Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

‘Where’s that bird from?’

‘Oh… nowhere.’ She could close down too.

An hour later they were running through rain and were fully wet by the time they climbed into the car. He drove her to Ward Place and kept the car idling under the portico as she collected her things from the back seat. ‘See you tomorrow,’ she said, and closed the door.

Once inside, Anil emptied her bag onto the table to find the postcard. Rereading her girlfriend Leaf’s message from America made her feel better. Some communication from the West. She went into the kitchen, her mind circling around Sarath once more. She had been working with him for several days and she still had no handle on him. He was high up in the state-sponsored Archaeological Department, so how much a part of the government was he? Was he its ear and eye while assigned to aid her in the Human Rights investigation and report? In that case whom was she working for?

Forensic work during a political crisis was notorious, she knew, for its three-dimensional chess moves and back-room deals and muted statements for the ‘good of the nation.’ In the Congo, one Human Rights group had gone too far and their collection of data had disappeared overnight, their paperwork burned. As if a city from the past had been reburied. The investigative team, which included Anil in a lowly role as a programme assistant, had nothing left to do but get on a plane and go home. So much for the international authority of Geneva. The grand logos on letterheads and European office doors meant nothing where there was crisis. If and when you were asked by a government to leave, you left. You took nothing with you. Not a slide tray, not a piece of film. At the airport, while they searched her clothing, she’d sat almost naked on a stool.

One postcard from Leaf. One American bird. She pulled some cutlets and a beer out of the fridge. There would be a book to read, a shower to take. Later she might go to Galle Face Green and have a drink at one of the newer hotels, watch the drunk members of a touring English cricket team sing karaoke.

Was the partner assigned to her neutral in this war? Was he just an archaeologist who loved his work? The day before, on a road trip out of Colombo, he had shown her a few temples and then, passing some of his students working in a historic area, had joyfully joined them and was soon collecting slivers of mica, telling them where they were likely to find fragments of iron in the ground, as if he were a gifted and natural finder of things. Most of what Sarath wished to know was in some way linked to the earth. She suspected he found the social world around him irrelevant. His desire, he had told her, was to write a book someday about a city in the south of the island that no longer existed. Not a wall of it remained, but he wanted to tell the story of that place. It would emerge out of this dark trade with the earth, his knowledge of the region in chronicles-its medieval business routes, its presence as a favourite monsoon town of a certain king, as revealed in poems that celebrated the city’s daily life. He’d quoted a few lines from one of the poems which his teacher, a man named Palipana, had taught him.

That was Sarath at his most expressive, almost enthusiastic, one evening after a crab dinner in Mount Lavinia. He stood by the surf drawing the shape of the city with his hands, sketching it in the dark air. Through the imaginary lines she could see the waves, their curl and roll, like his sudden excitement moving towards her.

T here were police officers all over the train. The man got on carrying a bird cage with a mynah in it. He walked through carriages, glancing at other passengers. There were no seats left and he sat on the floor. He was wearing a sarong, sandals, a Galle Road T-shirt. It was a slow train, travelling through rock passes, then emerging into sudden vistas. He knew that a mile or so before they got to Kurunegala there would be a tunnel and the train would curve into the dark claustrophobia of it. A few windows would remain open-they needed fresh air, though it meant the noise would be terrible. Once past the tunnel, back into sunlight, they would be getting ready to disembark.

He stood just as the train went into darkness. For a few moments there was the faint muddy light of the bulbs and then they went out. He could hear the bird talking. Three minutes of darkness.

The man moved quickly to where he remembered the government official was, beside the aisle. In the darkness he yanked him forward by his hair and wrapped the chain around his neck and began strangling him. He counted the seconds to himself in the darkness. When the man’s weight fell against him he still didn’t trust him, didn’t release his hold on the chain.

He had a minute left. He stood and lifted the man into his arms. Keeping him upright, he steered him towards the open window. The yellow lights flickered on for a second. He might have been a tableau in somebody’s dream.

He jerked the official off the ground and pushed him through the opening. The buffet of wind outside flung the head and shoulders backwards. He pushed him farther and then let go and the man disappeared into the noise of the tunnel.

While Anil was working with the forensic team in Guatemala, she’d flown into Miami to meet Cullis. She arrived exhausted, her face and body drawn out. Dysentery, hepatitis, dengue fever, they were all going around. She and her team were eating in the villages where they were exhuming bodies; they had to eat the food they were given because it was the only way the villages could participate-by cooking for them. ‘You pray for beans,’ she murmured to Cullis, removing the work clothes she still had on-she had rushed to catch the last plane out-then climbing into her first hotel bath in months. ‘You avoid the seviche. If you have to eat it you throw up somewhere privately, as quick as you can.’ She stretched out in the miracle of a foam bath, a tired smile towards him, glad to have reached him. He knew that exhausted and focussed look, the drawl of her slurring voice as she told her stories.

‘I never actually dug before. I’m usually just in the labs. But we were doing exhumations in the field. Manuel, he gave me a brush and a chopstick and said break up the ground and brush it away. We got five skeletons the first day.’

He was on the edge of the tub watching her, closed eyes, away from the world. She’d cut her hair short. She was much thinner. He could see she had fallen even more in love with her work. Tired out but also refreshed by it.

She leaned forward and pulled the plug out, lay back again to feel the water disappear around her. Then she stood on the tiles, her body passive as he pressed the towel against her dark shoulders.

‘I know the name of several bones in Spanish,’ she boasted. ‘I know some Spanish. Omóplato is this. Shoulder blade. Maxilar-your upper jaw bone. Occipital-the bone at the back of the skull.’ She was slurring words, as if counting backwards with anaesthetic in her. ‘You’ve got a mixed bag of characters working on those sites. Big-shot pathologists from the States who can’t reach for salt without grabbing a woman’s breast. And Manuel. He is part of that community, so he has less protection than the others like us. He told me once, When I’ve been digging and I’m tired and don’t want to do any more, I think how it could be me in the grave I’m working on. I wouldn’t want someone to stop digging for me… I always think of that when I want to quit. I’m sleepy, Cullis. Can hardly talk. Read me something.’

‘I’ve written a piece on Norwegian snakes.’

‘No.’

‘A poem, then.’

‘Yes. Always.’

But Anil was already asleep, with a smile on her face.

Cúbito. Omóplato. Occipital. Cullis wrote the names into his notebook, sitting at the table across the room from her. She was deep in the white linen bed. Her hand moving constantly, as if brushing earth away.