The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (14 page)

I had been given Nao-Kurai’s cabin but he would not let me move out of it now that I was well again though it placed a great strain on the sleeping quarters, for all the family had to fit themselves somehow into the main cabin by dint of hammocks slung from hooks and mattresses spread on the boards. The only other room in the barge was a cramped galley where Mama prepared our meals on two little charcoal stoves, using extremely simple, even primitive utensils.

There were six children. Nao-Kurai’s wife had died at the last birth, a boy now three years old. The eldest was also a boy, who suffered from a hare lip; for two centuries of inbreeding had produced a generation of webbed hands, ingrowing eyelashes, lobeless ears, a number of other slight deformities and, Nao-Kurai told me, a high rate of idiocy. The youngest daughter was five years old and still could only crawl. But his other children were strong and healthy enough. I still remember the two elder boys, strapping, handsome lads, diving into the river every morning to wash. But I could not tell what the girls looked like because of their thick, white crust. Even the five-year-old was painted over, although she drooled so much it made the red and white grease run comically together. The next girl was seven and the eldest nine. Though this one, Aoi, was a great big girl and worked hard all day at household chores under her grandmother’s supervision, she still played with dolls. I often saw her cradling in her arms and lullabying a doll dressed like the river babies, a knitted skull cap on its head to stop the demons who grabbed hold of babies’ topknots and pulled them bodily through the portholes, and the rest of it stuffed into a tailored sack, to stop other demons who sucked out babies’ entrails through their little fundaments. And the sack was bright red in colour because red kept away the demons who gave babies croup, colic and pneumonia. But when she offered me the doll so that I could play with it myself, I saw it was not a doll at all but a large fish dressed up in baby clothes. Whenever the fish began to rot, Mama exchanged it for a fresh one just like it so that, though the doll was always changing, it always stayed exactly the same.

That she showed me the doll at all shows on what close terms I had grown with her for even with their own menfolk the girls displayed a choreographic shyness, giggling if addressed directly and hiding their mouths with their hands in a pretty pretence of being too intimidated to reply. But as the weeks went by, I grew more and more attuned to the slow rhythms and amniotic life of the river, I learned to trill their speech as well as anyone and I became, I suppose, a kind of elder brother to them, although Nao-Kurai half hinted at certain plans for me which would make me closer than a brother. But I took no notice of him because I thought Aoi was clearly too young to be married.

As for myself, I knew that I had found the perfect place to hide from the Determination Police and, besides, some streak of atavistic, never-before-acknowledged longing in my heart now found itself satisfied. I was in hiding not only from the Police but from my Minister as well, and also from my own quest. I had abandoned my quest.

You see, I felt the strongest sense of home-coming.

Soon my new language came to my tongue before my former one. I no longer relished the thought of any food except maize porridge and well-sauced fish. Even now, I carry the memory of that barge and my foster family warmly at my heart’s core. I remember one evening in particular. It must have been late November, for the nights were chilly enough for Mama to have lit the stove. The stove burned wood and its long chimney puffed smoke out above the cabin in a homely fashion; it warmed us with its great, round, metal belly that glowed red from the heat it contained. Mama set down the bowl of stiff porridge on the table and Aoi brought us the bowl of stewed fish. Nao-Kurai said a few words of pagan blessing over the food and we began sedately to ball our porridge to a firm enough consistency to sustain its freight of fish. We ate sedately; we always ate sedately. And during the meal we exchanged a few domestic trivialities about the weather and the distance we had come that day. Aoi fed the youngest girl because she could not feed herself. The lamp above us moved with the motion of the boat at the whim of the current and rhythmically now illuminated, now shadowed the faces around the table.

I saw no strangeness in the whitened faces of the girls. They no longer looked like pierrots in a masquerade for I knew each individual feature under the cosmetic, the hollow in the seven-year-old’s cheek that showed where she had lost the last of her milk teeth the previous week and the little scratch the cat had given Aoi’s nose. And Mama looked just as every mother in the world should look. The limited range of feeling and idea they expressed with such a meagre palette of gesture no longer oppressed me; it gave me, instead, that slight feeling of warm claustrophobia I had learned to identify with the notion, ‘home’. I dipped my fist into the pungent stew and, for the first time in my life, I knew exactly how it felt to be happy.

