Robert Silverberg: Born with the Dead

“I won’t hurt him. Are you going to see him?”

“No,” she said. She grunted in annoyance and threw her shorts and blouse into a chair. There was a fierce pounding at her temples, a sensation of being challenged, of being threatened, that she had not felt since that awful day at the Newark mounds. She strode to the window and looked out, half expecting to see Jorge arguing with Nerita and Laurence in the courtyard. But there was no one down there except a houseboy who looked up as if her bare breasts were beacons and gave her a broad dazzling smile. Sybille turned her back to him and said dully, “Go back down. Tell him that it’s impossible for me to see him. Use that word. Not that I won’t see him, not that I don’t want to see him, not that it isn’t right for me to see him, just that it’s impossible. And then phone the airport. I want to go back to Dar on the evening plane.”

“But we’ve only just arrived!”

“No matter. We’ll come back some other time. Jorge is very persistent; he won’t accept anything but a brutal rebuff, and I can’t do that to him. So we’ll leave.”

Klein had never seen deads at close range before. Cautiously, uneasily, he stole quick intense looks at Kent Zacharias as they sat side by side on rattan chairs among the potted palms in the lobby of the hotel. Jijibhoi had told him that it hardly showed, that you perceived it more subliminally than by any outward manifestation, and that was true; there was a certain look about the eyes, of course, the famous fixity of the deads, and there was something oddly pallid about Zacharias’ skin beneath the florid complexion, but if Klein had not known what Zacharias was, he might not have guessed it. He tried to imagine this man, this red-haired red-faced dead archeologist, this digger of dirt mounds, in bed with Sybille. Doing with her whatever it was that the deads did in their couplings. Even Jijibhoi wasn’t sure. Something with hands, with eyes, with whispers and smiles, not at all genital—so Jijibhoi believed. This is Sybille’s lover I’m talking to. This is Sybille’s lover. How strange that it bothered him so. She had had affairs when she was living; so had he; so had everyone; it was the way of life. But he felt threatened, overwhelmed, defeated, by this walking corpse of a lover.

Klein said, “Impossible?”

“That was the word she used.”

“Can’t I have ten minutes with her?”

“Impossible.”

“Would you let me see her for a few moments, at least? I’d just like to find out how she looks.”

“Don’t you find it humiliating, doing all this scratching around just for a glimpse of her?”

“Yes.”

“And you still want it?”

“Yes.”

Zacharias sighed. “There’s nothing I can do for you. I’m sorry.”

“Perhaps Sybille is tired from having done so much traveling. Do you think she might be in a more receptive mood tomorrow?”

“Maybe,” Zacharias said. “Why don’t you come back then?”

“You’ve been very kind.”

“De nada.”

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“Thanks, no,” Zacharias said. “I don’t indulge any more. Not since—” He smiled.

Klein could smell whiskey on Zacharias’ breath. All right, though. All right. He would go away. A driver waiting outside the hotel grounds poked his head out of his cab window and said hopefully, “Tour of the island, gentleman? See the clove plantations, see the athlete stadium?”

“I’ve seen them already,” Klein said. He shrugged. “Take me to the beach.”

He spent the afternoon watching turquoise wavelets lapping pink sand. The next morning he returned to Sybille’s hotel, but they were gone, all five of them, gone on last night’s flight to Dar, said the apologetic desk clerk. Klein asked if he could make a telephone call, and the clerk showed him an ancient instrument in an alcove near the bar. He phoned Barwani. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “You told me they’d be staying at least a week!”

“Oh, sir, things change,” Barwani said softly.

Jijibhoi said, “In the entire question of death who is to say what is right, dear friend? When I was a boy in Bombay it was not unusual for our Hindu neighbors to practice the rite of suttee, that is, the burning of the widow on her husband’s funeral pyre, and by what presumption may we call them barbarians? Of course”—his dark eyes flashed mischievously—”we did call them barbarians, though never when they might hear us. Will you have more curry?”

Klein repressed a sigh. He was getting full, and the curry was fiery stuff, of an incandescence far beyond his usual level of tolerance; but Jijibhoi’s hospitality, unobtrusively insistent, had a certain hieratic quality about it that made Klein feel like a blasphemer whenever he refused anything in his home. He smiled and nodded, and Jijibhoi, rising, spooned a mound of rice into Klein’s plate, buried it under curried lamb, bedecked it with chutneys and sambals. Silently, unbidden, Jijibhoi’s wife went to the kitchen and returned with a cold bottle of Heinekens. She gave Klein a shy grin as she set it down before him. They worked well together, these two Parsees, his hosts.

They were an elegant couple—striking, even. Jijibhoi was a tall, erect man with a forceful aquiline nose, dark Levantine skin, jet-black hair, a formidable mustache. His hands and feet were extraordinarily small; his manner was polite and reserved; he moved with a quickness of action bordering on nervousness. Klein guessed that he was in his early forties, though he suspected his estimate could easily be off by ten years in either direction. His wife—strangely, Klein had never been told her name—was younger than her husband, nearly as tall, fair of complexion—a light-olive tone—and voluptuous of figure. She dressed invariably in flowing silken saris; Jijibhoi affected western business dress, suits and ties in a style twenty years out of date. Klein had never seen either of them bareheaded: she wore a kerchief of white linen, he a brocaded skullcap that might lead people to mistake him for an Oriental Jew. They were childless and self-sufficient, forming a closed dyad, a perfect unit, two segments of the same entity, conjoined and indivisible, as Klein and Sybille once had been. Their harmonious interplay of thought and gesture made them a trifle disconcerting, even intimidating, to others. As Klein and Sybille once had been.

Klein said, “Among your people—”

“Oh, very different, very different, quite unique. You know of our funeral custom?”

“Exposure of the dead, isn’t it?”

Jijibhoi’s wife giggled. “A very ancient recycling scheme!”

“The Towers of Silence,” Jijibhoi said. He went to the dining room’s vast window and stood with his back to Klein, staring out at the dazzling lights of Los Angeles. The Jijibhois’ house, all redwood and glass, perched precariously on stilts near the crest of Benedict Canyon, just below Mulholland: the view took in everything from Hollywood to Santa Monica. “There are five of them in Bombay,” said Jijibhoi, “on Malabar Hill, a rocky ridge overlooking the Arabian Sea. They are centuries old, each one circular, several hundred feet in circumference, surrounded by a stone wall twenty or thirty feet high. When a Parsee dies—do you know of this?”