Part 4, Chapter 3 (First Half)

Again, I'm sorry about the slow updates. I'm moving apartment (again!) today, so it's been a busy week. Enough excuses though, here's the first half of Part 4, Chapter 3. There are only three chapters left after this one, and it's at this point that conflicts start to come to the fore, and we see the resolution on the horizon.

I'll post the second half on Thursday, and I'll even schedule it into the Blogger program, so I don't forget.

Enjoy your coming week.

Dave

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Chapter 3

The next morning I wake to the noise of somebody moving around in the living room. I drag my lethargic body out of bed and stumble through the doorway. I know I look a comfortable mess. Martin is awake, groping through his backpack. It occurs to me that throughout the night, my own bag has sat in the corner of the room with the machinegun strapped to its side. This realization gives me a brief sense of panic until I notice that the gun hasn’t moved an inch since I left it there. The relief washes over me in a cool wave.

“Hey,” martin says with a smile. “How’d you sleep?”

The reaction from the boy cheers me, as for the first time since arriving at Saul’s home, Martin has shown enough confidence to start talking again. I know this is because Saul isn’t in the room. I don’t understand the boy’s aversion to the man — Martin has never displayed any nervousness around me, so I know he doesn’t worry about strangers. Saul is old. Saul is black. Saul is a loner. Any of those things could be an explaining for the boys attitude. “Yeah, I slept fine thanks,” I say. “It was great.” I look around the living room, uneasy in another man’s strange home. “Is Saul awake yet?”

“Yeah, he uh—” Martin pauses long enough to shrug his shoulders. “Well, he went out earlier, but I don’t know why. He thought I was asleep when he left so he was quiet about it.”

This strikes me as odd. “Oh, ok then. I guess I’ll make tea.”

*

While Saul is gone, Martin and I sit around the coffee table in the living room and talk. I ask Martin about his school life, trying to unearth why he was often so insular and shy, but after much digging I get no closer to understanding his reasoning.

Martin tells me about a particular teacher at his school who, in an effort to combat Martin’s shy nature, would make him read aloud in front of the class each day. Martin despised this, but his English skills were far exceeding those of his classmates who were denied the same opportunity. Martin laughs about how relieved he is, now that he will never go through that ordeal again, and we hear Saul turn the handle on the front door. The boy’s laugh falters. It’s a terrible way to react, but I’m inexplicably worried for my own and Martin’s safety. Saul’s mysterious disappearance didn’t concern me too much, but his silent approach upon the house is uncanny and unnerving. As he fumbles the door open and walks into the room, I’m on the edge of my seat.

Saul looks at us, aware of the strange atmosphere. He smiles, surprised and innocent.

“What?” he says, gesturing to his hands. He holds several small logs of wood. His smile turns to an amused smirk. “I was only getting wood for the fire.”

*

Noon approaches. Through the remainder of the morning, Saul and I sit in the living room and he tells me stories from his life. I know that he enjoys the role of the older man who passes on knowledge to his younger protégés. I know he doesn’t do this often, so I rarely interrupt his narratives. He tells me about the time he enlisted with the military, stationed in Israel in the 1950s, jumping from planes, fighting with his superior officers, landing himself in military hospital and finally military prison. He tells me of when he was stationed in the Egyptian desert, watching the huge battleships move slowly along the Nile. In that endlessly flat landscape, the ships look like they sail through the sand instead of any misplaced waterway.

As Saul tells me of beer, cigarettes, and violence in an intolerable heat, Martin sits by the fireplace, poking at the burning logs with a metal rod.

Saul tells me how his love of literature came to fruition. He’d started a fight over a beer tab. Things didn’t go his way and he woke up in an Egyptian military hospital with a knife wound in his stomach. Bored shitless in the hospital, he turned to reading to pass the long hours. He borrowed books from the meager hospital library and stole others from a rich British soldier in the next bed. He repeatedly devoured J.B. Priestley’s, An Inspector Calls, and several of the patients staged a performance of the play with Saul’s direction. Then when Saul was transferred to military prison (because the other combatant was an Officer), he turned to books again to survive the harsh environment in which he found himself. Saul had heard rumors that military prison was supposed to be an easy affair, but his own experience was far from this. He found himself the only black man in the complex. This was unusual and he was soon an outcast, despite the camaraderie normally found in the armed forces. From that time onwards, books saturated Saul's life. His method escape from these hardships was through the musty pages of old hardbacks, the quiet flutter of paper, and the overwhelming swarm of words as one flicked through a tome. Saul buried himself in those pages and words and never left, retreating into bibliophilia, loving his books more than anybody or anything else in this world.

Perhaps this explains his violent overreaction to Martin’s accident.

As Saul recites his stories, Martin entertains himself with the fireplace, nudging the wood with the steel poker, causing the flames to surge and fume, taunting the fire and losing himself in fascination. I watch the fire dance as I listen to Saul’s tales of his youth. When a chunk of wood falls from the fireplace, much to Martin’s dismay, it takes me a moment to react. It takes Saul longer. He notices my reaction first, and then turns to notice the burning log. Already Martin is trying to scoop the wood back towards the fireplace with arwith a, but in one regard, it’s too late. The unfortunate casualty is a copy of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. A flame licks it’s dusty, peeling cover, and fries the top pages. Martin bats the burning wood away and it rolls to the base of the fireplace where it rests on the hard flooring. Then he hits the flickering novel and puts out the burgeoning fire, leaving a jagged hole in the books centre.