The next day we came into the town of T. and the girls all went below when we moored beside the woodyard. Nao-Kurai asked me to go with him to the wood merchant and so I left the barge for the first time since I had boarded it. I found I was walking with a rolling gait. I was able to convince him that the wood merchant, at least, was one of the honest shoremen, but when we went to the market to get in stocks of maize for the long journey back down the river, I was able to render the river people a service which Nao-Kurai valued more highly than it was worth.

T. was a small, old-fashioned town so far to the inland north that a few sandstone outcrops of the mountains lay beyond the river. Yet here life seemed relatively unaffected by the war and people went about their daily business as if it were nothing to them that the capital had been cut off for three and a half years. This sense of suspended time comforted me. It made me feel that the capital, the war and the Minister had never existed, anyway. I had quite forgotten my black swan and the ambiguous ambassador for I had come back to my people. And Desiderio himself had disappeared because the river people had given me a new name. It was their custom to change a given name if someone had suffered bad luck or misfortune, as they guessed I had done, so now I was called Kiku. The two syllables were separated by the distance of a minor third. The name meant ‘foundling bird’; it seemed to me most wistfully appropriate.

In the market-place, peasant farmers displayed baskets of gleaming eggplants, whorled peppers, slumbrously overripe persimmons and blazing tangerines – all the fruits of late autumn. There were coops of live chickens, tubs of butter and cartwheel cheeses. There were stalls for toys and clothes, cloth by the yard, candy and jewellery. A ballad singer stood up on a stone to give us a vocal demonstration of his Irish origins and a bear in an effeminate hat trimmed with artificial daisies lumbered through the parody of a waltz in the arms of a gipsy woman with red ribbons in her hair. The market-place was full of the liveliest bustle and there were enough Indian faces in the crowds of country people to make us feel a little more at ease than we usually did on dry land, for this town was a kind of headquarters for the river people, for reasons I was to learn later.

First, we went to the corn chandlers and ordered fourteen stone of hulled maize to be delivered to the boat; then we wandered about the market making Mama’s commission of purchases. As they thrust three squawking chickens into paper bags for us, a man whose features and dress showed he was one of the clan came rushing up breathlessly and poured out a complaint as dramatically as Verdi.

Pared of the histrionic grace notes, it was a simple story. He had brought a consignment of grain from the plains to a seed-broker here. He had made his mark on a contract he could not read with the farmer and now the broker claimed he had contracted to carry a whole two tons more than had now been removed to the godowns and our brother, Iinoui, must pay the difference from his own pocket. Which would ruin him. Tears ran down his brown cheeks. He was fat, old, poor and quite at a loss.

‘This will be easy to settle!’ said Nao-Kurai. ‘Kiku here can read and write, you see.’

Iinoui’s eyes grew round with awe. He bowed to me stiffly and made one or two flattering remarks in the heightened language of respect they used when they wished to honour somebody’s skill or beauty, for they loved to abnegate themselves before one another. So we went all three together to the seed-broker’s. On the way, in the glass of a shop-window, I saw the reflections of three brown men in loose, white, shabby clothes, with tattered straw hats pulled down over our oblique eyes, a deep thatch of black hair above our upper lips and below austere noses that expressed contempt for those unlike themselves in the very whorls of our nostrils. I could have been Nao-Kurai’s eldest son or youngest brother. This idea gave me great pleasure.

The seed-broker was a pale, flabby, furtive man. When I broke into a flood of invective in the standard speech, he began to quail already and when I demanded to see the contracts, his blustering protests were adequate proof that he was hopelessly in the wrong. I threatened to find a lawyer and sue him for ten thousand dollars’ worth of defamation to Iinoui’s character. Sweat beaded his unhealthy-looking forehead. I had already developed a marked distaste for the insipid colouring and limp bodies of the shore people; they looked like the comic figures Mama would sometimes mould out of the porridge to make the idiot daughter giggle. The broker offered Iinoui five hundred dollars’ compensation for his ‘clerk’s mistake’ and when I told Iinoui this, both he and Nao-Kurai looked at me as though I were a magician. With a good deal of instinctive graciousness, Iinoui accepted the sum in cash but while the broker counted out the notes, the two barge-masters conferred together and then with me so that when Iinoui had stowed the money away in the pouch of his inner belt, I had the pleasure of informing the merchant that none of the river people would henceforward handle goods for him any more. Since the barges were the only remaining form of internal transport, it was he and not his prey who now found ruin staring him in the face. We left him shaking with impotent rage.

