Dreams of Rivers and Seas Read online

  She stopped and reached a hand across the table. ‘Are you listening, Mr John?’

  John looked up. The girl had a crumb at the corner of her lips. He was clenching his bowels.

  ‘So what else did you do? At this fortress place?’

  ‘There is a swimming pool there. We went for walks. Nearby there is an old step well. You know? It is very famous. It is like a big building upside down going down deep into the ground.’

  John didn’t understand, but he was struck by the mistiness in her eyes. You couldn’t disbelieve her.

  ‘We walked down down down every flight of steps, it is a very deep well, holding hands. There are nine floors going down into the ground. Have you ever seen one? It is like a temple upside down. Very very ancient. You climb down. Nine floors. But at the bottom there is no water now. It’s an ancient well. Albert said it was like paradise.’ She hesitated, remembering. ‘He liked to hold my hand. He said he liked it very much.’

  ‘And?’ John was suffering. He needed bananas again. Not cake.

  ‘He liked to see me dance. I danced for him at the bottom of all the steps. By the well. There was no one. He said even if there was no water my body was liquid. Liquid like a snake.’ She laughed. ‘It was beautiful to feel him watching. He said beautiful things. He said he could hear the water in my dancing. It was like a dream.’

  John really didn’t want to hear this. His father should have known better. ‘Wasn’t he ill? He must have been quite ill in November.’

  She was picking up crumbs. ‘Not so much. Not so ill. He just had some pains.’

  ‘But, if …’

  ‘Albert was very happy and very …’ She sighed. ‘Maybe he thought of your mother. He had a sad destiny, I think. I don’t know how to say it.’

  ‘So why did you say you were responsible for his death?’

  Jasmeet’s eyes clouded. ‘I left him, Mr John. I thought: this man cannot decide, he will never decide, he cannot even finish a letter. Soon my father will return from London. There will be hell to pay. One day there was a Sikh driver who was returning to Delhi and I asked him to take me back. I was avoiding the catastrophe.

  ‘Then after I came home and my father returned and Avinash was coming to eat with us, everything was horrible. It was horrible. They were telling me I must marry. I started to wish I had stayed with Albert. I thought, maybe after I had been away from him for so long, he would decide. He would understand now what he was losing. He had started to send me emails again. I thought it was a sign. He said he loved me. But you have read that on the computer.

  ‘So one day I decided to go to him and surprise him. I just wanted to see him too much. I couldn’t resist. I took the bus to the university. It was raining hard and I was in so much of a hurry to get off and run for some cover I didn’t see the motorbike. You know. Zoom. Bang. Then I was waking up in the hospital and I couldn’t see anyone for days. Now I will never dance again.’

  Jasmeet paused and bit her lip. Speaking in a lower voice, she said, ‘I think Albert died of love for me.’

  Only the acute discomfort in his midriff prevented John from bursting out laughing. ‘People don’t die of love, Jasmeet,’ he said. It’s the first time he has used her name. The absurdity of it cheered him up. ‘Particularly not a bumbling intellectual like my dad!’

  The girl’s face darkened.

  John leaned across the table through his pain. ‘You know Dad wrote that love was just a loaded word in a communication game. He didn’t believe in it.’

  Jasmeet turned her chair away and sat very still. Then she looked at him over her shoulder. ‘Albert said I had changed everything in his life. He told me he would die of love. He wrote it in his last message. You will see it on the computer.’

  ‘More like he thought he would die of shame if my mother found out,’ John said brutally. He got to his feet. ‘I need the bathroom.’

  Pushing aside the chair, John found it hard to stand up straight. The girl was upset. As he turned to ask the proprietor where the bathroom was, she just repeated: ‘Albert promised he would help me.’

  ‘I’m afraid there is no light in the toilet, sir,’ the proprietor said. His English was surprisingly superior. ‘I wouldn’t advise that you use it, sir. We have a little problem with the light.’

  ‘I really need to go,’ John said.

  The man put his book down and smiled. ‘Well, at your own risk, sir. I’m afraid it is not a very gentlemanly bathroom and we have no light. I am waiting for the electrician to come and repair it. It is very old wiring, you know, in this part of Delhi.’

