Ananya Dutta

Abstract Tragedy

4  

Ananya Dutta

Abstract Tragedy

The Skin We Touch

The Skin We Touch

25 mins
261


(The Skin We Touch

April the 31st, Thursday, 1992, Camden Chateau Prison, Brickway 43A.)

                                                                              Astel’s grievance pertaining to the bilge in the embankment seems to have been rightly placed. Huh! Such a plaintiff he has been all this while that it has been no less of a dilemma in itself for one to tell if he is being genuinely concerned or merely trying to cry wolf around, hurling the milieu in utter frenzy. The stench actually stinks. The bilge water is filling up the reservoir under the wooden chassis that cracks now and then beneath my feet despite my stillness. I move my eyes once here and at another jiffy, there, trying to catch sight of anything that will actuate me to spill some literary magnificence, just as she wanted it always, and just as, I believe, she must want now as well. I am wondering though, if that will be so. Very much in compliance with my anticipation, no such entity falls prey to my sight, and I, unable to help it, crumble another piece of fresh white paper that bears no more than a mere salutation “Dear Czarina”. The scrawny window sills are fragile too, and precisely vulnerable to a complete crash of any kind with even a thud exerted with no greater force than a fist’s. I lean back on the ottoman, merely to stare at the ceiling with absolute futility. I am quite astonished how it is happening, not that I was ever too sophisticated, barely esoteric in fact; my mind is so distraught now. These were my chaps and peers who owned and verily nurtured as well - the power of the cognoscenti. A beam, too linear and with a flawlessly described straightness, as if sketched, pierces the interstice that abuts the top bunk of my bed beside the sash window of my attic. The straightness is such that it nearly appears like a line drawn in arrant ochre. The light mauls my eyes even from a distance and in a second or so, drags me out of my transient oblivion – I behold the pelmets which cover the grubby brown rings of the rags on the top edge of the sash windows. I heed to this existence of such hauteur of upholstery as incredible for the apartment has been no bigger than a cubicle for me in a long time; all of my hours on board now seem to have been given away adagio. It fascinates me now how little I care about it all. Perhaps, I never did. It’s a bit too troublesome in here. It is the third day and my missive seldom attains in seeking some shelter on the davenport that I have noticed I have come to call as mine, let alone any success in my composition. My desk juxtaposes my bed all the time. And I am citing this truism because it’s not so often the case; the desk transitions from one corner of my compartment to another every time the ship careens; the latter is only left to be capsized completely in some hour I think is close. Now I anticipate that in even a closer minute, and I don’t know why. With the repulsive air in the entirety of my ambience, the seconds are harder for me to pass. I conjecture I can’t stand this malodorous smell any more. Indeed, to do hell with it! The room is warming up gradually with the heat of the sun outside. I never did well with the steerage, and yes, I will be taken aback if anyone does. The warmth is making me suck any soupcon of air I can find in this utterly arid milieu around me. There is only the sash window, broken from the lower half of its right edge which I can seek recourse from for now. I ponder over the thought as a jiffy passes me by, and I find myself in a stasis – still unable to know if I should do it. You know, that encounter, though witnessed from in between the space of my arms, is extant in my memory - indeed, that very encounter with the squaddie, it’s all in my head, only that I can’t bring myself to discard it. I am just not able to. I feel the lower half of both of my limbs grow paralyzed, too cagey to allow me to move towards those windows. I empathize because the reflection of what I withstood terrifies me in my bones now. 


December the 19th , Tuesday, 1989, Camden Chateau Prison, Brickway 46C. 

