Bitter Eden

by Tatamkhulu Afrika

Genres: World War II; War & Military; LGBT Gay

Synopsis

ONE OF NPR'S GREAT READS OF 2014

A modern classic being introduced to the United States for the first time, Tatamkhulu Afrika's autobiographical novel illuminating the profound and incomparable bonds forged between prisoners of war.

Bitter Eden is based on Tatamkhulu Afrika's own capture in North Africa and his experiences as a prisoner of war during World War II in Italy and Germany. This frank and beautifully wrought novel deals with three men who must negotiate the emotions that are brought to the surface by the physical closeness of survival in the male-only camps. The complex rituals of camp life and the strange loyalties and deep bonds among the men are heartbreakingly depicted. Bitter Eden is a tender, bitter, deeply felt book of lives inexorably changed, and of a war whose ending does not bring peace.

Release date: February 25, 2014

Publisher: Picador

Print pages: 240

Sample

I touch the scar on my cheek and it flinches as though the long-dead tissue had a Lazarus-life of its own.
Uneasily, I stare at the two letters and accompanying neat package which are still where I put them earlier in the day. Within easy reach of my hand, they are a constant and unsettling focus for my mind and eye.
The single envelope in which the letters were posted is also still there. Airmail and drably English in its design, its difference from its local kin both fascinates and disturbs. I am not accustomed any more to receiving mail from abroad.
The one letter, typed under the logo of a firm of lawyers, is a covering letter which starts off by describing how they have only managed to trace me after much trouble and expense, which expense is to be defrayed by the ‘deceased's estate'. Then comes the bald statement that it is he that has ‘passed on' – how I hate that phrase! – after a long illness whose nature they do not disclose and that I have been named in his will as one of the heirs. My legacy, they add, is very small but will no doubt be of some significance to me and it is being forwarded under separate cover per registered mail.
The other letter is from him and I knew that straight away. After fifty years of silence, there was still no mistaking the rounded, bold and generously sprawling hand. Closer inspection betrayed the slight shakiness that is beginning to taint my own hand, and I noted this with an unwilling tenderness and a resurgence – as unwilling – of a love that time, it seems, has too lightly overlaid.
After reading the letters – but not yet opening the package – I had sat for a long time, staring out of the window and watching gulls and papers whirling up out of the southeaster-ridden street, but not knowing which were papers and which were gulls. Reaching for an expected pain, I had found only a numbness transcending pain and, later, Carina had come in and laid her hands on my shoulders and asked, her voice as pale and anxious as her hands, ‘Anything wrong?'
I do not mean to be disparaging when I refer to Carina in these terms. I am, after all, not much darker than her and although my hair is fair turned white and hers is white-blonde turned white, my body hair is as colourless and (as far as I am concerned) unflatteringly rare. I, too, can be nervy although not as pathologically so as Carina whose twitchiness sometimes reminds me of the dainty tremblings of a mouse – and that despite the fact that she moves her long, rather heavy bones in a manner that is unsettlingly male.
Do I love her? ‘Love' is a word that frightens me in the way that these two letters frighten me and if I were to say ‘yes', I would qualify that by adding that – in our case and from my side – love is an emotion too often threatened by ennui to attain to the grand passion for which I have long since ceased to hope.
Certainly, though, I loved her enough to be able to say, ‘No, everything is fine,' and turn around and smile into the once so startling blue eyes that now – under certain lights and when looked at in a certain way – have faded into the almost as startling white stare of the blind.
Whether she believed me or not, I cannot say, and equally do I not know why I have bothered to even mention a wife, and a second one at that – the first having absconded to fleshlier fields a lifetime ago – who does not in any way figure in the now so distant and tangled happenings with which the letters deal. Or do I, indeed, know why and have I subconsciously allowed Carina to surface in a manner and image that have more to do with me than her and that will save me the pain of having to explain in so many words why, in those years of warping and war, an oddness in my psyche became set in stone?
Whatever the case, I am now back with the package and the letters, leaving Carina sleeping – or pretending to, she being disconcertingly perceptive at times – and no commonplace papers or gulls beyond the window to divert me: only a darkness that is as inward as it is outward as – yielding to the persuasion of the tide I thought had ebbed beyond recall – I turn to the package and start to unwrap it, then stop, not wanting this from him and as afraid of it as though it held his severed hand.
