The Dumb House (2 page)

When I was a child, Mother would come into the bedroom and tell me stories. It was a ritual she performed, without variation: I had to go up to bed, and she would follow five minutes later. I would hear the clock strike nine as she climbed the stairs. Sometimes she brought a book, but quite often she told me the stories out of her head. Whether she made them up, or had them by heart, I couldn't say, but she never once hesitated or faltered. I had the impression, then, that she knew every story that had ever been told, and all she had to do was think of one for a moment, and every detail came flooding into her mind, instantly. It was Mother who told me the story of Akbar: how he built the Dumb House, not for profit, or even to prove a point, but from pure curiosity. Nobody knows how long it stood, or what happened to the children who were locked inside with their mute attendants. Nobody knows because the story of the Dumb House was only ever an episode in another, much longer story, an anecdote that had been folded in, told in passing to illustrate the personality of Akbar the Mughal, the dyslexic emperor whose collection of manuscripts was the richest in the known world. Later I realised that most of the details of the story were embellishments that Mother had added herself, to spin out this single episode that I liked so much. In fact, the original story of the Dumb House was simple and fleeting. In that version, the Mughal's counsellors were debating whether a child is born with the innate, God-given ability to speak; they had agreed this gift is equivalent in some way to the soul, the one characteristic that marks out the human from the animal.
But Akbar declared that speech is learned, for the very reason that the soul is innate, and the soul does not correspond to any single faculty, whether it be the ability to speak, or to dream, or to reason. Surely, he argued, if speech came from the soul, then there would be only one language, instead of many. But the counsellors disagreed. While it was true that there were many languages, these were simply the corruptions of the original gift, implanted in the soul by God. They knew of incidents in which children had been left in isolation for years, or raised by animals: in such circumstances they had created a language of their own, that nobody else understood, which they could not have learned from others.

Akbar listened. When the counsellors had finished speaking, he told them he would test their hypothesis. He had his craftsmen build a mansion, far from the city: a large, well-appointed house, with its own gardens and fountains. Here Akbar established a court of the mute, into which he introduced a number of new-born babies, gathered from the length and breadth of the Empire. The children were well cared for, and were provided with everything they could possibly need, but because their attendants were dumb, they never heard human speech, and they grew up unable to talk, as Akbar had predicted. People would travel from all over the kingdom to visit the house. They would stand for hours outside its walled gardens, listening to the silence, and for years to come the mansion was known as the Gang Mahal, or Dumb House.

Mother would come to the bedroom and tell me this story in the evenings. Naturally, her version was different; she barely touched upon the controversy over the innateness of language, or the nature of the soul. Instead she described the Gang Mahal in sumptuous detail: the orange trees in terracotta pots, the
jewelled walls, the unearthly silence. I lay in bed listening, watching her lips move, intoxicated by her perfume. I used to wonder what had happened when those children grew up; how they thought, if thought was possible, if they ever remembered anything from one moment to the next. There are people who say speech is magical; for them, words have the power to create and destroy. Listening to Mother's stories, I became enmeshed in a view of the world: an expectation, a secret fear. Even now, nothing seems more beautiful to me than language when it creates the impression of order: the naming of things after their true nature; the act of classification; the creation of kingdoms and genera, species and sub-species; the designation of animal, vegetable or mineral, of monocotyledonous plants, freshwater fishes, birds of prey, the periodic table. This is why the past seems perfect, a time of proportion and order, because it is immersed in speech. For animals, memory might reside as a sensation, a resonance in the nerves, or in the meat of the spine. But for humans, the past cannot be described except in words. It is nowhere else. What disturbs me now is the possibility that language might fail: after the experiment ended so inconclusively, I cannot help imagining that the order which seems inherent in things is only a construct, that everything might fall into chaos, somewhere in the long white reaches of forgetting. That is why it is imperative for me to begin again, and that is why Karen was sent here, after all this time, to fulfil her true purpose.

I lived entirely in the presence of my mother. Even when she wasn't there, I was aware of her, somewhere, and I was always conscious of myself, I always behaved as if she were with me, watching and listening. My father, on the other hand, seemed barely present. Most of the time, I disregarded him, just as
Mother did. He seemed peripheral to our existence, irrelevant to our enterprise and, at the time, I thought he preferred it that way. Often, he was away on business. When he was at home, he would make an effort to play the game of father and son, but we were always awkward together. He knew I belonged to Mother.

