Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

‘Why don’t you let go, Cullis? Let’s stop. Why carry on? After two years I still feel like your afternoon date.’

She was beside him on the bed. Not touching him. Just needing to look into his eyes, to talk. He reached out and clutched her hair with his left hand.

‘Whatever happens, don’t let go of me,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ She pulled her head back but he would not release her.

‘Let go!’

He held on to her.

She knew where it was. She reached back and her fingers grabbed it, and she swung the small knife he had been cutting an avocado with earlier in a sure arc and stabbed it into the arm holding her. There was an escape of breath from him. Ahhh. All emphasis on the h’s. She could almost see the letters coming out of him in the darkness, and the stem of the weapon in his arm muscle.

She looked at his face, his grey eyes (they were always bluer in daylight), and saw the softness he had accepted into his looks during his forties disappear, suddenly go. The face taut, his emotion open. He was weighing everything, this physical betrayal. Her right hand was still curled around the knife, not quite touching it, grazing it.

They looked at each other, neither of them giving in. She wouldn’t step back from her fury. When she pulled back this time he released her wet dark hair out of his fingers. She rolled away and picked up the telephone. Carrying it into the light of the bathroom she dialed a taxi. She turned to him. ‘Remember this is what I did to you in Borrego Springs. You can make a story out of it.’

Anil dressed in the bathroom, put on makeup, and returned to the bedroom. She switched on all the lights so nothing, no piece of clothing, would escape her while she repacked her bag. Then she switched the lights off and sat and waited. He was on the twin bed, not moving. She heard the taxi draw up and sound its horn.

When she walked to the cab she could feel that her hair was still damp. The car took off under the Una Palma Motel sign. Their romance had been a long intimacy that had existed mostly in secrecy, the good-bye was quick and fatal, though in the taxi to the bus station she put a hand to her breast and felt her heart thumping, as if blurting out the truth.

She had one arm up, holding on to the rafter above her head. She herself felt like a whip that could leap out and catch something in its long finger. Palipana faced the woman who had come with Sarath. Hail, eyes! He said it again. Sarath was conscious of her pale arm in the light of the oil lamp as he listened to Palipana. ‘When he is finished, the painter of eyes is blindfolded and led out of the temple. The king would endow all those responsible with goods and land. All this is recorded. He defined boundaries for new villages-high and low lands, jungles and ponds. He directed the artificer to be allowed thirty amunu of seed-paddy, thirty pieces of iron, ten buffaloes from the fold and ten she-buffaloes with calves.’ Palipana’s conversation always seemed to include remembered phrases from historical texts.

‘She-buffaloes with calves,’ Anil said quietly to herself. ‘Seed-paddy… You were rewarded for the right things.’ But he heard her.

‘Well, kings also caused trouble in those days,’ he said. ‘Even then there was nothing to believe in with certainty. They still didn’t know what truth was. We have never had the truth. Not even with your work on bones.’

‘We use the bone to search for it. “The truth shall set you free.” I believe that.’

‘Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion.’

There was a crackle of thunder far away, as if earth and trees were being torn and moved. The wooden ambalama felt like a raft or four-poster bed drifting in the black clearing. Perhaps they were not nestled on rock but unmoored, on a river. She was lying on the lip of the structure, on one of the sleeping platforms. She had woken and could hear Palipana turning every few minutes as if it was difficult for him to find the precise location and posture for sleep.

Anil turned back into her own privacy, to Cullis. She felt there was this physical line to him wherever he was on the planet, beyond ocean or storm, some frail telephone cord that one had to tug clear of branches or rocks deep in the sea. And did he hold the image of her stride from that room in Borrego? They had both hoped for a seven-bangled night. She’d decided when she left him that she would call later to make sure he had not given in to sleep, but the fury was still taut in her and she did not.

Sarath struck a match against the rock beside the ambalama. So it was not a river down there. Light flickered up and she smelled the smoke of his beedi. An insect chirped like the sound of a watch being wound, one of the inhabitants in this forest of ascetics. ‘There has always been slaughter in passion,’ she heard Palipana say.

In the dark he continued speaking: ‘Even if you are a monk, like my brother, passion or slaughter will meet you someday. For you cannot survive as a monk if society does not exist. You renounce society, but to do so you must first be a part of it, learn your decision from it. This is the paradox of retreat. My brother entered temple life. He escaped the world and the world came after him. He was seventy when he was killed by someone, perhaps someone from the time when he was breaking free-for that is the difficult stage, when you leave the world. I am the last of my siblings. For my sister too is dead. This girl is her daughter.’

A few years before, the girl Lakma had seen her parents killed. A week after their murder, the twelve-year-old child was taken to a government ward run by nuns, north of Colombo, that looked after children whose parents had been killed in the civil war. The shock of the murder of the girl’s parents, however, had touched everything within her, driving both her verbal and her motor ability into infancy. This was combined with an adult sullenness of spirit. She wanted nothing more to invade her.

She lay hidden there for over a month, silent, non-reacting, physically forced from her room to do exercises in sunlight. The nightmares continued for Lakma, who was unable to deal with the possible danger around her. A child who knew the falseness of the supposed religious security around her, with its clean dormitories and well-made beds. When Palipana, her only remaining relative, came to visit her he saw she was immune to any help in this place. Any sudden sound was danger to her. She would finger through every meal looking for insects or glass, would not sleep in the safety of her bed but hidden underneath it. It was the time of Palipana’s own crisis in his career, and his eyes were in the last stages of glaucoma. He had bundled her up and travelled by train up to Anuradhapura, the girl terrified during the whole journey, then brought her in a cart to the forest monastery, the leaf hall and ambalama, in the Grove of Ascetics. They slipped this way out of the world, not noticed by anyone-an old man, a twelve-year-old girl who was scared of the evidence of anything human, even of this person who had brought her into the dry zone.

He wished more than anything to deliver her from the inflicted isolation. Whatever skills she learned from her parents had been abandoned too deep within her. Palipana, the country’s great epigraphist, began to educate her on two levels-gave her the mnemonic skills of alphabet and phrasing, and conversed with her at the furthest edge of his knowledge and beliefs. All this occurred as his own vision darkened and he began to move slowly, with exaggerated gestures. (It was later, when he trusted the dark and the girl more, that his movement became minimal.)

He supposed he had always trusted her, in spite of her fury and rejection of the world. He weaved into her presence his conversations about wars and medieval slokas and Pali texts and language, and he spoke of how history faded too, as much as battle did, and how it could exist only with remembrance-for even the slokas on papyrus and bound ola leaves would be eaten by moths and silverfish, dissolved by rainstorms-how only stone and rock could hold one person’s loss and another’s beauty forever.