The collected stories (21 page)

'Remember the library?' Morris would say whenever Lil cried. He could do both voices well, his bewildered American question, her stiff mispronounced reply.

One night she rejected the memory and said bitterly, 'I vish I had not met you.'

'Aw, Lil.'

'You make me zo unhappy,' she sniffed. Then she shrieked, 'I do not vant to leave!'

'Christ, I don't want you to either.'

'No, not leave . . . leave!' she insisted, and burst into tears again.

She was, Morris guessed, talking of suicide.

He went easy on her for a while and was careful not to criticize her accent. But something had happened to the marriage: it had become impersonal; he felt they did not know each other very well, and he didn't care to know her any better. Her accent made him impatient and set his teeth on edge: he interrupted her as you do a stutterer. She moped like a hostage. Her hips were huge, her face and hands went florid in the January cold, though her face was still pretty. But she was like so many Czech women he had seen

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in Prague, like his landlady, like the librarians and the shrews in the ministries who would not allow him to interview officials. Those women who tried to kill his research: they wore brown, belted dresses and heavy shoes; not old in years, they were made elderly by work. Somehow, they were fat.

His daughters were fat, too, and once Morris had said to his office mate O'Hara (the Middle East), 'I think if we gave them American names they'd get skinny again.' O'Hara laughed. Morris was, afterward, ashamed of having revealed his exasperation. Exasperation was the name he gave it, despair was what he felt: because nothing would change for him. He would have no more kids; he would not marry again. He had tenure: this was his job for life. He could hope for promotion, but in thirty years he would be -this hurt him - the same man, if not a paler version. The manuscript of his book, the letters from publishers containing phrases of terse praise and regret and solemn rejection clipped to the flyleaf, would stay in the bottom drawer of his desk. Once he had had momentum and had breathed an atmosphere of expectancy; he had flown across Europe and been afraid. But he had been younger then, and a student, and he had been in love.

The study he planned of ruling parties was getting nowhere. He could not keep up with the revolutions or the new names (the presidents and generals in these countries were so young!). He taught Political Theory and used a textbook that a colleague had written. Morris knew it was not a good one.

Then the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia. Morris looked at his newspaper and saw photographs of chaos. He was tempted to throw the paper away and pay no further attention, for he could not separate in his mind the country from that woman in his house (Lil!) urging food into the two fat little girls whose Slavic names, instead of being dimmed by three and four years of utterance, had acquired queer, unfamiliar highlights and were the roots of even sillier diminutives, encouraging ridicule.

Morris fought that impulse, and he did not want the oblique revenge which his indifference to the invasion would have been. So he read the story and looked at the pictures, and he felt exhilaration, anger stoked by a continuous flow of indignant shame, as if he had returned to a deserted neighborhood and realized, standing amid abandoned buildings, that he too had been a deserter. The pictures were of Prague: tanks in formation on a thoroughfare's

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cobbles, their slender cannon snouts sniffing at rumpled citizens; some boys near the tanks with their hands cupped at their mouths, obviously shouting; others, reaching, in the act of pitching stones; people being chased into doorways by soldiers wearing complicated boots and carrying rifles; people laying wreaths; pathetically small crowds wagging signs; two old ladies, with white flowers, weeping. Morris read the news reports and the editorial, and he fumbled with a cigarette, discovering as he puffed that he had put the wrong end in his mouth and lighted the filter tip.

'What's that awful stink?' It was O'Hara. He saw the paper spread out, the headline. He said, 'Incredible, isn't it?'

'I could have predicted it,' said Morris. He was shaking his head from side to side, but he was smiling.

O'Hara invited Morris over for a meal the next night. He said, 'And don't forget to bring the wife! She's the one I want to chew the fat with.'

Remembering Lil, Morris folded the paper and started down the corridor. He was stopped by Charlie Shankland (Latin America). Shankland said, 'I'm sorry about this,' meaning the invasion, and invited the Rosetrees for Saturday.

Lil cried that afternoon. She saw the paper and said, 'Brave, brave people,' and 'My poor country, always trouble.' At the O'Haras' and the Shanklands' Lil was asked about the Russians: how did she feel about them? what would she do if she were in Prague today? who would she support?

