The Cat's Table

by Michael Ondaatje

  ‘We can’t get the key from Giggs …’ ‘We’ll have to get it off Perera, then.’ ‘But who is Perera?’

  THOSE AT THE Cat’s Table continued to remain despondent over the departure of Mr Mazappa, and it was for this reason that Mr Daniels organised an informal dinner for its members, as well as a few extra guests. I was to invite Emily, who asked if she could bring along her friend Asuntha. More and more Emily appeared to be taking the deaf girl under her wing. The ayurvedic, at loose ends since the death of Hector de Silva, was also invited. He and Mr Daniels were often seen walking the decks in animated conversation.

  We all gathered in the turbine room, and soon we were climbing, one by one, down the metal ladder into the darkness. Only Ramadhin and Cassius and I, as well as the ayurvedic, had taken this journey to the ‘garden’, but the rest of the group had no idea where they were going and were murmuring to themselves. When we hit the bottom level, Mr Daniels once again sped away into the hollow and mysterious world of the hold. There was some contained laughter as we passed the mural depicting the naked women. By now Cassius had got to know it well. One day, he had managed somehow to get into the hold alone, pushed a crate in front of the mural, and climbed up onto it so he was level with those vast bodies. All afternoon, he stood there, like that, in the semi-darkness.

  Mr Daniels ushered us on, and turning a corner, we saw in front of us his garden and a table covered with food. All the murmuring stopped. There was even music somewhere. Miss Quinn-Cardiff’s gramophone had been borrowed once more, this time from the watersiders who worked in another section of the hold, so Emily began selecting various 78s from the pile of records. We were told some of them had been left for us by Mr Mazappa. Some guests walked on the ordered paths, alongside green fronds, the ayurvedic explaining – as if in secret, which was the way he always spoke – that oxalic acid from the star fruit was used to polish brass objects in temples. Emily, longing to dance, took the silent Asuntha in her arms, and swaying to the music, moved down a narrow path in her yellow dress, as if a star herself.

  When I think of all our meals on the Oronsay, the first image is never of the formal dining room, where we had been placed so far away from the Captain, in the most unfavourable location, but of that lit rectangle somewhere in the bowels of the ship. We were handed a tamarind drink that I suspect must have had a finger of alcohol in it. Our host smoked one of his special cigarettes, and I noticed Miss Lasqueti, who was bending down to study some ankle-high plant, lift her head and sniff the air.

  ‘You’re a complicated man,’ she murmured, coming over to Mr Daniels. ‘You could poison a dictator with some of these innocent-looking leaves.’ Later, when Mr Daniels described an antibacterial capsicum and a papaya that could be used to break up blood clots after surgery, she put her hand on his sleeve, and added, ‘Or Guy’s Hospital could use you.’ The tailor, Mr Gunesekera, drifting like a ghost among us, nodded in agreement, but he did that for any overheard remark, for it saved him from speaking. He watched as our host, standing now with the ayurvedic, pointed out the Madagascar periwinkles (for diabetes and leukaemia, he announced), and then plucked several Indonesian sour limes, a ‘miracle fruit’, he called it, which he would be serving shortly.

  And so we sat down to eat at a new Cat’s Table. The hanging lights swayed above us – somehow that evening there must have been a breeze in the hold, or was it the roll of the sea? Behind us were dark leaves of pencil trees and a black calabash. We had water bowls on the table with cut flowers in them, and across from me was my cousin, her arms resting on the table, her features so eager in the flickering light. On one side of her was Mr Nevil. His giant hands that once dismantled ships reached for a bowl and shook it gently, so its flower rolled in the water under the swaying light of the lamp. He was, as always, at ease in his silence, unconcerned that no one was talking to him. Emily leaned away from him to whisper to the waif. The girl thought for a while and then whispered her own secret into the ear of Emily.

  It was a meal none of us rushed. Each of us looked shadowed, abandoned, until we leaned forward to be caught in the light. Each of us moved slowly as if half asleep. The gramophone was rewound, and the Indonesian limes were passed down the table.

  ‘To Mr Mazappa,’ Mr Daniels said quietly.

