When they return to the park entrance, the French doctors and nurses getting out of their rickshaws claim to have spotted a python, a monitor lizard, a tiger. The German man pats Vicki’s shoulder. No tiger for us, he says, sympathetically, as if the three of them have, deservedly, been denied a treat. It is the first time she has been touched in a week. She can feel the warmth of the man’s hand, a tactile afterimage, even after they get back on the bus.
Kein Eden, the German man says, sadly, but perhaps not disapprovingly.
ANOTHER OUTING, finally, to a nearby town. The minibus is not air-conditioned, but the windows are wide open: it roars and grinds though streets that are strewn with objects, as if the buildings have turned inside out. For a few blocks, children run alongside, grabbing at the bus, calling, the whites of their eyes flashing. On the bus, there is a strong smell of body odour. The woman beside her says, desperately, I’m going to be sick, and then is sick, on the floor beside Vicki’s feet. In spite of her years of dealing dispassionately with body emissions, nausea rises in her.
Stumbling out of the bus, she is assaulted by the heat and racket and smells – like every smell in the world, pleasant and unpleasant: cooked meat and scorched vegetables; garlic, cumin, chili; excrement – human, cow and chicken; urine, sweat; smoke, sewer, petroleum – both combusted and not; soap, vinegar, ammonia. And every sound – mechanical, human, animal, musical, industrial – has been mixed together in a cacophony. The heat is overwhelming. She has got used to heat at the clinic, but this is something else. She is wearing a tank top meant for layering, and has cut off the legs of her trousers, not caring any longer about her flabby upper arms and varicose veins, but now, out in the heat of the day, she is drenched in sweat. Perspiration runs down her sides and her backbone, pooling under her breasts and the top of her rump.
She stands in a narrow segment of shade shared by a rooster and a goat, blank, waiting. Six more weeks. She should buy something – a shawl, jewelry, a carving of an elephant. But then their driver appears out of nowhere to chivvy them back into the bus. Something has happened – some catastrophe, personal or political, she can’t be sure which. A visit to a local palace, also, is inexplicably cancelled. That is, there are several explanations, but they contradict each other. There is no authoritative word.
AT NIGHT the longing for home rises like the phantom pain of a missing limb. She thinks: It is because I see so little of Charlotte. She tries not to resent that, not to think about how Charlotte had talked her into this trip, how she’d envisioned the two of them sharing a room, working side by side during the day in the children’s hospital wing, as they had done, twenty-five years ago, as new-fledged nurses. She tries not to resent this, but it is hard.
And she had not wanted to undertake this expensive trip to India. She had come for Charlotte, to be with Charlotte, who had almost died last year and who was her best and oldest friend.
But she sees now that the only possible justification for this trip is that it be a spiritual journey, a pilgrimage of letting go, and so she must not resent any deprivation.
The elderly Indian woman, Gita, snores, too. Gita, who is older and greyer and saggier than herself, even, smiling, rolling into the room like a smudge of sweet incense, pressing her palms together and bowing a little, Namaste. She had thought: Gita will be my consolation. She will show me by her example how to submit gracefully, to have no expectations. But Gita is a dictator, fierce and intransigent about the way to make up the inadequate cots, how to stow her toothbrush in the tin mug on the room’s lone shelf. Gita has a coloured photocopy print of Mother Theresa pinned to the wall above her cot, and Vicki had wondered if she were a nun, but she doesn’t seem religious.
She showed Vicki how to bathe, in the really Spartan set-up. They don’t get to shower every day – only the French medical workers do. And Gita showed her how to roll her shirt up and then down, to scrub away at her high-smelling crevices with a rag, soap, not very warm water. It’s all in the order you do it, the woman mimed. Face, breasts, arms, pubic area, feet last.
She does not feel clean. She looks forward to her twice-weekly shower as the compound garden to its watering. She ceases minding exposing her doughy, freckled self in the open cubicles. In the shower, she feels, for a few moments, contained in her own skin.
