by Paul Park
“That was tactless,” muttered the doctor.
“I don’t understand. Why are they looking at me like that?” whispered Abu.
“You think everyone is like you. You have nothing to fear from death. A Starbridge prince. You’ll go straight to Paradise. But these people fear it. However miserable their lives are now, their next ones will be worse, whichever horrible planet they’re condemned to.”
“Nobody still believes that.”
“Everyone believes it. And even if they only half believe it, isn’t it enough to make them miserable?”
“Drink up,” said a thin man at the edge of the circle. “Starbridge. What do you care?” He motioned towards Paradise with his head. “What do you care about us? Two weeks ago my brother died. The priests marked him down for the sixth planet. He was twice the man you are.”
Abu blinked. “I’m sorry,” he said. “My cousin could have saved him. He is a great doctor.”
The man snorted angrily, and Thanakar said, “Stop it, Abu. Pay attention. Look at his clothes. Listen to him—he’s not permitted medicine. None of these people are.”
“Yes, listen to me,” interrupted the thin man. “I took my brother to the hospital. They threw him out; not even a painkiller, they said. Nothing that might dilute the punishment of God, they said. Punishment for his sins. Listen to me—he’d never done anything. God help him, he’d even believed in your religion. It was punishment for being poor, that’s all. Punishment for having had to work all his life. Bastards! Drunken pig! Do you know what it’s like, the sixth planet? It has no air.”
Above them, a firework fish broke noisily against the sky, its scarlet tentacles drifting and unwinding in the idle wind. Thanakar took his cousin by the elbow. “Let’s go,” he said, but Abu wouldn’t move.
“Why do you hate me?” he asked the thin man. “I’ve done you no harm.”
“No, not you,” answered the man savagely. “Never you. Just robbed me ever since you were born. Just grown fat while I starved.” The crowd was moving angrily, and Thanakar pulled the prince away. A ragged woman reached to restrain them. If she had grabbed his arm, the doctor would have pushed her back. But the tentative fumbling of her fingers, as if she feared polluting him, made her hold a strong one. She hesitated to touch his sacred flesh, and her hesitation made the doctor stop, ashamed. She would not look at them. She ran her tongue around her teeth, stained blue with kaya gum, and then she whispered in a voice as fumbling as her hands: “Sir. Doctor. Forgive me . . .” and her words scattered away.
“What is it?” he answered. The woman was kneeling in front of him, in a posture of abasement that he hadn’t seen in a long time.
“You are a doctor?”
“Yes,” he said, making himself smile.
“Please. My little girl is very sick. I’m afraid she’s going to die. She has the fever.”
In the silence that followed, it seemed to Thanakar as if the circle of faces around them had tightened suddenly, closing off escape. People stared at him with differing expressions, some hostile, some smiling obscurely. Trapped! Damn!, he thought.
“It’s illegal,” he said guiltily, and around the circle he could see in people’s faces the hardening of their thoughts. So many expressions, but not a single sympathetic one. It made him angry that they had already judged him in their minds. They thought he had no heart, like all his kind.
“Please, sir,” mumbled the woman. “For the festival.”
“Where do you live?” he asked, because he wanted to see some change, some loosening in the circle around him. But once the question was out, he realized that he had trapped himself, because Abu touched him on the shoulder and whispered, “Good for you,” and because the woman raised her head and looked at him with such an expression of gratitude, it was as if he had already saved the child’s life.
“Not far,” she said.
This was inexact. After the decision was made to go, they stood around waiting, for unclear and shifting reasons. People jabbered to each other in languages the doctor didn’t know. There seemed to be two opinions about where the child was. A message was sent, a reply expected. It never came, but in the meantime people argued about how to go and what to bring. They would need electric torches. None were available. Someone’s brother had one. And then suddenly they all started in a crowd, turning away from the fairgrounds into a filthy labyrinth of streets.
