The Islanders

Smuj OLD RUIN / STICK FOR STIRRING / CAVE WITH ECHO

By Dant Willer, IDT Political Editor, writing for Travel & Vacation Supplement, Islander Daily Times. Although never published in the newspaper, this short essay has been available online from the IDT website for several years.

It began as a routine assignment for this newspaper, the sort of travel story I have been writing on and off for many years. As readers will know my by-line appears more often in the main part of the newspaper reporting politics or the economy, but all the staff here at IDT are given occasional travel assignments. Someone, we console ourselves as we pack our sandals and sun block, has to do these things.

The reader we have in mind is someone who might be thinking of taking a trip or a holiday. For those who are not we try to convey a reliable idea of what the destination is like. Travel journalism is not important in itself and only rarely has a wider relevance — for each reporter it can be a gentle reminder that there is more to life than trying to break a major news story.

My assignment, only the third in as many years, was to visit SMUJ. Why Smuj? everyone asked, including myself before I set out. Joh, the chief editor of the T&V Supp, said, ‘Your question provides its own answer. It’s a place no one seems ever to have heard of. There is no better reason for going there.’

So, in the spirit of seeking the hidden, the lost, the forgotten, the unknown, the undiscovered, I set out to explore Smuj. The first challenge was to find it.

As regular readers know, the IDT no longer publishes maps. The official reason for this is because most maps of the Archipelago are notoriously inaccurate, but our former policy was that an approximate map was better than no map at all. However, the newspaper had to revise this policy when a few years ago the T&V Supp inadvertently sent a group of retired church workers to a Glaund Army rest and recreation base on the island of Temmil. Perhaps that is largely anecdotal, but the lesson was learned. Instead of printing an unreliable map now we give details instead of how we travelled to the destination, and leave it to our readers to follow in our steps. This is always the hardest part of the assignment, as here in the IDT office we are not even allowed to use the unreliable maps printed by our rivals.

So my search for Smuj began. All I knew at the outset was that it is somewhere in the seas between Paneron and Winho, and is often said to be obscured behind the magnificent Coast of Helvard’s Passion. As I began my search on the internet — a first resort for everyone — a website assured me that Smuj was so well hidden within its own mysteries that even today the people who come from there, should they leave their enigmatic homeland to venture into the wider, mapless reaches of the Archipelago, will maintain the fiction of its inaccessibility and lament the impossibility of their ever being able to return.

It is all, I am a little sad to report, a romantic fiction. Smuj can be found. Neither immediately, quickly nor easily, but it is there to be found. All that is necessary is to forage through the small print of the ferry services in the approximate area and you will find that regular services are there. Not advertised, I should add, but certainly there.

Because I wish to encourage you to follow in my footsteps, I can save you the task of foraging. I chose to travel to Smuj on the scheduled services run by the Skerries Line, one of the smaller ferry operators in that part of the Archipelago.

The ship picked me up as the brochure said it would, and it departed and arrived on time at every port of call. There are many of these stopovers but they are greatly varied. The comfort on board for passengers was plain but of a completely acceptable standard, and the ship neither sank, went aground nor played loud music on its public address system. The cabins were air conditioned. While on board there was full, if occasionally intermittent, internet access. The shaded decks were adequate protection from the sun, and the steward service was good.

At one point in the voyage I was so lulled into a sense of contentment that I even thought, given the time and the funds, that I should like to spend the rest of my life cruising slowly through the Dream Archipelago. I loved the endless cerulean seas, the beneficent breezes, the tropical warmth, the attendant seabirds and surfacing dolphins, and of course the passing show of islands and rocky passages and glasslike calms. At night too the spectacle continued: we frequently saw the diamanté glitter of the lights in houses and towns, sometimes burning a path of bright colours across the dark sea towards our ship. I was therefore not all that pleased to disembark on Smuj, but because in reality I have neither the time nor the money to spend the rest of my life on boats, I was not sorry either.