Or is this all fancifulness? Am I permitting a phantom a power that belongs to me alone? What relevance do they still have – a war that time has tamed into the damp squib of every other war, a love whose strangeness is best left buried where it lies?
Haplessly, unable to resist, I listen for the nightingale that will never sing again, hear only the screaming of an ambulance or a patrol car, a woman crying to deaf ears of a murder or a raping in a lane, and lower my face into the emptiness of my hands.
* * *
I am lying on the only patch of improbable grass in a corner of the camp. Balding in parts, overgrown in others, generally neglected and forlorn, it is none the less grass, gentle to the touch, sweet on the tongue. The odd wild flower glows like a light left on under the alien sun.
I am not alone. Bodies, ranging from teak to white-worm, lie scattered at angles as though a bomb had flung them there. As at a signal, conversations swell to a low, communal hum hardly distinguishable from that of the darting bees, dwindle away into a silence in which I hear a plane droning somewhere high up, frustratingly free.
I am back in the narrow wadi sneaking down to the sea. I shelter under a rock's overhang, clutching the recently shunted-off-on-to-me Hotchkiss machine gun that I still do not fully understand. Peculiarly, I am alone but I know that in the wadis paralleling mine there is a bristling like cockroaches packing a crack in a wall of thousands of others who wait for the jesus of the ships that will never come. I have stared at the grain of the rock for so long that it has become a grain on the inside of my skull.
A bomber, pregnantly not ours, lumbers over the wadi on its way to the sea, its shadow huge on the ground, its belly seeming to skim rock, scrub, sand. I dutifully pump the gun's last exotic rounds at it, marvelling that, for once, the gun does not jam. But there is no flowering of the plane into flame, no gratifying hurtling of it into the glittering enamel of the sea, and I stare after it as it rises into higher flight and am drained as one who has milked his seed into his hand.
Later, a shell explodes near the sea, the sand and the windless air deadening it into the slow-motion of a dream, and the sun sets into the usual heedless blood-hush of the sky.
I squat down beside the now useless gun, resting my back against its stand, thinking I will not sleep, staring into the heart of darkness that is a night that may not attain to any dawn. But I am wrong. There are muted thunderings, stuttering rushes of nearer sound, an occasional screaming of men or some persisting gull, but I strangely sleep, as strangely do not dream, and am woken – not by any uproar but a silence – to a sun still far from where I have slumped down into the foetal coil. I do not need any loudhailer to tell me that the lines are breached, that the sand is as ash under my feet.
Dully, I struggle up, still tripping over trailing sleep, slop petrol over the gun and the truck of anti-gas equipment deeper in under the rock, curse all the courses at Helwan that readied frightened men for the nightmare that never was. The synthetics of the suits, gloves, boots, intolerably flare.
Down at the dead end of the beach, I wash my face in the tideless sea, stare out over the still darkened warm-as-blood water to the skyline that has become a cage's prohibitive ring, go back, then, to the higher, now sunlit land where silent men are smashing rifles over rocks with the ferocity of those who wrestle serpents with their bare hands.
I pass what is clearly an officer's tent. It is dug in until only the ridge shows, neat steps leading down. Outside, a batman is washing a china plate, saucer, cup, his pug-dog peasant's face seemingly unconcerned, but it does not raise from its staring down at the trembling of the hands.
I pass another tent sunk in the sand. Again the ubiquitous robot's playing games, denying midnight now. Frenziedly the hands polish the buttons on an officer's tunic, button-stick inserted round the buttons so that the Brasso will not whiten the sullen cloth, bring upon the hands a comic wrath. The tunic's shoulder flaps flaunt a crown. I am thinking ‘Christ!', beating back bile.
He is coming towards me, studying the anonymity of my fatigues, two pips glinting on his shoulders, sandy hair lifting in the awakening wind. The hair, the prissy pursing of the lips, the button mushroom eyes, warn of the worst of the breed and I snap him my still smart training college salute. He floppy-chops an arm back, barks, ‘Unit and rank?'
I think to tell him I am Colonel this-or-that because how would he – now – ever find out otherwise, but the solemnness in the air like bells' dissuades me and I say, ‘Sergeant. Second Divisional Headquarters. Sir!'
His eyes widen a little as he balances between surprise and what I suspect is a chronic tendency to disbelieve. ‘Div. H.Q.? What do you do at Div. H.Q.?' There is a slight emphasis on the ‘you'.