  John’s stomach was groaning. It was a matter of seconds, he thought, and at the same moment he realised what a farce this was: his father’s ideas, this scene in the café. It was complete farce. And I left a serious job for this! Instead of working out how to trick a ribosome into sterility he himself had been tricked into a situation that was quite grotesque, and certainly sterile. His gut was screaming.

  ‘It is up the steps on the right,’ the proprietor said, still with a note of warning.

  Forcing his bowels to hold fast, John walked stiffly to the back of the room. Up the two steps beyond the restaurant area everything was filthy and much hotter. The four men sitting on the floor appeared to be workers of some kind, unshaven, loosely turbaned. Perhaps they too had come in from the storm. They had finished eating and were talking quietly, drinking from bottles of orange soda. Beyond them the space split into dark corridors.

  ‘The toilet?’ John muttered, embarrassed.

  ‘Toilet?’ The men started to talk to each other in Hindi.

  ‘Not toilet,’ one of them shakes his head. He nods towards the blackness to John’s right. ‘Not use toilet.’ He pouts and makes discouraging signs with his arm. One of the other men is laughing.

  ‘There is a toilet, isn’t there?’

  The man’s head wobbles apologetically as if to say, there is, but then again there isn’t. John can’t hold on. He heads to his right where the man pointed and after a few yards of deep shadow finds a door.

  ‘Sir!’

  John turns. With absurdly grim faces all four men are shaking their heads.

  The door is greasy, of black splintered wood with a hook latch that drops into a ring. John has no choice but to lift it and wrench the door open. As he does so he releases the most fetid stink imaginable. It seems impossible he didn’t notice it the moment he entered the café.

  His bowels won’t hold. They had accepted to wait on the understanding that it was a matter of minutes, then of seconds. They have convinced themselves release is imminent. As he opens the door he feels a rush of pressure beyond resistance. The men behind are laughing. The smell is coming from pitch blackness. There is not the faintest glimmer. Automatically, his hand reaches to the wall for a switch and amazingly finds it at once. But clicking brings no change. What if the blackness is simply a hole? Some kind of pit? It might be vast or tiny. He will fall into filth. Talk about catastrophe. But he has to shit now! There’s no going back. He takes one step, gets behind the door and pulls it to. If there’s a latch this side he doesn’t bother with it.

  There’s no time. The stench is overwhelming. Likewise the heat. There’s a scuttling noise. His right hand feels at knee level for a seat. There’s nothing. Don’t breathe. Now he’s leaning with his forehead pressed against the door. Otherwise he might lose all sense of orientation. He unbuckles his jeans, thrusts them down, crouches, craps violently, liquidly, Christ, hoping he has got his arse beyond his jeans, beyond his feet. He gasps for breath. There’s more. He’s crouching, one hand on the door, shivering, bowels burning, cold sweat starting out on his neck and temples.

  And there’s no paper. John feels so angry. Why was he tricked into coming here? First the storm, then this awful place. Perhaps there is a hose and tap somewhere, or a bucket. He can wash. But how, when he can’t see? He can’t just pull up his jeans. He’s filthy.

  The smell makes him want to vomit. Again he
’s aware of a scuttling sound. If I fainted, I could be devoured by rats. He’s panicking. It’s a nightmare. This is something to wake up from. Blessed or cursed with dreams of water. Hand in hand down to a dry well. I could die here! John says through clenched teeth. He wants to scream. There had been shit floating in the water with his father’s coffin. He remembers the scene vividly now. The coffin was bumping about in water and shit. In a place like this, then. He crouches in the pitch dark, waiting to wake up, waiting for it all to dissolve. At least his bowels are relaxing.

