Miles has been given a promotion. He’s now officially her supervisor, though to be fair, he’d always lorded over her. The day she announces her news in the break room he doesn’t say a word; the next morning he steps into her office and tells her with so much magnanimity that she could sock him in the gut, “This is a beautiful thing that’s happening to you, Lucy, a beautiful, extraordinary thing. Don’t worry quite as much about work right now.”
She knows the words are meant to sound sweet, but she doesn’t trust him. What is it about Miles Norton that awakens the animal in her, the one who’d wring his neck at first chance? Whenever she sees his beer belly and his eyebrows, which are so long that they give him a look of perpetual electrocution, she feels an inexplicable fury. More than once he’s told her he’s too educated for this job, with all his graduate study and postgraduate whatnot; but standing next to her desk with an endless supply of theories on the working life, he seems perfect for the profession.
She smiles, says she appreciates his understanding. “Oh, and I’ll be late again tomorrow morning,” she says, as he’s leaving the office, thank you very much.
* * *
………………
The clinic that confirmed her pregnancy referred her to a Dr. Malhotra, who, they say, is king when it comes to delivering babies, so effusive were the nurses in their recommendations. Dr. Malhotra practices on the Upper East Side, a few blocks from Lenox Hill Hospital, where Lucy imagines she will be giving birth in five months. The morning clouds have given over to a steady rain, and without an umbrella Lucy begins to feel a chill.
She waits in the reception of Dr. Malhotra’s office, which is bereft of basic waiting-room necessities—no magazines, no children’s books, not even brochures. For someone who doesn’t enjoy waiting—and who, anyway, enjoys waiting?—it is a kind of torture, though productive, because she decides she will call her father that evening and tell him about his upcoming grandchild. He might give her the lecture of her life. So be it—better that he knows. She waits long enough to curse Jaryk three times over.
When Dr. Malhotra finally meets her in the waiting room, Lucy first mistakes her for a nurse.
“I’m Elizabeth. So sorry to keep you waiting. We were having some technical problems.”
Elizabeth Malhotra doesn’t have the accent Lucy grew so accustomed to in India that she herself started using it, hoping it would help. Lucy mentions her recent trip. She’s surprised when the doctor informs her that she’s never been.
“Medical school, then residency. Guess I never had the time,” she says.
Dr. Malhotra is of this country in a way that Jaryk never will be, which feels comforting somehow; the movement of generations can remove obstacles, if not for Jaryk, then for those who go on after him. Lucy feels free to tell Dr. Malhotra about the pregnancy, that the father is still somewhere in India.
“Well, maybe we could send him a picture,” Dr. Malhotra says, explaining that there is a new kind of machine that can see the baby inside her womb by sending tiny pulses.
“But will it hurt the baby?” Lucy asks.
“It is perfectly safe,” the doctor tells her, leading her to the ultrasound machine, one of the first of its kind in the city. The machine is grandiose with its dials and symbols. Its screen shows a gray-black nothingness that begins to shift as Lucy’s own body comes into focus, and there, in the gray-black space, says Dr. Malhotra, is a large white bubble that soon enough will develop eyes, a mouth, unborn weaknesses, desires she will not always understand, hopes she will not dare to crush.
Elizabeth Malhotra prints a picture of that light-filled center and hands it over to Lucy, who cradles the image to her belly. It is the first time that the child inside her has felt like its own being; until now, it had been a source of nausea or an inconvenient chapter in her love for Jaryk. But now it is of the flesh, hers. She cradles the picture as if the child were already born.
“The baby is developing just fine,” the doctor says, but Lucy barely hears the words—she feels an extraordinary loneliness at being given such news without Jaryk alongside her.
* * *
………………
Around ten o’clock that night she calls Timothy. It’s too late to call her father, who is early-to-bed-early-to-rise, though even if he were awake, on this night at least, she couldn’t tolerate being berated by him.
“A child out of marriage?” he might say. “This what I taught you?” He might say that, or he might cry for happiness; she doesn’t know which, and doesn’t dare to risk it. So Timothy Norwood it is.
It’s true that Timothy was married long before Lucy came into this world, long before her father even made his acquaintance, though there was no child from that union, as far as Lucy knows. The most he ever showed her about that time was a black-and-white photo of a young woman with plump cheeks, which he kept pocketed in the middle of his copy of Moby-Dick.
“Who’s that?” she said when she discovered the picture.
He’d snatched it away. “That’s my old girl,” he said.
She can’t imagine what a man of his age and experience might say of her situation, but who better to listen? Maybe the gout’s gotten to his leg again, because it’s one more ring before he makes it to the line.
He sounds so old when he answers. Older than when she visited last Christmas. “I am going to be a mother, Timothy.”
“Oh, my,” he says, for once grave, the line between New York City and Mebane gone as silent as the country night. “Well, you have my full congratulations.”
He sounds formal to her, perhaps even displeased, though she can’t tell if it’s simply an effect of the phone line and the physical distance. “Oh, and I might have to raise the kid myself.”
“What happened to the father?”
“That’s a complicated story,” she says.
