Spies in Canaan

SPIES IN CANAAN

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Travelling in a Strange Land

Gods and Angels

The Rye Man

Stone Kingdoms

The Poets’ Wives

The Light of Amsterdam

Oranges From Spain

Swallowing the Sun

The Big Snow

The Healing

The Truth Commissioner

A Run in the Park

For Alberta, who is the very best of us

CONTENTS

1. GHOST SOLDIERS
2. CROSSING OVER
3. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
4. A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

GHOST SOLDIERS

My cup is full and running over. A book full and running over with stories. So many stories you could never remember every one and all of them are true because God has told the storytellers what words to use. A giant killed by a single slingshot, walls that come tumbling down, men who walk through fire and are not consumed. Where there is no death except for the deserving because in the early-morning light the stone is rolled away and they tell me that is why I never have to die if I believe with all my heart. And so I sit on the Sunday-school pew with swinging legs, try to believe as I sing,

Twelve spies went to spy in Canaan

Ten were bad, two were good

Some saw the giants big and tall

Some saw the grapes in clusters fall

Some saw that God was in it all

Ten were bad, two were good.

and I do the falling-grapes-and-clusters motion with my hands, flex the muscles I don’t have to represent the giants and hold up the right number of fingers for the good and bad spies. Then when it’s time, I give my collection coins that are to be split equally between the orphans and the lepers. And the silver-haired Miss Reynolds brings out the flannelgraph, sticks pictures on it about a boy who lives in a barrel, but I don’t like this story so much as some of the others because I like to think the pictures for myself. So I see the little boy who brings five barley loaves and two small fishes and how they feed the five thousand and sometimes when I open my brown paper lunch bag in school I know how hard it must be to do a miracle. But there are miracles everywhere in these stories – a child born in old age, a withered hand healed, a storm told to be still. So many miracles I can hardly remember them all.

But there is one miracle that as a child frightens me and sometimes creeps inside my dreams, and only years later I see that it’s not a miracle after all. After the plagues, after the pestilence, an angel with black beating wings, knife in hand, swooping in at midnight across the silent desert sands to kill the firstborn, killing Pharaoh’s child and even that of the captive in the dungeon. Killing the unbelievers. I am a firstborn and in my dreams I hear their screams rent the night. In later life it flares back again in all its raw intensity when I watch the pictures of Isis ravaging across desert sands. But as a child I believe that if my father has painted blood on the doorposts and lintels we will be safe, all those who have followed this command will be unharmed, and so I lie perfectly still, imagine the door to our world painted with blood and, amidst the silence that enfolds the sleeping house, strain to hear the angel’s wings passing in the darkness.

I walk out to the garden and into the late-afternoon air, needing a little time to think, and look at the magnolia. It’s identical to the one we had in our London residence. Julia had planted this new one the very year we moved into the house, a house that was to be our permanent abode and our very last home. And for her it was, its finality unanticipated when cancer granted her the shortest of leases. There is still a lingering languid perfume from the creamy white flowers, even though the fierce flush of its earlier blossom has slowly faded with no trace of Lowell’s ‘murderous five days’ white’ igniting the coming evening, and when I touch the blossom it feels fleshy, ready to break in my hands, the soft pulp seared with a delicate blush of pink.

I take the petals, go back inside and set them in front of her photograph then return to my desk. Hannah, my housekeeper, comes to the doorway to tell me she’s going and that’s she left me something light for my supper in the kitchen. I have a growing dread of these moments. As always she asks, ‘Will that be all?’ and as always I answer yes and thank her but have no way to tell her that after she goes the house will fall again into a silence and increasingly a part of me wants her to never leave. I listen to the front door close, hear the familiar complaint of her car’s elderly engine as it starts up and try to focus again on the words.