  ‘And to Sunny Meadows,’ we answered.

  The cavernous hold carried our words, and for a while no one moved. There was just the gramophone’s continuing music, the slow breath of its saxophone. A faint mist, set off by a timer somewhere, fell for about ten seconds over the plants and the table, and on our arms and shoulders. None of us protected ourselves from it. The record ended and we heard the repeating scrape of the needle, waiting to be lifted. The two girls in front of me whispered back and forth, and I watched them, listened to them, closely. I focused on my cousin’s lipsticked mouth. I could hear this word and that. Why? When does it happen? The girl shook her head. I think the girl said, You could help us. And Emily, looking down, said nothing for a while, deep in a thought. There was this trench of darkness between one side of the table and the other, and I could see them through it, from the other side. There was laughter somewhere, but I was silent. I noticed Mr Gunesekera also looking straight ahead.

  ‘He’s your father?’ Emily whispered in surprise.

  The girl nodded.

  Asuntha

  SHE SPOKE TO no one on the boat about what her father had done. Just as, when she was a young girl, she would never reveal or admit where he was or what he was doing. Even when he was arrested and sent to his first jail. He had been just a thief then, a man working his trade, on the edge of the law. He had evolved from being a young, confident troublemaker.

  He was part Asian, part something else. He was never sure what. The name Niemeyer could have been inherited or stolen or invented. When he was taken away to prison, the wife and child were left with barely a rupee. The wife began to lose her wits, and the child soon found her mother no longer reliable. She would be silent and uncommunicative, or she spat out a fury towards everyone, even to the young daughter. Neighbours tried to help with subsistence, but she turned against all of them. She began harming herself. The girl was just ten years old.

  She got a ride with someone and went to Kalutara prison. She was allowed to see her father. They talked, and he told her the name of his sister who lived in the southern province. Her name was Pacipia. There seemed nothing else the father could do to help. Just this name. Niemeyer was about thirty-six then. His daughter saw him cornered in the prison cell, still lithe, but all his natural gestures were muted. He could not embrace her through the bars. Bars that as a thief he would have slathered himself with oil in order to slip through. Still, he seemed powerful to her, moving back and forth in an efficient silence, like that quiet voice of his that seemed to leap across space and enter you as a whisper.

  But it was more difficult to get home. During the journey it was Asuntha’s eleventh birthday. She remembered it suddenly, as she was walking the thirty or so miles from Kalutara. Her mother was not at home, or anywhere in the village. She had left a small thing, a present, wrapped in a leaf, a partially beaded bracelet with a brown leather strap. The girl had watched her mother sewing the beads on during the last few, sometimes crazed weeks. She tied it onto her left wrist. When her wrist grew too big for it she would wear it in her hair.

  Each night the girl stayed alone in the hut, waiting for her mother’s return, barely lighting the lamp, as there was only a quarter-inch of fuel. When night arrived she slept, waking in the later dark, with nothing to do until sunrise. She lay on the pallet and drew a map of the countryside in her mind and planned where she would go the next day to search for her mother. She could be anywhere, hiding in an abandoned village or along some river where trees hung over the fast-moving water. There was the possibility of her mother’s slipping down a bank in her distress or failing in a half-hearted attempt to wade across the lagoon. The girl feared all bodies of water; in them you could see the darkness
below the surface where it attempted to reach light.

  Birdcalls woke her and she left the hut to search for her mother. Neighbours offered to take her into their homes, but at night she always returned to the hut. She had told herself she would keep looking for two more weeks. Then she stayed another week. Eventually she wrote a message on a tablet, which she hung on the wall over her mother’s pallet, and walked away from her only home.