CHARLOTTE COMES AND FINDS her in her room. She and Henry are going back to Delhi for a few days. It’s the heat or her tiredness, but Vicki can’t process the information right away. What is Charlotte saying? Then she says: Oh, take me with you.
No, Charlotte says. You can’t come.
Something like a heat devil dances where she ought to be comprehending, manifesting in her facial expression. You needn’t scowl at me, Charlotte says. I’m sure you’ll be alright for a couple of days without me.
The tone Charlotte has used is condescending, snotty. Vicki feels a kind of shock travel under her skin. She stares, involuntarily, at her friend. Her streaked hair, her light golden tan, the translucent skin under her eyes, her teeth, which all, inexplicably, have little metal rims at the gum line, the deep lines radiating along her top lip. Vicki has an urge to slap Charlotte, wants to knock her over, all five foot nine of her, kneel on her chest, tear out her silly dangly silver hoops, grip her burnt-blonde hair in her fists and bang her head up and down on the chipped and cracked concrete floor.
Why is she here? She tries to remember – what had Charlotte actually said, when she had told Vicki about the trip? She had thought it was, I’m going on another service mission to India – you should come. But maybe it had not been that at all. She wonders suddenly what she is paying for out of the quite hefty residence fee. She hasn’t seen a breakdown of that fee. It occurs to her that India is supposed to be cheap, and for what she’s paying, she could probably be staying at a luxury resort in Thailand or Bali. She hadn’t told Peter what the trip cost, and he hadn’t asked, just said, Go for it! She feels now a little shame, that she hadn’t told him the particulars, that he had assumed she knew what she was doing.
Had Charlotte invited her, or had she invited herself along? What is she doing here?
A COUPLE OF NIGHTS LATER, when Vicki returns to her room, after cleaning up the last meal service, Gita conveys through sign language that Henry has a message for her. Are they back, then? But when she goes and finds him in his office, he puts his hand over hers and says, I am sorry your friend is ill. I am hoping the hospital in Delhi will help her.
Again, the shock under her skin. She feels suddenly light and small, as if she might blow away. Charlotte is ill, then?
She’s in the hospital, in Delhi, for diagnosis. She’s had some symptoms. Henry pats her hand. No need to talk. You will let it go better by not talking, hmmm?
Well, that’s certainly contrary to the wisdom of the western world. But in her narrow bed, she thinks about how much talking goes on: about how much she herself talks, effortlessly, endlessly, as if she’s pouring a lubricant out onto all and everything around her. She is a talker; she will be the first to admit that. But she’s always seen it as a grace, an effortless action, like breathing. Now small silences of others light up in her mind, a whole lifetime’s worth. Does she talk too much? Do people resent her talking? She is not mean-mouthed, like some other people back home. She doesn’t gossip or complain.
She feels a strike, like a snake’s, at her core, at some organ in her centre. Charlotte’s defection, her busyness, not just here but at home as well. Peter’s long working hours, his letting her travel without remonstrance. Her sons’ independence. Are they all just sick of her? Have they all been wishing just to be rid of her?
In her lumpy cot she lies awake, her molecules disintegrating, her outlines dissolving.
The next day as she’s helping to prepare the evening meal, Henry comes and finds her and talks to her in the high-ceilinged, blue-painted hall, with its scrubbed plain tables and floor. Charlotte has to be flown home, he says, before she’s too ill to travel. Do you want to leave with her?
She will need some help getting through the airports and so on.
Her first thought, even before alarm for Charlotte, is a dismay that shocks her. Leave now, when she has two weeks to go! But she has wanted to leave, has fixed her energy on leaving, from the moment she arrived.
And what is wrong with Charlotte? She feels a sense of shame, asking Henry, which is not mitigated by the surprised glance he gives her, nor his explanation, nor the shock she feels at the news.
How had she not known? And then she hears herself start to babble, Oh, typical Charlotte, so brave and what a grand gesture, so unselfish. But her face is growing hot: She can feel the blood pumping to her cheeks, and with it some anger, caustic, burning. And she must shut her mouth, she must press her fingers to her lips, and walk out of the cool quiet blue room very quickly, and into her own room, where she sits on her bed and shuts her eyes and slows her own breath with her will.
