Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

‘This is a murder victim, Sarath.’

‘A murder… Do you mean any murder… or do you mean a political murder?’

‘It was found within a sacred historical site. A site constantly under government or police supervision.’

‘Right.’

‘And this is a recent skeleton,’ she said firmly. ‘It was buried no more than four to six years ago. What’s it doing here?’

‘There are thousands of twentieth-century bodies, Anil. Can you imagine how many murders-’

‘But we can prove this, don’t you see? This is an opportunity, it’s traceable. We found him in a place that only a government official could get into.’

He was tapping his pen on the wooden arm of the chair as she talked.

‘We can do palynology tests to identify the type of pollen that fused to the bone, on those parts of him that were not burned. Only the arms and some ribs were burned. Do you have a copy of Wodehouse’s Pollen Grains?’

‘In my office,’ he said quietly. ‘We need to test for soil extracts.’

‘Can you find a forensic geologist?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No one else.’

They had been whispering in the dark for almost half an hour since she had walked from the skeleton at the fourth table and given Sarath’s shoulder a little tug, saying, ‘I have to show you something.’ ‘What?’ ‘This thing. Listen…’

They covered Sailor and taped the plastic. ‘Let’s lock up,’ he said. ‘I promised to take you to that temple. In an hour it’s the best time to see it. We’ll catch the dusk drummer.’

Anil didn’t like the abrupt switch to something aesthetic. ‘You think it’s safe?’

‘What do you want to do? Take it wherever you go? Don’t worry about anything. These will be fine here.’

‘It’s…’

‘Leave it.’

She thought she’d say it right out. At once. ‘I don’t really know, you see, which side you are on-if I can trust you.’

He began to speak, stopped, then spoke slowly. ‘What would I do?’

‘You could make him disappear.’

He moved out of his stillness and walked to the wall and turned on three lights. ‘Why, Anil?’

‘You have a relative in the government, don’t you?’

‘I do have one, yes. I hardly ever see him. Perhaps he can help us.’

‘Perhaps. Why did you turn on the light?’

‘I need to find my pen. What-did you think it was a signal to someone?’

‘I don’t know where you stand. I know… I know you feel the purpose of truth is more complicated, that it’s sometimes more dangerous here if you tell the truth.’

‘Everyone’s scared, Anil. It’s a national disease.’

‘There are so many bodies in the ground now, that’s what you said… murdered, anonymous. I mean, people don’t even know if they are two hundred years old or two weeks old, they’ve all been through fire. Some people let their ghosts die, some don’t. Sarath, we can do something…’

‘You’re six hours away from Colombo and you’re whispering-think about that.’

‘I don’t want to go to the temple now.’

‘That’s fine. You don’t have to. I’ll go. I’ll see you in the morning.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll turn out the lights,’ he said.

We are often criminals in the eyes of the earth, not only for having committed crimes, but because we know that crimes have been committed.’ Words about a man buried forever in a prison. El Hombre de la Máscara de Hierro. The Man in the Iron Mask. Anil needed to comfort herself with old friends, sentences from books, voices she could trust. ‘This is the dead-room,’ said Enjolras. Who was Enjolras? Someone in Les Misérables. A book so much a favourite, so thick with human nature she wished it to accompany her into the afterlife. She was working with a man who was efficient in his privacy, who would never unknot himself for anyone. A paranoid is someone with all the facts, the joke went. Maybe this was the only truth here. In this rest house near Bandarawela with four skeletons. You’re six hours away from Colombo and you’re whispering-think about that.

In her years abroad, during her European and North American education, Anil had courted foreignness, was at ease whether on the Bakerloo line or the highways around Santa Fe. She felt completed abroad. (Even now her brain held the area codes of Denver and Portland.) And she had come to expect clearly marked roads to the source of most mysteries. Information could always be clarified and acted upon. But here, on this island, she realized she was moving with only one arm of language among uncertain laws and a fear that was everywhere. There was less to hold on to with that one arm. Truth bounced between gossip and vengeance. Rumour slipped into every car and barbershop. Sarath’s daily path as a professional archaeologist in this world, she guessed, involved commissions and the favours of ministers, involved waiting politely for hours in their office lobbies. Information was made public with diversions and subtexts-as if the truth would not be of interest when given directly, without waltzing backwards.

She loosened the swaddling plastic that covered Sailor. In her work Anil turned bodies into representatives of race and age and place, though for her the tenderest of all discoveries was the finding, some years earlier, of the tracks at Laetoli-almost-four-million-year-old footsteps of a pig, a hyena, a rhinoceros and a bird, this strange ensemble identified by a twentieth-century tracker. Four unrelated creatures that had walked hurriedly over a wet layer of volcanic ash. To get away from what? Historically more significant were other tracks in the vicinity, of a hominid assumed to be approximately five feet tall (one could tell by the pivoting heel impressions). But it was that quartet of animals walking from Laetoli four million years ago that she liked to think about.

The most precisely recorded moments of history lay adja-cent to the extreme actions of nature or civilization. She knew that. Pompeii. Laetoli. Hiroshima. Vesuvius (whose fumes had asphyxiated poor Pliny while he recorded its ‘tumultuous behaviour’). Tectonic slips and brutal human violence provided random time-capsules of unhistorical lives. A dog in Pompeii. A gardener’s shadow in Hiroshima. But in the midst of such events, she realized, there could never be any logic to the human violence without the distance of time. For now it would be reported, filed in Geneva, but no one could ever give meaning to it. She used to believe that meaning allowed a person a door to escape grief and fear. But she saw that those who were slammed and stained by violence lost the power of language and logic. It was the way to abandon emotion, a last protection for the self. They held on to just the coloured and patterned sarong a missing relative last slept in, which in normal times would have become a household rag but now was sacred.

In a fearful nation, public sorrow was stamped down by the climate of uncertainty. If a father protested a son’s death, it was feared another family member would be killed. If people you knew disappeared, there was a chance they might stay alive if you did not cause trouble. This was the scarring psychosis in the country. Death, loss, was ‘unfinished,’ so you could not walk through it. There had been years of night visitations, kidnappings or murders in broad daylight. The only chance was that the creatures who fought would consume themselves. All that was left of law was a belief in an eventual revenge towards those who had power.

And who was this skeleton? In this room, among these four, she was hiding among the unhistorical dead. To fetch a dead body: what a curious task! To cut down the corpse of an unknown hanged man and then bear the body of the animal on one’s back… something dead, something buried, something already rotting away? Who was he? This representative of all those lost voices. To give him a name would name the rest.