William Vollmann - The Atlas

Then the train was vibrating across a flatness of dark brownish-greenish grass under a dark slate sky with power towers making tall black skeletons of interlocking triangles and a radio tower flashing like lightning far away under the night's thunderhead. He wandered through sleep that was like the soft wet grass between birch trees.

In the morning he saw that it had rained, and waking quickly he remembered Madagascar right away with the umbrellas unfurling well before six in Antananarivo, rising like mushrooms on cobblestones still wet with rain; the green tree above the sand like an immense lung whose alveoli were spreading green trunks, the women carrying their brooms bristles upward, handles upright like flagstaff's in the hollows of their arms: these brought morning to the dirt street walled with low brick houses. He loved someone there whom he would never marry. She knew that. He had never lied to her. But she waited, and wrote him letters, which he kept in the same drawer as the letters of his first love and all the other loves, and slowly the letters became overaccommodating, desperate, and then bitter, and it was his fault, even though whatever pain his first love had caused him was not her fault; which apparent contradiction demonstrated the failure of classical theories. What physicists call blackbodies , namely, hollow heated solids from which radiation passes out through a tiny hole, the rest of the solid being entirely black, prove through their spectra that energy is released in discrete quanta instead of in a continuous stream. He could see himself and the Malagasy woman as facing blackbodies (although her body alone was black), each radiating need and sullen resentment and lust and hope and love and all the other wavelengths in the spectrum, glowing only through their tiny sexual orifices which connected directly with their souls; but the steadiness of hysterical light was only an illusion; they were really and sincerely pulsing very quickly as they locked lips and children leaned out and ran while fresh meat began to go rancid in sizzling brick windows; and he was the one who had the orgasm of responsibility; he was the one to be blamed. He decided never to go back there and then he felt lonely so he went back there. She stroked his sunwarmed shoulders. She said: Je constate tous mes erreurs en te disant que tu n'étais pas gentil et tous nos petites disputes, je — je — je t'aimais trop et je t'aime encore plus, voila pourquoi j'ai faite comme cela … — and he said: Please don't talk like that, honey; 1 myself love you so much. — She said: When I think about you, I cry alone in my house. (A barefoot man in rags came walking past the hot green place where women were washing their clothes in the brown river. He balanced a long narrow cardboard box on his head. He held his hat in his hand. Why was he so familiar, like Madame Bovary's blind beggar? Had it been when the train was pulling out of Bangkok that he'd seen a man sleeping on concrete with his knees up beside a greenish canal in which so many trees reflected themselves as they groped down between blue continents of reflected sky? That man and the one in Antananarivo were brothers who would never meet. But if that were true, were rich men also brothers? And whom was he himself the brother to? Again from the Vatican he remembered snowy double curves of ceiling embellished by golden circles of crowns and angels; from these spheres crossed elaborate wreaths between whose legs lived paintings of rampant lions, monuments, beautiful and terrifying processions, and the ceiling's Saharas of whiteness which separated these entities swarmed with angels. These maps and diagrams were intended to demonstrate to him his relatedness to other beings in this world. Somewhere the two beggars were affixed like stars, still with the same sunken eyes of hunger and sadness, but the Celestial Painter had dressed them in royal purple and their hair glistened and the line between them had been painted in gold. Was there somewhere that those men could truly partake of the existence of angels? He couldn't believe it.) In Madagascar he wanted to explain himself and couldn't. He tried to please her and couldn't. She led him beneath the trees whose heads were as pale and lacy as carrot-tops; and together they journeyed across red and purple earths. — You no same before! she kept saying sorrowfully. Oh, your character not so good now! — And she turned away from him and played Malagasy solitaire, sweating in the hot tobacco breeze. She'd gained a little weight. Her