On arrival I found, as half-expected, a small island, charming and unspoilt, with many of the conventional, expectable attractions for visitors. The swimming is safe and there are several uncrowded beaches and coves to choose from. The scenery is modest but appealing. There are quiet mooring places for private yachts all around the coast. Scuba diving on the reefs is recommended. There is no casino, but once a year there is a horse-racing event. As for eating, the standard of cuisine in the restaurants I went to was normally better than adequate and at best of world-class excellence. Private or rental cars are not allowed on Smuj, but two-stroke mopeds may be rented on a daily or weekly basis. The proprietors of several of the hotels I went to in Smuj Port claimed to have recently installed internet access, but I was unable to confirm this.

Smuj is one of the few islands I have visited where there is inter-ethnic tension. For some reason Smuj has inherited three different vernacular patois systems, but none of them is dominant over the other two. It seems apparent to me that should the tourist trade increase then the influx of visitors will have the same unifying effect on the locals it has everywhere else, but that has not yet happened. One of the curious sights and sounds at the end of the long hot days on Smuj is the evening promenadá, where parading individuals and families exchange remarks, clearly mildly offensive, in street language the recipient probably does not understand, while the meaning is not in doubt. The mood is aggressive, but also somehow good-natured, almost a ritual. Rude hand signals do not a civil war make! Balancing this is the obviously high level of interested interaction between opposite members of sex in the young people. Perhaps within the next generation this conflict will die out, if only for this reason.

Meanwhile, it means that Smuj offers the sympathetic visitor an unusual social experience.

The patois divide also means that the name Smuj has three patois interpretations: ‘old ruin’, ‘stick for stirring’ and ‘cave with echo’. These are by consent more or less interchangeable.

I was due to stay on Smuj for a whole week, but by the third day time was hanging heavy on me. There is little culture on the island. In Smuj Town there is a small lending library, containing popular novels and copies of recent newspapers. There is a theatre, but locals told me it had been closed for several years. Touring companies rarely visited Smuj, they said, and in any event the theatre building needed to be renovated. I went to the museum, but had exhausted my interest in its few exhibits in under half an hour. I found a cinema, but it was closed. The only art gallery was exhibiting colourful paintings of the town. Swimming beaches and coves speak for themselves, and photographs are enough.

Then, one day at noon, while I was in a bar cooling off from the blistering sunlight, someone asked me if I had yet visited the ruined city in the hills. I had not. That evening I found out what I could — it was thought to be more than a thousand years old, destroyed in an ancient war, abandoned by what inhabitants had survived, and thereafter the little that remained had been sacked and looted.

The next morning I set off on a rented moped and headed for the range of inland hills. There were no indicating signs, but the man at the rental office told me that once I was through the pass I would see a large wooded basin surrounded by the hills, and the ruins were probably somewhere there. No one apart from me seemed at all interested.

I was soon to discover why. There had certainly once been some kind of settlement in the valley, but the traces that remained, all wildly overgrown with creeper, moss, intrusive shrubbery, were not much more than patches of broken rubble. I walked around for more than an hour, hoping to find something that might once have been a recognizable building or open space, but the clustering broadleaf trees had taken over. It was clearly a site that would reward scientific exploration, but I am not an archaeologist so would not know where to begin. I still do not know for sure which era it represents, who built it, who lived there.

I retraced my steps to where I had left my moped, wondering what else there could possibly be about Smuj that would be worth writing about. And at the exact instant, I found it.

When I dismounted I had hardly noticed the building next to where I had parked the moped. Now, walking back to it, I looked at the house for the first time. It was more than just a dwelling: a mansion of some extent, surrounded by mature trees, almost shielded from the road by the thicket. Beyond the widened patch of the road where I had left the two-stroke was a tall, metal gate, clearly locked and intended to be secure: it was not instantly obvious from the road because it was set in the drive itself, which curved away. I walked over and read the sign with great interest:

SCHOOL OF CAURER INSTRUCTION

AGES 6 — 18

UNDER PERSONAL SUPERVISION

AND PARTICIPATION OF E. W. C.

It took a few moments for the meaning of this to sink in.

