Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

She opened her eyes in the afternoon and Sarath was there.

‘He will be all right.’

‘Oh,’ she murmured. She pressed Sarath’s hand to the side of her face.

‘You saved him. Getting to him so quickly, then the bandage, the epinephrine. The doctor said he didn’t know too many who would know to do that in a crisis.’

‘It was lucky. I’m allergic to bees, I always carry it. Some people can’t breathe after a bee attack. And epinephrine also slows bleeding.’

‘You should live here. Not be here just for another job.’

‘This isn’t just “another job”! I decided to come back. I wanted to come back.’

There is a long stone path from the village road up to the walawwa. There is an old wall on the right hidden by foliage. A fork in the driveway after thirty yards. If you are driving you turn left and park, near the tea pluckers’ shed. If you are cycling or walking you veer right and approach the house and enter it through a small east door.

It is a classic building, two hundred years old, handed down through five generations. From no viewing point does the house look excessive or pretentious. The site and location, the careful use of distance-how far back you can stand from the building to look at it, the lack of great views of another person’s land-make you turn inward rather than dominate the world around you. It has always seemed a hidden, accidentally discovered place, a grand meulne.

You enter through the gate with its idiosyncratic slope on the top beam and you are in a walled front garden, with sand-coloured packed-down earth. There are two locations of shade here. The shadowed porch and the shadow under the great red tree. Beneath the tree is a low stone bench. Anil spends much of her time here, under the tree bent like an Aeolian harp that throws a hundred variations of shadow textures onto the sandy earth.

How old was the painter in the Wickramasinghe family when he died? How old is Ananda? How old was Anil, standing once in an airport unable to cry out the pain of her frustrated unreturned desire? What were the missing organs in men that made them stroll through life as courteously unfaithful, nonverbal creatures? If two lovers felt they could kill themselves over loss or desire, what of the rest of the planet of strangers? Those who were not in the slightest way in love and who were led and swayed into enemy camps by the ambitious and vainglorious…

She was in the garden alongside the moonamal tree and the kohomba tree. The flowers of the moonamal when shed always turned face up to the moon. The kohomba twigs she could break off and strip to clean her teeth, or burn to keep mosquitoes away. This place seemed the garden of a wise prince. But the wise prince had killed himself.

The aesthetics of the walawwa never surfaced among the three of them. It had been a location of refuge and fear, in spite of calm, consistent shadows, the modest height of the wall, the trees that flowered at face level. But the house, the sand garden, the trees had entered them. Anil would never get over her time here. Years later she might see an etching or a drawing and understand something about it, not sure why-unless she were told that the walawwa she lived in had belonged to the artist’s family and that the artist had also lived there for a time. But what was it about the drawing? This simple series of lines of a naked water carrier, say, and the exactly right distance of his figure from the tree whose arced trunk echoed the shape of a harp.

One can die from private woes as easily as from public ones. Here various families had been solitary, might have begun speaking quietly to themselves while a pencil was being sharpened. Or they would listen to a transistor radio, hearing something faint at the farthest radius point of the antenna. When batteries died it was sometimes a week before one of them walked into the village, that sea of electric light! For it was a grand house built in the era of lamps, built when there seemed to be only the possibility of private woe. But it was here the three of them hunted a public story. ‘The drama of our time,’ the poet Robert Duncan remarked, ‘is the coming of all men into one fate.’

The storm comes towards them from the north. The sky black, fresh wind shaking branches and shadows as they sit under their red tree. The only thing unaffected by the storm is Sarath, his eyes searching into the distance as they talk back and forth.

‘Come on, let’s go in-’

‘Stay,’ he says. ‘We’re already wet.’

She sits down on the stone bench facing him, watching the rain break apart his neatly combed head of hair. She feels irresponsible, to be out in a storm like this. She would have done it as a kid. She can hear drumming from the village, barely audible beneath the sound of rain.

‘You look like your brother with your hair dishevelled. Actually I like your brother.’ She leans forward. ‘I’m going in.’

She walks to the porch and climbs the steps out of the mud, shakes her hair loose and wrings it out like a cloth. She glances back. Sarath’s head is bent down, his lips moving, as if speaking with someone. She knows there will never be a boat to reach Sarath, to discover what he might be thinking. His wife? A cave fresco? The bounce of the rain in front of him? She dries her arms in the darkness of the dining room, puts her left hand to her mouth so she can lick the rain off the bangle.

In the rain he remembers what he was going to tell her about Ananda. He thought of it on the drive back from the hospital. No. About Sailor. ‘Plumbago,’ he says, the word filling his head. ‘He may have worked in a plumbago mine.’

…

That night, long past midnight, Anil could still hear the drumming through the rain. It paced and choreographed everything. She kept waiting for its silence.

Sailor’s head, Ananda’s version of him, was already in the village, and it was there that an unknown, unwished-for drummer had attached himself to it, begun playing beside it. Anil knew it was unlikely that identification would occur. There had been so many disappearances. She knew it was not the head that would give the skeleton a name but his markers of occupation. So she and Sarath would go now to the villages in the region where there were plumbago-graphite mines.

The drum continued its intricate antiphonal pulse, like steps that led them down a stairway to the sea. The drumming would stop only when there was a name provided for the head. But that night it didn’t stop.

When Gamini’s wife, Chrishanti, left their marriage, he remained in the house for a week, surrounded by all the things he had never wished for-state-of-the-art kitchen equipment, her zebra-striped table mats. Without her presence the gardener and sweeper and cook loosened away from necessity. He let his driver go. He would walk to Emergency Services. At the end of that first week he left the house and stayed at the hospital, where he knew he could always find a bed; this way he could rise at dawn and soon be in surgery. Now and then his hand slapped his breast pocket for the pen Chrishanti had given him, which he had lost, but he missed little of his past life.

When his brother phoned, concerned, he told him he did not want his concern. He was already taking pills with a protein drink so he could be continuously awake to those dying around him. In diagnosing a vascular injury, a high index of suspicion is necessary. If he had not been such a good doctor his behaviour would have been reported. He knew that what he was able to do in the hospital was his only societal value. It was where he met his fate, this offstage battle with the war. He ignored war news. He was told he had begun to smell, and for some reason this distressed him. He hoarded Lifebuoy soap and showered three times a day.