Countercharacter 4 (from Septimus Grout)

Well, here’s mud in your eye, Esmé, as Hubs always says every time he lifts his glass. Bottoms up. Down the hatch, old girl. Nothing for it now but to touch down on that cool clean slice of sand and wait out this blasted weather. It’ll rip Moth to shreds if I go on and I’ll be in the drink. That’s not going to happen. It certainly looks smooth down there and the tide is well out. Drift, hmm? Negligible, considering. Good long approach. Those animals. Some sort of cows, I’d say. Better keep an eye on them in case they scatter. They could wreck everything, and they say the natives worship them or some such thing. Don’t want to upset the natives, Esmé.

Here we go. Ease back, ease back. You can do it in your sleep. Gently. Throttle back and float on in. Perfect. That’s perfect. Tail up, straight roll. What’s that? Oh God, where did that come from? Blasted animal. Get away, you big idiot. It’s still coming. Can’t get back in the air now. It’ll wreck Moth, the stupid thing. Can I swerve? Full rudder, Moth!  Oh, sugar.

That’s how it happened. In my mind, at least. There we are making the perfect landing and this blasted buffalo comes lumbering across our path. I give Moth full rudder and the beach disappears. A wave must’ve caught our wingtip and whoops, over we went, upside-down in the shallows, me hanging there in my harness and getting a good dousing every time a wave comes in. Couldn’t get the blasted pin undone, you see. What a fix! Had to hold my breath every time I heard one coming. I can’t think what I would’ve done if I hadn’t got loose, I’m sure. Then the pin popped and I dropped straight down into the water and all I could think was, oh, I’ve ruined Hubs’ beautiful lilac leather flying suit he had made for me. I can hear him now. ‘Well, if you will go off trying to break the Australia-England solo flying record, Esmé Arlington, what can you expect?’

It was late afternoon by the time I dragged myself up onto the beach and took stock of the situation. Stranded on a tiny speck somewhere off Victoria Point, tide coming in and Moth upside down in the surf. All I could see was the wheels. Any chance of beating Amy Johnson’s time, well, I couldn’t think about that.

I was exhausted. The battle with the monsoon and the difficulty of landing had taken all my strength. I knew I had to act swiftly if I was to save poor little Moth. I sat watching the surf pound my plane to pieces. Just then it came to me we had flown over some kind of village as we searched for a place to put down. I turned and scoured the jungle to see if I could spot anything.

Clustered back under the trees directly opposite are what I suppose to be the villagers. I had heard tell tales of headhunters and cannibals among the island people along my route but, while some of these wore cloths, others were dressed in European cast-offs. Springing up, I ran towards them shouting that they must come and help me. I knew they couldn’t understand but I hoped my wildly waving arms would convey what was so obviously necessary. The whole group backed nervously into the forest, only a few men remaining. They did not look friendly. I slowed to a walk, thinking I must look like a madwoman and hoping that I hadn’t scared off the only chance of saving Moth from disappearing beneath the ocean.

It was then that it occurred to me that I might actually be in danger. In my concern for Moth and the necessity of saving the situation, the whole attempt, I’d not thought for a moment about my own safety. Instead of the intrepid flyer intent on her mission I realised I was now a rather diminutive woman alone on an unknown island faced with a group of half-naked hostile men. I felt my flying jacket for the comforting shape of the small revolver Hubs had handed me before takeoff. Not there. It had probably dropped out when I was hanging upside-down in the ocean. I tried the pocket for my knife but it, too, was gone. Well, I certainly felt vulnerable now.

Holding my breath, I back off, retracing my steps into the waves, and dive down beneath the cockpit, groping around on the bottom for the weapons. At some point the obvious dawns on me. My only hope of survival lies in the good office of these people and brandishing weapons in their faces might not be the best way to get them to help.

They had moved back out of the trees, their curiosity bringing them halfway down the beach to where the sand curved smooth and hard round the little bay. As I emerge from the surf, water pouring from my flying suit, they begin to back off again. I stand still and beckon, trying hard to smile through my exhaustion. They continue to retreat and, from nowhere, I burst into tears. My disappointment overwhelmed me and I sat heavily in the sand, head down, sobs shaking my whole frame. After a moment I feel a gentle pressure on my shoulder and I look up to see a tiny brown woman kneeling beside me. Her eyes are filled with such sympathy that I stop weeping. Encouraged, she calls out something to the others, who then timidly approach. Within minutes they are all sitting in a semi-circle around me. I get to my knees, gesturing towards the plane and patting the sand beside me. One of the men springs to his feet, addresses me excitedly and, after a quick conference with the other men, they all run off into the trees. I look questioningly at my new friend who points at Moth, grins and makes a motion as if to say they’ll fly the plane up onto the beach.