Of anything that I had expected to find on Smuj, a Caurer Special School was not it. My state when I arrived to confront that gate was that I was hot, thirsty, sweaty, bitten by numerous insects and in general frustrated by my visit to this small and obscure island. All these were uppermost in my mind as I stared in surprise at the sign on the gate. It was not an old sign — it looked recently made.

Did the phrase under personal supervision . . . of E. W. C. mean what I had assumed in the first instant? That Caurer herself was here, working in the school, on Smuj? Supervising and participating in person?

It seemed unlikely. Caurer had died several years before, which would seem to eliminate her from everything. But the circumstances of her death were attended by a certain mystery that I well remembered. The death certificate revealed that she had died of ‘infection / infestation’. In the shorthand understood throughout the Archipelago, this strongly suggested she had suffered a fatal insect bite, probably that of a thryme. The consequences of such an attack were so appalling that even though several hundred people a year were killed by the insects, there was still a stigma attached. Death after a thryme bite usually led to a hastily arranged cremation, often within twenty-four hours, and was always the target of speculation and comment.

These were the circumstances of Caurer’s death, but because of her public renown, and the love and respect in which she was widely held, she could not pass quietly from view. Her life was praised, celebrated and memorialized throughout the Archipelago in every form of the media.

I too was involved as a reporter in the search for information after her death. I was sent to Rawthersay to speak to people who had known or worked with her, and my impression of the great woman was deepened by what I saw and heard.

But there were difficult questions unanswered. The principal one concerned the cause of her death. No thryme colonies had ever been discovered in the temperate zone of Quietude Bay, let alone on Rawthersay itself, so the revelation that she had suffered a fatal bite caused great alarm throughout the islands. However, the usual searches and precautions confirmed that no colonies appeared to have been settled. The death certificate was in its way unambiguous, and the professionalism of the doctor who had signed it was never in doubt, but even so there remained a feeling that we were not being told everything.

Throughout her life Caurer had enjoyed robust good health, which naturally would not protect her from a stroke or a heart attack, or one of many other underlying causes of unexpected death. Any of those remained a possibility, a genuine death behind the one that felt a little unlikely. It was tragic and heartfelt, she was widely and sincerely mourned, but I at least, and many other journalists, continued to feel a nagging sense of mystery.

My own researches turned up the surprising information that shortly before her death Caurer had travelled unaccompanied to Piqay to be present at the funeral of the author Chaster Kammeston. This in itself was unusual: Caurer travelling alone was almost unheard of. Although she had been subjected to intrusive media coverage while using the ferries to reach Piqay, it turned out that in practice most of the media outlets who had cottoned on to her journey were all from the islands along the fairly narrow zone of the Archipelago through which she had travelled. For some reason it had spread no wider, certainly not to me or to the offices of the IDT. At the time, it was the fact of Kammeston’s death that had been the major news and Caurer was by no means the only famous or celebrated mourner at the funeral. When I looked through all the reports from the time, the identities of individual mourners were usually not specified: ‘the great and the good’ was the journalism shorthand employed by reporters who had not been allowed into the ceremonies.

I could not help wondering if the death of Kammeston might not have had something to do with what followed almost immediately after.

I was probably not by then the only one asking that question. After much travelling around, however, and after many further interviews, I came to the conclusion that although we had certainly not been told the whole story, there was nothing in the public interest about it, and that Madame Caurer was entitled to privacy, in death as in life.

Such thoughts rushed through my mind while I stood there by the sign that announced Caurer’s presence. Then I stepped forward and pressed the intercom bell. I heard nothing.

After waiting for more than a minute I pressed it again. This time a woman’s voice came faintly and tinnily through a small metal speaker. ‘May I take your name, please?’

‘I’m Dant Willer,’ I said, pressing my face to the green-painted grille. It was hot from the sun and a number of tiny dead insects crusted the gauze.

‘Madame Willer. I don’t recognize your name. Are you a parent?’

‘No. I’m a journalist.’ I sensed asperity in the silence that followed. ‘Would it be possible to come in?’