Iinoui insisted I take half his profits but I would not have done so had Nao-Kurai not told me that if I did not, I would hurt Iinoui’s feelings. Then we went to a bar which served Indians and drank a good deal of brandy and all the time they both flattered me unmercifully, so I felt almost ashamed. You must realize that, in spite of his quick wits and native intelligence, Nao-Kurai was not making good progress at his lessons. For one thing, he was far too old for the first grade. After so many years of hauling rope and heaving sacks, his fingers were too gnarled and stiff to handle a pencil with sensitivity. And, for another thing, his mind, which held the patterns of the currents in every river in the country and remembered the sites and quirks of all the locks on each one of half a thousand canals; his mind, a fabulous repository of water-lore, folkways and the mythology of the past; that mind which could calculate like lightning how much freight a barge could carry or how much coal made up a load – this crowded and magnificently functioning mind no longer had a stray corner left in which to store the Roman alphabet. Besides, he did not think in straight lines; he thought in subtle and intricate interlocking circles.

He conceived of certain polarities – light and darkness; birth and death – which, though they were immutable, existed in a locked tension. He could comprehend orally the most sophisticated concepts in a flash but co-ordinate his hand and eye sufficiently to form a linear sequence as elementary as ‘the cat sat on the mat’, he could not. ‘But, Kiku!’ he would say. ‘The cat sits there, upon your knee, and though she is not the only cat in the world, she is for me the very essence of cat.’ The very shapes of the letters led him astray. He fell to musing on their angularities and traced and retraced them, chuckling to himself with pleasure, until they became cursive abstracts, beautiful in themselves but utterly lacking in signification. Our evenings of study had become a mutual torture. I knew he would never learn to read or write. And his failure only made him respect me more. My success with the seed-broker clinched a decision that must have been growing in his mind for some time.

At last we broke away from Iinoui and went off to finish our shopping, belching fumes of brandy at one another companionably through our moustaches. I paused to spend some of my new wealth on a bunch of speckled dahlias for Mama and then I bought a cheerful silk handkerchief with violets painted on it.

‘Is that a present for someone?’ asked Nao-Kurai with the beautiful, tentative tact of my people.

‘For Aoi,’ I replied.

He had the chickens bundled in the crook of one arm and a whole still life of vegetables crammed in his other while I carried a cheese, a mound of butter wrapped up in straw and a basket containing four dozen eggs. But still he managed to reach out and grasp my hand.

‘Does my Aoi please you?’

We stood in the market and it was the middle of the afternoon. The gipsy girl still danced with her bear and their money box now glinted like a box of herrings from all the silver they had been given. The Irishman had just embarked on an endless lament for dead Napoleon and a few pennies lay in his proffered cap. I remembered the city, the opera-house and the music of Mozart. The voices of Mama and Aoi were now to me the music of Mozart and as I remembered the city, so I gladly said good-bye to it. The brandy I had drunk and Iinoui’s gift and pretty speeches made me warm and sentimental. And then Nao-Kurai might have been my father, from appearances; and I loved him already.

The river people had evolved or inherited an intricate family system which was theoretically matrilinear though in practice all decisions devolved upon the father. The father – or, nominally, mother – adopted as his son the man whom his eldest daughter married. When he died, this son-in-law inherited the barge and all that went with it. Therefore Nao-Kurai offered me far more than a bride; he offered me a home, a family and a future. If I murdered Desiderio and became Kiku for ever, I need fear nothing in my life ever, any more. I need not fear loneliness or boredom or lack of love. My life would flow like the river on which I lived. I would become officially an outcaste but, since I had signed my allegiance with the outcastes, I would no longer linger on the margins of life with a delicate sneer on my face, wistfully wishing that I were Marvell or that I were dead. My eyes filled with tears. I could hardly speak.