T. Boyle - Greasy Lake and Other Stories

You know the rest. The “tough” talks at Camp David (ostensibly over the question of the Berlin Wall), the Soviet premier’s postponement of Ike’s reciprocal visit till the spring, “when things are in bloom,” the eventual rescinding of the invitation altogether, and the virulent anti-Eisenhower speech Khrushchev delivered in the wake of the U-2 incident. Then there was Ike’s final year in office, his loss of animation, his heart troubles ( heart troubles —could anything be more ironic?), the way in which he so rapidly and visibly aged, as if each moment of each day weighed on him like an eternity. And finally, our last picture of him: the affable, slightly foggy old duffer chasing a white ball across the links as if it were some part of himself he’d misplaced.

As for myself, I was rapidly demoted after the Khrushchev visit — it almost seemed as if I were an embarrassment to Ike, and in a way I guess I was, having seen him with his defenses down and his soul laid bare. I left the government a few months later and have pursued a rewarding academic career ever since, and am in fact looking forward to qualifying for tenure in the upcoming year. It has been a rich and satisfying life, one that has had its ups and downs, its years of quotidian existence and its few breathless moments at the summit of human history. Through it all, through all the myriad events I’ve witnessed, the loves I’ve known, the emotions stirred in my breast by the tragic events of our times, I can say with a sense of reverent gratitude and the deepest sincerity that nothing has so moved and tenderly astonished me as the joy, the sorrow, the epic sweep of the star-crossed love of Ike and Nina. I think of the Cold War, of nuclear proliferation, of Hungary, Korea, and the U-2 incident, and it all finally pales beside this: he loved her, and she loved him.

It was on a dark, lowering day during one of the interstices of the monsoon that His Highness Yadavindra Singh, nawab of the remote Deccan state of Sivani-Hoota, began to miss his children. That is, the children began to turn up missing, and to an alarming degree. It began with little Gopal, who had been born with a mottled, pale birthmark in the shape of a half moon under the crease of his left buttock. Miss Elspeth Compton-Divot, the children’s English governess, whose responsibility it was to instruct her wards in the dead language and living literature of Greece and to keep watch over them as a shepherd keeps watch over his flock (flock, indeed — there were twenty-five sibling Singhs under her care originally), was the first to discover little Gopal’s absence. She bowed her way into the nawab’s reception room immediately after lessons on that fateful afternoon, the sky so striped with cloud it might have been flayed, to find the nawab and his wife, the third begum, in attendance on several prominent local figures, including Mr. Bagwas the rubber-goods proprietor, and Mr. Patel the grain merchant. “Most High, Puissant, Royal, and Wise Hegemon Whose Duty It Is to Bring the Word of God and the Will of Just Government to the Peoples of Sivani-Hoota and Environs,” she began, “I come before you on a matter of gravest import. ”

The nawab, a man in late middle age who had attended Oxford in the days of Pater and was given to ejaculations like “What ho!” and “ L’art pour l’artl,” told her to stuff the formality and come to the point.

“It’s your third youngest, sir — little Gopal.”

“Yes?”

“He seems to have disappeared.”

The nawab shifted his bulk uneasily in his chair — for he was a big man, fattened on ghee, sweet cream, and chapattis slathered with orange-blossom honey — glanced at his begum and then expelled a great exasperated puff of air. “What a damnable nuisance,” he said. “I don’t doubt the little beggar’s up to some mischief, hiding himself in the servants’ pantry or some such rot. Which one did you say it was?”

“Little Gopal, sir.”

“Gopal?”

It was then that the begum spoke rapidly to her husband in Tamil and he began almost simultaneously to nod his head, muttering, “Yes, yes, a good boy that. A pity, a real pity.”

The governess went on to explain the circumstances of the boy’s disappearance — the testimony of the night nurse who’d put him to bed, his eldest-brother-but-six’s assertion that they’d played together at cribbage before falling off to sleep, her own discovery of little Gopal’s absence early that day, when she commenced morning lessons by comparing her seating chart with the nearly identical moon-shaped grinning brown faces of the nawab’s brood.

Mr. Bagwas, who had been silently pulling at a clay pipe through all of this, abruptly pronounced a single word: “Leopards.”

But it was not leopards. Though the stealthy cats commonly carried off six or seven of the village’s children a night, the occasional toothless grandmother, and innumerable goats, dogs, cows, fowl, royal turtles, and even the ornamental koi that graced the nawab’s ponds, they were absolved of suspicion in the present case. After Abha, aged seven, and then the eleven-year-old Shanker vanished on successive nights, the nawab, becoming concerned, called in Mr. Hugh Tureen, game hunter, to put out baits and exterminate the spotted fiends. Though in the course of the ensuing week Mr. Tureen shot some seventy-three leopards, sixteen tigers, twelve wolves, and several hundred skunks, mongeese, badgers, and the like, the nawab continued to lose children. Santha, aged nine and with the mark of the dung beetle on the arches of both feet, vanished under the noses of three night nurses and half a dozen watchmen specially employed to stand guard over the nursery. This time, however, there was a clue. Bhupinder, aged six, claimed to have seen a mysterious shrouded figure hanging over his sister’s bed, a figure rather like that of an ape on whom a tent has collapsed. Two days later, when the harsh Indian sun poked like a lance into the muslin-hung sanctuary of the children’s quarters, Bhupinder’s bed was empty.

The nawab and his begum, who two and a half weeks earlier had been rich in children, now had but twenty. They were distraught. Helpless. At their wits’ end. Clearly, this was a case for Rupert Beersley.

We left Calcutta in a downpour, Beersley and I, huddled in our mackintoshes like a pair of dacoits. The train was three hours late, the tea was wretched, and the steward served up an unpalatable mess of curried rice that Beersley, in a fit of pique, overturned on the floor. Out of necessity — Beersley’s summons had curtailed my supper at the club — I ate my own portion and took a cup of native beer with it. “Really,” Beersley said, the flanges of his extraordinary nostrils drawn up in disgust, “how can you eat that slop?”

It was a sore point between us, this question of native food, going all the way back to our first meeting at Cawnpore some twenty years back, when he was a freshly commissioned young leftenant in the Eleventh Light Dragoons, India Corps, and I a seasoned sergeant-major. ”I’ll admit I’ve had better, old boy,” I said, “but one must adapt oneself to one’s circumstances.”

Beersley waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal and quoted sourly from his favorite poem — indeed, the only poem from which he ever quoted — Keats’s “Lamia”: “‘Not three score old, yet of sciential brain / To unperplex bliss from its neighbor pain.’”

An electric-green fly had settled itself on a congealed lump of rice that lay on the table before us. I shrugged and lifted the fork to my mouth.

We arrived at the Sivani-Hoota station in the same downpour transposed a thousand miles, and were met by the nawab’s silver-plated Rolls, into the interior of which we ducked, wet as water fowl, while the lackey stowed away our baggage. The road out to the palace was black as the caverns of hell and strewn with enough potholes to take the teeth out of one’s head. Rain crashed down on the roof as if it would cave it in, beasts roared from the wayside, and various creatures of the night slunk, crept, and darted before the headlights as if rehearsing for some weird menagerie. Nearly an hour after leaving the station, we began to discern signs of civilization along the dark roadway. First a number of thatch huts began to flash by the smeared windows, then the more substantial stone structures that indicated the approach to the palace, and finally the white marble turrets and crenellated battlements of the palace itself.