A larger group of men rapidly reappears carrying long poles and what appear to be lightweight logs or treetrunks. They race into the water, gesturing for us to follow them, surround poor Moth and, while most of us begin heaving the battered craft, some dive down under the structure and wedge the logs beneath as we lift.

The sun was sinking and the people were laughing and I realised that Moth had been prised free of the suction of the sand and the surf and was floating on a set of loose pontoons beneath the surface. With the assistance of a large wave, we run her onto the shore, then roll her bit by bit up past the high tide mark. She is safe for the night and I’ve had more than enough.

I follow my chattering saviours single file through the jungle to the curious safety of their little bamboo village. If you’d have told me earlier that day as I flew over that I’d be spending the night here, I would’ve thought you mad. But here I am — the lights twinkling through the forest, the smell of bad fish almost overpowering — and never have I been more grateful to see any habitation as these rude dwellings.

I had salvaged a good deal of my kit from Moth and managed to change into dry clothes and eat a small meal from my supplies before I addressed the problem of contacting civilisation. After a short pantomime to do with the different colour of our skins, I was able to get them to understand that I wanted to contact the nearest white people. They made motions that indicated they were a long way off.

Then, to my astonishment, they produced a map and indicated a tiny group of islands in the Preparis Channel between the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. I was relieved to see that the map was in English, meaning it was likely I was on British turf. I shook my head and pointed at Rangoon and the long coastal finger of Burma that pointed south towards Siam, the Malay States and the Straits Settlements. I couldn’t be on Preparis Island. It wasn’t possible that we had been swept that far west by the storm. They kept using the phrase ‘mutter-mutter’ and drawing their thumbs southward along the line of the islands to Port Blair on South Andaman. Later, when I checked through the Malay phrases I had copied from Francis Chichester’s book about his solo flight, I found the rather similar ‘mata-mata’ meant policeman or official. Next they produced pen, ink and paper and encouraged me to write a letter. I wrote a long note to whom it may concern, explaining I was safely down, that I had three weeks rations (in Singapore I had been warned it would be unwise to eat local food unless absolutely necessary) and the natives were treating me hospitably.

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Artwork © Stephen Kinsella

When I tried to induce the men to take the note and leave immediately, I was met with complete indifference. They made signs that I took to mean the sun coming up. After some time, during which I even offered my watch as bribe, I gave up and, following the extraordinary betel-chewing and spitting ceremony, retired to my woven mat. It had been the longest, most exhausting, exhilarating and frustrating day of my life. What a novice I was. How I wished to be back in my beautiful drawing room at home, listening to the Lux Radio Theatre or the dances from Leggett’s Ballroom in Melbourne on 3DB.

Late that night I hear voices raised in anger, an argument of some kind, and poke my head out from behind my sarong curtain (strung up on my flying boot laces) to see a number of villagers gathered round a seated man who appears to be writing a letter. They smile at me and, after more pantomime, it becomes clear there are two white men actually on the island and the man is writing a letter requesting them to come and see me. Some of the villagers agreed with this while others seemed strangely opposed. I urge them to continue, indicating it would be my dearest wish to see these men, then go back to bed.

Up at daybreak, I see the two messengers off, one by canoe, the other on foot into the interior. The first seems to expect me to come with him but I’m not getting into that flimsy little thing and then traipsing who knows where, slowing him down. Besides, I couldn’t leave Moth. I have a lot of work to do if she is to survive.

I have her brought up from the beach to the shade by the hut and begin the complete check I know is necessary if I am to save even her engine. The wings are almost completely destroyed, the fin and rudder unrecognisable and the propellor is partly shattered. The undercarriage, strangely, appears untouched and the fuselage and engine are outwardly undamaged, though full of salt water. I drain the fuel tank and the precious oil from the sump and begin the painstaking process of stripping down the motor, cleaning and coating each part in oil as I go, to try and slow the rust that I know will result from the invasion of salt water.

I work all day and half of the next, sweating outside the compound, villagers constantly collecting around Moth, offering help in any way they can. During a well-deserved break from my labours, a hubbub begins on the inland side of the clearing. A throng has collected there and I recognise the man who took the message to the interior. After some deliberation it became apparent that the two white men are on their way and not far behind my messenger.

