Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else (19 page)

The Indian gave a slight shrug.

Garudananda did in fact come, about two hours later. When he heard the verdict (the woman must be treated without delay and her body's fluids rapidly replenished), his shrewd, dark eyes betrayed a certain relief.

It turned out that this spiritual hotel had a surprisingly serviceable clinic. Someone sent for three of the “novices.” Two men showed up, and one Canadian woman, middle-aged and dressed in a sari: forlorn, skinny, with all the glamour of a swamp flower, the unmistakable mark of the durga on her forehead.

There were no introductions; they immediately fell into working mode. He gave practical instructions, leaving the physical side to them. Almost indifferently, he watched as they capably lifted the Serb under her arms and beneath her knees, and strapped her to a bed. She offered surprisingly little resistance, as if she were not even present in that fat, sweaty body. There was merely a brief increase in her mumbling as they carried her through the door.

From there on in it was a matter of routine. The Canadian
was, as it turned out, a competent nurse, and under his supervision she put a drip into the Serb's forearm. The Serb did not even flinch as the needle slipped smoothly into her vein.

He suddenly wondered which faction these three belonged to. Were they judging him? Did they approve of his decision? Were they future friends or enemies in this night-enfolded house, where he had arrived less than a day ago and still had three months to spend?

The mumbling gradually grew weaker. Soon the body slackened, and the glistening whites of her eyes disappeared behind their swollen lids. From the outside it seemed the Serb was sleeping peacefully.

He sent his assistants away, telling them he would monitor the woman himself. They nodded and impassively said good-bye. There was no commentary on what had transpired. He sat down by the Serb's bed and suddenly felt the whole weight of his journey. He realized vaguely that he would have to stay here tonight, since he would not be able to find his room.

The Canadian suddenly turned around in the doorway. She was the last of the three to leave, and for the first time she looked him straight in the eyes. There was such contempt in her thin, foxlike face that his fingertips went cold. Of course, he could have been wrong; the contact was too brief, and durgas always look contemptuous. Still, in that moment he lost his last shred of hope.

The durga closed the door behind her; the Serb slept on. It was quiet in the building. He must have briefly fallen asleep in the chair, because suddenly he opened a drawer and his watch was lying in it.

He had received the watch from his mother as a Christmas present when he was eight. Soon thereafter he was at a children's carnival and a magician did a trick that charmed it off his wrist. Before the boy's very eyes, in full sight of everyone in the hall, the man threw it into a mortar bigger than a bucket and ground it to a powder. For a few horrible minutes he thought he would never be
able to go home. Then the magician twirled a handkerchief over the mortar and pulled out the watch, whole and unharmed. The boy was relieved that at least he could go home now, but he did not put the watch back on, and he no longer wanted to wear it. He had lost his trust in it: he could not be sure that it was in fact the same one, and at night he would shut it up in the bottom of his drawer.

He woke to find his leg had fallen asleep. It prickled unpleasantly. He stood up to stretch a bit, and realized it was almost one in the morning. Yesterday was the third time, since the day he had needlessly shaved his head, that he had failed to get even a single point.

O durga, mother of disillusion,

drinking blood, devouring raw meat,

mother of all gods and goddesses,

ruler of the earth,

staring blankly, dancing without rest,

fearsome in your greatness,

honor be to you,

dhum!

à V. L.

“Your nephew is here, Master,” the serving boy announced in a funereal voice, supposing that it made him sound educated. “He would gladly undergo a hundred more incarnations for the privilege of greeting you.”

Wu knitted his eyebrows until their spiky white hairs converged beneath his forehead. He had no taste for yet another commentary on the combination of
sin
and
sa
syllables, but did not see how he could avoid it. The aroma Wu himself had named “porcelain maiden” was surely wafting along the corridors all the way to the court; in all the empire no one else had the skill to prepare the porcelain maiden. Only Wu. Only he! He and only he!

He felt a wearisome pressure in his head, the hollow pressure of several indistinct ideas (“fame — nakedness — nowhere to hide”), but there was no time to consider them: he had just lit the flames, and with painstaking care he was swinging the pan in an arc three thumbs wide and three-quarters-of-a-thumb high. Only thus could the “maiden” truly be released.

“Let him enter.”

A tubby, aging youth was standing in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot. He shuffled awkwardly along the wall into the room. His belly was soft and he teetered on long, thin legs like a wading bird.

“It's hot,” the youth said reproachfully.

“Lots hot,” he added after a moment.