Thanakar had waited with a sense of anticlimax. But as he and Abu marched along, the street illuminated by fireworks and the fitful torch, picking through gutters filled with garbage and stinking excrement, Thanakar was overwhelmed by nervousness. The woman who had originally accosted them had vanished, and instead the whole crowd was accompanying them, twenty people at least. More joined them at every twist of the narrow street, and often they had to stop while a whole jabbering conversation flowed around them. But finally, after more than half an hour, they stopped outside a house as wretched-looking as any Thanakar had ever seen, a wooden shack with boarded windows, guarded by a bony dog. It rushed to meet them, snarling and showing its teeth, but someone threw a stone and it whimpered away.
The prince and the doctor stood appalled. But they had come too far to turn back, so they stepped in through the littered yard and up the steps, to where one man was swinging the electric torch. By its light he showed them a crude placard next to the doorway: CONFESSIONAL. SIN EATING. “Dirty place,” he confided. “Very bad. Not a good place.” He grinned and stepped aside to let them enter.
The house was divided into two rooms. In front, through a glass doorway, they could see the sin eater, sitting with a client, but they had no time to look, for the crowd propelled them past, to where a woman knelt next to a broken armchair. It was the woman who had stopped them at the fair. She had changed her clothes; unnecessarily, thought Thanakar, for her new dress was just as dirty, just as torn as the old. He looked around. Light came from a kerosene candle. It reflected dully off a wall decorated with pictures of animals clipped from magazines. On a bed nearby, under the woman’s hand, in a nest of dark sheets, lay a sleeping child.
No one followed him into the room. Thanakar had an impression of the doorframe behind him rimmed with faces, from the lintel to the sill. It was very quiet, and Thanakar could hear the sounds of the confession from the other room. The prince stood near, frowning and grinning. He took a drink from his plastic bottle.
The child was a girl, perhaps two thousand days old. The doctor approached her warily. Under her hair he could see the circle of her scalp; it looked so small and fragile, yellow in the yellow light. The light glinted in the hair along her arm. He said, “Is this she?” At the noise of his voice, the child turned her head, and he could see her puckered face.
“She’s lovely,” said the prince behind him.
“Yes,” murmured the woman softly. It was as if the presence of her child had given her strength. In her own home, her fumbling servility had disappeared. She didn’t rise, or look at them, or ask them to sit down. There was no place to sit.
The doctor cleared his throat. “You understand,” he said, “I have no medicine with me. No equipment.”
“I have faith in you, sir,” said the woman simply.
The doctor cursed under his breath and exchanged glances with Abu. He rubbed his hands together as if washing them. “What’s that smell?” he asked.
“Smell, sir?”
On the floor by the girl’s head lay a bowl full of vomit and wet feces. “This room is very dirty,” he said.
“Dirty, sir?”
“That’s what I said. Do you have any clean bedsheets?”
The woman looked up and shook her head. There was a hint of panic in her eyes.
“Never mind,” said the doctor hurriedly. He sat down on the bedside and ran his fingers over the child’s fine, almost transparent brown hair, not quite touching her. Even so, he could feel the fever in her head. Sweat glistened on the hairs of her upper lip. “How do you feel?” he asked.
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The child said nothing, and turned away her face. Under her ear he could see a place where some cosmetic cream had dried in a thick crust, and he picked at it idly with his fingernail. It flaked away, and under it he saw a red birthmark, one of the many signs of the unclean. God had marked her. Thanakar put his finger on the mark. “How long has she been like this?” he asked.
“She was born with it. Sir.” There was a note of bitterness in the woman’s voice.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I meant the fever.” But he kept his finger where it was. “You are runaways?”
“Yes. They wanted to put her in prison. They said she was a witch.”
“It doesn’t matter. I am not the purge. But I’m surprised you let me see her. You must be careful.”
The woman seemed close to tears. “Oh sir,” she said, “I thought she was going to die. Her fever just goes up and up . . .”