I retreated to my hut space to clean up. While I was cleaning off the grime as best I could, I could hear what I presumed to be the noise of their arrival. By the time I descended from the hut, a celebration was in full swing, the two men being seated in the favoured position at head of circle. One is badly sunburned, wild-eyed, ginger-headed with a salt-and-pepper beard, the other small, olive-skinned and wears a cap pulled low so only his black beard is visible. They stand as I approach, beaming and holding out their hands in greeting. I don’t know why I had thought they would be English. I’d been looking forward to being able to pour my troubles out to someone and now I was forced back on my minimal language skills and growing expertise in pantomime.

The big redhead does all the talking, the smaller man simply watches and nods or shakes his head. It transpires that they’re Dutch and work a mine somewhere deep in the forest, or perhaps on the other side of the island. A short walk from the village is a navigable river where they’ve moored their motor barge. It seems they expect to take Moth and myself across the island to what sounds like their camp and then tow us with their launch across the Strait to Rangoon, weather permitting. They also make it known the launch has a radio. At this news I spring up, itching to get started on the arduous task of packing the pieces of Moth up for transport but they calm me down, issuing orders to the natives and taking charge of the whole job. In the dew of the following morning, we set out for the river along another of those thin forest trails, the jungle visibly steaming as we thread our way through.

When we arrive at the barge, there is poor Moth, stacked neatly in twined sections, already waiting for us. It seems the villagers had worked well into the night carting her along the trail and stowing her on the barge. I give the last of my very popular chewing gum to my tiny friend and tearfully wish them farewell. The Dutchmen make it known that the trip back upriver will be rather longer than their descent and, once we are well out on the narrow waterway, we settle down with cigarettes, betel nut and some of my precious chocolate to while away the hours.

With the noise of the motor and the language difficulties, we mostly keep our thoughts to ourselves, smiling at each other and occasionally offering more of our travel supplies. Despite the mosquitoes I doze off because I’m woken by the dark man shaking my shoulder and pressing a book into my hands. It’s very weathered, though bound in something like kid. He urges me to open it and, to my surprise, it’s written in English, in a very formal hand with a faded sepia ink. I look at the dark man. He appears to want me to read it, so I oblige. Here is the precise and extraordinary tale to which I became privy on that long hot day, the monotonous beat of that barge motor thrumming its way into my very dreams over so many years to come.

It was in Barcelona, I believe, a cheap restaurant on Las Ramblas, years ago, this man that I was sure I recognised came in, blinking from the bright light of the boulevarde. I peered at him, attempting to verify his identity because, you see, there could be no survivor. My eyes alone had seen this thing, such a thing as really happened: the forest had moved on the villages like an army and consumed the huts; a foetid rot overran the clearings, monkeys trooped in in their thousands, and then nothing — it was silent. If I was the sole memory, the last survivor, the final tatter of that obliterated world, then who was I looking at? That, more than anything, is what made me decide to relate what I witnessed to some other. Oh yes, a witness. I am not the subject of my tale. Far from it. Though the events I saw changed me irrevocably, though the impress of that time still directs my ways, my habits, prior to recount I will say this: I was a visitor to that damned place and this is what I saw.

 But perhaps I should assay certain landmarks of my life that you may credit the circumstances which prompted my situation.

I was born on 21 May 1884 around seven o'clock at a fishing hamlet not far from Niagara. My father owned a small smack. He died of complications arising from a berthing accident when I was but six, leaving nothing, my whole inheritance coming to little more than that. One of the other fishing families was good enough to adopt me, saving me from a childhood of orphanages, leaving me half a son, half a boathand.

At the age of twelve I left for the town, taking up various trades but, as I found none I liked and there being a war, I ended up enlisting. I could have made a good marine but I soon realised I would never really adapt to military life. I was sent to a training centre and from there on to active service with the Asiatic Squadron, bound for the South China Sea. When war broke out, we were in Hong Kong. Recalled from leave to engage the Spanish fleet in the Phillipines, I deserted.  I succeeded in reaching Amoy on the Chinese mainland and remained for some months unidentified among the international community on the island of Gulang Xu. I was without work and, in the end, with the assistance of an organisation of pacifist foreigners, was provided with a false passport and settled at Georgetown on Penang Island, near to the harbour. I found a job as a marine mechanic and lodged in a small family hotel, spending most of my evenings in a bar listening to the radio or, occasionally, playing cards or marking a pak-ah-pu ticket with one or another of my workmates.

