughout the night, and his footsteps made curt, dull crunches against his boots. Still, he moved quicker and quicker to catch up with her until the blue of her skirt caught the light of a streetlamp on the opposite corner of the street.
And there was Martha, pressed against the wall of a tailor shop by a tall man. Harold almost called out to her, until he heard a giggle escape from her lips.
“Alf!” she squealed, as he buried his head in between her neck and the fur lining of her overcoat. All three agents, not supposed to cross paths in open air, on one street corner in Paris. Harold walked home, collecting flecks of snow in his hair, and looked back only once.
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“Cigarette?” he asked, a final offering. Harold put up his best Bogart, attempting to emulate the suave way he would offer a light to a beautiful woman.
Back in Paris, when Martha received word that it wasn’t safe to return to London just yet, they watched and re-watched the Hollywood films the Americans brought over for entertainment. Martha especially loved Humphrey Bogart, the frank sincerity in his eyes and the flat bemusement in his voice. And the way he would grab a woman by her shoulders before kissing her like it’s the last thing he’d ever do.
“I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble,” Martha would say, imitating Bogart’s stern expression.
“You’re a good man, Sister,” Harold would reply, though he never could get the cadence quite right.
It took Harold three tries to get the match lit now, and when he extended his hand, the flame shook, bouncing to the syncopated rhythm of his trembling fingers, a leaf shaking against the wind.
She brushed it away.
“No,” she said. “They make me rather dizzy.” She didn’t look to see his puzzled reaction. Three years ago, he had seen her slide a fresh cigarette between her lips while the last one still burned orange into the ground.
“Right,” was all he managed to say, as he lit a cigarette for himself.
They watched each other with a certain understanding. In his eyes, she thought he saw doubt; in hers, he thought he saw sorrow.
The door clicked shut behind him and the ground beneath her may as well have been made up of falling sand. If only he had kissed her, and seen how insignificant she truly was.
Martha watched him walk with intent along the street through the parlor window, looking forward towards the beach with irrational optimism. She shook her head to expel his hope, and her guilt from her head, loose curls bouncing out of their bobby pins.
She wasn’t the one who rolled the cigarettes with dead man’s bells; she wasn’t the one who sent the coded telegraph instructing his demise. She had only replaced the Army Clubs with Kensitas—the more costly brand of cigarettes, after all. What toxins filled the filters was none of her doing or concern.
She sat on the sofa for a quarter of an hour, staring into the designs of the garish wallpaper and fingering the pearls on her necklace until they shined with her own sweat. A passerby who witnessed this display would have thought her possessed.
It was perhaps fitting this way, she thought, given that she was the only person in the universe who saw the scratched-off underbelly of Harold’s existence, that she would be the one to take it away.
Her breath caught as her eyes caught themselves in the mirror. Perhaps she could stop him before he smoked the Kensitas. Or maybe if he’d just smoked one, it wouldn’t be enough to do him in. She couldn’t take him to a hospital, obviously, but she remembered bits and pieces of her nurse training from years ago. She sprinted past groomed lawns and untroubled children. Indeed, indeed.
Martha was nearing the end of Moseley Street when she stopped, breaking out of her run in three short steps. Sweat ran in rivers down her face, picking up her cakey foundation along the way and forming creamy grooves that dripped off her chin. She pressed the back of her hand to her neck to catch them. Repentance oft before.
Just as she wasn’t sure what it was that made her run after him, she wasn’t sure what it was that made her stop. She almost laughed at herself for running after him, like some simpleminded schoolgirl pining for her chance at head-over-heels love. Life was not about romance anymore. During the war, romance let them forget that they were risking their lives simply stepping foot on French soil, that her colleagues caught in the field were being sent to death camps. Romance was impractical and inconvenient in real life, where there was so much less to lose.
Pentinence a pieces tore.
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A pair of lovers saunters by, giggling just above the seawall. The woman yelps in surprise when the streetlamps flicker to life.
The sand is colder now; he thinks it could be snow. The darkness has pulled all remnants of sunlight from the sky and replaced them with little sparkly dots. As many stars in the sky as grains of salt in the ocean. They shine and swirl in whirlpools every time he blinks.
And that is when he sees her, a blurry outline that becomes brighter as she floats towards him. The fancy studios lights give a soft, glossy sheen to Martha’s pale complexion as the camera pans across her face. She is smiling, but it is a wounded, distant smile, one that is no relative to joy. He reaches out to her, breaking the line of the projector and casting a shadow over the image. Just as he fully extends his arm, the picture fades to black, and the score builds as the credits roll. His arm drops limply into the sand. The couple has made their way down the beach, out of earshot.
He watches a dragonfly land on a fold of his trousers, inching along the soft creases, choosing to crawl when it knows how to fly. He heard once that dragonflies only live for twenty-four hours. What a cruel joke, to exist only for a day but feel it is forever.
He thinks that perhaps every memory he had ever remembered, even the ones recorded and then lost, are all at once playing through his mind, flickering at 29 frames per second on the same screen. How disappointing, he thinks, that these are all of the thoughts he is ever going to have. Parceled out one by one, his memories make him feel significant, even invincible. He has very few memories of which he was ashamed, quite a few that would have made his mother cry with joy and his father stand taller, if they had been there to witness them.
But somehow, all together, the memories are blurry and flat, the ones that had been clamoring for attention, their voices dying out and dragged out to sea to drown a silent death.
Harold feels that he could be swallowed up whole into the deep caverns of the earth. Miles beneath the sand, there is a burning, black hole searing into the rocky strife, that is pulling and stretching through layers of silt and stone, beckoning him home.
Harold lies on the beach until everything he has ever said or done or dreamed or thought is dredged up by fishing nets, examined and inspected, and thrown back, sunken and anchored to the sea floor. He comes across a thought he had once, as a 23-year old sailor the on a merchant ship, stenciling a crate of cotton. He remembers this moment so vividly, the way the ship’s long, sluggish rock against the waves made his head feel heavy and his bones feel hollow. The way the salty water that leaked in through the cracks mixed with sweat and stung his eyes. He remembers thinking that there must be something more than this, that maybe he was destined for something greater, something great, even. The memory lasts just long enough for him to know that it was real, and then, like all the rest, it is forgotten.
A burst of wind spins off the ocean, picking up his hat and dragging it down the shore. The waves that sneak up onto the wet sand pull the hat back down with them. His hat drifts away, and dances in circles out to sea, where the waves finally pull it under, and fold it into the earth.