   

The fusillade hurled up on the black sky by the dragoons on the frontage was strident to my room in the attic, and I was aware that it was late then. The inglenook of my hearth had developed a certain daub of the thick coal on its brown and pallid bricked walls that were all bereft of paint, squalor in lieu. The cold air was palpable in the room. I felt that I really needed the fire in my hearth. I had ransacked the entire space of my steerage before coming to remember that the cosh had been collated by the squadron that morning. The zephyr was blowing with icy splashes, and so was it canoodling my skin with its frosty lips. It was around the culmination of the month of December, and Christmas was on its way. After an utterly imperious fiat that had avowed starvation for the convicts for two and a half weeks straight, all of the detainees on Aboriginal Voyage were addressed with an asseveration of a feast two days prior to that night. The female detainees were also to be concomitant in that gathering for some company and to carouse with us. I couldn’t keep up with the time anymore to meet her; given all the months I had spent wastefully only hoping to have a glimpse of her. The banquet was still a day away, and we the detainees were under a strictly incessant probation. With those heavy boots thumping the wooden floor right outside my room, besides the parquetry damaged with clear and reckless indifference, it summoned great and gallant audacity in me to venture stepping outside my compartment. I was too perturbed to ask, and couldn’t deny that I was fearful despite knowing that it was too pusillanimous of a man, even if he was held hostage as a detainee in a ship. “Oh you small hearted coward! Why be so scared when you know you have still got two intact legs to walk with and a mouth to speak from, unlike those who have long lost a sense of both? There’s still warm blood in your veins Leith. I know you can let them know about your entreaty to go out to the cellar. It’s merely about some blocks of coal for your fireplace. Oh come on you wretch boy! Aren’t you manly enough that you’re cowering at the thought of just asking? Shame on you! Must I pity myself! Oh God!”, I chided myself. I had nearly conceded with the cold gale that crept inside from the broken sash windows of my room, rendering me frostbitten. A few moments had passed before my ears comprehended a squeak from the other room. To be honest, it helped my valor surpass every intimidation that had perturbed me all that while. Reaching out for my parka from the rucksack beside me, I darted outside from the door that opened to the postern. It wasn’t a paving too long, barely a couple of feet as I had assumed on my transfer under detention of the Aboriginal from California, and ten wide strides long if accuracy captivated one’s fancy. The air was palpably stiff and seemed icy enough to be easily flaky. Having figured out where the shrill of the voice had come from, I was soon standing on the truss of the stoep that stretched a floor above my residence. I stood a foot away from the parapet of the stoep. The stockade above my head was all covered with transparent ice to portray a stalactite, but it only derailed my sight. “Pardon sir, I am not culpable in this. The parley with my husband only incited my hopes that….”, I heard a female voice down from the peneplain that juxtaposed the marina of the Northington Humprey lake. It was incomprehensible how my heart felt a paroxysm of both relief and fear in tandem. I breathed out a sigh for I could figure her voice and it precisely, wasn’t Czarina’s. But occupying the space of that one foot that had parted me from the edge of the upper ledge, it was an astonishment like no other that my body appraised in the matter of a shake while it remained alive with all of its senses. “I beg of you sir! Spare me my life!”, the female voice shrieked, her wrists held tight in a lash in front of her rag that appeared to have been worn over months, and thus, vividly grubby with a fuchsia. “Shall I commiserate? Perhaps, I should. But then my lovely mistress, who do you think you are and who do you think I am? You frump! I am the commander general of the comrades’ troops that your tiny little eyes must behold all around the marina behind you. And what are you? A piece of vapid castaway! Must not you dare speak! You have no position to!”, thundered the general as the lady heckled him short, saying, “But I have right to!”. The commander receded by a few steps. He stood gazing at the lady who was pushed down to her knees. She looked him straight in his eyes. My gaze had become transfixed for a moment with a silent blizzard mussing up the quiet of the scene below that I saw the commander pull his rifle out from his corduroy trousers, and within the blink of my eye that followed, shot her dead. My eyelids cautiously refused to open again. A terror seized my heart with a force I had never known before. I was perplexed, bewildered, and deranged all simultaneously; what I did know was that it was all too much for me to bear. I despised the taste of resentment inside me. A glint of Czarina’s thought crossed my mind, and I couldn’t be any more terrified at that. I darted across the stoep and rushed straight towards the Aboriginal Women Seraglio where she had told me she was transferred to. An inrush of some entirely untoward premonition presaged my soul on the inside, and I felt falling short of breath. My steps quickened as I got closer to the compartments, but I took special care to do so only stealthily. Given my status as a male detainee, I was well