I had been in Georgetown for three years when, on the morning of  31 October, 1902, my landlady handed me a letter. Posted the previous week from Rangoon, a British outpost not far to the north in Burma, it had a letterhead bearing the name

                                                VICTOR  RUHOFF,  MD

above a coat of arms. There was no address and no telephone number. The letter said only this: 

Sir,

We should be most grateful if you would kindly agree to meet us to discuss a matter which concerns you.

We shall be at the Raffles, on Friday 16 December and shall await you in the Mezzanine Bar from 6 p.m.

Thanking you in advance, and with our apologies for not being able to give you a fuller explanation at the present time, we remain,

                                                                        Yours faithfully …

 There followed a signature which only the name given in the letterhead allowed me to identify as 'V. Ruhoff'.

Of course this letter scared me at first. I had been recognised; it had to be blackmail. Once I had mastered my fear I could begin to reason: that the letter was in English did not mean it was for me, for the man I had been, for the deserter; my current identity was English-speaking Canadian, so my command of the language was not likely to surprise anyone. The people who had given me assistance did not know my former name. It would require an improbable, inexplicable set of coincidences for anyone who had met me before to find me now. Penang is not a large city, off the main routes, unknown to tourists, and I spent the best part of my days down in the inspection pit or on my back underneath an engine. And even if someone had come across my tracks, what could they ask from me? I had no money, I had no way of getting any. The war had been over for five years — well, there are always wars — it was likely that I had been granted amnesty.

I tried to imagine all the possible ramifications of the letter. Was it the outcome of an investigation, of an enquiry which had gradually drawn its net around me. Was it written to a man whose name I might have or who had my name? Was it from a solicitor who believed I, or someone whose name I possessed, was heir to a fortune?

I read the letter over many times, trying to find some clue, but all I found were grounds for still greater perplexity. Was the letter's 'we'  merely a formality, the customary style of almost all business correspondence, where the signatory speaks for and on behalf of his emloyers, or was I dealing with two, or more, correspondents? And what was the meaning of the 'MD' which followed the name of Victor Ruhoff in the letterhead? In theory, according to the reference book I borrowed briefly from the company secretary, it could only be the American abbreviation for 'Medical Doctor', but though the symbol was widely used in the United States, there was no reason for it to appear in the letterhead  of a European, even if he were a doctor; otherwise I would have to suppose that this Victor Ruhoff, though he wrote to me from Rangoon, was not European but American. This would not in itself have been particularly surprising - there are many European emigres in America, and many American doctors are of European descent; but what could an American doctor want of me, and why had he come to Rangoon? Was it even imaginable that a doctor of any nationality would use a letterhead which indicated his profession, but instead of supplying the information one would have a right to expect — his own or his surgery's address or number, his consulting times, his hospital posts, etc. — furnished only a fusty and impenetrable crest?

All day I pondered what I ought to do. Should I keep the appointment? Or should I run away right then and start all over again, somewhere else, in Australia or the Argentine, living another illegal existence, with another fragile alibi, with another fabricated past and another identity? As time passed my anxiety gave way to impatience and curiosity; feverishly I imagined that this meeting would change my life.

I spent some of the evening at the Municipal Library, leafing through dictionaries, encyclopaedias and directories, in the hope of gleaning information about Victor Ruhoff or possible clues to other interpretations of the initials 'MD' or to the meaning of the crest. But I found nothing.

The next morning, a lingering presentiment, made me stuff into my travelling bag some linen and what I might have called, were they not quite so paltry, my most treasured possessions; my wireless, a gold fob watch which might well have been my great-grandfather's, a little mother-of-pearl figurine bought in Formosa, a rare and peculiar seashell which my 'godmother' correspondent had sent me when I was on active service. Did I mean to run away? I don't think so; rather, to be ready for any eventuality. I gave my landlady notice that I would be away for perhaps a few weeks and settled up with her. I went to see my employer. I told him that my brother had died and, to allow myself some time, that I had to go and arrange the funeral for him in Columbo. He allowed me two weeks off and, as he appeared to value my skills, gave me a small retainer in advance.

I went to the ferry quay and put my bag in a locker. Then I sat in the middle-class waiting room, almost in the middle of a group of Dutch workers leaving for the mainland, and I waited for six o'clock in the evening.

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