Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

‘Beyond that. There is a place we can stay, a walawwa, an old family estate-we can continue working there. With luck it’s still empty. Sailor must have been killed somewhere in that area, perhaps even came from there. We can try to find Palipana’s artist on the way. I suggest you break contact with Chitra.’

‘And you’ve told no one.’

‘I have to meet officials, give them summaries of what we’re up to, but for them our investigation is nothing. I haven’t spoken about this.’

‘How can you bear it.’

‘You don’t understand how bad things were. Whatever the government is possibly doing now, it was worse when there was real chaos. You were not here for that-the law abandoned by everyone, save a few good lawyers. Terror everywhere, from all sides. We wouldn’t have survived with your rules of Westminster then. So illegal government forces rose up in retaliation. And we were caught in the middle. It was like being in a room with three suitors, all of whom had blood on their hands. In nearly every house, in nearly every family, there was knowledge of someone’s murder or abduction by one side or another. I’ll tell you a thing I saw…’

Sarath was speaking in the empty offices, but he looked around.

‘I was in the south… It was almost evening, the markets closed. Two men, insurgents I suppose, had caught a man. I don’t know what he had done. Maybe he had betrayed them, maybe he had killed someone, or disobeyed an order, or not agreed quickly enough. In those days the justice of death came in at any level. I don’t know if he was to be executed, or harassed and lectured at, or in the most unlikely scenario, forgiven. He was wearing a sarong, a white shirt, the long sleeves rolled up. His shirt hung outside the sarong. He had no shoes on. And he was blindfolded. They propped him up, made him sit awkwardly on the crossbar of a bicycle. One of the captors sat on the saddle, the one with the rifle stood by his side. When I saw them they were about to leave. The man could see nothing that was going on around him or where he would be going.

‘When they took off, the blindfolded man had to somehow hang on. One hand on the handlebars, but the other he had to put around the neck of his captor. It was this necessary intimacy that was disturbing. They wobbled off, the man with the rifle following on another bike.

‘It would have been easier if they had all walked. But this felt in an odd way ceremonial. Perhaps a bike was a form of status for them and they wished to use it. Why transport a blindfolded victim on a bicycle? It made all life seem precarious. It made all of them more equal. Like drunk university students. The blindfolded man had to balance his body in tune with his possible killer. They cycled off and at the far end of the street, beyond the market buildings, they turned and disappeared. Of course the reason they did it that way was so none of us would forget it.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing.’

There are images carved into or painted on rock-a perspective of a village seen from the height of a nearby hill, a single line depicting a woman’s back bent over a child-that have altered Sarath’s perceptions of his world. Years ago he and Palipana entered unknown rock darknesses, lit a match and saw hints of colour. They went outside and cut branches off a rhododendron, and returned and set them on fire to illuminate the cave, smoke from the green wood acrid and filling the burning light.

These were discoveries made during the worst political times, alongside a thousand dirty little acts of race and politics, gang madness and financial gain. War having come this far like a poison into the bloodstream could not get out.

Those images in caves through the smoke and firelight. The night interrogations, the vans in daylight picking up citizens at random. That man he had seen taken away on a bicycle. Mass disappearances at Suriyakanda, reports of mass graves at Ankumbura, mass graves at Akmeemana. Half the world, it felt, was being buried, the truth hidden by fear, while the past revealed itself in the light of a burning rhododendron bush.

Anil would not understand this old and accepted balance. Sarath knew that for her the journey was in getting to the truth. But what would the truth bring them into? It was a flame against a sleeping lake of petrol. Sarath had seen truth broken into suitable pieces and used by the foreign press alongside irrelevant photographs. A flippant gesture towards Asia that might lead, as a result of this information, to new vengeance and slaughter. There were dangers in handing truth to an unsafe city around you. As an archaeologist Sarath believed in truth as a principle. That is, he would have given his life for the truth if the truth were of any use.

And privately (Sarath would consider and weigh this before sleep), he would, he knew, also give his life for the rock carving from another century of the woman bending over her child. He remembered how they had stood before it in the flickering light, Palipana’s arm following the line of the mother’s back bowed in affection or grief. An unseen child. All the gestures of motherhood harnessed. A muffled scream in her posture.

The country existed in a rocking, self-burying motion. The disappearance of schoolboys, the death of lawyers by torture, the abduction of bodies from the Hokandara mass grave. Murders in the Muthurajawela marsh.

They weaved towards the inland hills.

‘We don’t have the equipment to do that sort of work here,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

‘If the artist is as good as Palipana says, he’ll improvise the tools. Have you ever been involved with this kind of thing?’

‘No. Never done reconstruction. I have to say we sort of scorn it. They look like historical cartoons to us. Dioramas, that sort of thing. Are you getting a cast made of the skull?’

‘Why?’

‘Before you give it to him-whoever this noncertified person is. I’m glad we’ve decided on a drunk, by the way.’

‘You can’t get a cast done without waking up all of Colombo. We’ll just give him the skull.’

‘I wouldn’t.’

‘And it would take weeks to arrange. This isn’t Brussels or America. Only the weapons in this country are state-of-the-art.’

‘Well, let’s find the guy first and see if he can even hold a paintbrush without shaking.’

They arrived at a scattering of mud-and-wattle huts on the edge of a village. It turned out the man named Ananda Udugama was no longer living with his in-laws but in the next town, at a petrol station. They drove on, and she watched as Sarath got out and walked up and down the one street of the town, asking for him. When they located him it appeared that he had just woken from an early-evening sleep. Sarath gestured to her and she joined them.

Sarath explained what they wanted him to do, mentioned Palipana, and that he would be paid. The man, who wore thick spectacles, said he would need certain things-erasers, the kind on the end of school pencils, small needles. And he said he needed to see the skeleton. They opened the back of the jeep. The man used their squat flashlight to study the skeleton, running it up and down the ribs, the arcs and curves. Anil felt there was little he could learn from such a viewing.

Sarath persuaded the man to come with them. After a slight shake of the head, he went into the room he was living in and came out with his belongings in a small cardboard box.

Two hours before Ratnapura they were stopped by a roadblock, soldiers moving languidly out of the shadows towards them from both sides of the road. They sat in silence, falsely polite, handing over their identity cards when a hand snaked into the jeep and snapped its fingers. Anil’s card seemed to give the soldiers trouble, and one of them opened her door and stood waiting. She was not aware of what was expected of her until Sarath explained under his breath; then she climbed out.