“She’ll be all right. How long has she been like this?”
“Four days. What more can they do to us . . . ?”
“She’ll be all right. Tomorrow I’ll send something to take the fever down. In the meantime, you must try to keep her clean. I’ll show you. Bring me a bucket of warm water, soap, and towels.”
The woman started to cry, and one of the men in the doorway said, “There is no hot water, sir. No towels.”
“Cold water, then. And soap.”
“Soap, sir?” said the woman in despair.
“Yes. Soap. Is that so difficult to understand?”
“Don’t bully her, Cousin,” came the prince’s gentle voice.
Thanakar pulled the sheets away from the girl’s body. She turned her face back towards him and opened wide her eyes, staring at him without speaking as he moved his fingers down her body and unwrapped a grimy bandage around her knee.
“Why do you want soap, sir?” asked the woman.
The doctor bit his lips. “I want to wash her.” Under the bandage was a deep infected sore. Her whole knee was covered in a leaking crust of scabs.
The woman got to her feet and said some words in a strange language. One of the faces in the doorway disappeared.
The girl’s feet were encased in plastic shoes. As Thanakar removed them, she cried out. Underneath, her feet were covered with dirt and blisters. The shoes were several sizes too small. He took them off and laid them by the chamberpot. “She shouldn’t wear these,” he said quietly.
“No shoes, sir?” the woman asked, her voice tearful. “But shoes are good. Aren’t they?”
“Not these shoes. Look what they are doing to her feet. It’s a wonder she can walk.”
“She can’t walk, sir.”
The girl lay on her back. She was dressed in a ragged nylon smock, with buttons running down her chest. Thanakar unfastened several, and as he did so, he felt the air in the room change. The girl’s eyes widened and filled with fright. And behind him, the men who had been standing in the doorway came in and stood or squatted all around, staring at his hands. There was no hostility in their faces, only total absorption in his smallest movements, as if instead of simply peeling the smock back from her narrow ribcage, he were making an incision and peeling back the skin. A man came in with a bucket of water and half a bar of soap. Taking them from him, Thanakar started to wash her, with clever movements of his elegant white hands.
For Prince Abu, the tension in the room was hard to bear. With an unclear idea of stepping out into the street and waiting there, he wandered through the doorway. But as he passed the entrance to the other room, he stopped. Someone had pulled a curtain over the glass, but the door was partly open, and he looked inside.
It was something he had read about. In popular mythology, a man died only after he had made a total of 400 mortal errors. It was an idea that had grown out of the commentary on the 1,019th verse of the Song of the Beloved Angkhdt: “Sweet friend, how long have I known you? How many days have I sensed you near me, sleeping, waking, your body within reach. Without you, I would have made myself a hell long ago and furnished it with lies, and memories of four hundred women left unsatisfied. Dear love, you have taken these things into yourself. Love, you have saved me . . .” The text was obscure, but it had led to this, that blameless men with nothing left to sell would sell their blamelessness. A sick man would come in, afraid of death and damnation, the weight of his mistakes suddenly intolerable. And the confessor would take them on himself, one by one, a few at a time, into his own body, according to a simple ritual. The sick man would sit down and try to capture in his mind all the particulars of the sin that he wanted to expunge. On his lap he held a box of colored powders—black for bitter thoughts, red for evil actions, green for harmful words. He would make a selection, and holding some powder in the pouch of his lip, he would begin to talk about his sin, every aspect of it, germination and result, everything that weighed upon his conscience. Besides its foul taste, the drug was a powerful expectorant, and by the time the man had finished talking, he would have filled a stone basin with colored spit. Then he would rinse his mouth out with sweet water, and his confessor, after prayers and exhortations, would drink down the contents of the basin. And at the end, the sick man would have stepped back from the grave, and the healthy man would have taken one step towards it.