aware of how my entry was condemned in the quarters there, and the repercussions it would summon in case my violation was taken notice of, and I didn’t care. As my strides grew longer whilst my pace remained way too quiet, the thought of a gory sight clobbered my mind - a sight that made my senses perceive in their areas of consciousness, a possibility of my never finding her. I knew that yet another ominous probability, just like million other unwelcome possibilities that had foreshadowed my head, all a subject to utter deprecation, had also constructed room for itself. It was possible. Anything was possible, both bad and the worst, and that petrified my limbs around the stairs. Catching my breath, I clambered up the stile of the compartments. I held the parapet of the stoep of the women’s compartments and looked down at the starboard with all the valor I could scrounge for from within myself. None loitered and I found my breath again. As I finally reached the hallway I was looking for, finding arrant darkness around, I sensed an intrigue take hold of me and I desired to shout out her name. The pictures of the cadavers piled up together in not more than a single heap superseded the spaces in my memory where the ones of sweetness could have sought home. I couldn’t bear to envision the sight of such spectacle; aware of the veracity associated with the scenario, whatsoever it held for me that night, I couldn’t be any more cognizant of the fact that I wouldn’t only lose her, but the one she bore within as well. I was growing too hopeless and dejected when I saw the casement of the nearby sanatorium display the silhouette of a shadow. Another zephyr of optimism struck my face, and it was no less of a fascination for me to grasp for it was incredible how a tint of any indication could kindle life in a corpse when the latter encountered a peril otherwise. Ironically, they existed together. I only later realised that they didn’t merely accompany each other; they in fact, had to. There was no choice. I strode further on soft feet until I came to stand right beside the pane of the window. To my plethora of bliss, the shadow, for I could so certainly tell and bereft of just one doubt in my mind, appeared scrawny, a little less lithe, and with a black stria on the top of her head that evinced the chaplet she knew I liked the most on her and her merely. The chignon hung at about the posterior tuft of her head, right below the hairnet. Irrespective of the distance, the chenille of her chemise almost felt soft on the palm of my hands. The room barely had an aperture to let any beam of light seep in, yet her attire, her hair, her crew neck dress’ hem and her hands felt such a cinch for me to decipher. Indeed, I knew her well, and I was so convinced about the same. I pushed the door open, and a thin air, rather warm, blew past my visage as I stepped in. She stood next to the window, with her back towards me. “Czarina, it is you.”, I uttered, soft as a whisper. She stood intact, with both a paucity of motion and a chary contempt. “Czarina, I am leith, your husband. I came looking for you. The carnage close to the marina terrified me. They killed a lady. I wanted to check on you. Are you fine?”, I tried speaking again, getting quietly closer to her. The vain attempts of mine in extorting a response from her rather infuriated me. She stood firm like a tree whose bark was too old to feel the bite of any insect. But fearing the very next moment, I extended my left hand towards her right shoulder that was rendered bare with the chemise hanging loosely about the other. “Czarina, is the baby alright?”, I enquired, placing my left palm on her bare skin. As I had least expected the first response from her in two months to be what it turned out to be, it had to take me aback. She commenced sobbing lightly. I heard her mutter something in between her sobs. “Czarina, why are you crying? What’s the matter?”, I expressed my query as a parlous warmth developed right underneath the skin of my chest. I brought my right hand to my neck and further directed it downwind that led it to her right hand. Hurling both of my hands in the dark air, she shouted, “Do not touch me!” The blizzard transmuted all of a sudden. The entirety around me seemed like a stranger despite my acquaintance with it since months. The small and the only lamp of the room close to an earthen statuette right beside the transom of the window was flickering. The worn out curtains on the window panes, all worn out and seemingly damp with the cold mist in the air moved with little motion and dusted off the dirt that, in lieu of pervading all throughout the room, happened to rest superficially on my face merely. Czarina’s back was directed to me again. She stood still. I wondered if she knew that so did I. The mist in the air of my ambience, the tick of the clock, and the down of the fringe that still remained stitched to compose the hem of my hessian trousers - it was strange how I felt everything around me, and hated it all the same as my senses comprehended their existence in my milieu. Of all of what I felt, the darkness of the room, the caressing flow of her white muslin chemise otherwise soft on my chest, and the heat beneath my skin afflicted me with a pique I could no longer deny feeling inside myself. I perceived them all so much so quickly, just with her utterance of those few words, that I had conceived them deep inside myself before I could forbear my mortal body to feel. You see, how could I not despise the ability in me to feel? I hated that I was alive enough to feel. The silence was