How had she not known? And why had Charlotte not told her? Self-reproach and anger at Charlotte course through her, now – not simultaneously, but alternating, one on the heels of the other, as if they were fountains of sludge bubbling in her, somewhere around her upper thoracic area, and she sees herself, a foul machine like the incinerators attached to the clinic, burning rubbish beneath, toxic invisible gases pouring from her mouth. Unclean, unclean, she wants to cry.
Vicki does not fly home early, with Charlotte. Instead, Charlotte’s two daughters fly to India to retrieve their mother, take her home. Vicki doesn’t see Charlotte – she is only able to render service by packing Charlotte’s suitcases, which are then taken into Delhi by the group of French doctors and nurses returning to Europe. Charlotte is dead, by the time Vicki returns to Canada.
During her last two weeks she is moved out of the kitchen and into Charlotte’s position as Henry’s assistant. This is at once more interesting and more demanding than her kitchen work, but she does not think it more fulfilling, as she had imagined it must be. Her envy at Charlotte’s spending time with Henry – she recognizes it as envy, now – seems a foolish thing. When she suggests to Henry that one of the others in their group – Helen, who is a retired accountant, or Jim, a lawyer – might be better at the job, he uncharacteristically wrinkles his face, shakes his head and lets out a quick involuntary no!, then recovers himself and says that Helen and Jim are too useful to the building team to be switched.
One of her duties is to work on a narrative report that Henry must submit yearly, and in reading past reports and working on this report she deduces (not to her surprise, no – but not to any satisfaction at the confirmation of her suspicions, either) that Henry has a very interesting position vis-à-vis the clinic and the Centre: that is, it is not apparent what he does besides bring small groups of women – mostly women, and mostly, she thinks (from their limited contributions) retired, middle-aged women, but also some younger people, especially younger men – to the Centre for eight-week stints, for which experience they pay inordinate sums of money. Some of this money goes toward the Centre, but much of it – and sums collected from individuals who do not choose to travel here – go, as far as she can see, toward Henry’s travels back and forth from India to various parts of Canada, four times a year, and his living expenses while in Canada.
She does not see any financial records, of course. She sees only the reports, and gathers, from what she has paid herself, from what little Charlotte had told her, what is going on. She is not shocked at the revelations about Henry’s “work.” She has somehow lost the ability to be shocked, she thinks, by the time she has figured out this story. She is not shocked at Henry’s duplicity, his audacity. She is not admiring of it, either. She will not tell Peter, she thinks. Then she thinks that she will tell him – that she will require more honesty, more transparency, of herself. Then she decides, again, that she will not tell him. He does not need this knowledge. It can do him no good. She wonders if she should report it to someone – but who? And what would she be reporting, after all? She thinks that the Director of the Centre must have some idea, must be content to take the small amount of the recruits’ work and money that Henry remits, and may not want to lose even that.
She understands, from the work that Charlotte has already done, in her series of trips, from her years of knowledge of Charlotte, that her friend also must have read this story and comprehended it fully.
THERE IS A SHORT STAY in Goa on the way back. Charlotte had booked this part of the trip for them, and Vicki does not know how to unbook it, so she must go, with Henry and a couple of the other people who travelled with them. The hotel seems unnecessarily luxurious, next to the clinic. We need this, to recover our strength for the work ahead of us, Henry says. And she understands, from her work on the report, that Henry cannot stay in this nice hotel in Goa on the way home unless others do as well – that he is expected to see them back to Kamloops. So though she would much rather go straight home, not spend three more days, she does not protest, but accepts what has been booked for her, out of her money.
