Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

‘The skeleton I could have proved something with has been confiscated.’

‘We seem to have too many bodies around. Is this one less important than the confiscated one?’

‘Of course not. But the confiscated one died less than five years ago.’

‘Confiscated. Confiscated… Who confiscated it?’ Sarath said.

‘It was taken while I met with Dr. Perera in Kynsey Road Hospital. It was lost there.’

‘So you lost it, then. It was not confiscated.’

‘I did not lose it. It was taken from the lab when I was speaking with him in the cafeteria.’

‘So you misplaced it. Do you think it’s possible Dr. Perera had something to do with that?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps. I have not seen him since.’

‘And you wished to prove that skeleton was a recent death. Even if we now do not have the evidence.’

‘Mr. Diyasena, I’d like to remind you that I came here as part of a human rights group. As a forensic specialist. I do not work for you, I’m not hired by you. I work for an international authority.’

He turned and directed his words to the audience.

‘This “international authority” has been invited here by the government, has it not? Is that not right?’

‘We are an independent organization. We make independent reports.’

‘To us. To the government here. That means you do work for the government here.’

‘What I wish to report is that some government forces have possibly murdered innocent people. This is what you are hearing from me. You as an archaeologist should believe in the truth of history.’

‘I believe in a society that has peace, Miss Tissera. What you are proposing could result in chaos. Why do you not investi-gate the killing of government officers? Can we get the air-conditioning on, please?’

There was a scattering of applause.

‘The skeleton I had was evidence of a certain kind of crime. That is what is important here. “One village can speak for many villages. One victim can speak for many victims.” Remember? I thought you represented more than you do.’

‘Miss Tissera-’

‘Doctor.’

‘All right, “Doctor.” I have brought here another skeleton from another burial site, an earlier century. To establish the difference, I would like you to do a forensic study of it for me.’

‘This is ridiculous.’

‘This is not ridiculous. I would like to have evidence of the difference between two corpses. Somasena!’

He gestured to someone in the back of the hall. The skeleton, wrapped in plastic, was wheeled in.

‘A two-hundred-year-old corpse,’ he said out loud. ‘That’s what we assume, anyway, the boys in archaeology. Perhaps you can manage to prove us wrong.’

He was tapping his pencil against her table, like a taunt.

‘I need time.’

‘We give you forty-eight hours. Leave the skeleton you were talking about and go with Mr. Somasena to the lobby, he will escort you. You will have to sign back all your research before you leave. I must warn you of that. This skeleton will be waiting for you in the front entrance in twenty minutes.’

She turned from him and collected her papers.

‘Leave the papers and the tape recorder, please.’

She was still for a moment, then removed the tape recorder from the pocket where she had just put it, and left it on the table.

‘It belongs to me,’ she whispered. ‘Remember?’

‘We’ll get it back to you.’

She started walking up the steps to the exit. The officials hardly looked at her.

‘Dr. Tissera!’

She turned at the top of the stairs and faced him, certain it would be for the last time.

‘Don’t attempt to return for these things. Just leave the building. We’ll call you if we want you.’

She stepped through the door. It closed behind her with a pneumatic click.

Sarath remained there and spoke quietly, out into their midst.

With Gunesena he wheeled the two skeletons on the trolley through the side door. It opened onto a dark passageway that would take them towards the parking lot. They stood still a moment. Gunesena said nothing. Whatever happened, Sarath did not want to return to the auditorium. He felt for a switch. There was the crackle of neon trying to catch, that stuttering of light he was used to in buildings like this.

A row of red arrows lit the passageway, which inclined upwards. They pushed the trolley with the two skeletons in the semi-darkness, arms turning crimson every time they passed an arrow. He imagined Anil two floors above him, walking angrily, slamming each door she walked through. Sarath knew they would halt her at each corridor level, check her papers again and again to irritate and humiliate her. He knew she would be searched, vials and slides removed from her briefcase or pockets, made to undress and dress again. It would take her more than forty minutes to pass the gauntlets and escape the building and she would, he knew, be carrying nothing by the end of the journey, no scraps of information, not a single personal photograph she might foolishly have carried with her into the Armoury building that morning. But she would get out, which was all he wished for.

Since the death of his wife, Sarath had never found the old road back into the world. He broke with his in-laws. The unopened letters of condolence were left in her study. They were, in reality, for her anyway. He returned to archaeology and hid his life in his work. He organized excavations in Chilaw. The young men and women he trained knew little about what had occurred in his life and he was therefore most comfortable among them. He showed them how to place strips of wet plaster on bone, how to gather and file mica, when to transport objects, when to leave them in situ. He ate with them and was open to any question in regard to work. Nothing was held back that he knew or could guess at in their field. Everyone who worked with him accepted the moats of privacy he had established around himself. He returned to his tent tired after their day of coastal excavations. He was in his mid-forties, though he seemed older to the apprentices. He waited until the early evening, until the others had finished swimming in the sea, before he walked into the water, disappearing within its darkness. At this dark hour, out deep, there were sometimes rogue tides that would not let you return, that insisted you away. Alone in the waves he would let go of himself, his body flung around as if in a dance, only his head in the air rational to what surrounded him, the imperceptible glint of large waves that he would slip beneath as they rose above him.

He had grown up loving the sea. When he was a boy at school at St. Thomas ’s, the sea was just across the railway lines. And whatever coast he was on-at Hambantota, in Chilaw, in Trincomalee-he would watch fishermen in catamarans travel out at dusk till they faded into the night just beyond a boy’s vision. As if parting or death or disappearance were simply the elimination of sight in the onlooker.

Patterns of death always surrounded him. In his work he felt he was somehow the link between the mortality of flesh and bone and the immortality of an image on rock, or even, more strangely, its immortality as a result of faith or an idea. So the removal of a wise sixth-century head, the dropping off of arms and hands of rock as a result of the fatigue of centuries, existed alongside human fate. He would hold statues two thousand years old in his arms. Or place his hand against old, warm rock that had been cut into a human shape. He found comfort in seeing his dark flesh against it. This was his pleasure. Not conversation or the education of others or power, but simply to place his hand against a gal vihara, a living stone whose temperature was dependent on the hour, whose look of porousness would change depending on rain or a quick twilight.