He took off his hat and mopped his balding head and his short, chafed neck with a none-too-clean handkerchief. The odor of
his sweat intermingled with the porcelain maiden, and only Wu's six-year monastic education in controlling his inner demons allowed him to hide his distaste. He was nearly certain no one would notice that aberrant moment in the final product, but nonetheless all hope of perfection was irrevocably gone. At the most critical juncture, when the pieces of meat first mystically united with the blue-burning sauce of Jena beans and pepper, an alien stench had permeated them — and that never helped matters. Still, Wu said to himself, those two geese — meaning the empress and her oldest daughter — they won't notice it, but as for me, I would never let it touch my tongue.

“Thank you, exalted one, for–stooping–to–my–humble– insignificance,” he mumbled. It took far less time to say than it does to read. Centuries of misuse and age-old affectation had ground this common idiom down to a few muddled, utterly meaningless syllables. The poet looked at the round chair as if wondering what to do with it, and then sat heavily down.

“Whatcha cooking?” he said without interest.

What a question! It stung Wu, but lightly, like a flea. Everyone knew the porcelain maiden. Even his nephew had eaten at least his weight's worth; he should know that aroma by now! What if I asked him: so you write poems, is that it? Never heard of them. No one recites them! — His inner demons toyed briefly with the idea of saying this out loud, but Wu did not have the time just now.

“Dinner for the empress,” he answered calmly.

The meal was now almost ready. All that remained was to pour it into stone bowls rubbed generously with a bitter root. Wu did not usually rub the bowls himself, but yesterday he had caught a plump little girl peeling the root with fingernails that were horrendously dirty. He was so infuriated that he whacked her with a large ladle. She whimpered for a while and this morning made herself scarce — well, she was evidently afraid, probably off complaining to some hysterical aunt of hers that she couldn't take that old madman anymore.

Alone! All on my own! the demons wailed, and from the height of a child's arm Wu began precisely and ever so carefully to
pour the pungent substance into the steaming bowls. When the moist maiden touched the sizzling stoneware it underwent a final, triumphant tremble. The vitreous meat writhed and congealed, as if it wanted to flocculate, but it held fast, its surface splitting slightly open. It now looked like the frozen skin of a very pale girl, with a polished tinge akin to that of old miniatures. Wu knew this was the only way to achieve a gradation of flavors. In the meat's tiny cracks, the juices had not uniformly hardened, and the crust had become a concentrate of the concoction's spicy apex: a plume of taste, its coloratura.

Wu, as always at that moment, remembered the day he had discovered the trick with the hot bowl. He was not quite thirty and had run non-stop out toward the Buried Wells, nearly delirious with a high, ringing joy.

“The empressetta eats too much,” the poet said indifferently, undoing his belt to let his belly flop out. “The princessina too. They're glutton-guts.”

It was the poet's habit to mutilate the most common of words, as if he didn't even know his own language. And to think his teacher had been one of the empire's most famous grammarians! At fifteen Wu's nephew had put out his instructor's eye in a scuffle and was immediately exiled to the provinces. Only his family connection to Wu and, at the time, Wu's strong hand, had enabled him to return years later.

The poet stuck his hand under the silk.

“Have you spoken with the censor?” he asked, yawning. From the wild rippling of the ribbons he appeared to be scratching his belly most energetically.

Ah, so that's why you're poking around here! Wu thought, irritated. You've come to find out whether this year they'll finally have a public reading of your … your … He hesitated, but the only thing that came to mind were some words mutilated in his nephew's style, so he stopped trying to pin down the concept. Well, you can wait, boy, you can wait. I think I already do more for you than I should by letting you parasitize the family name — and heaven
knows it's never done anything for me. But for me to dishonor it further by advancing your … your … It was the same problem as before, and Wu abandoned his ruminations.

“The censors,” he said severely, “are drowning in work just now. Over a hundred poems came in for the emperor's birthday celebration contest. The censors have locked themselves in the library and have been studying them for days.”

His nephew stared sleepily at the smoke-stained ceiling as if this answer had nothing to do with him. The porcelain maiden became more delicate by the moment; it evaporated into oblivion like a dream before waking, and what was left behind was a taste just as evanescent, haunting and hollow. His nephew could probably no longer smell it, Wu realized, and soon, after twice the time, it would desert Wu as well. How many times have I lost her already, and where does she disappear to? I'll never know.

“The emperor will probably disappear,” his nephew said suddenly, in the expressionless tone he always used. “I figured it out by doing a structural analysis of the last hundred years of court poetry.”