  Then he has the solution. Yes. I’m not stupid. Not for nothing the PhD. Now. He stands, slips one foot out of a sandal, balances precariously on the other leg – hard in complete darkness – slips jeans and underpants off the leg, then the jeans back on, then the sandal. There’s something slimy on the sandal. He’s breathing deeply now, however horrible the air. Now there’s definitely the sound of a creature. It doesn’t matter. This is the only solution. He repeats the rigmarole with the other leg. Jeans leg and underpants off, jeans back on. Symmetry. Balance! God knows what his jeans may have picked up touching the floor but now he has his underpants free and clean in his hand. Where’s the sandal gone? For a moment his toe touches the damp floor. Please, the sandal! There. He can wipe himself with his underpants.

  John works out that if he folds them carefully, he can have three attempts. He’s regained some composure. He works quickly but carefully, trying not to touch the shit. Never again. When he’s done as much as he can, he tosses the pants away into the blackness – God knows what’s there, he hates India – and pulls up his jeans. As he does so, something runs over his foot, over the top of his sandalled foot, which automatically kicks out, stubbing his toe into the door. Oh Christ! There so much pain in the body just waiting to be unleashed. He almost falls, clutching at the door, picking up a splinter on the old wood. Definitely a splinter. But he’s done it now. He’s done it, he’s okay, and he’s going to his mother’s and then straight back to England. Straight back.

  A moment later, when John emerges from the door and confronts the four men, he has a determined smile on his face, albeit grim. The men smile back. The proprietor looks up with curiosity from his book. Jasmeet asks: ‘Are you all right, Mr John? You are pale.’

  ‘We need a taxi,’ John says.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  HELEN HAD KNOWN that Albert was not telling the whole truth about his torment. But this knowledge was not available for reflection or elaboration. It was locked away. There was a knowledge of Albert, of their marriage, their entire life, which had always been locked away, from day one, from that first evening when he had driven her to her political meeting and then disappeared to his concert. That obscure part of themselves and her awareness of it had to be there to make the marriage they had possible; equally, it had to remain locked away. It was one of the conditions of life that one did not question. ‘One does not question,’ Albert had written for one of the conference papers she had presented for him, ‘the mental processes of visual-image perception that moment by moment construct the world around us, even though experiments have shown how fallible those processes can be. One does not question them because to do so would mean chaos.’

  Helen had wondered, standing at a microphone to read this out to a respectful academic audience, whether Albert hadn’t simply found another of his indirect ways of telling her something. She had always felt that he was speaking to her in riddles through his work, that his work in fact was primarily addressed to her. Or rather: it was the need to tell her things without speaking to her directly that made his work possible. And because the method was indirect she was also invited not to understand, or to lock away her knowledge in some file that could never be opened: in any event to go on unquestioning, even to speak his words for him at prestigious conferences as if they had been meant for others. The important thing was that the two of them must never really speak. To do that they must know what they mustn’t speak about. Helen was good at this. If she hadn’t been, their marriage would not have lasted. ‘Every behavioural stability’ – she had read out Albert’s conclusion to those New York professors – ‘indeed all functioning interrelationships, are thus predicated on falsifying systems of perception, interpretation and communication, of which the language in which this paper is written is but one.’

  Albert loved, Helen had sensed during the ensuing applause, to leave an audience with a conjuring trick that saw both himself and the arguments he had just advanced vanish in a puff of smoke, the moment of maximum intellectual brilliance coinciding with the most drastic self-effacement. Only she was left behind, at the podium, ready to take questions with an embarrassed smile, as she had been taking questions for months now from this irritating American. ‘You are doing this for me, Helen,’ Albert had whispered in the dark of their last night. ‘You don’t know how grateful I am.’ They were arm in arm. The familiar tension had reached its climax. The web they had woven was at its tightest and most fragile. His voice was tormented, seductive. He was leaving her behind. The syringe was ready for his effacement. To have her do it was an act of brilliance. It would be the first injection he had ever let her give him. ‘Helen, Helen, Helen,’ he whispered, ‘what a beautiful completion.’

  For you, she muttered through the long nights that followed; for you, dear Albert, but not for me. Her husband’s death had not been a completion for Helen. It was pure loss. It had seemed beautiful, but only as it happened, only as fulfilment of his wish, to die in her arms, at her hand, in the fortress of their marriage, to complete and end his own story as he wanted. And he had wanted it urgently. But afterwards she knew it was a terrible mistake. Albert’s torment was not the torment of the cancer sufferer, she forced herself to realise. It was not the ordinary fear of a slow agony. There were years of life in Albert. I knew that, and I still did as he said. I pretended not to know. I didn’t ask him to explain. I didn’t demand to know what he was afraid of.