'You do not know how . . . messianic . . . are the Russians,' she said. Morris had never heard her use that word before. He was pleased. 'My husband,' she went on, looking at Charlie and lowering her eyes, 'my husband thinks they are okay, like you all do. But we know they are terrible-' She could not finish.

She had said 'sinks' instead of 'thinks.' Morris was angry with himself for having noticed that. He wanted her to say more; he was proud and felt warm toward her. He was asked questions. Twice he replied, 'Well, my wife says she thinks,' ending each time 'Isn't that right, Lil?' And each time Lil looked at him and bowed her head sadly in agreement.

Morris dug out his dissertation and read it, and threw half of it away. He made notes for new chapters and began consulting Lil, asking detailed questions and not interrupting her answers. He gave a lecture for the Political Science Club, and he was invited to

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Chicago to present a paper at a forum on the worsening situation in Czechoslovakia. He started buying an evening paper; he read of more students defying soldiers and scrawling Dubcek's name on the street with chalk. He followed the funeral of the boy who was shot, and he saw the Czechs, whom he often felt were his Czechs, beaten into silence by the Russians. But the silence did not mean assent; even less, approval. It was resistance. He knew them, better than most people knew them. Time had passed, but it was not very long after the first Russian tank appeared in Prague that Morris Rosetree came home from a lecture and whispered to his wife, 'Lepska, I love you.'

Sinning with Annie

Make no mistake about it, I, Arthur Viswalingam, was married in every sense of the word, and seldom during those first years did I have the slightest compunction. Acceptance is an Asiatic disease; you may consider me one of the afflicted many. I was precisely thirteen, still mottled with pimply blotches, pausing as I was on that unhealthy threshold between puberty and adolescence. Annie (Ananda) was a smooth eleven, as cool and unripe as the mango old Mrs Pushpam brings me each morning on a plate when I sit down to my writing. (Is it this green fruit before me now that makes me pause in my jolly memoir to take up this distressing subject, one that for so long has troubled my dreams and made my prayers pitiful with moans of penitential shame?) It was a long time before the eruptions of adolescence showed with any ludicrous certainty (I almost said absurtainty!) on Annie's face. I imagine it was around our third anniversary, the one we celebrated at the home of that oaf Ratnam, my cousin (his mother, another yahoo, unmercifully repeated a jape about our childlessness: 'Perhaps they are not doing it right!'). I cannot be sure exactly when Annie became a woman: she always seemed to be a small girl playing at being grown-up, worrying the cook and sweeper with her pouts, dressing in outlandish styles of sari, crying often and miserably - all of this, while we were married, an irritating interruption of my algebra homework.

At my present age I am certain of very little; I only know that I can no longer expect God to listen to mv incessant wailing, and so I turn to my fellow man, not for indulgence but simply to give God a rest. This is the wet season in Delhi; the temple monkeys are drenched: they sit mournfully under the crasslv painted arches, their fur sticking out in wet prickles, their pale blue flesh chilled with the monsoon, giving them the deathly look of the gibbons that turn up now and again, bloated and drowned in the open drams of this city. My pen spatters ink; 1 w rite slow lv on unbleached tooKcap with main half-starts and crossings-out. I can hear the

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wheezing of wind through the little midden of Asiatic rubbish that has accumulated in my lungs; I can feel my heart stretching and straining with each pump, like an old toad squatting in the basket of my ribs. To misquote the celebrated poet from Missouri, I am an old man in a wet month.

But imagine me, if you can, seventy years ago, standing on spindly legs (I thought all the world stood on spindly legs until I saw English shopgirls) - as I was saying, standing on spindly legs at the temple entrance, in my pint-sized turban, my hands clasped against my thirteen-year-old breast. All manner of hooting and shrieking from the street echoed in the temple: bargains being struck, coins and brown rupees exchanged for flesh and fruit. That was long ago; it has taken all this time for me to see the irony of those beastly hawkers.

Little imbecile that I was, I had no idea I was being swapped. I did not know that Annie's father had promised five thousand rupees to my father if the marriage transpired as arranged. Chits and promises had been exchanged; my parents had haggled while I played dawdling puddle games and kicked my football. And little did I know of my father's bankruptcy, my mother's idle, spendthrift ways; no, it pleased me that my father always seemed to be on holiday, my mother dressed richly in excellent shawls. How was I to know my father was lazy, my mother foolish; or, indeed, that I would have to pay for their sins with my chaste flesh?

