Heaven's Gold

Heaven’s Gold

How many weeks and months had they been digging now? Heinz-Harold Dortmund had stopped counting; he had decided long ago that it served no purpose to keep track of the lost, unproductive days. In that time, others had struck it rich, others who it seemed to him had worked far less hard than they. It was this that kept them going. The belief that one day their turn would come.

This was what he told himself every day as he rose from his bed to dress ready for the climb to the mine, and every evening when he trailed back down the mountain at the end of another fruitless day. This was what he said to his twin brother, Gert-Harold, and to his father at regular intervals, often to their exasperation: they had heard his keen exhortations so many times before as they worked side by side.

Their efforts had not gone entirely unrewarded. Occasionally they had found morsels of gold. Not nuggets; not deep, rich seams leading off among the hard strata of rock. Mere granules, no larger than grains of sand. Dust. There seemed to be no reason or pattern to these discoveries, no indication of probability they could pursue. Some days there was gold dust, others there was not. There had never been any certainty or consistency to serve as a guide as to where they should dig next.

And so they spent their days, each day barely distinguishable from the next, save for variations in degrees of cold and heat. As they worked they rarely spoke. They each knew their purpose, their aim, the things they needed to do. Talk of home, Germany, of the things they had left behind, only led to sadness. Other than to talk of the weather, or the rock face in front of them, the other, more fortunate prospectors, there was little to say. Stoic silence, they had learned, was the best negation of disappointment.

It started with the merest of sounds, like the quiet groan of the ocean, or the distant rumble of an approaching storm. A subtle disturbance in the fabric of the world, barely audible beyond the steady chatter of their picks and spades, the softer counterpoint of their laboured breathing. They had been warned of such things, the hazards of working underground. They recognised it instantly, before the ground itself began to move around them: the sound of rock starting to tear, of the earth splitting open.

There was no time to escape, even to consider its possibility. At the moment they became aware it was happening, the ground stirred and swelled, a fissure split open in the roof of rock, admitting the light, the other strata piled far above. A slab of stone tilted and crashed from the roof to the floor of the chamber they had carved, where they were working, closing off its exit. As the tremors settled, dust started to pour down through the fissure, steadily filling the closed chamber they were now in.

At the first movements, the three men stood up straight, looking at each other in consternation. Heinz-Harold saw in the wild-wide eyes of his brother, and of his father, the same fear he knew they would see in his. He reached out through the falling stream of debris and took hold of his father’s, his brother’s upper arms to reassure them. The fluid strength of their bodies beneath their clothing reassured him in turn. He was with his blood family. They were of strong stock; together they would survive.

He pulled his brother and father towards him. As one they huddled back against the surrounding walls of stone, moulding their bodies against each other, and against the rock they had spent the past year and a half wounding and scarring, but which had refused to yield up its gold in any quantity. Now, it seemed, the rock wanted their flesh, their blood, their breath as recompense for all it had suffered, for what little it had given.

His brother and father clung tightly to him; their bodies pressed against his. He could feel their three hearts beating their own, separate panicked rhythms, the sharpness of the rock against his scalp, the backs of his bare hands, his hips, his spine, the ridges of his shoulder blades. Their arms were wrapped tightly around each other’s; three grown men, drawn together by fear, like children lost in the wilderness.

He found himself trying to remember when he had last been this physically close to his father or to his brother. When last he had touched either of them other than in passing while they worked. He remembered how he and his brother had wrestled and tumbled together when they were boys, but that was long ago. Now they were grown men; they had become discrete entities, more remote physically and spiritually than he had ever thought possible. No longer twinned, other than through birth and physical resemblance, made separate by experience and time. The mental empathy, the strange, prescient knowledge of each other’s thoughts they had seemed to possess together as children; that too was gone.

Everything was gone from him. It had all slipped away without his having noticed. Even the familiar comfort of his wife’s body next to his own; that too he could not remember. Only the raw caresses of the earth. The inert flesh of the world in which he had spent the last eighteen months delving and scavenging.

Such was the sum, the limit of his memory of his dealings with the realms of physicality; the earth in which they had dug and scraped, their flesh bleeding into its flesh, their bones abraded against its bones. With the passing months it had drawn him relentlessly to itself, gradually taking over his senses. Without his realising, it had filled his being, his soul. And now, it seemed, it wished to consummate their union; to embrace him in the ultimate coupling of dust and flesh. To claim him absolutely.

Even through the pressing urgency of his fear, he found himself worrying about the boy, his only son. How he would make it in this foreign country. On his own, having been suddenly made a man. He knew it would be hard for him. The imperfection in his eye would remain always a cause for insult, for prejudice against him. Yet another indication of his foreignness, his otherness, slight and superficial though the damage was.

And he wondered too what man, which one among the sombre and unforgiving men he knew, his wife would be forced to give herself to. To honour and obey. But no! Not love or cherish! That would be too painful a betrayal of his memory, even if it would be the only way that she and their daughters would be able to survive. What man would come to know her body in the way he had known it, all of its secret, fearful places?

And he found himself thinking of his son making angels in the snow. Of how a child could take such innocent pleasure in the smallest details of the world, in making his own, small impression on the way the world was structured. Had he ever made snow-angels as a boy? He could not remember. Had he ever been a boy; gone about the world immersed totally in boyhood’s stream of innocent wonder? There were memories, dim and receding that reassured him he had.

But there were many other, stronger recollections, of later, more adult and responsible times. Of his first job, as a printer, in Dortmund; he had been barely fifteen then. Setting the wooden blocks in the racks. Scouring pitch-black ink across the arrays of mirrored letters. The succulent kiss of ink on paper; the crackling sheets of paper sliding from the press, damp, heavy, aromatic; the permanent stain of the ink on his hands - another dark incursion into his being. Then there had been his courtship, his wedding. His first adult touch of a woman’s skin; his own first act of possession. Followed those few months later by the birth of the boy. The pride of it; the tears of joy. The births of his two daughters, equally joyful. Equally blessed with tears.

