Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

Within the week, she lets him know that he’d be welcome in her bed; and, gently, that he’d be a fool to refuse her. Max doesn’t hide from her the fact that he’s married, nor that he must leave this place soon. But the relief he finds with her — not just her body, the comforts of her bed, but her intelligence, her hands on his neck, the sympathy with which she listens to his hopes and longings — the relief is so great that sometimes, after she falls asleep, he weeps.

“I have been lonely,” she tells him. “I have been without company for a while.” She strokes his thighs and his sturdy smooth chest and slips down the sheets until their hipbones are aligned. Compactly built, she is several inches shorter than him but points out that their legs are the same length; his extra height is in his torso. Swiftly he pushes away a memory of his wedding night with long-waisted Clara. The silvery filaments etched across Dima’s stomach he tries not to recognize as being like those that appeared on Clara, after Elizabeth’s birth.

He doesn’t insult her by paying her for their time together; she isn’t a prostitute, simply a woman grown used, of necessity, to being kept by men. Each time he arrives at her bungalow he brings gifts: little carved boxes and bangles and lengths of cloth; for her daughter, who is nearly Elizabeth’s age, toy elephants and camels. Otherwise he tries to ignore the little girl. Who is her father, what is her name? He can’t think about that, he can’t look at her. Dima, seeming somehow to understand, sends her daughter off to play with the children of her servants when he arrives. Through the open window over her bed he sometimes hears them laughing.

Dima has lived with her father in Leh and Gilgit and here, in a quarter of Srinagar seldom visited by Europeans; she claims to be the daughter of a Russian explorer and a woman, now dead, from Skardu. For some years she was the mistress of a Scotsman who fled his job with the East India Company, explored in Ladakh, and ended up in Kashmir; later she lived with a German geologist. Or so she says. In bed she tells Max tales of her lovers, their friends, her father’s friends — a secret band of wanderers, each with a story as complicated as Dr. Chouteau’s. Which one taught her botany? In those stories, and the way that she appears to omit at least as much as she reveals, she resembles Dr. Chouteau himself, whom she claims to know. A friend of her father’s, she says. A cartographer (but didn’t he tell Max he never made maps?) and advisor to obscure princes; a spendthrift and an amateur geologist. Bad with his servants but excellent with animals; once he kept falcons. She knows a good deal about him but not, she claims, where he is now.

One night, walking back from her bungalow, a shadowy figure resembling Dr. Chouteau appears on the street before Max and then disappears into an alley. Although the night is dark, Max follows. The men crouched around charcoal braziers and leaning in doorways regard him quietly. Not just Kashmiris: Tibetans and Ladakhis, Yarkandis, Gujars, Dards — are those Dards? — and Baltis and fair-haired men who might be Kafirs. During this last year, he has learned to recognize such men by their size and coloring and the shape of their eyes, their dress and weapons and bearing. As they have no doubt learned to recognize Englishmen. If Dr. Chouteau is among them, he hides himself. For a moment, as Max backs away with his hands held open and empty before him, he realizes that anything might happen to him. He is no one here. No one knows where he is. In the Yasin valley, Dr. Chouteau said, he once stumbled across a pile of stones crowned by a pair of hands. The hands were white, desiccated, bound together at the wrists. Below the stones was the remainder of the body.

When he leaves the alley, all Max can see for a while are the stars and the looming blackness of the mountains. How clear the sky is! His mind feels equally clear, washed out by that moment of darkness.

During his next weeks with Dima, Clara recedes — a voice in his ear, words on paper; mysterious, as she was when he first knew her. Only when Dima catches a cold and he has to tend her, bringing basins and handkerchiefs and cups of tea, does he recollect what living with Clara was really like. Not the ardent, long-distance exchange of words on which they’ve survived for more than a year, but the grit and weariness of everyday life. Household chores and worries over money, a crying child, a smoking stove; relatives coming and going, all needing things, and both of them stretched so thin; none of it Clara’s fault, it is only life. Now it is Dima who is sick, and who can no longer maintain her enchanting deceits. The carefully placed candles, the painted screen behind which she undoes her ribbons and laces to emerge in a state of artful undress, the daughter disposed of so she may listen with utmost attention to him, concentrate on him completely — all that breaks down. One day there is a problem with her well, which he must tend to. On another her daughter — her name is Kate — comes into Dima’s bedroom in tears, her dress torn by some children who’ve been teasing her. He has to take Kate’s hand. He has to find the other children and scold them and convince them all to play nicely together, then report back to Dima how this has been settled. He is falling, he thinks. Headfirst, into another crevasse.

During Dima’s illness it is with some relief — he knows it is shameful — that he returns at night to his spartan quarters. Through the gossip that flies so swiftly among the British community, the three other surveyors have heard about Dima. Twice Max was spotted with her, and this was all it took; shunned alike by Hindus and Moslems, Christians and Sikhs, she has a reputation. That it is Max she’s taken up with, Max she’s chosen; to Max’s amazement and chagrin, his companions find this glamorous. They themselves have found solace in the brothels; Srinagar is filled with women and they no longer turn to each other for physical relief. But to them, unaware of Dima’s illness and her precarious household, Max’s situation seems exotic. The knowledge that he shares their weaknesses, despite the way he has kept to himself — this, finally, is what makes Max’s companions accept him.

They stop teasing him. They ask him to drink with them, to dine with them; which, on occasion, he does. They ask for details, which he refuses. But despite his reticence, his connection to Dima has made his own reputation. When the rest of the surveyors return from Dehra Dun and they all head back to the mountains, Max knows he will occupy a different position among them. Because of her, everything will be different, and easier, than during the last season. It is this knowledge that breaks the last piece of his heart.

April arrives; the deep snow mantling the Pir Panjal begins to shrink from the black rock. Max writes long letters to Laurence, saying nothing about Dima but musing about what he reads. Into Srinagar march tri-angulators in fresh tidy clothes, newly trained Indian assistants, new crowds of porters bearing glittering instruments, and the officers: Michaels among them. But Michaels can no longer do Max any harm. Max and his three companions present their revised map of Srinagar, and are praised. Then it is time to leave. Still Max has no answers. Dr. Chouteau has continued to elude him; Dima, fully recovered now, thanks him for all his help, gives him some warm socks, and wishes him well with his work.

Which work? Even to her he has not admitted what he is thinking about doing these next months. He holds her right hand in both of his and nods numbly when she says she will write to him, often, and hopes that he’ll write to her. Hopes that they’ll see each other again, when the surveying party returns to Srinagar.