Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

‘She says her father — or rather her mother’s father — was a colonel in the Indian Army. So now I’ll make you the right curry.’

If speech were born it must have been on a woman’s lip, just as hair if it were born must have sprung from a woman’s pudendum to hide her shame. For women are great hiders of the unsayable, their gossip is only their own sorrow turned downside up.

I went over to my cases, but just could not take anything out, neither books nor dhoti, nor even the sari for Madeleine that Saroja had so carefully folded and put in a corner, with a silver kunkum box, sacred coconut and betel leaves. The customs official had wanted to see whether, being an Oriental, I did not carry opium; he took the lid off the kunkum, and the powder fell on the sari, as at a marriage, or at the seventh-month pregnancy adoration. Auspicious the sari looked, and I thought it best to take it out first. ‘I’ve a gift for you,’ I said.

‘Show it to me,’ she shouted from the kitchen.

‘Here is a gift of a sari from Saroja.’

She was disappointed: she wanted it to be from me. But Saroja’s sari was the one at the top, and it was the one which had the kunkum on, so I took it out. ‘Let me put it on you,’ I said.

As she undressed I could see the contours of her beautiful body, so simple, so erect, so unopened. I tried to dress her, and she let me do it, for she wanted to be touched by me, to be held by me, to know the knowing that has made knowing a single presence. But I was far away, my hands slipped, and several times I had to make and remake the folds. When I had at last tightened her at the waist, I said, ‘Now I’ll go and have my bath.’ She answered, ‘Come quick; the food will be cold, love.’

As the bathwater ran I just did not know what I was thinking or doing. Noise somehow gives one a feeling of rest, noise that is steady and familiar. I went to the bathroom window and saw that the sickly olives had been removed — planted in the days of the Romans, Hector had said — and the open land already showed the emergence of fireflies. They were just beginning to shine here and there and soon, I thought, I would see their dance, as we saw it every summer in the dark of the olives. I slipped into my bath and scrubbed myself dutifully, feeling that I might have more courage thus. A clean body seems full of wisdom.

The fireflies did not start dancing in the backyard. But far away in Monsieur Thibaut’s olive groves they made such a pattern of beauty that I shouted, ‘Madeleine, Madeleine.’ There was no answer. I slipped into my pyjamas and went to Madeleine’s room, where we usually moved our table to eat, and there she was lying on her sofa, silent. She must have been crying, but she put on a brave face. Tears came rarely to Madeleine; she seemed to have a power to stop them.

‘Shall we eat?’

‘Oh, yes. Everything is ready. I have only to make a salad dressing.’

‘No garlic for me, please!’ I shouted, once again to say something.

I can remember as though it happened but the other day how we started our meal rather easily: I told Madeleine about Little Mother, and her wonderful promise on the Bombay beach. ‘You Indians seem full of wonderful gestures,’ she said, without bitterness, but with a certain objectivity.

‘We are a sentimental people,’ I said. ‘We weep for everything.’

‘Yes; so much so that with Tagore’s novels alone you could make a Ganges.’

‘There’s much sorrow in my land, Madeleine, but such beauty between man and man. Even between man and woman,’ I added.

‘Did you hate the Europeans very much when you were there?’ she asked.

‘Hate them? You know the Englishman is more loved in India than foreigner has ever been. We forget evil easily. Naturally we love the good.’

‘So that the pariah may have his separate well, and the woman slave for men.’

This was an unexpected, a new bitterness. She added, as though to hide her thoughts:

‘Georges has been asking me a great deal about India. You know, Rama, he’s a nice fellow, though a little fanatical. Fanatic as he is his Catholicism makes him understand India more than I do, pagan that I am. He would convert the whole of India to the Roman Church, make of India an august gift to the Pope. He can see no salvation otherwise. But there you are, he’s studied Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, and he’s also studied Vedanta, and that is more than I have done. He wants to see you very much. When shall we ask him home?’

‘Whenever you like,’ I said, and added somewhat selfconsciously: ‘You know it was I who first discovered him.’

Georges was one of those brilliant young White Russian intellectuals, brought up in the best of European and Orthodox traditions — his father was a well-known critic, belonging to the group round Berdiaev. Georges had joined the Maquis, and had his left arm torn off in some gun battle; thus he walked, with the awkward assurance of a mystic, and taught Latin at the College de Garcons. He read with ease several European languages, and had lately started learning Chinese and Sanskrit. He had come under the influence of the unfortunate Ségond tradition in Aix, but the Maquis and the confusion after led him more and more to visit the Dominicans at St Maximin.

During the Occupation — before Georges joined the Maquis— he had gone to the monastery on a visit; Father Zinobias, the young Austrian monk who took him round, spoke French haltingly, and whenever he hesitated for a word Georges was ready to help him. The Austrian, being quite lost in this southern land, was so happy to meet someone who could speak German with him. A friendship thus casually made grew with the years, and when the Maquisards wanted to hide their ammunition in the region the Dominican Fathers were most helpful: three of them gave their life for it. Georges thus started becoming involved in Catholicism. His father was already a convert to Catholicism and worked at the Theological Seminary in Munich, besides working at the Russian Institute of the university. But Georges, brought up in exile, clung to his Orthodox fold, for in loving his church he felt he was more faithful to his motherland. To him even Mount Athos was part of Russia: for the Slavs it will continue to be so as long as they feel their religion was born on the mountains of the pagan Greeks.

Georges loved his father, the more so as he had lost his mother at an early age, in fact in Russia, and before the exile: his clinging to Orthodoxy had brought no difficulty in the relationship between father and son. They loved each other deeply, and the old man wrote such long and wise letters to his son. It was perhaps an act of loyalty to his father that had made Georges become kinder to Catholicism, and as soon as the Germans had occupied the whole country Georges simply went over to St Maximin and asked for baptism. He spent three weeks in prayer and meditation, and they say he came out a new man. He did not seem to belong to this world.

He took his Agrégation in Latin because it mattered little what he taught. He could just as well have taken a History or Philology Agrégation. The more difficult a thing, the more he liked it: which explains the reasons for his taking up Chinese. But Sanskrit he started learning, I think, truly for the sake of understanding Indian philosophy.

Georges and I had met at the university library. We had heard of each other, or rather he had heard of me; I was more visible, as it were, being an Indian, and being married to a colleague of his from the Women’s College. He came to us with that Slav simplicity and earnestness that makes contact with the Russians so enriching.

‘Yes, I would be happy to see Georges,’ I said.

‘You know he was the first to take me to St Maximin. I have met Father Zenobias,’ she added, somewhat timidly.