“Well, it isn’t true,” says Timothy, after a long pause. “You will not have to raise the kid yourself. Your father and yours truly will be there. We’ll live under your bed if we need to. I have changed some wet clothes in my time.”
She can’t picture Timothy ever having changed a diaper, but still his words are what she’s needed to hear—what she wants from home, where she cannot be unloved, no matter what.
“Oh, and Lucy? If I hear the complicated-story father of the child doesn’t do his duty, I might just load up my pistol. I still have decent aim.”
“Thank you, Timothy,” she says. “You get some rest, now. No more staying up late, okay?”
“Yes, darling,” he says.
It’s the silence again, the room she rents for a fortune, the unread books on the bookshelf, the half-washed dishes drying dutifully on the rack. Soon it’ll be morning in India, the sun rising over the farms and the hills, the cows lowing out to pasture, the hips of the sari women moving to some ancient beat, and soon Jaryk will wake into his own life. The walnut tree will shake its eaves, and the smell of her will be long gone from their cabin.
The Butler’s Disappearance
shantiniketan—august 1942
Jaryk learns to sleep on the roof even when it rains. He learns that all he needs is a mosquito net, which Rohan the butler has rigged to the fronds of a coconut tree; he learns to count the stars through the million eyes of the mosquito net, learns that when it rains it is a warm rain, like being in the shower, only he can’t control when the water stops. He learns to keep a beard, which in the mornings is wet and heavy like a dog’s fur. If he wakes in the night, he hears the professor’s flute rising from the recesses of the house. Never the same melody, complex riffs, melancholy minors flirting with birdsong, music that surrounds the property whether he’s listening or not.
Two weeks into his new sleeping arrangement, he finds himself awoken by Mrs. Pal. For a long moment, he stares at her turmeric-stained palms, confuses their color for that of the sun. It’s earl
y enough that he feels the damp from the night’s rain, turns over to feel his sheets are soaked through.
“You need a proper shave,” she tells him. “And why do you still sleep out here? There is so much rain.”
“The mosquito net catches most of it,” Jaryk says, though it isn’t true—after a monsoon, he and the net are equally drenched. Sleeping in the cabin reminded him too much of Lucy. He could’ve claimed another room in the house, but whatever room he chose, Misha’s ghost would’ve found him. On the roof the rain discourages the ghosts. He can feel the tides that rise larger than his life.
“Also, it is too hot to keep a beard,” says Mrs. Pal.
He nods. Though she’s right—during the day it becomes too hot for even a T-shirt—he hasn’t been able to shave. Not that he hasn’t tried. He’s lifted razor to chin, held it there until the warm water in the basin turns cold. Something in the ritual, which he’d performed every day of his working life, now repels him. Besides, the month-old beard makes him feel like a different person—not beyond recognition, but capable of new identities.
“Your husband said you are leaving,” Jaryk says. “I’m sorry the position at the college didn’t work out.” In another week, the substitute position Mr. Pal had been given will run its course. Anyway, the children have their own school to return to, so now it’ll be him and the professor, carrying the performance to the end.
“I will tell you once more,” Mrs. Pal says. “Now that the sarkar is involved, it’s best you leave.” She’s warned him of rumors that mercenaries are bent on disturbing the performance. Their little village theater has become confused with issues of larger dissent and has attracted the eye of the government.
“I have to see it through,” Jaryk says. At first, it was enough that he had come, as Misha had before him. The mercenaries wouldn’t bother a village with an American, wouldn’t risk the bad publicity an incident would bring, but now that the professor has appeared on radio shows and in newspaper columns, spoken at over a dozen rallies in Calcutta, the little village of Gopalpur looms large on the map. Even the prime minister, Rudra Bose has claimed, knows of their story.
“See this,” says Mrs. Pal. She shows him a copy of The Statesman, where Rajan Datta, the chief minister’s right-hand man, has made mention of them, responding to a question about the fate of Gopalpur: “ ‘Not even the Academy, not even American transplants, can deter the hand of justice.’ ”
“Yes, the professor showed me,” Jaryk says. “All day yesterday he was gloating that we’d made it onto the big stage.”
Mrs. Pal adjusts her sari to kneel beside him. He moves the mosquito net out of the way and offers her a seat on his wicker-mat bed, which she refuses. She’s no longer glaring at him, that’s good, but something’s still screwed up in her face. Spending time with the Pals has absolved him of some illusions surrounding the serenity of families. He’s never had one, a proper family, that is, nothing after the orphanage, at least, so he’d assumed that when both father and mother give their love, the resulting happiness multiplies with each child they bring. Except they bicker, the children fight, and Mrs. Pal often seems at the point of exhaustion. It’s right when he thinks she’s about to scream that he’ll see, as he does now, the look of a woman who’s not wholly there, who lives an alternate life with a perhaps younger husband, a different set of unruly children, or maybe no dependents at all, maybe nothing to keep her on the narrow path. If she catches his gaze, she’ll fix herself back into matriarchy, and the moment, as it does now, will pass.
“What about you, Mrs. Pal?” he asks. “What’s next for you?”
“For my family everything will be as it was,” she says, her face fixed again into austerity. “And yourself? That day, why did you not go home with Miss Lucy?”
