Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

“I am ever so keen on our next trip,” Janey said. “Tibet. We found a way of going there without going into grotty old China. You just charter a plane in Nepal.”

Manfred said, “Maybe I come along. I was there. I wrote some things about the Schamanismus in Nepal. I know some important people, healers in Kathmandhu.”

Steadman just listened. The lights dazzled him, his ears rang from the talk, he felt anxious, he hated seeing his book in the room. He noticed Hack leering at Sabra, he heard Wood explaining how you would go about running a country like a business. Janey sat, knees together, watching Manfred drink from a bottle of aguardiente he had swiped from the restaurant table. Steadman sensed a great emptiness in the room — after all, it was just a hotel room in which they were taking their turn as guests. But the vibrations of an unspoken drama among the people present animated his imagination, and he saw more than he had words for, like a nameless odor or the echoes of strange rituals.

He watched and waited for a silence, and then filled it as conspicuously as he could, saying, “Take me home, Mother.”

“No one’s going anywhere,” Hack said. “You came here for a drink. You’ve got to drink something first.”

Steadman said, “You don’t want me here, really.”

Instead of denying this or protesting, they stared.

“Just stay,” Hack said. “And drink something.”

“You don’t mean that.”

Hack turned his back on Steadman and said, “This guy is calling me a liar.”

“You want the truth?”

Steadman was seated, facing them all, and the way he fixed his eyes on them, the tone he used in phrasing this question — his smile, his seriousness, his poise — silenced the room.

He asked for some water. Janey poured some from a hotel bottle of mineral water and handed him the glass. Steadman did not drink immediately. He took a small bottle of dark liquid from his pocket.

“Is the datura,” Manfred said, as Steadman poured some into his glass and mixed it with a swizzle stick, muddying the water until it was the color of tea, with bits of broken and shredded stems floating on its surface.

This whole process was so pedestrian, so like someone taking a routine dose of medicine, the interest in the room shifted away from him and a buzz of voices resumed. Satisfied that they had persuaded Steadman and Ava to stay, the others felt they had won, so they ignored them, and it seemed they had forgotten Steadman’s pointed question.

They expect you to be counterintuitive, Sabra was saying.

It’s a good thing Big Oil is taking over crappy little countries like this, Hack was saying.

The redemptive thing about debt, Wood was saying.

I don’t fancy being a whole-hogger anymore, Janey was saying. I am done. Done and dusted.

And only Ava and Manfred watched Steadman drink the tall glass of dark water — Ava with a puzzled smile, Manfred with recognition and a kind of envious joy that looked like hunger.

In the glow that was spreading through his body like warmth, Steadman became aware of an enlargement of his physical being — a bigness — of shadows slipping into him, separating his mind from his body, his nerves from his flesh. Something prismatic in his vision began this process of separation, too. It was what he had felt in the village: a sense of fragile surfaces. Everything he saw had an absurd transparency, but what lay beneath it was unexpected, like the spider he had seen in the village, rising from the bottom of his cup after he had emptied it of the liquid, and strangest of all, not a drowned spider, but a large one frisky with intelligence, on lively legs.

Steadman was so engrossed he had stopped pretending to smile at what he saw. The room was transformed; the people in it, too. The words they used were visible to him. They had weight and density and texture; understanding their substance, he knew their history. He could examine each one, and he was astonished at their deception, for he was able to study them and translate them, and each one seemed to contradict itself absolutely, as love meant hate, and black white, and joy sorrow. “I mean it” was its opposite, insincerity, the proof of a lie.

The room was much bigger now, and it held many things that had not been visible to him before. The ceiling was high, the sound from outside very loud, and even the smallest murmuring voice was audible to him.

He was able to reason that if a dream lacks logic and connectedness, is random and puzzling, it was the opposite of a dream, and was wonderful for its coherence. The version he saw of this room he took to be the truth. These people existed in their essence. It was no dream for him — they inhabited a dream from which he had woken.

Next to him, Manfred had been gabbling to Ava and had not noticed that Ava’s attention was fixed on Steadman.

“My father teach me how to paddle a boat,” Manfred was saying.

“Your father was a strange and violent man,” Steadman said. He had no idea why he said this or what he was going to say next, but the words kept coming. “He was a soldier. You hated him. But it’s a terrible story.”

“Blimey,” Janey said, for she had been on the periphery of this conversation and saw Manfred’s face redden as though from a choking fit.

Steadman said, “Your father was a Nazi.”

“That’s not news, ducky. The Huns were all Nazis,” Janey said, looking at Manfred eagerly — something horrible and gloating on her big plain face and the way her tongue was clamped between her teeth in her eagerness to know more. Sensing a secret about to be revealed, she wore an expression like lechery.

Manfred said, “My father was not healthy. He was wrong in the head.”

“He was in the SS.”

“Not the SS, but the SA, the Sturm Abteilung. But so what? Why blame me for my father?”

Protesting, saying vaht and fazzer and uttering the German words, attempting defiance, he sounded weak and emotional.

“He was captured,” Steadman said. “He was in a prison camp.”

“In Russia, working in a labor camp for the mines,” Manfred said, “until the mid-fifties. Ten years after the war was over, the Russians released him. You know nothing of this. It was hard for us!”

“That wasn’t the end,” Steadman said. “After he got sent home he couldn’t adjust.”

Manfred said, “You don’t know me! How can you know this?”

Now, with Manfred’s clamor, the whole room was watching.

“And he killed himself,” Steadman said.

“Why are you bringing this up? Can’t you see he’s upset?” Sabra said. “We were supposed to be having a drink for our despedida .”

“You asked for the truth,” Steadman said. “Manfred hates his father. He hates all fathers. He hates all authority.”

“And that doesn’t matter either.”

“His hatred has made him contemptuous. He hates you all. He is positively subversive.”

Manfred stared at Steadman with glistening eyes and sour insolence as the others waited for more.

“He’s a thief.”

“This is a lie,” Manfred said. “I am important in my country. I know the biggest scientists. I am a writer on drugs and ethnobotany. I am a journalist in the States. Americans know my name.”

Steadman ignored him and said calmly, “Those thefts you attributed to the Indians in the village and the people in the hotel. Your binoculars, your knife, your traveler’s checks — that was Manfred. He stole something from each of us.”

Janey said, “Is this true, Manfred?”

“Is a lie.”

But just that denial and the way he swallowed and sulked seemed the clearest proof of his guilt.