bothered by her sobs again. “You don’t want me to touch you. Is that what you mean Czarina? Do you mean it?”, I spoke from in between my teeth, struggling for words. She continued to sob and cried out quiet tears as she refused to turn her face around. The intrigue I had witnessed in my heart to call out her name while looking for her in the compartment caused a stampede of the desire in me again, and I didn’t resist this time. I reached out for her right hand, and fighting her reluctance to concede with my hold, held it only too tightly in my grasp. Turning her around with stretched arms of mine, I said with quelled strength in my voice, “What are you saying? You are my wife. Why did you say so? Czarina, I need to know. Tell me. I have always loved you. What is amiss? I…” I was dumbfounded amid my speech as the flicker of light from the ajar window on her left fell on her. The delicate hands I had known on my face every time she cuddled my neck to plant fervent kisses of such affection on my cheeks appeared too foreign with a rifle gun on her left hand. Despite my sanity I was hardly keeping up with, my mind could ransack no good reason within for her to stand like that. Her chemise was bloody at the base, and by the time I had taken enough of a glimpse of her gory sight to finally look into her eyes, she was trembling with fear, and I knew that I could tell that. “I don’t belong to….I am so….rry…so so sorry…..I didn’t….this for myself….”, she babbled, her hand quivering but the fist that remained stern. “Czarina, where did you get it from? Why are you having it?”, I said amidst the raw terror that was taking room in my heart. “I…I….am I guilty for it? What have I let happen? Ah! Pardon me Lord! He won’t forgive me; you will never forgive me!”, she said, controlling her voice in between her tears. All through the time, she had kept her eyes closed. She persevered to open them, merely for her vision to be derailed in forming a sight. They were very much drowning in an ocean inside. She took her hand from mine, gradually bending forward, and held her stomach with it. It was soon a wrench as she tweaked and shivered in pain that was inevitably visible. I detested beholding her cower like that. But she merely lowered her shoulders too as she drooped down with her forehead, tightening her grips, both on her stomach and the rifle. The gale outside shook the window next to her and opened it a little further, letting more of the light fall on her white chemise. It was only then that I came to take notice of the blood stain on it that had emanated around her groin and thighs. It appeared like fresh blood, and I knew that she was bleeding. Gathering my sobriety, I looked at her inflicted body. Entirely aggrieved, I said in spasmodic bursts of each syllable precisely distinct, “Czarina, what has happened to you?” She stood quietly, only cowering and pressing her stomach more and more. Finding all my patience lost, and utterly careless of the squadron of comrades on the rigger close to the taut sailcloth on the mast outside, I shouted, “Czarina! Answer me!”. “They raped me!”, she responded straight away. Nothing but the sound of her sobs surrounded us. Now her tears out of her eyes seemed to wet my cheeks. Those compassionate kisses of such fervor she had canoodled me with, those arms that caressed mine, and those fingers that ran through my hair, fondling it with any chance they would discover, all seemed to peter out on my limbs as the latter grew petrified; I realized that just as those chaps dismembered the other day were rendered derelict with their mauled arms and legs, I too had lost the sense of both. “I cannot live Leigh, never like this.”, she said, her tears descending incessantly from her eyes. With all that I had heard hitherto, I was barely listening. “Leigh, do you hear me? Leigh, I need you. I hate this hour. I hate this!….”, I heard her speak, but was too traumatized to keep listening to her any further. Little did I know how this dearth of my attention would actuate me to summon my own end. After having displayed such selfish presence when she kept screaming for my hand, I deserved that, and there was none denying it; there couldn’t be any. “Leigh, I am breaking asunder. Leigh!”, she screamed for the first and the last time in what I had envisioned would be sweetly clandestine a rendezvous. “What?”, I whispered, taking recourse of the remnants of the strength that I had in me for my voice. Her sobs continued as she said, entirely broken, “Say something”. I looked up. I hadn’t known that just one more sight of her visage was all I needed to flow away in a cavalcade of a river of my own, and even little did I appraise that hers was an ocean already. I moved forward and placed my right palm on her left cheek, but was unaware of how I was to wipe her tears away. I felt like I didn’t deserve to do it. Unlike the lady, I had lost my right to. It was so hard for me to feel the wetness of her tears on my palm that the moment I did, I knew that it was brutal for her. What only pricked my skin on the surface burnt hers beneath. She was all fire but cried tears that were ice cold. She stared at my face for a jiffy, and with all of the affection that her feminine body still allowed her to feel for a man she struggled to remember as her husband, she whispered before pushing me away with great force, “I wish I could touch you too.” The next moment, I had hit my chin against the concrete parquet of the floor as my ears heard a gunshot, too strident and acerbic, and right behind my back before I could behold her alive for one last time.


