Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

‘By now historians had arrived too. Taoist and Confucian scholars, specialists in musical chimes. We pulled sixty-four bells up out of the water. Till now no instruments from this period had been found, though it was known that music had been the most significant activity and idea of this civilization. So you would beburied not with your wealth but alongside music. The great bells removed from the water turned out to have been made with the most sophisticated techniques. It seemed each region of the country had its own method of bell-making. In those regions there had been, literally, wars of music…

‘Nothing was as important. Music was not entertainment, it was a link with ancestors who had led us here, it was a moral and spiritual force. The experience of breaking through barriers of slate, wood, water, to discover a buried women’s orchestra had a similar mystical logic to it, do you understand? You must understand their state of acceptance somehow of such a death. The way the terrorists in our time can be made to believe they are eternal if they die for the cause of their ruler.

‘Before I left they had an event where everyone who had worked there came to hear the bells being struck. It was at the end of my year. It took place in the evening and, as we listened, we felt them physically, lifting into the darkness. Each bell had two notes to represent the two sides of the spirit, containing a balance of opposing forces. Possibly it was those bells that made me an archaeologist.’

‘Twenty murdered women.’

‘It was another world with its own value system that came to the surface.’

‘Love me, love my orchestra. You can take it with you! That kind of madness lies within the structure of all civilizations, not just in distant cultures. You boys are sentimental. Death and glory. A guy I know fell in love with me because of my laugh. We hadn’t even met or been in the same room, he’d heard me on a tape.’

‘And?’

‘Oh, he swooned over me like a married man, made me fall in love with him. You’ve heard the story. How smart women become idiots, ignore everything they should keep on knowing. By the end I wasn’t laughing too much. No bell-ringing.’

‘Was he in love with you before he met you, do you think?’

‘Well, that’s interesting. Perhaps it was the habit of my voice. I think he’d listened to the tape two or three times. He was a writer. A writer. They have time to get into trouble. I had been asked to chair a talk at a conference given by a teacher of mine, Larry Angel. A lovely, funny man, so I was in fact laughing a lot at the way he thought and put things together with his nonlinear mind. We were onstage sitting at a table and I introduced him, and I guess my microphone was on and I was chuckling as he gave the lecture. The old guy and I always had a good rapport. Favourite-uncle atmosphere, slightly sexual but definitely platonic.

‘I guess the writer, my eventual friend, also had a nonlinear mind, so he was getting the jokes. He had ordered the tape because he was interested in researching burial mounds or something, a rather serious subject, and he wanted information, and details. That was our meeting. In proxy. Not a big moment across the universe… We were on a high wire for three years during our relationship.’

Their first adventure together: Anil drove her unwashed white car that smelled of mildew to a Sri Lankan restaurant. It was just a few months after Cullis had heard her on the tape. They were driving through early-evening traffic.

‘So. Are you famous?’

‘No.’ He laughed.

‘A little?’

‘I’d say about seventy people who are not relatives or friends would recognize my name.’

‘Even here?’

‘I doubt it. Who knows. What is it, Muswell Hill?’

‘Archway.’

She opened the window and yelled.

‘Hey, listen, everybody-I’ve got the science writer Cullis Wright in my car! Or is it Cullis Wrong? Yes, it’s him! He’s with me today!’

‘Thank you.’

She rolled up the window. ‘We can check the gossips tomorrow, to see if you were busted.’ She rolled down the window and this time used the horn to gain attention. They were stuck in traffic anyway. Maybe from a distance it looked like a fight. An angry woman half out of the car gesturing towards someone within, trying to get passersby on her side.

He nestled back into the passenger’s seat, watching her loose energy, the ease with which she swept her skirt up to her knees and leapt out of the car once more after pulling the hand brake with a grunt. She was now waving her arms, banging on the dirty roof of the car.

He would remember other moments like this later-times when she tried to strip off his carefulness, tried to unbuckle his worried glance. Making him dance on one of the dark streets of Europe to a small cassette player she pressed against his ear. ‘ Brazil.’ Remember this song. He sang the words with her on that Paris street, their feet dancing over the painted outline of a dog.

He sat there, pressed against the back of his car seat, traffic all around him, watching her torso through the car door as she yelped and pounded on the roof. He felt he had been encased in ice or metal and she was banging on its surface in order to reach him, in order to let him out. The energy of her swirling clothes, the wild grin as she entered the car again and kissed him-she could have broken him free. But as a married man he had already pawned his heart.

She left him eventually in the Una Palma motel room in Borrego Springs. Left nothing of herself for him to hold on to. Just the blood as black as her hair, the room as shadowed as her skin.

He lay in the dark room watching the twitch of his arm muscle flick the knife into movement. He drifted, a boat without oars, into half-sleep. All night he could hear the faint whir of the hotel clock. His fear was that the beating in his blood would stop, that the noise on the roof of the car as she reached for him would end. Now and then a truck hushed by, twisting light. He fought sleep. Usually he loved the letting go. When he wrote, he slipped into the page as if it were water, and tumbled on. The writer was a tumbler. (Would he remember that?) If not, then a tinker, carrying a hundred pots and pans and bits of linoleum and wires and falconer’s hoods and pencils and… you carried them around for years and gradually fit them into a small, modest book. The art of packing. Then he would be off scouring the wetlands again. How to make a book, Anil. You asked me How, you asked What’s the most important thing you need? Anil, I’ll tell you…

But she was on the night bus climbing out from the valley, locked for warmth in her grey ferren-half cloak, half serape. Her eyes inches away from the window, receiving the moments of lit trees. Oh, he knew that look in her, realigning herself after a fight. But this was to be the last time. No second chances. She knew and so did he. Their life of sparring love, tentative abandonment, the worst and best of times, all the memory of it balanced as on a clearly lit lab table in Oklahoma, the bus stirring its way up into the mist, passing the small towns in the mountains.

Anil’s body hunched into itself as it became colder. Still, her eyes did not blink, she would not miss any movement this last night with him. She was determined to underline their crimes towards each other, their failures. It was just this she wanted to be certain about, although she knew that later there would be other versions of their fatal romance.

Apart from the driver she was the only sentinel. She saw the jackrabbit. She heard the thud of a night bird against the bus. No lights on within this floating vessel. She would be cleaning up her desk for five days, and then leave for Sri Lanka. She had somewhere in her bag a list of every phone and fax number where he could reach her on the island for the next two months. She had planned to give it to him. She had circled around his fucked-up life, his clenched fears, the love and comfort he was scared to take from her. Still, he had been like a wonderful house to her, full of unusual compartments, so many possibilities, strangely rousing.