  She went inland and south, living on whatever fruits and vegetables she could find. But she longed for meat. A few times she begged for food at a house and was given dhal. She did not tell them her story, just that she had been travelling for a week. She passed monks with their held-out bowls, and she passed the coconut estates where the guards at the entrances were brought lunch by someone on a bicycle. She stopped near these sentries and talked to them in order to inhale the meal they were eating openly in front of her. In one village she followed a rice hound along back lanes to the remnants of a meal that had been flung out from a kitchen door. She found a cut-open jak fruit and ate so much of the petal-shaped fruit that she was sick, then overcome with sudden fever. She climbed down into a river and stayed there hanging on to a branch in order to lose the feverish heat in her. She had been travelling for more than eight days when she saw four men carrying a trampoline along the road. She knew where she was. She followed at a distance, till they eventually turned and asked who she was. She said nothing. She loitered but did not lose sight of them, even when they started crossing a field and disappeared over a scrub hill. And so she came upon the tents. She asked for Pacipia and a thin man brought her over to a woman. This was her father’s sister.

  In certain ways she looked like him. Pacipia too moved like an animal. She was very tall, and appeared tougher than the girl’s father in the way she treated the men and women around her. It was a small rural circus she was responsible for, and she held it together with strict rules. She was different with the girl, however. She lifted Asuntha into her arms and walked away from the performers to some thorn trees. She ran her fingers through the girl’s hair as she listened to her brother’s daughter tell her about meeting the father in jail, the disappearance of the mother, the hunger for meat above all else. Pacipia had met the mother a few times, and she nodded, careful not to let the girl know what she was thinking. Eventually, when she thought it was all right, she put the girl down.

  She took Asuntha into each of the tents. The sides were rolled up because of the afternoon heat, and the girl saw the acrobats sleeping in the daylight, facing the wind that came through the open sides, all the way from the coast. In spite of the fact that she had been travelling alone for at least a week, she was still unsure of the place she was now in. But her aunt assumed she was not naturally nervous. She was her father’s child, wasn’t she? The girl stayed beside Pacipia those first days, hampering her preparations. There were to be some performances during the next few days in the village of Beddegama. Then the troupe would move on. A new village in the southern province every week. Otherwise her musicians would get enchanted with local girls and leave the troupe. The musicians did not have that much to do, but their fanfares were essential in any circus.

  Because of the hindrance of the girl, Pacipia was exercising before the sun came up; anyone who was awake would hear the bounce of the trampoline and in the semi-darkness see Pacipia wheel in mid-air, land on her back or her knees, pivot up once more, further into darkness. By the time the sun rose she was covered in sweat and walking to a farmer’s well, pulling up the roped bucket to pour water over herself again and again. There was always that singular pleasure at a well. She walked back in her drenched costume, which would dry in the sunlight, to the tent where the girl would be waking. What independence Pacipia owned had, it seemed, disappeared. She was never married, had no children, but now there was this girl she was responsible for until her brother returned.

  *

  THERE IS A story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You find in this way the path of your life. And so, within a few weeks, the girl Asuntha could be found in mid-air, held by an outstretched arm, then thrown towards the grip of another, swinging down simultaneously from another tree. She had her father’s strong, light bones, and she had beneath her first fears a self-sufficient nature. She would have to loosen that away from herself in order to allow trust. Pacipia would help. Pacipia too had been full of self-sufficiency once, one of those seemingly stunned-looking children who hold an anger in them; it had scared her parents and the friends of her parents. But acrobats always needed to trust the company around them.

  The circus performed along any stretch of country road that was bordered by trees. Villagers brought mats and sat on the tarmac in the late afternoon when it was no longer too hot but before the shadows lengthened to confuse the performers’ sight. Then the sound of a fanfare emerged, some of it out of the depths of the forest, some more magically from the high branches of the trees where the trumpeter was. And a man seemingly on fire, his face painted like a bird’s, swept down on a rope, skimming the spectators’ heads, smoke trailing behind him, catching another rope and swinging this way farther and farther along the stretch of audience-covered road. There were harp sounds and whistles coming off him until the painted man disappeared into a tree and was never seen again.