Saul stands in silent disbelief and stares at the novel. He scoops is up from the ground, still hot, and holds it before his face. “What—” he begins. An eternity passes, and he continues to stare. Martin looks to me, nervous. “Saul?” I ask.

But he just stands in the middle of the room, cradling the book. “Oh no,” he says in a flat tone. Then he repeats himself. “Oh no, oh no.” I can’t grasp the depth of his devastation. It seems so alien. How is he so upset over a single book when surrounded by so many thousands more? Like a child who damages a toy and decides that toy had meant the world to them. Saul is so self-absorbed that he fails to place such a small loss in any reasonable proportion.

I ignore Saul’s lamentations for a moment and turn my attention to the burning wood on the ground. I pick up the two open beers on the coffee table and pour them over the flames. Then I turn back to Saul and The Pilgrim’s Progress. The old man holds the book away from his body at waist height trying to ascertain the damage, which is greater than I first realized. Again, he says, “Oh no, oh no.” The smoke from the extinguished wood fills our lungs. It brings back images of burning down my family home. Now, that was loss.

Martin’s face is a mask of worry and horror. “It’s ok, right?” he says to Saul. When the boy fails to evoke a response, he turns to look at me. I stand a couple of feet away. I don’t know what to do, or even if there is anything I can do. Instead, after Martin and I make a brief eye contact, I shrug my shoulders in a gesture of reassurance and turn to wait out Saul’s bizarre reaction.

“Look what you’ve done,” Saul says. He shakes his head and repeats himself, spitting through clenched teeth, the book held in the firm grip of newly appeared anger.

“I’m sorry,” is all Martin says.

I try to defuse the situation. “Saul—”

“Look what you’ve done.”

“But, it’s alright?” Martin says, as he reaches up to touch the book. I’ve broken out in a sweat. The perspiration on my forehead is a shocking cold, like electricity through my brain. My arms have begun to heave and wobble as adrenaline surges through my body. I’m nervous of what’s going to happen next and worry that Saul’s reaction could manifest itself physically. Didn’t he only just say he was once holed in military prison? I know something terrible is about to happen — I can read such a reaction in Saul’s bloodshot, bulging eyes.

Saul steps slightly away from Martin; more like his body veers an inch or two to the side. “No, it’s not alright,” he says with his teeth set tight in anger. “It’s not alright!”

Martin utters an upset, “But,” and retracts his hand from Saul and the prize the old man grips.

And Saul snaps.

“Does this look alright, you little fuck?” he yells at Martin. This from the man who only one night previous had told me how much of a responsibility Martin must become to me. “Does this look alright?” He thrusts the book close to Martin’s face, so the boy can see what he’s done. Martin takes a step backwards in fear.

“Hey, Saul!” I yell. He was right last night. He said the boy was my responsibility and so I won’t let the old man bully him. “What the fuck are you doing?”

But Saul doesn’t hear what I say. He’s too absorbed in his own anger. He’s not angry at the book’s value diminished, or even angry that Martin committed such an accident, instead he is angry that something has been taken from him. He’s angry that he has had to deal with another loss. Perhaps this is why he has imposed such an isolated lifestyle upon himself. Perhaps Saul has been through more loss than any reasonable mind should have to cope with. But that excuses nothing.

All that loss is a mute point as I watch this old ex-military man advance on a twelve-year-old boy, tears on both of their faces and my own body pumping with new fury.

“Saul!” I yell.

“Please!” Martin begs.

“You little fuck,” the old man screams, clutching his book. “You little fuck!”

And the boy is tumbling backwards, tripping on the raised tiles of the fireplace’s terracotta base. The tiles are cracked and lined with soot and Martin falls towards them with a yelp, cut short by a thud, his head cut short by the hard wall. He’s on the ground, crying, a long drone at first, and then a hoarse intake of breath, before a wail cutting through my ears.

Saul’s expression has changed. He heaves air into his lungs, panicked at what he may have done, horrified at what he has already done. Then my own emotions of anger manifest themselves in physical outrage at Saul. I see blood around Martin’s head.

“You old fuck,” I scream. “You dirty — you bastard fuck!”

And then I’m running at him, my peripheries burring, the boy’s screams filling my skull and Saul turning to face me, in slow motion, in horror. My fists are pounding the old man and make contact with his bald head. He drops backwards to the ground and I follow him down, screaming. “You fucking bastard. A boy! You fucking bastard. I could kill you!” Somewhere behind me, I know Martin’s bleeding. And really, really, I do, for a moment, try to kill Saul, wishing him dead as I continue to pound my fists through my ragged breath and a lip bursts or a nose bursts and my knuckles are numb and Martin’s crying has stopped because he sees what’s happening and, somehow, I’m dragged back into the world with an unconscious, maybe dead, old man beneath me, with red running down the black valleys of his creased face and blood on my own knuckles. I roll back and lie on the ground. All three of us on the ground, and all three of us wondering, what the fuck has happened? What the fuck has happened? How the fuck did this happen?

*

“Get your things, Martin,” I say. “We’re leaving.”