  Why?

  While Albert was alive Helen had been able to pretend. Or rather, she hadn’t been able to do otherwise. But now he was gone, the mechanism was breaking down. Day by day the old complicity was decaying. There are moments, now, when Helen seems unable to put one foot in front of another, at the clinic, on the street; some crucial lubricant has dried up, she can’t move. She remembers his embrace slackening, she feels his cheek against hers, turning chill. Why had he wanted to die? Why by my hand? With Albert’s death, a buried knowledge began to moulder. This is something you can’t just cremate and scatter. She must go back over things. Why else would she have started talking to Paul?

  Yet out of habit Helen could not finally arrive at the place that she and Albert had learned to avoid so well. ‘The strongest complicity,’ Albert had written apropos of climate change, ‘is the complicity of shared denial.’ There were things Helen undoubtedly knew, things she physically felt – why she and Albert had come together in the first place, why they had lived their whole lives abroad – and she would circle around those things; it was impossible not to, given the gravitational pull they exercised; but she would not plunge and explore, she would not dig them out and name them. So she had chosen, in effect, to discuss Albert with the one man whom she could not really speak to, not openly, because of course he would write down whatever she told him. Then her life would lose its secret sense, the uniqueness their strange marriage had conferred on it; then she would stand naked before her son, whom neither she nor Albert had spoken of at all in the days when his death was decided.

  So rather than tell everything with candour, she had insisted that Paul give up his writing project, that he pay attention to her not to Albert, that he see the excitement and superiority of a life of service: her life, not Albert’s. If nothing else, she would win that old debate at last. She had teased the biographer with intriguing details and simultaneously discouraged him; she had made him curious and told him his biography was pointless. She had fostered mystery without giving him the key to understand
. What were Albert’s abstract and tortured considerations, she had hinted, beside the smile of a destitute boy returning from death’s door, a girl with hepatitis recovering her bright cheeks? And she had used her body too, what charms remained. Why fret over the dead man when there is still some mileage in the widow?

  She had definitely done all that, even if it wasn’t planned. She wasn’t a calculating woman. The man’s ingenuousness encouraged it. And his blundering. Paul had absolutely no idea. He was a naïf. But she had never expected the American to agree, to capitulate even; she hadn’t expected she would have to hear his drawling, gravelly Yankee voice say: ‘Hey, by the way, Helen, I want to accept your invitation. You know? I’d like to go and work with you somewhere remote, if it’s really a prospect.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  They were eating lunch. Helen had gone to the clinic that morning but the dust storm had deterred the sick. There were few patients. Helen was at a loss when the flow of suffering was interrupted. She had wandered around the clinic for a couple of hours, visiting the bed cases assigned to her, trying once again to talk to Than-Htay. The boy was not recovering. The infection had responded somewhat to the drugs she had found for him, but his vitality had not returned. Not quite sick enough to be given a bed, he drifted around the clinic like a ghost, hovering in doorways, sleeping in the shade in the courtyard, nibbling a chapatti in the canteen.

  Normally such a case would have been discharged to his family, but Than-Htay had none. He was still not speaking Hindi. He didn’t try. If told to sweep, he held the broom between limp fingers as if he had no idea what it was for. His eyes were luminous, but vacant. Asked to help unpack a van and sort some boxes, he simply stared. He too was locked away somewhere, Helen thought, in the realm of some trauma she would never fathom. Albert would have got in there and found out. Sufferers knew at once that Albert could be told things. They understood he would not try to heal them or wake them from their trance; so they told him things, they let him film them. They understood he was just looking; he wouldn’t take their precious pain away. It was curious that he never filmed me, Helen thought. He made no videos of the way his wife bandaged an ankle, or swabbed clean a sore. But his eyes were always on me. It was Albert’s gaze made everything possible, Helen thought; even when the eyes mocked.