by Ananda Devi
They heard the same dangerous, cold music beckoning them to their deaths.
A clean war, they said. But hadn’t there been bodies rent asunder like bits of cloth on barbed wire? Wasn’t human flesh still as easily torn? And didn’t these soldiers, these twenty-year-old kids in their algae-tinted fatigues, have the same faces inured to the shock of waking up to the terrible weight of war, the flood of massacres, the sheer human cost?
The truth of this war hit much harder when she saw images on the television of a young American woman soldier humiliating prisoners. The face of this woman shocked her. A murderous, cruel, closed-off child flattened by a total lack of heart or feeling. A face that only saw itself, only saw the small world it had come from, saw the walls as firm as they were invisible, the walls of absolute alienation from the truth of others, the only truth that counted. A sort of tragicomic figure with her absurd poses, her finger pointed at the prisoners forced to masturbate, a grotesque figure of a malefic angel who knew how to dehumanize the enemy so thoroughly that death was merely incidental.
This was the face of the era.
Mary never knew why she cried with rage and impotence as she saw this woman keeping a naked man on a leash, his head covered by a hood.
Mary, at a loss for words, turned toward Cub. But he paid no attention to the war. He paid attention only to his own survival. Mary, having seen where he lived, understood that he was fighting his own war, that after living there, he couldn’t be surprised by this surfeit of violence. Cub hadn’t looked twice at this soldier woman. He looked a little like her, actually, in spite of his beauty, because of that cold, calculating gaze.
She saw it in his ingenuity in wrangling a few pounds out of her. Never too much, never huge amounts, but it was as if he had punctured a vein with a very thin needle and now Mary’s money, droplet by tiny droplet, was escaping. This was testament to a sort of deep-rooted indifference in which compassion was nowhere to be found.
And so he said one day that he needed to buy some medicine for his mother. She had followed him as she usually did without his realizing it (he never rushed, he wandered as if he had all the time in the world). He bought a beautiful leather handbag. Mary thought, momentarily, that it might be for her, and her cheeks reddened with joy. When he left the shop and got on the 159 bus, a horrible jealousy overcame her. She took the same bus, barely concerned about being seen; his ears were covered by his headphones and his eyes were faraway, he didn’t even notice when she walked right in front of him to take a seat behind. For the whole journey, she watched the nape of his neck, so smooth and fragile under his huge hat, his shoulders which rose and fell slightly in rhythm with the unintelligible music he was listening to, his not-so-childlike back. Her jealousy didn’t abate in the least as he went straight to his mother’s. She took the elevator, indifferent to the obscene graffiti, the stench of urine, the pointed stares that followed her. She was fixated on the footsteps of the one person who mattered. She watched him go into the flat. He left the door ajar. She hid behind the door and watched him offer his mother the handbag.
His mother smiled. This weary woman’s smile transformed her face. The dimples in her cheeks deepened, making her look so much younger she seemed like a child. She clutched Cub in her arms, pressed her nose into his hat perched on top of his hair. Mary waited for Cub to pull away quickly, but he stayed there, his eyes less distant, with a smile not unlike his mother’s, the same dimples deep in his cheeks. Wanda slung the handbag on her shoulder and swanned like a model. Cub lay down and stretched out across the sofa, crossing his arms behind his head and smiling as he watched his mother simpering.
Mary stepped back, her body as heavy as her heart. Why couldn’t she ever have a love like that?
When Cub came back, much later, he was soaked from the rain. Mary ushered him in with exclamations, went to find a towel, and rubbed his head, getting a small sense of this mass of soft, spongy hair. She made him take off his T-shirt and dried off his torso. Her hands slid across his skin and lingered. He did not protest. She wanted to hold him tight against her, but that image of his mother and the smile they had shared held her back. She held this body as long as she could in her hands, and he, as if world-weary, did not pull away.
She ignored the warnings that sapped her spirits. His innocence had no price, she insisted to herself.
