The PuppetMaster (47 page)

Directly in front of me the two second-class cars had derailed, the right wheels resting on the ties, the left wheels mired deep into the earth. Three more cars slid off and tilted precariously to one side. I lifted Jitka and held her at arm’s length. She stood on her own weight and seemed unhurt other than a dirty scrape on her elbow from the jump. “Where is she?” I asked again.

She stared back disoriented, bewildered. “She didn’t come back when the train began to leave, Bhim. Oh Gott, I thought she was with you. It all happened so fast.”

“What do you mean she didn’t come back? Where did she go?”

Jitka squeezed her eyes shut and then looked at me more clearly. “She left right after you went for the paper. I thought she was going to find you.”

I looked at the mayhem--behemoths of twisted steel and the tons of scattered debris of terrified travelers. To my left, along the platform, dazed Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and a few disparate ferenghis huddled in ragged groups. Families, couples, and lone passengers searched for bags or relatives, looking to reorganize something, anything. Luggage flew from doorways and railway officials began running and shouting, and no one understood at all what had really happened. Except me. To my right, near the foot of the bridge, people were sobbing or staring over the precipice. She got off before it left the station, Bhim. She got off. She’s safe. She’s here in the crowd. Just need to find her. “I just need to find her,” I heard myself whispering. But she wasn’t there. I searched the faces, the hair, clothes, but none of Uli’s features came back to take away my growing fear.

The other side, she must have gone out the other side.

I scrambled to the opening between the slanted cars and leapt to the top step in one stride. Through the space I could see figures on the opposite side, bodies crawling on the earth, people wandering, moving numbly in the direction of the bridge and incline. She’s here, I know it. She is. But she wasn’t. I jumped to the other side and saw only the trousers and silks of Indian first-class. My brain screamed. I looked into the second-class car, but knew she wouldn’t be there, and the ache that had left, the one that had wrapped itself so coldly around my heart for so long flooded back in. I tripped, fell to my knees, and then to all fours. No, no, no. That one word, the one that denied she was gone, railed against my fear. It repeated and repeated in my head, cried out, then slowly, gradually, it grew quieter. And fell silent. Then, there was no voice, no scream, nothing but emptiness. My head sank until my forehead touched the ground. I clawed at the dirt of the field. With a faint perseverance the voice whispered. No. The wreckage below, maybe she’s alive. No, it whispered. I raised myself and dragged myself towards the edge. She’s gone.

The engineer who had fallen on top of me when we tumbled from the cab, trotted towards me, waving his hand in the direction of the warehouse across the river. “He’s getting away.” I looked into the distance to see the black Mercedes turning onto a frontage road that paralleled NH 24, the east-west highway. Sutradharak was slithering into obscurity. He had been forced to demolish the bridge before he had intended, perhaps when he saw the train slowing or me running like a madman across the field. He hadn’t succeeded; he had failed to murder the grand number he had wished for.

But he has destroyed me, I thought. I stared at the receding bumper and felt only the total despair that comes from losing love. I had felt it before, and it hurt no less now. Uli had been right. Mej was pure evil and I had been too naive to see it. My hands dropped; my head sank to my chest. The victory of yesterday, the discovered cure, it was all erased. Adam was wrong. It wasn’t the light of a million suns growing brighter; it was only darkness. And it was closing over me. I walked silently past the engineer to the edge of the slope and stared down at the mass of twisted engines and cars.

Seventy-Three

The vagaries of memory are mysterious and indefinable. Critical elements, like the scent of perfumed hair, a hummed melody, the color of an iris, the touch of a moist lip, or the curve a smile, can all be triggered to return in finely wrapped packages. They burst in complete recollection into the mind with the insertion of a just single key. The totality of a person, a lover, returns fully, and all it takes is a key, a catalyst, or a spark. For me that spark was a wisp of cloth.