‘Chemical Warfare Intelligence and Training. Sir!'
He is impressed and it shows in a slight inclining to me of stance and tone, and something like a greediness of the eyes, which makes no sense and which I dismiss as a stress-induced fancifulness of the mind.
‘Do you want to hand yourself over like a sheep or make a break?' His voice is casual but his glance is sharp and I hear myself saying, ‘Make a break,' even though previously there had been no thought of that in my mind. I am honest enough to admit that I am no hero and, even now, I am painfully aware that my excitement at the prospect of escape only slightly exceeds my congenital dread.
‘Get in that truck then,' he says and indicates a battered three-tonner a few paces off. ‘Where's your kit? Are you armed?'
‘No kit, sir. No arms.' Even as the words still sound, I realize what I'm saying and I hump not my kit but my shame as I for the first time am faced by the fact that I never even thought of retrieving my kit from the anti-gas truck before I set the latter alight. As I said, I'm no hero and more likely to be stood against a wall than paraded for a gong, but he does not seem to mind, even nods, and I get into the truck and see that there are already others in it, lying flat, face down. Surely veterans, these, because they have lined the sides of the truck with the kitbags that they did not forget to bring, and another spider of fear scuttles up my spine as I understand – as I should have at the start – that they are braced for the crossfire that is already raging in my mind.
It would take but a step and a jump to again quit the truck, but I stay put and we are off, the truck weaving and rattling over the moonscape of the land, roiling up a hot white dust that settles in our hair, eyes, clothes, till we look like labourers in a cement factory coming off shift, and the knotting in me slowly slackens as there is still no shot or shout.
Then, without warning, we stop, the suddenness of it sliding us around like loose cargo on a canting ship, and the cab door slams and the lieutenant is shouting to us to leave the truck, hands raised. And we stand up, but don't raise our hands because we don't know what the shit he is on about, and the Jerries are ringing us round and the lieutenant is proffering his revolver to the brass in charge. But the brass waves it aside and the lieutenant turns to us and smiles, but there is nothing behind the button mushroom eyes and I know the meaning of betrayal and the rottenness that slinks in the flesh and breath of men.
‘Come,' says the lieutenant. Then, patronizingly: ‘We could never have got through, anyway.'
‘And you knew that,' says the hulk with a beard beside me and a gun seems to flow into an extension of his hand, but his aim does not match the buccaneer beard and the lieutenant stares, chalk-faced and open-mouthed, as his shoulder shatters and the revolver farts a useless round into the sand.
The brass fires then and the hulk's face explodes, splattering me with blood and bone, and I lean over the truck's side and hurl up the supper I never had. Then the Jerries post a guard over us, gun drawn, and another gets into the cab beside the driver and the truck turns around and heads back into the dying town.
The lieutenant does not look back as the grey, stolid shapes close round him and I unashamedly claim the hulk's kit as my own and, upending his water bottle into my hand, cleanse my face and fatigues as best I can.
‘Anybody lying here?' asks a pommy voice, referring to the narrow space on my left, and I open my eyes, but the sun is level with them now, blinding them, and I close them again and say, ‘No.'
As expected, he takes the space without any further asking my leave, which would have been unnatural anyway in a place where anything unclaimed is everyone's prey, and I am only surprised that he had anything at all to say before he flopped himself down. His shoulder lightly brushes mine and I wince aside, not only because I dislike poms, but because I have never been one for touching or being touched and, as a prisoner, I have been leant upon, trodden on, shoved all possible ways, with a frequency and vehemence that should see me through for the rest of whatever days are still mine. Also, he smells of soap, the overly scented yet almost frothless shit that one can sometimes beg or buy off a guard, and his shoulder is wet as though he has just crouch-bathed under one of the rows of taps in the open-ended shelter across the way.
I almost grow curious enough to turn around and look at him, but the sun is a gold leadenness in my limbs and I am back under that other sun as the Jerries add us to the biblical multitude that waits, not for any Saviour, but for the older than that assembling of the enslaved, the time-before-time's smashing of the rebellious knee.
