Jaryk promised he would deliver the report, but there remained the excuse of the dinner party. The guests, he said, were starting to arrive, and the professor had asked them to serve as greeters.
“But first,” Jaryk said. “I’d like you to meet my Indian saviors.”
Jaryk found the Pals debating the proper choice of clothing. After he’d complained that he couldn’t sleep in Misha’s old room, he’d been given his own cabin, while the entire Pal family had been stationed in a musty room with walls that smelled of ammonia and a semifunctional ceiling fan. It was here that Avik was holding up two outfits: one was a schoolboy’s suit and the other was the kind of toga Lucy had seen Indian men wearing.
“Is this dinner party a formal occasion, Jaryk?” Mrs. Pal asked. “And if it is formal, shall we look like Indians or, instead, like colonials?”
Lucy said, “You can’t go wrong if you look like yourself.”
Jaryk introduced her to the Pals as “Lucy, from New York.” He didn’t say “Lucy, my girlfriend and future fiancée.” Nothing remotely intimate, Lucy thought. Just a name and a location. Then he expounded on the history of Jaryk-meets-the-Pals—or rather, he glossed over it. The other details, she assumed, would come in time. She found Mr. Pal immediately likable. He had what in Mebane would have been called a serious beer belly, but he moved as if he were liberated of all weight. A caterpillar-length eyebrow hair ran rampant, which she wanted to pluck. From Mrs. Pal, though, she received the aristocratic shoulder. It wasn’t enmity, Lucy felt, just a hint of condescension.
“Look at you, princess,” Lucy said to Priya, who was dressed in a sari, each knot perfectly done, the whole contraption a marvel of structure. “Did your mother tie that for you?”
“Oh, not at all,” Mrs. Pal said. “Such trivial things they learn by themselves.”
* * *
………………
Though the grand table had been dusted and expanded, most of the guests—an assortment of university faculty with their spouses as well as the foreign delegation, which consisted of three American professors of history, an old Finnish expert on Tagore’s life and work, and a few scholars from Cambridge and Oxford, specializing on everything from literature to botany—remained standing in the dining room to mingle. Small earthenware plates were provided (“made in Gopalpur,” the professor announced), and the spread itself consisted of a mélange of vaguely European dishes: potatoes au gratin, a broccoli casserole, cutlets placed next to bowls with red and green sauces.
At first Lucy spoke only to Mr. Pal. He regaled her with tales of the area. A few generations ago, a spiritualist had meditated under the great banyan tree by the gates of the university and decided this was to be the Tagore family’s retreat. “And that spiritualist, Dwarkanath, was quite close to the Bose family. Part and parcel. And so Rudra Bose’s great-grandfather built this house.”
As Mr. Pal talked about the evolution of the university at Shantiniketan, Lucy studied Rudra Bose. The professor was moving among the guests with Jaryk in tow. To each camp, he introduced Jaryk as “our honored guest,” and while Jaryk mumbled a few words, the professor studied the room for his next destination; in between, he got the pianola to play Brahms, berated the waitstaff for not replenishing the cutlets, and festooned the lintel with flowers.
It was only when Jaryk’s imploring glances turned sour that Lucy came to his aid. She knew he couldn’t tolerate parties for long. While the idea of a party excited him, he quickly tired of the repartee. He couldn’t understand the purpose of small talk, couldn’t imagine that a flit about the weather or the news might turn into something serious, even a friendship. The time she’d taken him to her office Christmas party, he’d later confessed he’d only stayed because she was having fun. It had meant something then, that he’d endured a little for her sake.
Professor Bose was moving Jaryk toward the foreign contingent, a group of mostly elderly men, perhaps with an interest in either Rabindranath Tagore or the history of Warsaw. There was even a reporter in the mix, taking notes while sipping from a tumbler of whiskey.
“Darlings,” Lucy said to no one in particular, “I’m stealing him for a minute.”