April the 31st, Thursday, 1992, Camden Chateau Prison, Brickway 43A. The present day continues. 


“Detainee 547A, open the door! You cruel chap! Open it right now I said.”, a coarse voice calls out from the outside of my cabin. He continues, “What! So you won’t open huh! Well, I will satiate your desire to assay our metals kept near the fender. Huh! You must have seen them, haven’t you?” I remain in my position, with a fountain pen on my right hand. He persists thwacking the wooden door. Just as I’ve come to be aware in the past thirteen days they kept me imprisoned in here for the whole time of, he too is very well aware of how the latch can be unfastened, and I know it. I only don’t want to heed to it right now. These are my moments after all, my last moments with her; I merely wish I had a few more of them. I let him thump on the patina of the door, allowing him to ruin the same; none of it matters because I do not like any company here anymore, be it that of the inanimate entities around me. Moreover, doing so aids me ascertain more of the seconds which, though very hypocritical of me to say in light of what I feel right now, I fancy with all my heart. I lean back on my spine, and stare at the ceiling and the rusty fan that only seems to be in motion. “Perhaps, I should see it as an irony.”, I speak out into the thin air that encompasses the entirety of the room. “Hey you! Are you still alive there? Have you slain yourself huh?”, the voice shouts and bursts into a laughter. The milieu goes quiet before I hear a few feet thump in the propinquity of the door. They bludgeon it down in no time. “Hey you! You dunce! Get up!”, a voice, different in its tone, derides me as one of the feet of the respective owner kicks me on the edge of my ribs. “Can’t you hear the campanile? It’s time. Get up you bastard!”, the voice iterates as the blows on my ribs follow. Complying with their commands, I get up. It is then that I hurl my eyes in the milieu of my box room and it appears no bigger than mere steerage. “Lift up your hands”, the voice demands as the commander taps on my right elbow with his bludgeon. I tilt my head as does the rigger careen along. I finally take notice of his countenance. It suggests vivid ruthlessness. Yes it does, and one so inevitably that I don’t behold any way I can escape admitting it. The lineaments are bold on his face, just like a soldier’s should be, very coldly fixed and bereft of any propensity to allow any abstraction inside. I conjecture the skin they touch is also just an abstraction for them; they don’t know what it is like to have another skin underneath one’s own. It fascinates me right now to know if he ever felt anything - compassion, affection, lenity or anything. I fix my eyes straight ahead and they catch sight of the grubby and partly broken and much scratched mirror. I become conscious enough to notice, bereft of any anticipation to have the awareness then. I realise that nowhere prior in time had I taken a look at myself. I see it like a long time. I will be flaunting if I say that the foremost impression of my unkempt entirety appears more repulsive to me that I ever expected it to be. “Ah! I have been so dirty these days”, I find myself whispering as the commander taps on my right elbow for a second time. “What did you say? Never mind. We don’t have time for your burble, let alone bother. Now come on chap! Lift up your arms. We have got a few things to take care of.”, speaks the voice from my back. I see him beckon his other accomplices and gesticulate with his left hand. Keeping his cosh aside, he points at a rucksack with the index finger of his right hand. I squint my eyes