Not that I was ever disrespectful. When he asked me to take a walk with him, I always assented readily, and we would go out, pretending there was some purpose to our excursion. Usually, he would ask me to go fishing. He had no idea of how fishing was done, but he must have thought it was appropriate, the sort of thing fathers do with their sons. We would carry our rods and baskets to the river, then sit on the bank in silence, watching the water flow over the dark weeds. I was certain the place we usually chose was wholly unsuitable. I never saw a fish there, in all our visits.

We would spend a couple of hours like that, then we would gather up our equipment and turn for home. I think my father enjoyed being near the water. It set him at his ease and, on the way back, he would seem more relaxed; he would make efforts at conversation, asking me questions about school, or what books or music I liked. I would answer as well as I could; I think I wanted to be friendly, but the questions were too simple, too closed. Then, as the conversation petered out, he would fall back on his favourite stand-by, which was to ask if there was anything I wanted, anything I needed. To begin with, I must have thought these questions were nothing more than conversational gambits, and I told him I was fine, there was nothing I could think of. Eventually, when I saw how disappointed he was with this reply, I began naming things, just to keep him happy, and perhaps also to see what would happen. I was surprised to begin with, then later, slightly irritated by the
fact that he always remembered what I had asked for. Inevitably, the requested item would arrive: without ceremony, it would appear in the hall, or on the table in the breakfast room. There would be no gift wrap, no tags or ribbons, nothing to say who had sent it. Most often, these gifts were delivered to the house, and usually when my father was away. Mother must have been aware of the parcels, but she made no comment. It was as if they had been delivered to us by accident.

In a spirit of loyalty, I tried to ignore them, too; but I have to admit there were times when I was pleased. My father's interpretation of even my vaguest request would be uncanny. No matter what I asked him for – a bicycle, a new violin, a tennis racquet, a fountain pen – no matter what it was, it would always be the size, the style, the colour I would have chosen. Yet I never felt these objects were gifts as such, because I never felt they were entirely mine. I used them the way I would have used something borrowed, taking care of them the way you might care for something that, sooner or later, would have to be returned. Occasionally I asked for things I didn't really want, to see what he would do. Yet still, no matter what it was, he only chose the best, and I would be embarrassed, as if I had been caught out in a mean practical joke. Sometimes I even forgot what I had asked for. I would just say the first thing that came to mind, to give him something to think about as we made our way home across the meadow. But he always remembered. Whatever I requested would appear, in its plain packaging, like a bundle of exotic flotsam, washed up on the doorstep. Most of the time, he wasn't there for me to thank him. I think he arranged it that way, to avoid any difficulty. Looking back, in spite of his seeming collaboration with our regime, I see that he was secretly and perversely trying to find some way into the world I shared with Mother, and these gifts were his crude
attempts to win my confidence. I feel sorry for him now, in retrospect. He must have been lonely; it must have pained him to know he was little more than a stranger to us, someone we treated with courtesy, but whom we regarded, essentially, as a guest in our house.