But I’m distracted once more by the padded envelope on my desk that contains a DVD and the briefest of notes from someone I knew over forty years ago. Someone with whom I shared a part of my life in a far-off world that was short in duration but whose memories continue to accompany the counting down of my years. And there’s something in me doesn’t want to view it, because I don’t always trust the past and sometimes, if you stumble into it unaware, it can pull you in like quicksand, drag you down until you go under. And I know I have to hold my head up, so for the moment at least I set the envelope to one side and try to find my own path back, exercise some control over what is rising to meet me.

But perhaps I’m only avoiding committing to the details because it goes against the grain, against all the values of discretion that years of service inculcated. Discretion, secrecy, silence – these are still the trade’s accepted virtues, even in an age of supposed freedom of information where the idealists believe that it never requires a price to be paid. Those we bring through rendition to sit in cells with their interrogators in places that don’t exist and those we subject to ‘enhanced techniques’ know a different truth – that knowledge is often the most dangerous thing of all to possess and that in this world the safest lives are those who know nothing. But only if you are believed. Yes, only if you are believed.

How to tell the story and be granted this belief, even if never as completely as I would wish? So much distance has been travelled from those far-off days and there are other things fixed firmly inside the codes of confidentiality I once worked by, and perhaps, above all, the redactions we all make on the pages of our past. And yes, when you alone carry the information, it is, of course, a pressing and constant temptation to omit or even reshape the moments when we were less than we wanted to be, or make ourselves the victim rather than the perpetrator of our own lives. I’ve realised that already.

Perhaps to counter that I have a little postcard of one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits above my desk. I glance at it often, think how tempting it must have been to leave the world a noble image, one infused with an enduring grandeur. But this is not what I see. Instead he gives us the face of an old man saddened and wearied by the incomprehensible flurries of life that have carried him here. His clothes are black, his eyes look away from the darkness that occupies one side of the canvas, but it’s as if it’s slowly moving towards his face and already seeping into his skin. A silent dignity survives the centuries. Perhaps such a final dignity will always be out of my reach because I think the only way to attain it is by telling all of the truth and I’m not sure if I can do that, or even if all of the truth is something that can ever fully exist any more in this world where the Chinese whispers of the Internet era have resulted in what we blithely call fake news.

My story isn’t inspired by an awareness of the dying of the light. I’m no longer young, of course, but in that brief hinterland that exists just before you become very old. My health is generally good, only the arthritis in my left knee that sadly prevents too much tennis a nagging nod to mortality. So I hope there are plenty of miles to go before I sleep. Nor is it about rage, because I’m not fired by an intensity of anger but rather mostly just regret and the longings you think should have withered on the vine with advancing age. That’s one of the strangest things about getting old – you assume that all the restlessness and confusions of your younger years should, with the fullness of time, be replaced by an inner security, a solidity that preserves from the high tides of life, when actually what endures is just a different current of troubling uncertainties. And if it doesn’t flow with the same spring fuse of youth and you think yourself cossetted by whatever money and status you’ve accrued, you can never swear that a single moment, whether in a waitress’s fleeting smile or a juddering memory, might not see those same defences permanently eroded.

I was a small-town prairie boy whose featureless, unbroken horizons were filled only with what could be conjured from dreams and, as I grew up, the endless supply of books I borrowed from our local library, where trespassing dust trembled nervously in the thin shafts of light slanting through the windows’ wooden slats as if wary of discovery. And it was in this same library that I first imagined I was in love, in love with Mrs Hartford, one of the two librarians and mother of two boys who attended the same school as I did. I’d watch her through the stacks, surreptitiously part the spines of books to allow my view, secretly track the course of her work routines by listening for the press of her black patent shoes against the wooden floorboards, but if she so much as smiled at someone she probably thought of as a serious boy and keen reader, I’d blush and lower my head to whatever text I was studying, momentarily mortified by the thought that she could read my adoration as plainly as the words on a page. I would always wait to ensure that she was at the front desk and the one to stamp my books and, as she did it, I’d feast on the piled and pinned glory of her hair, the delicacy of her fingers, the whiteness of the underside of her wrist. Hoped one day she might come to work with the pins removed from her hair so it fell in auburn drifts about her shoulders. Hoped she’d be impressed by my reading choices. Perhaps those months of painful infatuation were the genesis of my sense that love and books are somehow sensually indivisible, that one can’t fully exist without the other.