Such innocence that he never asked anything about the life the two of them were now living together—that was what she thought, trying to convince herself that Cub knew nothing of this world, even though, of course, he knew this world far better than she did. She didn’t dare to step over the threshold into the unknown. He was here. That was enough. But why? What was his intent? She did not want to know.
When he disappeared, she simply waited for him. Between the moment he left and the moment he returned, everything she did was for him. She didn’t ask how this story would end, because it never could. Her days crumbled so quickly that she could not be scared of the future: it didn’t exist. What about his future? a single, tiny voice asked. What’s in store?
If he ever took the time to listen to this voice, if he could have answered it, he would have said that she was wrong, that he had never been innocent because people like him were born all-knowing, with resourcefulness flowing through their veins, their hands closing hungrily on the warmth of life. They had nothing to do with innocence. That was just another word for foolishness. Cub would rather know everything. He had seen murders and rapes, and he had not looked away. Battered children and corpses. He refused to be willfully blind.
In the imaginary conversation the two of them had, he said to her: I am a survivor, that’s how people make it. This city doesn’t do anything for people like me when we’re sentenced from the outset. Every day I meet the lifeless gaze of those who have given up the struggle, those who don’t even have the time to get their things before the police kick them out, those the world wants to erase because they’re of no use. I am one of those who charge forward right away, who won’t be stopped, not even by the walls they build around us or the pits they fill with the bodies of those who tried to cross them. I don’t want to cross them. I want to stay on my side of the void and look down from there at you all, dare you all to come join me. I’ll dance on my side of the void and you won’t be able to touch me.
But Cub did not say those words because he barely talked. Each day he erased himself more and more, pushing himself closer and closer to transparency.
Cub, Cub, Mary said, you’re dancing with the sun, your path is toward the others, you’re a bridge, a link, you have to change what can be changed. Mary wanted to believe that there was a reason for their meeting.
I don’t want to change anything at all and I definitely don’t want to be a bridge, Cub said. All I’d do is piss on everybody walking below.
So why are you here? What are you doing here? Mary did not ask those questions. The mere thought that Cub might decide to leave one day tore at her guts and left her reeling. She would do anything to keep that day from coming. She was ready to fight death itself.
Like a madwoman in pursuit of her shadow, she followed him, bumping into strangers, anti-war protesters, pro-war protesters, policemen, dogs, drunkards in search of some warmth, endlessly curious children, endlessly incurious women. She didn’t belong in any of their ranks; this world wasn’t her own. How many people were there like this, walking around in this city and refusing its embrace? Their path was lonely and the city could have gone under overnight, razed by a bomb, struck by a meteorite, buried by an earthquake, and they wouldn’t have noticed. The city was an incubator, it allowed them to exist, but it had formed no bonds of loyalty or of cordiality with them. They were the termites living in its wood, chewing away at its flesh and turning it to dust, but it didn’t help them to survive either. They took as good as they got.
Mary followed Cub, who was dancing on a tightrope, dancing for so long so long even with the only music that of his heartbeat, even with his head b
efuddled by his own hustle and bustle. She only followed his path so she wouldn’t lose him, so she’d always know where he was and where he was headed.
Sometimes Cub seemed to be nothing more than the interplay of light in her eyes, sometimes here, sometimes gone, but which he alone imbued with weight.
Where was he going? To tread all the paths, all the routes, all the intersections. Not to lose his way. Never to lose sight of his shadow, never ever. He was the one who experienced miracles. Oh, gods, was such a love even possible? Would such lightning ever strike her?
One Sunday, walking down a street forking off Portobello Road, Mary heard the sounds of a party from the house of one of the shop owners, an Indian man she knew well.
She stopped in front of the place, which was decked out in multicolored lights. Booming music shook the glass panes. The garden was already packed and the hullabaloo just kept growing recklessly. “The flowers here,” someone yelled, “no, not there, I said here, no, that huge vase is going to block the door, everyone’s going to trip over it, and what’s this table doing here? All the tables go in the great hall, and where did the champagne flutes go, aren’t there any, the caterer was supposed to bring them, call him, we’ll have to buy some and …”
The voice was swallowed up by its own hysteria.