The professor had decorated the corner windowsills with forget-me-nots, and away from the crowd, Jaryk thanked her by tying a flower into her hair. “They’ve been grilling me. Only reason I’m still here is because of you. And the chicken,” he said. To prove it, he took a large bite of the saucy concoction on his plate.
They watched the foreign contingent pass around a bottle of Black Label; heavy pours overfilled silver cups. Outside, the walnut tree shook its leaves to a cool breeze. The engorging heat had lifted, and inside the dining hall, the grand windows open, Lucy sensed the crowd, its collective voice soaring above the bells of the walnut tree, celebrating the arrival of unseasonable weather. It was the time for rain, she’d been told, but the monsoon was late. For the moment, they were alone with each other.
Lucy remembered the tightness in her chest the last time she’d seen Jaryk’s old super, Roger Garcia, who’d unfolded his palms and said simply, “He’s not here.” Then climbing up to the fifth floor, where she’d found his apartment empty and she’d felt humiliated, as if what they’d had wasn’t worth more than a letter. “I deserved a goodbye in person,” Lucy now said. “I know you were going through so much, but you should’ve made time for me.”
“You’re right,” Jaryk said. “I’m sorry.”
But he said it too quickly, she thought, almost reflexively, as if “sorry” were the way to fix any difficult situation.
“You’re here in India now. It was hard for me to even imagine.”
“You know, this was all Misha’s great idea. Misha arranged for the passports. Misha made the itinerary. I’ll show you our guidebook. Cover to cover, his terrible handwriting. We were going to help the people of Gopalpur, and then we were going to travel. From the south to the north. Tea estates, beaches, and temples. See it all on two cheap motorbikes. What a plan it was! Except, I never intended to go—not ever. It was only when he died that things changed.”
When Jaryk mentioned Misha’s handwriting, she remembered the girth of his hands. She had named him Woolly Mammoth. The memory of Misha wrapping her in a bear hug tempered her feelings toward Jaryk’s disappearance; she understood it couldn’t have been easy for him, grieving alone. Still, she asked, though more softly, “But you didn’t tell me about any of this even before Misha died—why not?”
“Because I didn’t want to burden you,” Jaryk said.
“That’s not good enough,” she said, struggling to keep her voice down. “Not good enough for the person I want to share my life with. You left your apartment in New York. You didn’t tell me any of it.”
“I didn’t think any of it was going to pass. Look around! I’m in a village in India. Professors are asking me about a play I performed in Warsaw thirty years ago. I’m knee deep in the problems of people I’d never heard about before I came here. Would you ever have thought up any of this, Lucy? I could never have imagined. I thought I was going to get Misha’s ashes and come right back home.”
“Why haven’t you?” she asked quietly.
“I have a job to do here,” Jaryk said. “I finally have a chance to do something good.”
She didn’t know what to make of this side of Jaryk. She stared at him a long while, hoping to see into his heart, but the professor found them by the window and led them back into the party’s swell.
Encouraged by the flow of Black Label, the party shifted into a noisier din. The waitstaff retreated into the kitchen with a salaam to the professor while the butler danced from person to person, refilling empty cups with a cheeky grin. A northeasterly wind blew the Victorian curtains from their restraints, knocked down glasses, and overturned a potful of curd.
The old Finn caught Jaryk’s attention. “Are you the gentl
eman from Warsaw?”
The group had arranged itself in a rectangle, with Lucy and Jaryk on opposite sides. Lucy could feel Jaryk looking for an escape route, but there was no easy path out of the conversational phalanx.
“Won’t you tell us about your experience of the play in ’42? Won’t you tell us how it feels to be here in the land of the author? Do you feel you are reliving that time?”
“No, I’m not reliving that time,” Jaryk said.
“I’m led to understand The Post Office was also performed in Paris the night the Germans took the city.”
“And in Bangladesh during the crackdowns of General Tikka Khan,” Rudra Bose added.
“Well, I’m here because The Post Office means something to Bengal right now,” Jaryk said. “I’m talking about what’s happened to Gopalpur. This play protects the villagers’ future. Their story is what I’m thinking of now.”
