Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

The next postcard was of a parabolic dish antenna. Again no message or address. Anil was angry and threw it away. A few months later, when working in Europe, she got the phone call. She didn’t know how Leaf had found her.

‘This is an illegal call, so don’t say my name. I’m cutting into someone’s line.’

(As a teenager Leaf had made long-distance calls on Sammy Davis Jr.’s stolen phone number.)

‘Oh Angie, where are you! You were supposed to write.’

‘I’m sorry. When’s your next break.’

‘In January. A couple of months. I may go to Sri Lanka after that.’

‘If I send you a ticket, will you come and see me? I’m in New Mexico.’

‘Yes. Oh yes…’

So Anil returned to America. And she sat with Leaf in a doughnut shop in Socorro, New Mexico, a half-mile from the Very Large Array of Telescopes, which minute by minute drew information out of the skies. Information about the state of things ten billion years ago, and as many miles out. It was here, in this place, that they caught up with the truth in each other’s lives.

Originally Leaf had said she had bad asthma, that was why she had moved into the desert for a year, disappearing from Anil’s life. She had got involved with Earthworks and was living at The Lightning Field near Corrales. In 1977, artist Walter De Maria had planted four hundred stainless-steel poles high in the desert on a flat plain a mile long. Leaf’s first job was to be a caretaker of the lodge. Powerful winds swept in from the desert and she got to witness storms, because during the summer the poles drew lightning onto the plain. She stood among them, within the electricity, the thunder simultaneous around her. She had just wanted to be a cowboy. She loved the Southwest.

Now Leaf met Anil near the Very Large Array-the telescope assembly that picked up languages of data out of the universe above the desert. She was living alongside these receivers of the huge history of the sky. Who was out there? How far away was that signal? Who was dying unmoored?

Well, it turned out Leaf was.

They sat facing each other during the meals they had together every day at the Pequod. Anil felt the giant telescopes in the open desert belonged to the same genre as Leaf’s beloved drive-ins. They talked and listened to each other. She loved Anil. And she knew Anil loved her. Sister and sister. But Leaf was ill. It would get worse.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I just keep… forgetting things. I can diagnose myself, you see. I have Alzheimer’s. I know I’m too young for this, but I had encephalitis as a kid.’

No one had noticed her illness when they had worked in Arizona. Sister and sister. And she had left without telling Anil why she was really leaving. With all the solitary energy she could draw on, she had gone east to the New Mexico deserts. Asthma, she said. She was starting to lose her memory, fighting for her life.

They sat at the Pequod in Socorro, whispering into the afternoons.

‘Leaf, listen. Remember? Who killed Cherry Valance?’

‘What?’

Anil repeated the question slowly.

‘Cherry Valance,’ Leaf said, ‘I…’

‘John Wayne shot him. Remember.’

‘Did I know that?’

‘You know John Wayne?’

‘No, my darling.’

My darling!

‘Do you think they can hear us?’ Leaf asked. ‘That giant metal ear in the desert. Is it picking us up too? I’m just a detail from the subplot, right.’

Then a splinter of memory returned and she added, awfully, ‘Well, you always thought Cherry Valance would die.’

…

And did she? Sarath had asked, when Anil told him about her friend Leaf.

‘No. She called me that night when I had fever, when we were in the south. We always would phone each other and talk till we fell asleep, laughing or crying, trading our stories. No. Her sister watches over her, not far from those telescopes in New Mexico.’

Dear John Boorman,

I do not have your address but a Mr. Walter Donohue from Faber & Faber has offered to forward this to you. I write on behalf of myself and my colleague Leaf Niedecker about a scene in an early film of yours, Point Blank.

At the start of the film, the prologue as it were, Lee Marvin is shot from a distance of what looks like four or five feet. He falls back into a prison cell and we think he might be dead. Eventually he comes to, leaves Alcatraz and swims across the So-and-so Straits into San Francisco.

We are forensic scientists and have been arguing about where on his body Mr. Marvin was shot. My friend thinks it was a rib glance shooting and that apart from the rib break it was a minor flesh wound. I feel the wound to be more serious. I know many years have passed, but perhaps you could try to remember and advise us of the location of the entry wound and exit wound and recall your discussions with Mr. Marvin as to how he should react and move later on in the film when time had passed and his character had recovered.

Sincerely,

Anil Tissera

A rainy-night conversation at the walawwa.

‘You like to remain cloudy, don’t you, Sarath, even to yourself.’

‘I don’t think clarity is necessarily truth. It’s simplicity, isn’t it?’

‘I need to know what you think. I need to break things apart to know where someone came from. That’s also an acceptance of complexity. Secrets turn powerless in the open air.’

‘Political secrets are not powerless, in any form,’ he said.

‘But the tension and danger around them, one can make them evaporate. You’re an archaeologist. Truth comes finally into the light. It’s in the bones and sediment.’

‘It’s in character and nuance and mood.’

‘That is what governs us in our lives, that’s not the truth.’

‘For the living it is the truth,’ he quietly said.

‘Why did you get into such a business?’

‘I love history, the intimacy of entering all those landscapes. Like entering a dream. Someone nudges a stone away and there’s a story.’

‘A secret.’

‘Yes, a secret… I was selected to go and study in China. I was there a year. And all I saw of China was this one area about the size of a pasture. I didn’t go anywhere else. That’s where I stayed and where I worked. Villagers had been cleaning a hillock and had come across earth of a different colour. Something that simple, but teams of archaeologists came. Under the different-coloured grey earth they found stone slabs, under these they found timbers-huge timbers that had been cut and stripped and nestled together like a great floor in some mead hall. Only of course, it was a ceiling.

‘So it was, as I said, like an exercise in a dream where you are made to go deeper and further. They brought in cranes to lift the timbers out and underneath them they discovered water-a water tomb. Three giant pools. Floating there was a lacquered coffin of an ancient ruler. Also in the water were coffins with the bodies of twenty female musicians along with their instruments. They were to accompany him, you see. With zithers, flutes, panpipes, drums, iron bells. They were delivering him to his ancestors. When they removed the skeletons from the coffins and laid them out there was no damage to any of the bones to reveal how the musicians had been killed, not one fractured bone.’

‘Then they were strangled,’ Anil said.

‘Yes. That’s what we were told.’

‘Or suffocated. Or poisoned. A study of the bones could have told you the truth. I don’t know if there was a tradition of poisoning in China at that time. When was it?’

‘Fifth century B.C.’

‘Yeah, they knew poisons.’

‘We soaked the lacquered coffins with polymer so they wouldn’t collapse. The lacquer had been made out of sumac sap mixed with coloured pigments. Hundreds of layers of it. Then they discovered the musical instruments. Drums. Mouth organs made from gourds. Chinese zithers! Most of all-bells.