She walks by herself, though, looking at the birds, the everyday birds, spotted doves and mynahs that had flown in and out of the kitchen in the Centre. She walks past the tourist shops with their racks of cheap rayon shirts and dresses, their shelves of boxed papaya and cashews, of faux bronze Ganesha statues and silver jewelry, suntan lotion and thongs. She walks by the enormously expensive shops, with their handbags whose cost would feed and house an Indian family for a year. In a crosswalk she hears a man trying to sell another man a gram of something unnamed for $60 US. She passes thin children selling CDs of sitar music, with as little interest as she would have in a plaza parking lot in Kamloops.
On their last day in Goa, Henry hires a car and driver and takes her – just her, not the others – to dinner. Henry is looking very sleek, she thinks. He smells of licorice and aloes and something floral – hibiscus, maybe. What have you been doing with yourself? she asks, and then wishes she hadn’t. An odd expression flits across Henry’s face. Indulgence, she’d call it. At the same time, his lips curl slightly. That would be what is called a sensual smile, she thinks, though she does not know if she has seen one before. She does not speak.
You are sad, Henry says. They are on the top floor of a hotel, on a terrace that is roofed with palm fronds under which large fan blades turn endlessly. Below them are the city’s lush gardens and lights, the band of sand and sea, the waves sweeping endlessly onto the shore, and endlessly retreating.
Henry says, You are sad to be leaving India, Vicki. But don’t be. You did a lot of good work. You made a difference. And you can come back. The clinic would welcome someone of your calibre every year.
She says nothing. Henry has moved his chair so that they are seated side by side, now, looking at the view. He puts his hand on her arm. She looks at it: his tanned, freshly manicured fingers. I know what you’re feeling, Henry says. Your heart is still there with those tiny ones. You have something exceptional to offer, Vicki. You’re thinking, why not commit to another eight weeks next year?
A sound almost like a giggle nearly escapes her. If Peter could see this! But she sobers, remembering she can’t even begin to tell him.
I think, Henry says, and he slides his fingers down her arm and intertwines them with hers, I think you and I are alike. We need to give, but we need constraints, or we’d give everything we have, and that would be the end of us. That’s why I can’t let you come back, Vicki. I know you want to do more. You and I, we have that compulsion. But I can’t let you spend – expend – everything you have.
She’s about to speak, then, to say that she’d love to come back to the clinic, if they’d only let her work with the children, but Henry puts his finger on her lips, tenderly, so that what comes out of her mouth is a muffled bleat: Mmunh.
Yes, money, Henry says, sadly. It’s never a substitute for the real thing, is it? But sometimes it has to do. Sometimes, it’s all we can do. And then, I think, it’s an acceptable sacrifice.
In her mind h
er voice is babbling away: Well, you know, Peter and I don’t have a lot, though we’ve worked hard, but we’ve got a little put away, I suppose more than we actually need. . . . Babbling, bubbling away, and underneath, that hot element of anger she never used to notice. But she doesn’t open her mouth: She doesn’t speak. She watches, instead, the brazier, burning away smokily in that great blue room. Charlotte is dead now, leaving with her secrets. Peter has called her, actually made an international call to the hotel to let her know. She had loved Charlotte. Perhaps. She had also envied her, for decades her envy like a bird with the head of a snake, swimming under the water.
But she had used Charlotte’s name, on the envelope of Henry’s accounts and receipts that she slipped into Helen’s room at the hotel, an envelope of items meant to be shredded, but perhaps very meaningful to someone in Helen’s profession.
She knows that she has not been motivated by a strong sense of ethics in giving those documents to Helen.
She pulls her fingers, gently, from Henry’s grasp, lays them over her purse, which is in her lap. She feels her lips tighten into a thin line. Something has hardened inside her. But she can feel the ground, at last. Even though she is in a sort of limbo in this tropical paradise, she can now feel the ground.
The fan blades whir, and stutter, occasionally. The lights flicker: the twinkling lights of the city, as well. The power is not consistent, Henry says. She can see that.
The air is warm milk, or warm silk, something too soft and slippery to trust.
When she gets home it will be March, and the worst of winter over, but the landscape will be bare and sere, hiding nothing, pretending nothing. She will be glad to be home.
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