towards him a little and look at him one more time. His rugged stance however, draws a picture of myself to me, merely in the entire obverse; I see myself as an effeminate pipsqueak. My gaze reverts to the disheveled pane of the mirror that stands in alignment with my eyes, and surely enough, I feel I have lost the right to call myself a man as well. I lift my hands up. The commander touches the corduroy pockets of my dungarees and further scrutinizes my socks and shirt while all this while, my mind gradually finds its way back to the missive I was trying to compose for her. I wonder if they will allow me to complete it, just for once. I look at the davenport where the piece of paper lies, with a scribble in black ink at the top left vertex and the rest covered in faded sepia. “Do you want to get hold of something?”, the commander enquires, taking notice of my gaze. I look down. I fear he will tear it apart. He comes closer to my face, chucks my chin with a signet ring that he wears on his index finger and with a soft brutality, speaks straight to my face, “Could you have done any better? Oh you poor man! I pity on you.” “You do?”, I say in return, involuntarily guided by a voice that doesn’t sound like mine to me. “It surprises me that you do. Let alone pity, I thought you barely felt anything.” , I say, looking straight into his beady eyes. He slaps me hard on my nose, and does so again as I try composing my posture. My nose is rendered bloody and drops of it slide down from the edge of my lips. “Oh you better be taciturn! How insolent of you! Shut those lips tight. No one is going to hear you anyway. Hear the cannonade. This is the call of your doom. YOU WILL BE DOOMED!”, he shouts to my face. “Why are you saying this now? I have been doomed already. Don’t think I am waiting to be again anymore!”, I shout back, my palms closing in a fist. He knocks me at my feet with his cosh, and puts handcuffs on both of my wrists. I hear the cannonade outside and know that it’s time. That makes me happy in a long time because that evinces that it’s time to leave. I merely catch a single glimpse of my letter with my eyes turned aside before I am led out. 

The avenue down to the camp of execution seems like a long haul again. I assess the craving of my feet in my chest. They desire to cease, meet the stop but too terrified to meet any stop all at the same time. This bewilderment deranges me for once. I want to reach the arena as fast as I can, and this inrush of such palpitations inside me makes me want to run to the camp back. My eyes feel too tired to keep looking anymore. They are dying to see her soft fair pallor they always dived deep into, losing themselves whilst absolutely conscious. The thought of my letter seeks a place in my mind as my entry is subpoenaed, only for execution and no trial. I am soon led up the narrow stile of the pedestal wherein awaits me a loop of a hessian rope. I rise up with my hands behind my back, tied tightly by the handcuffs that maul the skin of my wrists. Ironically, numbness is all my senses figure out. I try thinking about the letter one last time, wondering if I can picture her face in my mind just that once. I fail, again, and surely as I run out of the last few seconds I ascertain then, I try to think of what I should write in my last letter to her. I trudge the feet that keep me from the loop of rope; I only get closer to her. I whisper to myself, “Dear Czarina, you’re like a dream in my head now” until the fabric feels rough on my neck and the corduroy soft on my eyelids and I begin to see her.                               


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