  Then the rest of them came out, in stained and ragged colours, and for the next hour leapt from trees into the empty air and were caught in the arms of others, who seemed to fall from even greater heights. A man covered in flour fell into the central trampoline and rose out of the dust he left behind. Men walked across tightropes stretched from tree to tree, carrying brimming buckets of water, slipping in mid-air and hanging on with just one arm, releasing the contents into the crowd. Sometimes it was water, sometimes it was ants. Each time a man stepped out onto the tightrope, the drummer warned of the danger and the difficulty, and the trumpet shrieked and laughed with the crowd. Eventually the men on the tightrope fell to earth. They curled their bodies when they hit the tarmac, and stood. They were the only ones standing until the people in the crowd got to their feet. It was over, save for one acrobat still up there, still yelling for help, hanging from a rope by one foot.

  At first Asuntha would be caught only by Pacipia. But this was not trust. It came from the belief that if this relative would not pluck her out of the air into safety, then she might as well lose her life in the fall to earth. The greater test came when Pacipia stepped away from Asuntha, who was on a high branch, and ordered her to throw herself to another. Knowing fear would grow by thinking and waiting, Asuntha overcame it instantly. There was in fact hardly time for the catcher to move forward.

  And so the girl entered into that carapace which had been waiting for her. She was now a member of the seven-person circus that traversed the provinces of the south coast, living in one of four tents, and warned always by Pacipia, who was wary of the adulterous musicians. One day, in mid-performance, while she was in the trees, she saw her father among the sparse audience, and she swung down one-handed to his level and embraced him, and did not leave his side during the rest of the show. He stayed a few days. To be truthful, having nothing to do, he was too restless for Asuntha’s and Pacipia’s comfort. He quickly realised his daughter was in the most secure place she could be. She would have her own life in this circus, as opposed to a life lived with him.

  She had not even thought of leaving with him. And from then on, in the various meetings between father and daughter, it was as if she were the adult watching him as he went further into deepening levels of crime. He visited her once when he was in the heaven-like clutch of addiction, and Asuntha ignored him, just watched him making friends with the acrobat Sunil, the one who wore the painted face of a bird, watched him laughing with the young man, trying to charm him with that voice.

  The country was full of stories about Niemeyer during the three ye
ars when she rarely saw him – he had become popular as a criminal, almost loved. There was a gang around him, some of whom were killers who haunted and slipped in and out of the political world. He continued to wear that foreign name like a badge, or an insult to the establishment. It was a ridiculous heritage claimed by the man, taken from some possibly distant European ancestor, possibly not, so the name was mocked, insisted on by this ‘heir’. Only now and then did Asuntha wish for his presence as a comfort. She had her own dangers. As an acrobat she had broken her nose once, then a wrist, the one that still wore her mother’s last gift to her, made of leather and beads.

  Then, when she was seventeen, and had grown into all the skill and confidence she needed, she had a bad fall. They were rehearsing for a pretended accident. She leapt from a high branch, kicked herself outward off a tree trunk and missed her aimed-for catcher, fell to the road, and the side of her head glanced against a mile-marker stone. When she came back into consciousness she could not hear what Pacipia was urgently saying to her. She kept nodding and nodding in spite of the pain, pretending to understand what was being asked. The fear that had been absent now was there. So she was of no more use to the six other performers who had become her family. A month afterwards, still without any hearing, she slipped away from her chosen world.

  When the circus troupe realised she was not returning, Sunil, who had caught her that very first time when she had to trust someone other than Pacipia, and who had also reached out frantic to catch her during her last fall, was sent by Pacipia to look for her. He entered Colombo and disappeared. Pacipia did not hear from him again.

  Sunil was at Niemeyer’s pre-trial hearing when he saw Asuntha in the packed gallery of the Colombo courthouse. When it was over he followed her at a distance along a narrow street that had sloping parapets and into a lane that became a street of goldsmiths. Chekku Street. It was like an exuberant medieval lane. She kept on walking, and then, somewhere on Messenger Street, she disappeared. Sunil stood very still. He knew that even if he could not see her, she could see him. She was always quick to be aware of what was taking place around her – and since her fear had returned, that skill would be even stronger. Besides, he was lost now. He had lived in the southern province most of his life; he really did not know the city. A strong hand grabbed his arm. She pulled him into a room the size of a carpet. He didn’t speak. He knew her deafness embarrassed her. He sat down and was still.