Then he had brought them here. Following some whim, some crazed delusion that they had had no option but to follow. His family. All that he cherished. Taking them across an ocean, a continent, in search of wealth. The faces of his wife’s parents, creased with sorrow, waving them goodbye. All the good and familiar and worthwhile things they had left behind. The barren, unwelcoming landscapes they had been forced to accept in their place. As home. As consolation. The other displaced souls they had encountered in this strange land with its alien ways. And finally, the eighteen months - was that how long it had been? - of hunger and hardship that his dream had forced them to endure, while he, a skilled tradesman, an educated man who could both read and write, grovelled and sweated in the soil to secure their survival.

And why had he and his brother and father elected to dig so deep, so far into the dark heart of the earth? Why had they not stayed out in the light and air, beside the river, where the others were looking? Was it intuition, perhaps, or the product of some dark, unrecognised necessity inside him? Inside all three of them? Some stubborn, subterranean need for enclosure embedded deep in their German souls?

Or was it simply because here in the mine at least they had experienced some good fortune, had found here some few grains of gold, often where they had least expected to discover them; the impoverished sprinklings of providence? Always though, it had been only a little, as though some precocious sprite - a kobold perhaps, unknowingly transported with them from their homeland - had been tempting them, luring them deeper into its lair. Always they had found just enough to keep them looking. Never enough to satisfy their dreams.

Such were the thoughts that came to him, surprising him with their complexity, their sheer irrelevance to his predicament, while the crumbling rock kept steadily falling. He tried to look up along the twisting crevice rising twenty feet or more above him to culminate in a shard of light flickering at the surface. Even as he started to choke in the clouds of falling dust, the light glancing off the particles as they cascaded down from above struck him as beautiful.

“See, Papa! See, Gert!” he shouted, giving in to the misplaced feeling of elation which had inexplicably taken hold in him, and struggling to extract his arm from the rising pile of debris engulfing their bodies, to draw their attention to the myriad points of refracted light descending towards them.

“Look! See the light, how beautiful it is! It’s like gold dust falling from heaven. Finally, we have found gold.”

He turned his head to look at his brother, saw his own face reflected there, the familiar eyes full of tears, the mirror of his own face covered with a fine layer of water-streaked dust. His brother’s hair was grey with dust. He looked like a ghost. A frightened, almost saddened ghost, grown old in an instant. The tears filling his brother’s eyes were not tears of elation.

“Yes. I see it,” his brother called back softly, turning his eyes away from the burning motes, and without conviction.

“We all see it, how beautiful it is,” his father said. “The world is a beautiful place, more so when you believe you are leaving it. Be quiet. Save your breath. You may need it. If we are fortunate.”

His father’s face was ghost-like too, a white cowl of dust rising to a rounded point on top of the natural white crown of his hair. The light in his father’s eyes was easier to classify than the light he had seen in those of his brother. His father’s eyes were full and bright with anger.

“Papa, why are you angry?” he asked.

“What is there not to be angry about?” his father replied, and also closed his eyes to stop the tears from falling.

His father was standing with his back to the chamber, directly beneath the crevice, facing both of his sons and the enclosing wall of rock behind them. It was how they had hurried together to seek the hoped-for safety of the walls of the chamber, Heinz-Harold pulling the others towards him and the imagined protection of the rock. The flow of debris was slowing, but still it kept falling. The loosened earth still streamed down over his father’s shoulders, pouring in rivulets across his chest, accumulating around his neck, beneath his chin, rising higher than he could raise his face to escape it. Heinz-Harold reached across with his arm, the one he had freed to point at the light, to brush away the dust from his father’s lips. His other arm was trapped irretrievably around the chest of his brother, held captive by the rock and his brother’s body pressed against it. He did not mind his arm being where it was, the helplessness, the mild discomfort of it. He gently squeezed his brother’s ribs to console him.

“Don’t be angry, Papa,” he said, his fingers lingering on his father’s lips. Their faces were close, but not close enough for him to kiss him. He wanted nothing more at that moment than to kiss him. “Our lives have been sufficiently blessed,” he said instead. “We have our children. In them we will live on. They will live out our dreams for us.”

“My children are here, dying here with me. What then of my dreams?” his father said, his voice tired and complaining.

“No, Papa. Listen. Heinz-Harold is right,” his brother consoled him, tipping his forehead forward to touch gently against both their faces. “Our children are your children too. Your dreams are our dreams; they too will be lived.”

They stared at each other as best and for as long as they could, their widened eyes filled only with sadness now, as the dust rose up and covered their mouths, their straining, up-turned faces. Their breathing came short and rapid as the tightening muscles of their chests struggled to draw in air against the weight of earth pressing in around them. There was nothing more that could be said.

All words, all exchange of thoughts between them was over. Any words they might have felt the need to say had been deprived of any meaning, made as light and inconsequential as dust. They themselves had become like statues, locked in this one wordless instant. Even the empathy Gert-Harold had once shared with his brother could not permeate through the dust to convey one syllable of consolation. He closed his eyes, to spare them the sight of his anguish, but neither could he bear to watch the awful sight of his father and brother dying.

“I love you both,” he heard his brother say, and he tried to mouth the same words in reply, to eradicate the sense of loss, the sadness. What he could not erase was the sting of dust in his nose and throat, filling the passageways of his lungs, drowning him, the earth slowly repossessing him from within; or the sounds of his father and brother choking, their desperate coughing cries, the convulsions of their bodies forced against his own as they struggled for their final breaths, to cling to their last precious moments of existence.