Actually, the conqueror turns out to be not at all like a royal Caesar or a rapacious Genghis Khan. Or should that be the other way around? Flanked by his panzers in his one overt try for histrionics and his face shrouded in the shadow cast by his cap, he speaks to us as one who too, dixie in his hand, stands in the queue when grub is up. We are, he assures us, lions (which, secretly and guiltily, we know we are not), but our officers are donkeys (which, most passionately, we know but too well), and a sigh like a wind in ripening wheat runs through us as we stand, belly to spine, locked in our adoration of this new god of war.
Not me, though. I am still seeing the lieutenant turning to us with his savouring smile of a little boy who pulls wings off flies and I am wondering what other and less pleasing agenda lies behind this companionable charade. And this mistrust is still prowling in me when a guy I know I know, but cannot at once place, comes up to me, humping his kit, sweat like a wounding under his arms, and says, ‘I am from Div. H.Q. Aren't you?'
I look at him and nearly say, ‘No,' because, one, I'm by nature a loner and my one-man job as the anti-gas freak has allowed me to indulge that up to now, and, two, this man looks like he's going to make more of a loner of me after the first few exchanges about the nothing we share.
It's not that he looks all that bad. He's got this hook of a nose that reminds me of Issy Kapelowitz who was in our class at school, but I don't think he's a Yid because (unless he's a convert which only happens about once in a trillion years) there's a crucifix slung about his neck and, if you're asking me, it's ivory and he had better watch it or his parting from it is liable to be the brand of sweet sorrow he could well do without. His hair (what I can see of it under the dust) is brown and soft and more wavy than curled, and his brow is high (which does not necessarily mean that he has sense) and his chin juts (which does not necessarily mean that he is anything other than several kinds of an obstinate cunt).
His eyes, though, hold no ambivalence, interpret all else. Sunk deep in his skull, ringed by the bruises of a sleepless night, crinkled at the corners as though he laughs a lot or is a lot older than his flawless, clearly still natural teeth would have me believe, they are gentle – and conciliatory – and understanding – and every other damned innocuous quality that can sometimes so set my teeth on edge.
No, even with those eyes, his face is not intolerable, and his body is not laden with any belly and his legs go down straight and his arms, though no weightlifter's, are reasonably muscled and male. What does put me off are his movements: the little almost dancing steps he takes even when, supposedly, he is standing still, the delicate, frenetic gestures of his hands, the almost womanliness of him that threatens to touch – and touch – and touch – and I have already told of my feelings concerning that.
But then I look around me at the facelessness of the crowd, the namelessness of it because there are so many to name, the stemming of us into this sweating, defecating mass by the single thin wire strung on makeshift posts pushed into the dispassionate sand; and the alienness of it all, of this scarred and dying world that holds nothing of the green exhilaration of my own heart's land, overwhelms even my solitariness and I look at him with something of a despairing and say, ‘Yes, I'm from Div. H.Q.'
‘I knew I'd seen you there!' he exclaims and his hands flutter like exuberant wings. ‘I was a clerk in Intelligence. Typing and files. That sort of thing. What did you do?'
‘Nothing much,' I lie. ‘Emptying the generals' piss-pots most of the time.'
‘Oh,' he says, a little thrown. ‘But you are joking, aren't you now?' Then: ‘Well, I think we chaps from Div. must stick together, don't you? At the moment I feel more like a child out of school than anything else and yesterday I quite sinfully enjoyed destroying all those stuffy files! But the feeling won't last because God alone knows where to from here. So,' and he thrusts out his hand, ‘my name is Douglas – Douglas Summerfield. What is yours?'
‘Tom – Tom Smith,' I say, struggling to get my hand back from his lingering clasp and naming my names as coarsely as I can in the hope that this will emphasize their commonness as opposed to the grandiloquence of his and so, from the start, abort a relationship upon which he seems ferociously intent, but from which my entire ego quails. I do have enough of a conscience left, however, to remember with some measure of guilt that the names on my birth certificate (and which I hardly ever spell out to anyone) are Thomas Aloysius Smythe.
The small, mean ploy fails. When I sit down on the dead hulk's kit, he sits down on his – next to me – and talks and talks, not irrelevantly or even tediously, but with a bright hungering for communication with – grappling to – another that bewilders me and draws me even deeper into a shell which he does not seem able to sense is there. Or does he and is it that which is spurring him on to ever more determined efforts to break me down?