Nevertheless, I felt guilty sometimes, when the parcels arrived and I stripped them open to find some expensive object that I couldn't use, glittering in the morning light. Occasionally I would go to the river alone and stay there all day, as if paying a forfeit, or enduring some kind of penance. The river seemed different when I was by myself: it was a mysterious place, whose strangeness I was interrupting. Sometimes I took my rod and pretended to fish, for my father's sake. I wanted to tell him I had been out there while he was away, carrying on where we had left off. Sometimes I even convinced myself that I would catch a fish. It would have been good to have something to show him on his return. Most of the time, though, I just took off my shoes and socks and waded out into the cold, quick water, to feel the long streams of riverweed against my shins. My feet would be chilled to the bone, but I still felt the current on my skin, and I would stand for as long as I could, letting the cold sink in, trying to become another element of the river, as natural, as neutral, as the silt and the water. I looked for fish, but I never saw any. I remembered a story Mother had told me once, about an ancient water spirit who lived amongst the weeds in dark ponds and rivers. The spirit was called Jenny Greenteeth, and I suppose, in the book, it was meant to be a woman, but I imagined it as a near-hermaphrodite, part-woman, part-man, part-fish, something wired into the sway of the water, aware of the least flicker or ripple. In my mind, it possessed that special fish-sensitivity where even rainfall is a tapping at the spine; it knew the difference between ordinary disturbances of
the surface, and the steps of a child, or the tug of a probing stick. In the book, it was shown as a wrinkled, bone-and-hair fiend, surging from the water, its long nails and jagged teeth coated with weed and moss. But on those visits to the river, I would imagine something subtle, almost invisible. Quick as a pike, it would rise to its prey, then disappear into the depths, but there would be no cries, no blood, no immediate horrors. A deceptive calm would return to the river: birds would sing again, the sun would break through the clouds. The victim would be unaware of what had happened. After a while, he would grow bored, and return home, where no one would notice any change. Yet the change would have happened under the surface, behind the appearance of normality. That child would never be the same again. He would grow into something dark and cold, something that belonged to the river. He would see possibilities that others missed, and he would act upon them. People would begin to see him as a monster, but as far as he was concerned, they were nothing more than phantoms. His world was different from theirs. In his world, their thoughts, their actions, their judgements were immaterial.

In the holidays, when I was home from school, Mother would take me out looking for corpses. To begin with, it was her idea: she wanted me to see how things looked when they were dead, and she got me to come by making a game of it, an odd form of hide and seek. She said every animal had a place of its own where it would go to die if it could; wild animals wanted to be alone when they were sick or dying, and they would crawl away into the undergrowth, to be out of the light and the wind. The only dead things I had seen until then were pheasants and hedgehogs on the road to the village, but Mother had a gift for knowing where to look: animals I had only ever encountered
in books became real as corpses, life-size, as it were, with hard claws and tiny, blood-threaded teeth, flesh I could prod and turn, fur I could stroke, disturbing the flies, drawing the cold or the warmth of decay through the palm of my hand. As we searched for fresh bodies, we would revisit the sites of earlier finds. There was always something new to see, something strangely beautiful – not only in summer, when the bodies imploded slowly and the smell was dark and sickly, but also in autumn and winter, when they lay for weeks, cold and untarnished, frozen voles laid out on the grass, small birds lying under the hedges with their legs stretched, their eyes clenched and wrinkled. It was odd, but as I followed the process of decay, there seemed to be something curative in it all, as if the animal was being renewed, or purified, leaching away in the rain, drying in the sun, vanishing slowly, leaving behind only a faint yellowish aftermath in the grass, in which form was implicit, with a half-life of its own.

After a while, I started going out on these hunts alone. At some level, at the level of an undercurrent, I had begun to think it might be possible to be incorporated into this process in some way; or rather, I began to form a primitive, superstitious notion that I could make it work for my own purposes, propitiating it with small offerings, vague gestures of rehearsal and assent. At school we performed an experiment with moulds, sealing a piece of moistened bread in ajar and leaving it in a warm place to see the lime-green and ochre life-forms growing on the surface, and I repeated this experiment at home, unscrewing the lid of the jar each day for the sweet perfume of new life arising from decay, probing the black and silvery hairs, watching them blossom and collapse in their hundreds. I varied the contents of the jar: lemon rind, scraps of meat, cabbage leaves, egg-yolk – everything had its own way of becoming something new, and I made my own private catalogue of implosions and seepages, ergots and
mildews, sickening odours, twitches, vanishings. One afternoon I loosened a tangle of hair from Mother's brush, wrapped it in tissue paper and buried it out in the garden amongst her irises, so the freshening rain could wear it down and make it new, irresistibly, in the cold earth. That same year I began to collect the skulls and bones of the animals I found, laying them out on beds of sawdust in old shoe boxes, giving each its own label to show the date and place where it had been found. I think even then I knew what I was doing, but at the same time it had the quality of a game – as if I were preventing myself from fully understanding that these rituals, these clumsy flirtations with death and renewal, were really my childish attempts to prevent Mother from dying. I remember that there was an afternoon, around that time, when it first came home to me that she was mortal. Of course, I must have known before then that she would die, but there had never been real understanding, the idea of her death had always been vague, lacking in intimacy.