Abu had read about this ritual, but he had never seen it. There in the dark room, by the light of a single candle, he saw a fleshless, toothless, bald old man and a pale young one. They sat opposite each other on wooden chairs, leaning over a stone pot set on the floor between them. Both were too absorbed in what they were doing to notice the prince standing in the doorway.
The old man had almost filled the basin with black juice. “It was wrong, I know,” he mumbled. “But it wasn’t my fault. My wife hired her when I was gone from home. I wouldn’t have objected, not that, but still, there was something unnatural about her. Something wicked in the way she disturbed my sleep. I couldn’t sleep. I thought about her constantly. I neglected my business. It wasn’t natural, not for a girl like her. A serving girl, from the lowest family . . .” He spat a jet of juice into the bowl and then continued more distinctly. “She wasn’t good looking. It wasn’t that. She looked . . . vulnerable. Weak. It maddened me. She was a witch, I tell you. It wasn’t my fault.” The juice ran down his chin.
“No excuses,” said the young man.
“No. Of course not. That’s not what I mean. I was bewitched, yes. I thought about her. Nothing dirty. I thought about her.” He emptied his mouth again.
“Don’t lie,” said the young man. The old man sighed, rubbing his hands together in his lap, hunched over the basin, and when he continued, he was almost inaudible.
“I used to imagine her naked,” he confessed. “At night I used to lie in my bed and imagine her . . . breasts.” His voice trailed away.
“Her breasts.”
“Her breasts, yes,” the old man repeated loudly. He sighed. “I used to imagine touching them.”
“How many times?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I didn’t do anything. At least, not like that. I used to . . .” His voice died down to nothing, and he emptied his mouth into the bowl.
“Tell me.”
“I used to beat her. I would find fault with her work.”
“Stop,” commanded the young man. He held out the box of powder and motioned towards the red compartment. Sighing wearily, the other took a pinch of red and put it in his lip. Then suddenly he pitched forward and clapped his skinny hands to his mouth.
“Keep it in,” commanded the young man. “Don’t spit it out.”
The old man’s eyes and nose were streaming water. “God, it burns,” he cried when he had recovered speech.
“Yes, it burns,” agreed the young man softly. He held out the box again.
“Ah, God, no more. Not again. Have pity.”
“Take it.”
Moaning and weeping, the old man took another pinch.
“Now, tell me. What did you do?�
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“I . . . I beat her.”
“Louder. Stop mumbling.”
“I beat her.”
“How many times?”
“I . . . I don’t know.” The man was weeping and wringing his hands. “I can’t remember.”
“Think. Visualize each time.”
There was a pause. And then: “I beat her seven times.”
“How hard?”
“Not hard. I swear to God not hard.” The old man smiled pathetically. “I’m not strong. She was a healthy girl. At least . . .” He spat red drool into the pot. Abu could see it clearly, floating on a puddle of black. Action floating on the surface of the mind, he thought. He raised the bottle to his lips, but the movement changed the shadows on the floor. The old man looked up and sat back in his chair. “Who are you?” he cried, red drool running down his chin. “What are you doing here?”
Prince Abu moved out of the doorway to let the light fall on his uniform. The old man stared at him, astonished. The juice made strings of liquid down his clothes.
“I’m sorry,” said the prince. “I’m sorry to disturb you.” But the two men sat there staring without moving. “My cousin is a doctor,” he explained to the sin eater. “We came to see your daughter.”
Still the men said nothing, and then slowly, as if unwillingly, they got to their feet to make the compulsory gestures of respect, knuckles to their foreheads, hiding their eyes.
“No, please,” stammered the prince. “Never mind that. We came for the carnival. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you. Please continue with your . . .” He broke off, embarrassed, and stepped back through the doorway and out into the passage. From the other room there came a yell of pain, and he could see Thanakar rising from the bed, holding his finger.
“Ah,” he cried. “She bit me. Like a wild animal.” And then he smiled.
* * *
“They hate us,” remarked Abu sadly, later, as they walked down to the docks.
“They have their reasons.”