“In 1942, you were the hero of the play, weren’t you?
“And it was performed in the ghetto, under the most horrible of circumstances, was it not? Under the expectation of execution? With a lack of food? In the thick of the deportations?”
“Yes, in the thick,” Jaryk said.
“Is that a pianola?” Lucy asked, trying her best to politely change the subject. She didn’t know these men but knew they didn’t have the right to grill Jaryk.
“Yes, yes. But won’t you tell them about those long days and nights leading to the August of 1942?” Professor Bose asked Jaryk.
“Didn’t you say you got the pianola from the British?” Jaryk asked, ignoring the professor’s bait.
“Yes, it’s an Aeolian, purchased straight from the British Raj by my father in 1942.”
“Lucy plays. She learned since she was a kid,” Jaryk said.
“May we have the honor of a performance?” Bose offered.
“We’ll see,” Lucy said, walking to the pianola. She ran her hands along the keys, feeling all the eyes in the room on her. The pianola had a knob on its side that she turned to stop the waltz. Then it was a regular piano again, and she sat down on the piano bench, laying her hands as her mother had taught her. Even so far from home, there were habits that would guide you: the way to sit, for example, the way to let the fingers rise above the keys, where exactly to place the feet. She could play a prelude and fugue by Bach from memory, and that was what came to her now, all the notes her mother had given her, emerging from a place of uncomplicated joy. Playing a long composition from memory was like hiking a trail her body remembered without a map, its inner choreography a compass for the next note and the one after. When she stopped, she noticed that everyone was watching her.
The professor led a cycle of applause, but she hadn’t played for the attention, only wanting to feel a little at home, as if she were sitting next to Mama, staring out at the dogwoods. It took a moment to come back to the room. Jaryk’s eyes were focused on hers. She could tell he was admiring her anew.
“That was beautiful,” Jaryk said. “You know, I’ve never heard you play before.”
“I’ve thought about getting a piano, starting to practice again. Someday, when there’s time.” She wanted to deflect the attention. “Hey, will you introduce me to your cast?”
The cast, their families, and the Pals were in the parlor room, separated from the rest of the party. Here the food had been scooped onto banana-leaf plates, and a line of children eating on the floor consumed most of the room’s walking space. There was no Black Label to be found, and the children seemed unusually well behaved.
Jaryk introduced her to the play’s main actors, a crew of four stiffly dressed children. There was the Flower Girl, who true to her role had pinned a forget-me-not onto her dress; there was the Village Headman, who was played by a chubby boy with dimples; there was the Good Uncle, played by a bespectacled boy with an infectious grin: and, finally, there was Amal, who was played by the tea bearer she’d met at the professor’s office.
“It’s Neel, isn’t it? Neel like blue?” Lucy said.
“Yes, madam.”
The boy didn’t strike her as being the likeliest of stars. With his mother in tow, his head resting on her shoulder, he seemed ill equipped for a public performance; but then, none of the play’s cast seemed to be from acting ilk, at least not the way she’d known actors to behave in her school. She herself had participated in theater with a series of uninspiring supporting roles, and had been told by Mr. Roberts, the drama teacher, who doubled as gym teacher, “The number-one rule of acting is enthusiasm.” These children would never have survived a day with Mr. Roberts.
Jaryk whispered into Lucy’s ear, “These kids have been through tough times.” But she didn’t need him to tell her that. She’d been watching the way Neel shared space with his mother. Even when he ventured away to play with the other kids, he’d hang on to the hem of her sari. While deep in play, he’d give her sari a tug, and she’d reciprocate with a pull of her own.
The professor joined them in the parlor. “I see you’ve met our stars,” he said to Lucy.
“Did you hold auditions?” she asked. “How did you find them?”
“Auditions? Well, let us say they were for the most part—informal. Let us say that each and every villager has a part to play. They are all witness to the atrocities, that is. They are all fighting for the right to their land.”