There are moments, always brief, when he falls silent, takes a rosary from a button-down pocket of the tunic with its three stripes of the rank that we share and, running the rosary through his fingers, mutters under his breath with an intensity that unsettles me even more than the usual prattling of his tongue. And sometimes a sudden surging of the crowd will separate us and I will try to slip away from him through the bodies standing densely packed as mealies in a field, but always, somehow, he finds me again, either suddenly reappearing at my side, fine white teeth smiling and glad, or waving to me over the intervening heads like – I savagely think – a drowning clown or a tart desperate for trade.
Later in the day, the Jerries begin to truck us out of the temporary camp, travelling in slow convoy along the coastal road, the sea sometimes seen, sometimes only the salt of it crying ‘Here!', and Douglas is again right there beside me in the truck, having held onto my arm with a bruising stubbornness throughout the crazed battling to get aboard. Why, I am wondering, did we so object to being left behind when, so Jerry tells us, we will tomorrow morning be handed over to the Ites who, we are assured, are something else again?
Dusk shading into night, the convoy stops as at a sign and the trucks melt into the side of the road. Ours crashes in under a low, almost leafless tree and the driver-guard whisks a camouflage net over the still protruding bonnet with the deftness of an old angler casting his line. Why, I do not know, because the sky has been clear of our planes all day. Have we still got any planes? Are the Jerries, the Ites and us all that is left of humankind? Where are the wogs to whom this soil belongs?
I get off, Douglas shadowing me – who else? – stare out over the flat endlessness at the other side of the road, this solitary tree. Ancient flint glints in the half-light, the earth seems tinged with as old a blood, stubborn scrub starts up out of it like terrified hair and I am crying inside. Douglas, clinging to my profile, puts out a mothering hand, but I strike it aside and he exasperatingly smiles, nodding that he understands, and I come closer to prayer, fiercely, entreatingly, wishing him gone.
Astonishingly, the driver pours water from a jerry can into a canvas basin on a collapsible stand, invites us to wash our faces and hands, pantomiming what he means when his tongue fails. Warily as beasts too many traps have scarred, we edge closer, do as he says, but quickly, knowing that our necks are achingly exposed, and he fetches some cup-sized cans from somewhere in the cab, not fearing that we might cut and run – where to, anyway? – and begins to open them, not with a bayonet, story-book style, but with a civilized tin-opener that stabs me with thoughts of other places, other times, as poignantly as it punctures the cans.
Then he hands us each an opened can, pantomiming ‘Eat!' and I see that the cans contain chunks of a grainy, grey meat in a splash of thin and oily slop, and I take out a pinch of the meat with cautious fingers and taste it, and it is as though I had never known a tasting tongue before, and I bolt the meat and slurp up the slop with all the passion of the hunger I had forgotten my belly held. And Douglas, forever vigilant, looks at me with as passionate a pitying and hands me the still uneaten half of his can, saying he is not hungry, and I am sure he is lying and make to hand the can back, but then think, as much of irritation as of hunger overcoming me, ‘What the fuck! If he wants to be a prick, then let him!' and the Jerry picks up our two empty cans and puts them with the other empties into a sack and throws the sack into the cab, asking nothing of us, more captive than conqueror and a kind man who does not wish that we litter this small refuge that none of us might ever again have reason to disturb.
Is it his kindness – or Douglas'? – that, too late, shames me, turning the meat in my belly into the dead flesh that it is as we lie down to sleep, I in the hulk's greatcoat, Douglas beside me in a waterproof, the rest variously huddled as the earth cools down with the suddenness of a switched-off stove? Quietly, I turn my head. Douglas is asleep, lying on his back, his mouth slightly opened, his breath even and slow, the hands with which he earlier counted his beads composed, the almost frenziedness of his waking self subsumed by the vulnerability of the inward child. Am I too intolerant of him? Should I cut the relationship and have done? Is ‘relationship' not too strong a word? Can there be a relationship between the pursuer and the pursued?
I turn my head the other way, quickly now, aware of a rustling of wind or sand. The driver, unsleeping, is standing there, on guard and armed. His shape is very black, very tall, against the nearing, plunging, shower of the stars; his face, in profile, has a noble flow. Enemy and killer, yet there is a grace in him, a youthfulness and urgency that is as beautiful as it is animal and male, and I fall asleep against my will, knowing that he is there.