I heard the woman clearing her throat — a thin rasping noise in the speaker. She started to say something, but the words would not form. A quick popping noise came through the speaker. I could not help it: in my mind’s eye I imagined an elderly woman, leaning forward unsteadily to the intercom microphone. Another rasping noise, as she cleared her throat.

‘We never grant interviews. If you are not the parent of a student here, you have to make an appointment. But we have nothing to say to the press, so please don’t be troubled by the effort.’

There was finality in her tone and I sensed that she was about to break off the contact.

‘I was hoping to see Madame Caurer,’ I said quickly. ‘Not as a journalist. Would that be possible, please?’

‘Caurer is not here. She is busy on other work.’

‘Then she is normally here in the school?’

‘No. That is incorrect. Tell me your name again and what it is you want.’

‘I am Madame Dant Willer. The truth is that I am a journalist for the Islander Daily Times, but I am here on holiday. I’m not seeking an interview for the paper. I have read the sign on your gate.’ The thirst and the endless blazing heat were making my own voice weaker. I didn’t want to clear my throat, send a rasping noise down the intercom. ‘Please may I speak to Madame Caurer? Or may I make an appointment to meet her?’

‘I’ve remembered your name now. I think you wrote a book about the range wars on Junno. Is that right? Is that who you are?’

‘Madame Caurer —’

But the background hiss of the intercom suddenly ceased and I knew that the brief exchange had ended. My senses were alive. I stood there limply in the heat, the fulgent, unrelenting sunlight, with the sound of the hot breeze passing through the tree branches around me, the insensible dashing of small birds, the stridulation of insects, the white glare on the unmetalled road, the sweat running down my back and between my breasts, the burning of the drive’s stony surface through the thin soles of my sandals.

I suddenly realized I might perish there in the tropical heat because I was unable to move. I held to the metal bars of the gate by a force of will over which I felt I had no control. I tried to raise myself to see better, but from this position the only part of the main building that was visible was a brick wall, next to some white-painted outhouses.

I was convinced I had been speaking to Caurer herself.

I was certain she was there, inside the building a short distance away. I was unsure what to do, and anyway I was incapable of acting on any decision. I pressed the intercom button several more times without response, then sagged again. I felt the back of my neck burning and blistering in the heat.

Then she said, ‘I think you will need this.’

She had appeared on the drive beyond the gate and was approaching me slowly. In one hand she held a tall glass tumbler, in the other a flagon of water. Condensation clouded the side of the jug. The weight of it was making her arm tremble and I saw concentric ripples darting across the surface. Caurer was there, actually there, an arm’s length away from me. She poured the water, her hand shaking because of the weight straining her wrist. She filled the tumbler to the top, passed it to me through the bars of the gate.

Our fingers briefly touched as I took the glass from her.

She stood straight before me as I gulped the water gratefully. She was taller than I had expected, smooth-skinned, not smiling but not unfriendly, steady in her gaze, wearing a pale blue dress, a broad-brimmed white hat.

She said, ‘I admired your book more than I can say.’

I felt overcome with amazed pride and contrary humility. ‘Thank you, Madame Caurer — I didn’t think you would know the book. That’s not why I’m here —’

‘How long have you been out in this heat?’

I just shook my head.

The gate slowly opened making a whirring noise, a motor somewhere hidden. Nothing now separated me from her. She still had not moved — the frosted flagon of cold glass unsteady in her hand. She stood erect, regarding me seriously and with a sudden intensity. I felt so scruffy, unsuitable, dressed in clothes not even good enough for scrambling around lost ruins, let alone meeting this woman. I straightened myself, to try to meet her steady regard as equally as I could. Caurer of Rawthersay, standing there, an arm’s length away.

I had never seen her before, not even a picture. But I stared back at her, dizzy with a sense of recognition. She was me, we looked alike! It was as if a mirror had been thrown up in front of me. I raised one hand. She lifted her own, the one not gripping the jug. I felt the same intensity in me that I was sensing in her. My head began to swim. I could not hold the upright posture, because something had happened to weaken me. I slumped, looking down at the ground. I focused on my legs, my bare feet loosely strapped inside the sandals, and was ashamed of the dirt and dust that begrimed me, the black lines between and around my toes.