It’s been a couple of weeks since Lucy’s departure, yet he often finds himself replaying their last day together, the order in which things happened. He remembers rising before dawn to kiss her belly and listen for a heartbeat, though it’s too early for that—their child remains more concept than person. He’d come so close to proposing to her by the ruined temple, but he hadn’t.
When Lucy awoke that morning, she found him staring. He tried to look away, but felt her gaze drawing him back, the tenderness of the night when he’d told her about the train to Treblinka. “Are you coming home with me?” she’d asked.
He’d shaken his head no. She began to pack her clothes, spending long moments folding the salwar kameez that had been gifted her, making sure her blue chiffon dress was rolled tight into a bun to avoid getting wrinkled. He remembered all the colors of her open suitcase, all that evidence of a life lived in hues and shades, the slope of falling light from the window illuminating her forearm as she pressed on the suitcase till it groaned and closed.
He’d made her lunch for the plane. Warm, good food for the two of them—Lucy and the child. His hand had lingered on hers as she took the paper bag, the last sign of his love.
“I ask myself that question, Mrs. Pal,” Jaryk says, bringing himself back. “Why not go home with Lucy? It would’ve been easier, but what about Neel? What about the safety of everyone in the village? Every day that I’m here is a day without guns.”
“You sound like Rudra Bose,” she says, gripping his wrist. “Don’t let him fool you. They’ll come when they’ll come. He has his own fish to fry, Jaryk, but it is not your concern. I wish we could stay. I thought it was our karma to protect you.”
“Don’t worry,” he says, loosening her grip on his wrist. “I’ve been through worse, much, much worse.”
“I know,” says Mrs. Pal. “That’s why we wanted to take care of you.”
His gift has always been to attract the best protectors. First, Pan Doktor, then Misha, and now the Pals.
A week later the Pals leave. He promises that he’ll call them when the date for the play is set, and they agree to return for the performance.
* * *
………………
The problem with the date of the play is that it keeps getting pushed back.
The first time is the professor’s doing. He’s decided they’ll perform the play in English to appeal to an international audience, which initially means chaos for the child actors, who’ve studied little English at the local school. Still, he tries his best to train them to speak English phonetically, an exercise in irony, the English language never having been his strong suit.
The second delay is due to one of the main actors, playing the Fakir, coming down with jaundice. They don’t have backups, so losing the Fakir comes as a shock. The professor scrambles to find a replacement, but there are few children left in Gopalpur who can carry the part.
“Why don’t you play him?” the professor asks Jaryk. “The Fakir is an older character, and, besides, in Warsaw, your leader played the part, no?”
“Yes, that was Pan Doktor’s role,” Jaryk says. Sometimes, he thinks he’s told the professor too much of the way the Polish production had been staged, how Esterka had directed them to speak the lines, many of which come back to him the more he rehearses with the cast. She’d been the first woman he loved, at an age when love soared past boundaries of the romantic or the familiar, and remembering her has given the work of rehearsal—which is often more of an English lesson than anything else—the feeling of homage. If there were a heaven, which he did not believe there was, but say there were some place afterwards where good people could winnow their hours, she’d be looking down on them, clucking her tongue at every missed gesture, though even in the scolding you’d feel a little adored.
At Gopalpur he tries a mix of loving sternness but lacks Esterka’s gravitas. When the children want a break, he always concedes, and without Mrs. Pal there’s no one left to keep the discipline. Certainly not the professor, who’s been less and less a part of the play’s production as the weeks have worn on. He’s busy giving interv
iews to journalists and speaking at conferences in the city, retelling the story of the village and the story of the play. Sometimes he encounters the professor only if he wakes at night and happens to hear the flute from the house, the etudes becoming more frenzied—or is that only his imagination?—and then if he wanders into the house, stands by the staircase, Misha’s ghost shoves him back to the roof: I died here. Don’t let me have passed for nothing.
He thinks of Lucy less and less. It was only a month ago that she was here, her long blue dress trailing in the field at Gopalpur. Perhaps it’s the way remembering Lucy comes with memories of New York, a city that now feels as faraway as the North Pole. Instead, his days are filled with Neel. Like most children at Gopalpur, Neel is subdued when he’s outside the village. But at Gopalpur when he’s with Jaryk playing by the well or the goat shed, his smile comes easily, and Jaryk can see the gap between Neel’s two front teeth.
Neel loves to teach him things. He leads Jaryk into a forest of taal trees, where anteaters have built their towers as tall as men, and rattles off facts he’s gathered from library books. “This tree has been here thirty years,” he explains. “Just count the grooves and you’ll see.” From Neel, Jaryk’s also learned a few words of Bengali. Accha, for instance, which means, depending on the situation, okay, or go on, or even maybe.
In turn Jaryk helps Neel with his math homework. A good morning is teaching Neel about fractions, cutting a mango into sections to demonstrate a half, a fourth, an eighth, then enjoying the fruit together, the juice sticky on their chins.
“What is the point of math?” Neel once asks him.
“If you know math, you can decide your own life. If you don’t know it, then you have to trust other people to tell you how much you’ve earned.”
A Play for the End of the World Page 21