I wake up, once, before we must. He is still on guard, but standing at a different angle to where I lie. A misshapen moon is now low in the sky. I do not know if it is rising or setting, suddenly do not even know where we are, never having been further than where we lost the war. Long shadows reach for me as though I am the last of living flesh. A bird or beast horribly howls. I am floating again on a lambent, tideless sea where, a millennium ago, we swam under a risen moon, our limbs' pale tentacles seeking our beginnings in our ends.
At first light, Douglas is shaking me and we are all rising and looking past each other like dead men. Even Douglas, sensing our sombreness, spares me the usual bonhomie, and the driver sets up the basin again and we wash, distasteful of ourselves as though, in the night, we had consorted with a foulness primal as the sand. And the driver hands us each a crooked doorstep of black bread, indicating that he is sorry that he cannot give more, and in the clear betraying dawn I see that he is not at all tall, and there is a scar running from the corner of an eye to under the chin and his eyes are old and stunned from having seen too much too soon.
Douglas has readied his kit – and mine – and is now standing staring in the direction of the barely audible sea, fingering his beads and muttering what I have learned are ‘Hail Marys', and, although I say nothing, having been taught respect for other people's faiths, I wish he would stop because, to me, prayers are a private affair and he is as embarrassing to me as though I had come upon him with his pants down and shitting behind one of these stones.
Maybe Douglas has a point, though, because he is just dropping the beads back into his pocket when the Jerry points to dust-covered truck after ditto-covered truck rounding the far western bend of the road and says ‘Mussolinis' as though the word leaves a bad taste on his tongue. Then, his eyes gravely compassionate, he makes this-way-that motions with his hands that indicate a switching-round and my heart is darting in the cage of my throat and the bread in my belly is a black pregnancy of unease.
‘Hey, Yank! You got a watch? I get you cheese and chocolate for watch.'
Where I am lying is next to the highwire fence and the speaker is so close that I almost feel his breath on my cheek. But I don't turn my head to look at him because I know who it is. It's the particularly scruffy little Ite guard with a face like the mummy walks again, his eyes alone belying that with their glitter like needles and the quickness of spiders on the run. To him, all prisoners are Yanks and have watches all the time and, like me, are suckers for chocolate and cheese, and his breaking in on my thoughts so peculiarly on cue worries the little extrasensory worm I inherited through my mother's genes.
‘Fuck off!' I say and turn my back on him and the bolt of his rifle clicks as he screams, ‘You fuck me? I fuck you!' but I know he will not shoot and the ou beside me laughs an honest laugh that I could like, but Douglas has already taken his place in the ramshackle Ite truck rattling its way westwards under a lowering sun.
That night, we are herded into a cemetery with a fence around it that is as impregnable as any prison's, and although I am aware of random lights filtering through inadequate blackout shields, there does not seem to be any ongoing activity save ours and the night is as unidentifiably about us as the middle sea. The graves are clearly those of wogs, and believing wogs at that because the mounds of earth are mostly unadorned in compliance with a faith as austere as the desert in which it was first proclaimed, and, in the still moonless night, I stumble and fall as from a reaching of hands and know a horror at our desecration that no agnostic should. Douglas, though, is undisturbed, ensconced as he is behind the barricade of his beads.
‘Herding' is too harsh a word? Hardly so. Jerry was right about the Ites. Runts in ragged uniforms that uniformly don't fit, egged on by foppish officers who porcinely, tediously scream, they flail into us with boots, fists, rifle-butts, their zest the tired simulations of children playing a game long since no longer new.
I am generalizing the way xenophobes do? Perhaps I will ask myself that question, maybe even answer it, in some later, more gracious time – supposing, of course, that such a time can ever again be – but at the moment, in a night that never ends, my only philosophy is that of the living who would not be dead as these we are now trampling under their crumbling mounds.
As the incoming trucks disgorge more and more of us into the burial ground's inelastic space, cramming us against each other and the dangerous discomfort of the barbed wire fence, I say to myself that this cannot go on and, when the moon at last rises, I see from Douglas' face that he is telling himself the same thing, his eyes disbelieving and stunned, but – and this stays with me – his soft, garrulous mouth set as tightly as mine in his determination to stay alive. Hell, I am thinking, he is not all piss and wind.
Sometime in time's long standing still, stasis is reached as we stare with faces pressed against even the inside of the only gate and the guards know that to open it would be to unleash an onrush as involuntary as the bursting of a dam. I am lock