breasts now reminded him of those clusters of green bananas that hang off the trees like grenades. They were now mostly silent together, those two, she playing cards, he slapping his mosquito bites and gazing at the rain that fell upon the street. He watched the bright white sky, the weird pale green trees spreading in the square, the dirty kids laughing, showing white teeth. He kept thinking: What's the use? — He tried to compliment her; one night he pointed to a calendar girl and said that she herself was that beautiful and more so. She thanked him spiritlessly. (Before, when he honey-talked her she'd smile, set down her rum bottle, and give him a big wet kiss, saying: Merci, mon amour . .) Two days later, unable to digest the insult after all, she began screaming at him in rage. It turned out that he'd said the worst thing. The calendar girl was of another race, hence ugly. — But me no want problem with you, so just smile, speak thank you! she shouted. Oh, you no good! — It was like the time in Afghanistan during the war when Suleiman was sick. His medicine was in his packsack which was locked away; and Suleiman was too poor to have medicine of his own, of course. Gholam Sayed kept saying: Suleiman is ill, Suleiman is ill. — But Poor Man had the key and Poor Man was asleep. Old Elias, the malik of the village, had warned him never to wake Poor Man. Without Poor Man the Russians would get them, so his concentration must never be molested. — Who else has the key, then? he asked Elias, knowing that someone did but forgetting the name. — No answer, either because Elias didn't understand or else because by asking he was breaking some commandment unknown to him. Suleiman lay feverish. He asked Suleiman if he wanted him to wake up Poor Man. Suleiman lowered his head and whispered no. So they all sat there staring at one another in the hot red dust; and then Gholam Sayed said again, more accusingly: Suleiman is sick! — If you care for him get the key, he replied, angry now. Then I can open my pack and get a pill for him. — The oratorical effect of this speech was somewhat lost, as he had to consult his Pushtu-English dictionary for every second word. (He would have preferred to be as reclusive as a crow dodging under a bridge.) — Gholam Sayed said nothing. — I don't know how to find the key without waking Poor Man, he added, or would have, but the dictionary didn't have the words find, locate or discover . He couldn't think what other words to look for. He had never been good at crossword puzzles. (The dictionary was really a disappointment.) He managed to say: It's difficult for me. I am a foreigner. It's not difficult for you. You are a mujahid. — Then suddenly Gholam Sayed announced: Suleiman is not sick. — He says he's sick, so he's sick, the traveller insisted. Help him. Or show me how to help him. — It's Ramazan, said Gholam Sayed. Muslim no eat. No drink. — If a man is sick, the traveller replied, then no Ramazan. — At this, Gholam Sayed pointed to Suleiman and said something disparaging. The traveller didn't understand. Then he pointed to the traveller, indicated breasts on him, pointed to Suleiman and said: He want. . and made his culture's equivalent of a representative gesture which suggested that Gholam Sayed, at least, squatted when he did it. They were all Muslim missionaries so maybe they didn't need the missionary position. Whether or not Suleiman had designs on him, the traveller didn't really care. Walking up the unnerving cliffsides, Suleiman had held his arm. He'd picked fruit for him, held his hand in friendship when they walked. Suleiman had helped him. Suleiman was sick and he was not helping Suleiman. — He said he's sick, so he's sick, he cried. Help Suleiman! — It's Ramazan, returned the implacable Gholam Sayed. Muslim no eat, no drink. — The traveller went to look for the other man with the key but didn't see him, so he came back, and Suleiman was moaning with fever and Gholam Sayed was standing there grinning. — He gave Gholam Sayed a push. (Gholam Sayed had pushed him many times on the journey across the border. Once he'd been weak with dysentery and Gholam Sayed had shoved a machine-gun butt into the small of his back.) — Help Suleiman, he said. — He is no sick, said Gholam Sayed. — You are a liar, he said. — It's Ramazan, Gholam Sayed replied. — You are no Muslim if you will not help your brother, the traveller said, fearing these words even as they came out. Those were the kind of words that made people kill. — I am Muslim, said Gholam Sayed simply, grandly, contemptuously. Suleiman is Muslim. You are no Muslim.