The engineer was rambling diffusively about the escaping Sutradharak, when a ripple of pale-blue reached my eye, and for a moment, my mind didn’t comprehend the source. Then a mud-stained sea horse emerged and fluttered in eel grass. I blinked. It was coming from the partially submerged first-class compartment at the edge of the river. Her backside appeared first, then the tail of her kurta, and then all of Uliana Hadersen stood. She was straining to pull a small man up through the front door--which was now angled upward to the sky. Her skirt and kurta were torn and drenched. Her hair was smeared with grime and muck of the river, but she was alive . . . and saving people’s lives. Helping. Every recollection of Uli came back, every kiss, caress, and sweet consummation.

I leapt down the incline in incredibly long bounds, my ankle ignoring the swelling pain, my feet slurping in mud, my eyes blinded with tears. I sprinted past the toppled freight cars on the lower slope and into the deep mud of the riverbed. My shoes sank into ooze that clawed and pulled at them tentacles. I struggled across the flats to the first class cars, lying on their sides twelve meters apart, perpendicular to each other. The furthest, with my Uli somewhere inside it, lay with its lower half sunk deep into the water. A group of Hindus, dazed and bleeding, crouched below the protruding wheels. Two women were cleaning blood from a man’s face with the ends of their saris. A young Muslim man climbed down the undercarriage, which was now an eleven-foot wall up to a single exit at the top. I stepped onto an axle assembly, then onto broken hydraulics, springs, and shafts. As I reached the wheels near the top, I heard her voice. “Hello Mein Schatztki.” I looked into her face, eyes like sapphires and marigolds. Her look told me she knew that I had thought she had died. It showed in my eyes.

Her hand stretched out for mine. “I could use you help.”

Fingers slipped around mine and that touch, the electricity of it, woke me from the nightmare of pain I had been in a minute before. I climbed onto the side of the car and stood. “Uli, what happened? Where…”

She touched my cheek with wet fingers and pulled me toward the opening that led down into the passenger car. Sideways “Later, Sweets. Right now we need those strong arms and legs of yours.” Then she disappeared through the doorframe.

I lowered myself into the space and peered into shadows. Above, the barred windows provided a muted light onto a ruin of luggage, breakfast trays, bedding, and three desperate people. Half way down the compartment a young woman in drenched silk was struggling with a sobbing boy in her arms. She was trying desperately to climb over the jumble of twisted bunks to the freedom of the door. Behind her a familiar figure lay trapped in eddying, black water. The gentleman who had purchased our breakfast was pinned at the chest by the metal bars of a sleeping berth, his left side and shoulder held tightly below the surface. He sputtered and gasped, his body contorting against the bar like a pinned serpent. Uli was trying unsuccessfully to lift the frame. It flexed in begrudging centimeters. I reached out and pulled the woman by the elbow, lifting her and the child past me toward the skylight door. Then I threaded my way further into the gloom. Halfway down, on the left side, amidst a crush of sleeping berths, two bodies--an older man and woman--were wrapped in each other’s arms. Their eyes stared sightless at each other.

Scrambling over a mound of suitcases and debris, I saw more reason for concern—the incline was slippery, and gaining a foothold to pry the metal upward would be difficult. Uli had just pulled against the slats again and slipped. Her leg skewed sideways into the water that now swirled to the side of the man’s nostrils. He couldn’t draw a full breath, his eyes pleaded frantically at me. I seized the frame opposite Uli and tried to find footing. My left heel wedged against a hinge of some sort, but my right kept sliding frustratingly across something below the surface. It felt like the bars of one of a submerged window, but I couldn’t be certain.

The water I was standing in filled the man’s mouth, choking him.