From the other side of the street, she sniffed and inhaled all the familiar odors: cumin, sandalwood and asafetida. She smiled at the sheer number of luxury cars from manufacturers she’d never heard of, parked along the sidewalk. She smiled as she saw the steely, resentful glares of the born-and-bred Britons glancing at this display, then, lowering their eyes, hurrying along with their purchases from the corner shop. That evening, as they chewed their bland cold meats, they would hear the sounds of partying and the clinks of crystal coming from the smartest house on the street, the only one not to have been carved up into flats, and they would mull over dreams of elbowing everybody else out.
A long, ostentatious line of cars went down the street. The first, a white limousine, was adorned with flowers, ribbons and silver paper. Those following behind were honking to announce the bridegroom’s arrival. Mary saw a pudgy face in the first car, kohl-rimmed eyes, pursed lips. His elbow was perched on the ledge of the open window, the cream-colored silk of his jacket gleaming softly, the sleeve just short enough to reveal a gold Rolex and, on a chubby finger, a sparkling diamond.
More neighbors came out to see what was going on. Some smiled at this riot of color and noise; others scowled and slammed their doors shut and turned up the volume on their TVs. Kids were staring in fascination while teenagers giggled, sorely tempted to stick their gum on the immaculate surfaces. The bare branches on the trees were trembling. A few last leaves fell, and their dance down to the sidewalk reminded Mary that she was cold. Cold, above all, because she was there, contemplating the sounds of this party she had no part in.
An old man made his way out of the house. He had a frayed wool scarf around his head. She realized he was Nari, the owner of the house and of the shop facing Portobello Road on the other side. He saw her and smiled.
“Hello, Mary, did you come for the carnival?”
He seemed to be trying to escape from his own home.
“It’s my granddaughter who’s getting married,” he said. “But I’m not going to stay for the party. They can’t make me. What’s the point in going over the top like this? I can’t even guess how many millions these cars have to be worth. You know I’d never say no to money, but I haven’t got a thing in common with these gazillionaires. Half the ladies in there are even more gussied up than the Taj Mahal! And I’m just thinking about the towers of silence again. I’ve decided this is it, I’m not going to any more weddings, not even for my family. I’m going to think about towers of silence.”
“Towers of silence?” Mary asked. “What are those?”
“An environmentally friendly way of getting rid of the dead,” he replied. “Parsis cannot bury or cremate their dead. Thus spake Zarathustra, or Zoroaster, our prophet. So we have to build granite towers, and at the top there are open platforms with hundreds of compartments in concentric rings. The outer circle holds men’s bodies, then in the center are the women’s bodies, and children’s bodies are in the innermost one. Criminals’ corpses go somewhere else, on top of a bare cement tower with no decorations. When we die, men dressed in white, whose only job is this, will carry our bodies to the top of those towers. Up there, the vultures are waiting, as still as statues. They know we’re coming, and they’re waiting. When the garden doors open, they take flight and circle over the towers with a hunger that’s downright Pavlovian. The vultures may look ugly, but when they fly they’re slow and graceful. Any time they see a new corpse, they come by the thousands. They feed on it completely, intimately. They feast and they stuff themselves, but they’re always silent, almost out of respect for these mouths that won’t ever talk again. They peck out eyes, chew up cheeks, rip open bellies to yank out succulent entrails. When they’re no longer hungry, they take flight again, then they return in circles, closing in and in until they land near the corpse once more. And so, over several days, it’s eaten: only the bones are left. The wind and the sun dry them and whiten them. When they’re clean and white, the corpse carriers come back and walk to the brink of the pit at the center of the tower, and they throw it all to the bottom, where the bones of the Parsis have been piling up and disintegrating for millennia. And the vultures go on circling around those towers of silence without a single sound. Out of respect for the dead who nourish them.”
Nari’s face had clouded over again.