Lucy looked over at Mrs. Pal, who was frowning as openly as she was.
Lucy excused herself from Jaryk and the professor’s company. She didn’t know the first thing about the history of Bengal, but neither had Jaryk. She supposed she had come to India with a lover’s mission: to find Jaryk and bring him home. He didn’t seem amenable, though, to so simple a plan. The professor had explained that the play would be performed in a few months, but Lucy worried that Jaryk might want to stay even longer. What he loved about the Lower East Side, he had once confessed, was how he could wander the streets without needing to think, every mailbox, street sign, and phone booth a marker of home.
She hadn’t told him about the baby. The time just hadn’t felt right. But these last few weeks, she’d walked around with a feeling of presence. “Moonflake,” she would say, touching her belly, remembering a story her mother had told her about a factory where children were grown from the tiniest particles. “And each day, Moonflake gets bigger,” her mother would say, and she would imagine it as a luminescent snow particle, growing as it fell from the sky.
Mr. Pal joined her in the courtyard. “I’m not long for parties,” he informed her, leaning back against the trunk of the walnut tree, pointing his girth toward the clouds.
“Care for a cigarette?” he asked. “Actually, it’s a bidi, a stronger, more local equivalent.”
The bidi looked more like a hastily rolled joint. The sharp smell of the tobacco struck her fiercely, and she remembered the first week she’d given up cigarettes. Her diary had memorialized that time as the Autumn of Desperation. At work, she had chopped away at her caseload, biting her fingernails until she left tracks of blood on her paperwork. She’d done it for Jaryk. Rather, she’d done it to mark the seriousness of their relationship. Inherited from her father, the idea of a necessary sacrifice—that to gain something good, you had to give something else up, a kind of zero-sum game to happiness. Except, that had been in New York, and this wasn’t a cigarette. It was a local variant—did it count?
“Proper Indian tobacco,” Mr. Pal said. “You will not find in America.”
She waved him away with a smile. Rules were rules, she told herself, even if no one was watching.
* * *
………………
In the parlor, Jaryk helped Professor Bose serve his guests dessert from a giant brass tureen. The banana-leaf plates, upon which the children had feasted with grim determination, had been piled and collected. Later, the whole bundle of leftovers would be tossed over the
fence for the wild boars and their offspring. But now it was time for the sweet treats. Jaryk watched the professor scoop a mound of rice pudding into little clay bowls. The children ate each grain with delight, licking their fingers afterwards.
When they were finished, the professor announced, in English and then Bengali, “Now we eat with our minds! We tell each other ghost stories. We sing monsoon songs.”
What ensued was a kind of collective bargaining; no one wanted to sing, and yet everyone wanted to sing. No one wanted to tell a story, but each of the children, Jaryk could tell, was dying to tell a story. The Flower Girl had her hand raised in the air, as if she were answering a question in class, but the honors were given to Neel, who began a song in Bengali. Mr. Pal translated into Jaryk’s ear. The song was about a fisherman going out into a storm. The winds at his back. The night beginning to descend.
The boy had a good, sure voice, not terribly melodious, but he could project his words to a much larger room; he wasn’t afraid to be heard. As Neel sang, the academics from the dining room wandered into the parlor. The old Finn gaped. At least one of the Indian professors joined in the song. Lucy followed them back into the room.
“If the fisherman dies in the storm tonight,” Mr. Pal translated, “then he wishes to see everything for what it is. He wishes to smell the mud on the riverbank he will not reach. He wishes to feel each splinter of the boat he has made with his own hands.”
After the song, the professor announced it was time for the families to return to the village.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” Jaryk told Neel.
“Okay,” Neel said, though he didn’t seem convinced.
“He’s got a lovely voice,” Lucy said to Neel’s mother, who squinted in response, quickly gathering her son.
When it was only Jaryk and Lucy left in the room, Lucy stroked his neck with her fingertips.
A Play for the End of the World Page 17