She stepped forward quickly, caught me as I fell. The flagon dropped to the ground, and broke in a splashing crash on the hard surface of the drive. She had caught me with one strong arm, her body sagging to brace herself against my weight. Without the jug in her hand she gripped me with her other arm, her leg jolting us both as she changed position. I slumped against her, the fabric of her dress against my face. I felt the tumbler fall from my hand. I thought stupidly of all the broken glass around us. Then I smelled her scent, a light fragrance of mint, or flowers, or something that flew. The warmth of her body, the reassuring grip of her arms. She shifted her weight again, so that she was able to hold me better. I closed my eyes, felt safe, hot, dizzy, grimy, ashamed, thankful, but above all safe in her arms. I knew my knees had given out, that if she let go of me I would crash to the floor. The cicadas rasped around us, the sun was an endless blaze.

I was next aware of being half carried, half dragged. Two strong young men, one on each side, one shaved bald, the other straggle-haired. They were encouraging me, trying to make me feel secure. They urged me on with soft words. My bare feet scraped lightly along the dusty floor, my arms thrown intimately around the men’s necks. It was cool inside the house, the shutters down, a draught of blown air, shiny boards with pale rugs scattered, tall potted plants, terracotta ornaments, a decorated screen, a cushioned bench, long fronds over the windows.

Caurer stood beside me, her wide-brimmed hat now knocked to an angle, not yet adjusted, my dirty sandals dangling from her fingers. She was a slender woman, grey-haired, pale-eyed, in the senior years of her life, a presence of immense but silent power. I was stunned to be with her. Still she wore that same serious, uncritical regard. I hardly dared look at her, this woman who looked just like me.

In the distance, somewhere above, sounds of movement. I was in a school.

An hour later I had almost recovered. I had taken a shower and Caurer found me some clothes I could borrow. I had drunk a lot of water, and eaten a light lunch. At times I was alone, as Caurer had work to do in the school.

But at the end of the afternoon she and I were alone together in her first-floor study, and I realized during that intense conversation that without in any way planning or rehearsing it, I had spent most of my life searching for this woman, to know her.

Later I returned on my moped to Smuj Town through the dusty evening heat and the overhanging trees, the swarming midges and emerging moths, the gradually quieting cicadas. In the town the evening promenadá was beginning, the measured ambling around the squares and along the shore, the gay colours and flamboyant hairstyles, the calling and gesticulating and laughing, the young men on their motorbikes, the busy cafés and restaurants, the sound of guitars.

The next day I packed my luggage, went to the harbour office for a refund on my ship’s return passage, and then was driven in a taxi to the school on the plain in the hills, behind the trees, beyond the gate, next to the ruined city.

Postscript

I wrote most of my essay during the first two or three days on Smuj. I completed it later when I was living in the school house. I despatched it to the newspaper together with my resignation, and I never discovered if it was published or not. I suspect not.

Madame Caurer and I worked together for several years. Officially, my role was to liaise with the media on behalf of the Caurer Foundation, ensuring that what was printed or reported about the work still going on was accurate and true to Caurer’s intentions and wishes. In practice, much of my real work was to act as her confidante, her personal assistant and at times her adviser. Once or twice, when she felt the strain of travel or the pressure of crowds would be too great for her, I went in her place, never speaking, never pretending more than the quiet illusion my features created. When Caurer’s health at last began to fail, I became in effect her nurse, although of course she had a full medical team on her staff. I was with her when she died, having become, in her own words, her most trusted and intimate companion. We were of an age, we were so alike in every way.

It was seven years after her earlier, false death. The harmless imposture was over. This time there was a quiet burial in the grounds of her home, and the only attenders were the members of her inner circle.

Everyone at the Foundation says I still look just like Caurer, but I make no use of that any more. She is gone.