Knowing we had only one chance, and that it would squeeze all the remaining air from his lungs, I set my right foot directly on his chest. He looked up at me with terrified eyes as his face sank below the surface from my weight. Uli on the other hand, understood, and said one word “Now!” We both lifted with all the strength we had. The berth rose six inches, no more. The man was still pinned under my foot, so I lifted onto my toes, pivoted until my heel was above his shoulder and stepped down. He twisted from the pain, and I felt his body spasm and writhe as water entered his lungs. I pivoted again until my foot was on his upper arm. Uli let go, and for three seconds I held the entire load while she reached across and yanked the man’s collar away from the bar. My foot slid off his arm, the metal snapped down with a watery twang. But with gasping breaths and spewing water, our man came to the surface and rolled to his knees. He vomited a mass of brown water and idly cake and then groaned, “Christ in Heaven!” Christian, I thought, not Muslim. My earlier assessment had been wrong. Then he groaned again, “Please, can you help me from this foulness?” I lifted beneath his armpits and pulled him upright onto the tilted floor.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

He needed to ponder that for a moment, then smiled broadly and in a booming voice said, “My arm hurts like hell, my good man, but,” he patted his chest, “nothing seems to be otherwise broken.”

Uli helped him over the pile of suitcases and up the incline, and as he reached the door he called back in a quieter voice, “I seem to be in your debt again, my friend.” With a drawn smile he climbed into the light of the morning.

I stayed behind to complete a last chore; one that I decided was mine alone. It was, I believed, a small absolution for my earlier moment of doubt. All the lessons and gifts I had received over the last ten days had slipped away when I thought Uli was gone. I had doubted. That would never happen again.

Lfting of the dead is not such a vile task as we might imagine--another lesson Adam taught me. I didn’t know their names. I didn’t know their faith. I only knew that they had died in each other’s arms in love together. With a serene mind and caring touch, I closed their eyes and lifted them one at a time through the door to waiting hands.

Seventy-Four

Ascending from the intestines of that car into the Bareilly sunlight was like stepping from the cave at Sarnath. Or stepping into the dazzling courtyard of my villa after a night’s rain. It was the pure exhilaration of reaching the shoulder of a perfectly formed wave after being deep inside the pipe. It was liberation from all the dark closets of my life. Every muscle ached with fatigue, bruises were swelling and purpling over my body. I felt none of it. Uli was alive. That was all I knew. All I wanted.

I climbed down the undercarriage and stood in mud up to my ankles. She turned and came to me, wrapped her arms under mine, and pressed her head against my chest. We remained that way for what seemed to be a long time, tears blending with the salts of our bodies. Her fingers touched my lips and we kissed, deeply and passionately, right there in front all the staring eyes.

The huddled crowd behind us clapped.

“I thought you were gone,” I whispered.

She smiled and set a hand on my heart in her usual way. “I see that, Lover. But I am right here.” A little tap.

“But you weren’t inside…?”

“Shh,” she whispered. “Not now. A story for later.”

I kissed her eyes, her hair and neck, and would have stood that way longer, but the railway police had different ideas. As we stood in each other’s arms, a lone officer descended the hillside with his rifle leveled at me. In Bengali he bellowed, “Get down! On your knees, now, hands on your head!” It seemed I was still a suspect of some sort, but I was not willing to lower myself into the muck at my feet.

“I beg your pardon?” I asked as I let go of Uli and stepped away. I raised my hands, but didn’t kneel. His rifle came to eye-level.

Behind me voices began rising at once, one rose above the others. “What in Christ’s holy name are you doing, man?”

The policeman scowled and barked, “This fellow is a terrorist,” He glanced from the small group to me and with a shade of uncertainty, added, “He attempted to blow up the train.”

The engineer who stood with me at the edge and followed the policeman down the slope, now stepped between us. “He did not,” he yelled. “He kept it from being destroyed entirely. This man warned us and kept all of us from going into the river.” He pointed in the general direction of the highway above us. “The man you want is at this moment driving west on the NH 24 in a black Mercedes.” The policeman hesitated and, then far too slowly, lowered his rifle. I exhaled.

A typhoon of noise washed over us, people shouting, whistles shrieking, sirens and horns moaning like gale winds. Uli and I stood at the center and heard only each other.

“I thought I had lost you,” I said again.

“I know,” she said. “It was in your eyes when you climbed up to help me. I knew you thought I had died.” Her eyes twinkled. “But I didn’t, you see.”

“So, where did you go? Jitka told me you left the compartment.”