“There aren’t any towers here, though,” he said. “I asked my children to pay for a trip to Bombay, where all my family is waiting for me in the towers of silence. I want to follow in their footsteps and give my body to the vultures who will clean it and purify it. Then I can lie upon them, I can add my calm bones to their sleep. I’ll be at peace.”
He gave Mary a sad smile.
“Off you go now, don’t waste another second thinking about these happy fools,” he said. “Or just look at their eyes. You can see how useless they are. They’re trapped like flies in their spider web of identity. Here, they’re Indians mimicking all the pomp and circumstance of their homeland. In their homeland they’re civilized Westerners with too much money, sneering at their compatriots’ customs. At heart, they never stop going back and forth; they’re lost and alone. All this noise and toasting won’t fill the emptiness in their souls. Go home, Mary. Pour yourself a single-malt whisky like me, and get some sleep. You’re best off doing that.”
“But you miss your towers …” Mary replied.
“In the end, what matters is how you die.”
Have you seen the old man
……………….
Kicking up the paper
With his worn out shoes?
……………….
Yesterday’s paper telling yesterday’s news
—RALPH McTELL, “Streets of London”
The worms had stopped raining down into the bowl. But this had been replaced by a stench that increased by the hour, which grew so horrible that Mary wondered whether it would wake up the neighbors and the entire neighborhood. She half expected them to come pounding at her door to complain. But nobody came.
Sitting in her armchair, she examined the hole in the ceiling with stubborn concentration. What was up there? It was just a closed-off attic that was reached by a trapdoor in the hallway. Could a dead rat give off such an odor? No, it could only be a human corpse.
A few days earlier, she had seen the headline on the front page of a newspaper: MAN JUMPS TO DEATH SPLATTERING THE GUTTER PRESS. Those words had taken her aback, as she hadn’t understood what they meant: a man kills himself by jumping from on high, splashing the tabloids. She’d bought the paper to read the article. It had to do with a man of no fixed address who, according to the people interviewed, had taken refuge in the attic of a house, until he could no longer h
andle the hunger or the cold. At that point he’d climbed to the top of the Post Office Tower and jumped from the spire. The irony was that he landed on a newspaper kiosk. His blood had splattered over the papers that trumpeted exactly this kind of news. Beggars who knew him said that he’d been a war vet who’d never really integrated back into society. He’d lived in the attics of residential homes, sometimes eaten dead rats.
Mary shuddered at the thought that Howard might have lived like this, abandoned by everybody, eating dead rats. And one day, tired of life, he had …
Howard, she said, couldn’t you have come to me? I would have welcomed you, taken you in. I’d have been your angel and your savior. That was all I wanted, to be useful, to open my arms and my body to the only man I’ve truly known. Do you know how many lives you could have given me? One for each year we were apart. One for each day and each hour, Howard, an eternity of lives, my body would have been your house, my flesh your nourishment. Dead rats? Howard, you could have eaten me alive and I would have been overjoyed. I’ve counted for so little. Life’s passed us both by completely. Everything went too fast for us. It used to be the world wouldn’t have turned without us, and now it doesn’t matter whether or not we’re still here.
So quickly, so early, all these men who had fought so hard had become useless. Erased from memory by a history retold too many times, like a photo left in the sun too many months. People had forgotten that those men had been flesh and blood before being reduced to names on monuments or rather, before being reduced to the wives and fathers and mothers and children of names on monuments. Other wars were fought, but none, in this country, bore the pathos of these wars, the ones that Mary and Howard and their parents had endured, wars at their doors, in their bellies, in their minds, in their hunger. Holes in the middle of their town, their city, their heads. Generations wiped away. Who remembered the disgusting bread they’d had to gulp down while trying not to vomit? Or that vile gruel that women cooked in secret, masking their shame with a stiff upper lip? Who remembered those maimed young men who had forgotten how to laugh? Erased, erased so quickly, the page was turned, and Mary had become transparent, Howard a beggar feeding on rats who had jumped from the top of a tower.