Bitter Eden: A Novel by Tatamkhulu Afrika

Author:Tatamkhulu Afrika
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, War & Military, Gay, Fiction
ISBN: 9781250043672
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2014-02-24T13:00:00+00:00

We have lost all sense of space and time, the significance of what we pass, only peripherally observe. Pines, stark as pikes, approach, recede, as though it is they that move, tell us that there is a perspective to the white paper of the snow, but we, too, are paper, stay paper, two-dimensionally and blessedly unaware. Each day we slosh through the snow that is not snow, each night lie down in it, the flakes covering us like the bugs in that land, now two years dead, where I cannot remember it ever having rained, though, of course, it did, the unchanging sun shining in my mind alone.

How slowly, prissily, we move, putting each foot down as though its bones are broken or a priceless glass, but the guards don’t seem to mind, seem to understand that we are barely this side of sense, that no amount of shouting, or belabouring with rifle-butts, will quicken flesh already busied with its death. The two loaves of bread, dozen boiled potatoes and a Red Cross food parcel each with which we started out have long since been desperately, sparingly, eaten and returned to the earth in the shape of our minute, difficult turds, and all that is left to us are the occasional, seemingly abandoned turnip fields that the guards permit us to rifle, phlegmatically watching as we claw out the turning-woody turnips and gnaw at them with teeth that, each day, seem less rooted in our gums.

We ask the guards how much further and they shrug. We ask them what is the purpose of the march and, mostly, they again shrug, but some say we are going to a better camp down south, but don’t look at us while they are saying this, a tightness to their mouths that disturbs. We pass through a city which we are dimly aware has fallen in upon itself like a pack of cards, only a cathedral’s steeple still standing as though it witnessed to the indestructibility of truth – or is it myth? – and people are scuttling in and out of the ruins and going about their business with the imperviousness of ants, and we ask the guards what city is this, but now they do not shrug or answer, just look at us with a loathing that rears its head with the swiftness and deadliness of a snake.

Each night, bodies thick as slugs with all the clothing we still possess, Danny and I bed down together, grappling each other for warmth with the awkwardness of mating snails, and sometimes we fumble back through the two years since we rocked down the last gradient into a countryside of lawns that were virgin grass, and storybook houses for pixies and elves, and we rank and sodden from lying, interlaced as packaged fish, in the shit and piss that anxious anuses and bladders were no longer able to restrain. It is then that we realize that the past can be as truly past as it

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.