The bridge
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 14: The Trouble with Paradise
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Wayne Macauley
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Wayne Macauley's biography and other articles by this writer
And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
C.P. Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians
I am the last of my group – the others are all dead or have gone missing – and before me lies the bridge, spanning a wide black river, the other side constantly shrouded in mist. It is an old wooden thing, the piles shaped like hour-glasses, its handrail a meandering zigzag. I have never dared walk on it, but if I stand at the end and look out to where it is eventually engulfed in mist, I can see a number of boards missing and many more eaten by damp. The river beneath it seems hardly to move, and I have watched – sometimes all day, from first light to last – a broken twig or branch float by on its way downstream to my left. The mud of the bank is thick, pasty and grey, scattered with reeds both living and dead; two steps into this mud and you would be up to your ankles, six and you would be up to your knees, any more and you would more than likely disappear forever. I've been here for months – I can't tell you how many – and in the absence of further orders I have remained at my post. I guard the bridge, against what I don't exactly know, but I suspect that somewhere in the mist on the far side of the river an enemy must lie waiting, that they are a different colour, their eyes a different shape, their God a different God to ours, that the bridge is therefore of some strategic importance, and that this, collectively, is the reason behind the orders I still carry crumpled in my pocket.
The plane comes by every fourteen days and drops a little parcel tied up in hessian beneath a small white parachute. If it falls on my side of the river, I am able to retrieve it and add its contents to my store: fourteen cans of Borlotti beans, seven candles, one box of matches and a small bar of chocolate. But once every twenty-eight days, as if by clockwork, I must stand and watch helplessly as the parcel descends and disappears swaying into the mist on the far side of the river. I sometimes think it only does it to annoy me. But I shouldn't complain: to be supplied once a month is better than not being supplied at all, and on the days when luck is smiling I will hear the distant drone in the east, look up to see the plane roaring in overhead, see a door fling open and my parcel fly out, and watch happily as it sways down to land in amongst the trees nearby. There I open it up, count each item a few times over in the hope the Quartermaster may have perhaps made a mistake in my favour (he never has), then wrap it up again and carry it back to camp.
My dwelling place is the small hut set in amongst the clump of trees a little way back from the river, put together bit by bit over the many months of my stay. Beyond this clump of trees lies an expanse of grassland that I have called The Paddock, and beyond that again more trees, sparse and low-lying, extending across the flats as far as the eye can see. The hut is well concealed from land or air; the clump of trees forms a canopy overhead and its entrance looks out on the bridge, over which I am therefore able to keep a vigilant watch, according to my orders. In the early days – I mean before the coming of the plane – I simply slept and all but lived within this clump of trees on the ground. I ate only grass, drank only the water I could squeeze from my clothes, and sat staring out for days on end at the river, the bridge and the mist. I was, I admit, expecting the order to withdraw to arrive any day – my post seemed pointless – and therefore saw no sense in making myself too comfortable or going to any great trouble.
But, as each day passed and no such order arrived, I thought it wouldn't do any harm to make a few little improvements around the place, if only at the very least to shield me from the rain that drizzles here for weeks without cease, so I set about weaving from the reeds by the river a large square mat which I then secured with more reeds to four trees in my clump at a height of about two metres until, after a good two weeks' labour, I had a sloping and almost waterproof roof; by the time the plane was returning on a regular basis and I had put from my mind any thoughts of moving I had woven three walls too.
I have since closed in the entrance to this hut with a parachute cloth smeared with mud for camouflage and hung another cloth down the centre, dividing it in half. On one side of this divide I've made a bed from reeds and hessian (beside it an empty bean can-and-candle lamp), and on the other side a storehouse in which to keep my supplies. I don't own much, but on the three shelves of timber plied from the bridge and stacked one above the other on rocks gathered from out on The Paddock, you will find: my rifle, now a little rusty and in bad need of some oil; my knife, which has served me for everything from cutting reeds to opening beans; my writing materials, a standard issue Spirax 560 pad and pen; the old plastic orange juice bottle that I use to store my water, found a few months ago washed up on the bank and retrieved at the time by poking a long stick into its neck and drawing it up out of the mud (I sit it out overnight beneath the trickle from my roof and by morning it is invariably full); my eating utensil, called a spork – a novel thing, carved by me for the purpose and so named because of my sense of humour; and, last but by no means least, in quantities varying more or less with the time of the month, my beans, my candles, my chocolate and my matches.
It's a regular little home now, and outside the entrance I have put together a fireplace with rocks, with an old log drawn up beside it for a seat. Here I sit after the evening meal, sometimes well into the night, perhaps writing a few lines in my pad as now or simply staring into the dying red of the coals and quietly thanking, as I often do, the plane for its coming. For, even if every second drop goes astray – and it does, alas, without fail – and even if my rations are simple and my life a little spartan, still I have my reasons to be thankful: the early doubts about the importance of my post here (I lived for weeks with these doubts), the sense of having perhaps been left behind and forgotten, the feeling that my original orders might in fact have become redundant, all these worries were quickly dispelled as I first watched the plane fly in overhead. So someone must know of my existence I said to myself on that first day, someone has remembered me, someone has said in some faraway office with telephones and filing cabinets and wall-charts and memos: that young man who holds the bridge, he must be supplied, his post is important, he's protecting our interests, he cannot want. I took great comfort from these thoughts then, and have comforted myself with them many nights since.