What little of the world that existed outside my library-book pages had been pared even more by an evangelical Presbyterian upbringing and decent but plain-living parents. My father, who had an agricultural seed business, was an elder in our local red-brick church, superintendent of its Sunday school, and his sea of faith never ebbed throughout the rest of his life, until that life was stolen by something else. A faith symbolised by a burning bush, but what smouldered unquenched through my late teenage years was a desire for something and somewhere to which I couldn’t even give a name, much less understand how it might be attained, until gradually those stories with which I had grown up came to be overlaid with different ones. So Jonah and his whale was replaced by an old man struggling to land a giant fish – an old man who in his youth from the deck of his boat had seen lions walking on an African beach – and the feeding of the five thousand was pushed aside by what felt like the even greater miracle of Rose of Sharon suckling a dying man. And these stories gave me a different world in which to live, told me I wasn’t crazy and more than anything that I wasn’t alone, while whispering that the seemingly endless stretch to the horizon might in time come to be filled with something I hoped would reveal itself to be love.

But Saigon had no horizon, no empty spaces that hadn’t already been claimed and filled full of unmediated life. The city flared intensely against the senses the way its incessant traffic flowed all around you, and whatever nervous resistance I might have initially offered was soon swept away in absolute bewildered surrender. In those first few days after my arrival it wasn’t languid oriental images, or a Zen-like calm, that pressed against my consciousness but rather the frenetic intensity of the moment from which there was no escape and from which I desired none. So on those early mornings when I walked the couple of blocks to the downtown offices where I worked I was almost overwhelmed by the scenes and sensations that blazed through me.

Men brushing the streets with what looked like fantails of twigs, swishing rotting crimson and yellow fruit into the gutter; already a stream of Hondas weaving round cyclos and cyclists, one with a gas cylinder propped on the handlebars, one with hens in a bamboo cage and a pyramid of boxes so the rider was barely visible; an open-fronted barber’s shop with a poster of James Dean in the doorway and the bee-like buzz of clippers zipping; the sound of the Mamas and the Papas from an open window and paper lanterns hanging from a wooden rail; the spicy sizzle of a noodle stall; the wavering blue wick of a welding flame in a courtyard as a man worked on a bike repair; sunlight splaying against beer and soft-drinks kiosks and under one of the scantily leafed tamarind trees that lined each side of the street a trio of shoeshine boys called out to me, their voices high like a harmonised descant. They weren’t the only inhabitants of the city who spoke to me those mornings. There was a begging, legless vet on a bamboo mat always in the same spot who held out his wooden bowl; an old woman all in black perched on a little stool massaging her feet who raised her face to me and uttered what might have been a daily greeting or a curse; and a young woman with sleep in her eyes wearing a white halter top and denim hot pants, who invited me inside the darkened doorway of the steam and massage parlour behind her.

My very first night in that city, however, had seen me make a fool of myself. A combination of jet lag, some questionable airline food and a general sense of disorientation saw me slip into a fractured sleep, awash with the swirl of crazed images that had their origin in television’s portrayal of the war. I woke repeatedly before forcing myself into a shallow doze but suddenly jerked awake as gun and heavy-arms fire burst all around the building. My first night in Saigon and I was taking incoming fire. I tumbled out of bed, ducked to the window and tried to look out without making a target of myself. Intermittent, luridly-coloured light flared behind a building on the other side of the road. I backtracked and opened the door, then stepped into the corridor to meet an American who appeared to be responding to the attack by taking a six-pack of beer and a girly magazine to his room, three doors down from mine.