We lived in princely fashion, with leisure and comfort that for all I know even a prince would envy: the lower class's idea of the voluptuous is always grander than the prince's, because it is unattainable. Their demons and gods, about which I shall speak presently, show them to be a very imaginative lot; coupled with their idleness this breeds a grotesquery all its own. My father's credit remained solid; had my father declared himself bankrupt very early on, or had my mother gone about in the market in tattered sari and worn sandals, a splintery wooden comb stuck in her hair instead of the ivory one she habitually wore, the final reckoning would have, I am convinced, come sooner. The people in our village were quite ignorant and easily gulled. Foolishness was a plague which descended on us early and stayed, not killing, but maiming: cripples abounded. In evidence of this, which I am sure my parents took careful note of, the villagers worshiped a whole zoo of beasts, a pseudospiritual menagerie: snakes, monkeys,

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elephants, goddesses with six arms and dreadful snouts, gods with elephantine ears, tusks and even wrinkled trunks. To be human was a crime against everyone; it was grotesque. Have I mentioned the cows? It pains me to recall the bovine benedictions I performed: I have stroked the hindquarters of a plaster cow until the paint flaked off and the stone itself was worn smooth - nay, made indentations in the plaster flanks with my praying fingers! I donged bells and keened, lit tapers, strewed petals. We Hindus have a curious faith that, in a manner of speaking, transforms a farmyard into a place of worship - a backward, rat- and snake-infested farmyard at that. The more dumb and stupid the idol, the more devoutly we pray. Mrs Pushpam, for example, is at this moment with a hundred other yelping women, beating her tambourine before a smudged mezzotint of Shiva in a squalid bazaar. It should surprise no one to learn that two of the dozen or so words which English takes from my language are goon and thug; I would not be amazed, further, if fanatic and dunderhead had Sanskrit roots.

Where was I? Yes, at the temple. I was there because my father's credit had run out at last. No one else knew this of course: the bluff was still working. I think of a card game, symbol of bluff. I have never seen a child's face on a pack of cards, though I have in my mind a special pack, my father's, the cards marked Foolishness, Pomp, Ego, Greed, Idleness, Boastfulness; there is a face card as well: the painted image of a sallow prince, dressed ludicrously in finery, the little demented face staring with big eyes. It was this card my father played in the spring of 1898 (it was a 'marrying year,' as they say in my language) in the Laxshminarayan Temple, when he was released from his years of bluff, and I was bound up irrevocably with sin.

The Savior of the faith I embraced only this year similarly stood in a temple; he spoke wise words to his elders about Work, Duty and His Father's Business. The comparison with me is crude and unworthy, but it serves to throw my sin into bold relief. I too stood 111 ail Eastern temple, but less confidently than the Nazarene; I stood with sweating elders and uttered inanities (God help me, I have already said something of my father's 'business'!), stroked for the umpteenth time the cow's behind, the monkey's flank, mooed and crowed, in a tongue I would very willingly now like to disre-member, the shrill syllables of my pagan faith, trumpeted like Gan-

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pari, the elephant god, chattered like Hanuman, and let myself be anointed (under the circumstances, a sacrilegious verb) with unguents, perfumes, juices, nectars, spots of dust, rare oils and essences and - it shames me to mention this, though I promised to be ingenuous - devoured a reeking pudding made up of the excrement, dung I should say, of all the above-mentioned animals. Meanwhile a medium went into a trance and, eyeballs rolled up, scraped his tongue with a rusty sword after which he wrote asinine charms on yellow slips of paper with the blood. Talk about barbarism! You have no idea.

My bride, the child Annie, was heavily veiled, clotted with blossoms, orchids, a paraphernalia of frangipani and jacaranda, anything the idlers who arranged the wedding could lay their hands on. She was so small she could have been a corsage; and she was as mobile as Birnam wood. None of it meant much to me, neither the incantations nor the odors, the clanging temple nor the avaricious side glances of my 'elders.' My attention was fixed elsewhere: in the corner of the temple a beggarly snake charmer on his haunches blew a swollen flute, coaxing a sleek, swaying cobra out of a basket.