The Life to Come

by Michelle De Kretser

  ‘The town, which had once been the capital of Sri Lanka, was famous for its ancient monuments. My father took me to see them at the first opportunity: colossal temples and palaces, and stone reservoirs of green water that were the remains of an ingenious system of irrigation. I grew bored pretty soon. The old city is spread out, and the day was overcast and moist. Despite the deep shade cast by the giant trees that stand along the roads and among the ruins, I felt thirsty and hot. Unused to having sole responsibility for me, my father had neglected to pack the thermos of iced, filtered water that accompanied my mother on our outings. I refused to drink king-coconut water, and there was no question of my consuming one of the unhygienic, violently coloured sherbets sold in the street. My father gave in to my whining and we turned back. I could tell he was disappointed by my lack of enthusiasm for the history that lay around us, but all he said was that I was right not to overdo things while I was still convalescing.

  ‘I was happier in my father’s cool bungalow. In those days there was no TV in Sri Lanka, and I would spend the morning reading in a planter’s chair with a tall glass of sugared lime juice at hand. I’d brought my favourite comics with me, and they were supplemented by an old storybook I found in the bungalow, a tale of derring-do called The Captain’s Revenge. I’ve forgotten most of it, but I know that the Captain was slim and plucky and always carried a dagger—sometimes between his teeth. When I grew tired of reading, I would go in search of the cook. He had a really majestic silver moustache, and he told me a ghost story about a water-carrier who appeared at dusk and made his way with his cart to a spot near an outbuilding where a well had once stood. There was also a tale about a white dog that brought misfortune to whoever saw it. My parents were rationalists, and my father would certainly have put an end to the cook’s stories if they had come to his notice. But he would no doubt have been pleased to learn that the ruins we had visited together had made quite an impression on me. Although we’d spent no more than an hour among them, they had begun to invade my dreams. Night after night brought stupendous domes, flights of steps, tall stone figures, ancient trees whose massive branches formed archways through which I had to pass. That sounds alarming. In fact, I would wake from those dreams, in which I wandered among the ruins on grassy paths, filled with a tremendous sense of well-being.

  ‘One morning, lolling about in my chair, I became aware of a commotion in the street. I went outside and down to the gate and looked down the street. People and vehicles were rushing through the junction with the main road. There was an odd smell—then I saw smoke rising from the direction of the shops. The cook appeared on the veranda and called me inside. He said there was “trouble with Tamil people”. The phone started to ring, and I ran past the cook to answer it, sure that it would be my mother, who put a trunk call through to us every day. It was my father. He told me that there had been “an incident at the station”. An “incident”: I was struck by the word, at once portentous and vague. My father said there was nothing to be concerned about, and that I was to stay indoors and do as the cook said. Then he asked to speak to the cook.

  ‘My father didn’t come home for lunch that day. I pestered the cook for information, and at last he told me that when the Jaffna train pulled into the station that morning, a mob had boarded it and assaulted the Tamil passengers. The violence spread and escalated, and soon Tamil shops were being looted and Tamils attacked in their homes. Casualties were still streaming into the hospital, and my father expected to be there all day. The cook related these facts dispassionately and assured me that, being Sinhalese, we had nothing to fear.

  ‘“Why do people want to kill Tamils?” I asked. “What have they done?”

  ‘The cook considered this, smoothing his moustache. Eventually, “They are not like us,” he said and went away.

  ‘I felt intense excitement as I ate my rice and curries in solitary splendour in the dining room. The events unfolding outside had the unreality and glamour of the books I read. They would bring the test of courage I had always longed for—the Captain and Batman collaborated in the scenarios my imagination supplied. At the head of a daredevil band, I issued brutal orders: “Spare no one!” “Holy smoke—stand back, you dogs!”

  ‘In fact, time dragged, heavy and slow. I must have taken the siesta that had become routine when I was ill. The smell of smoke intensified as the day wore on. My sense of eager anticipation had vanished, and I felt aggrieved by my father’s prolonged absence. Self-pity, which lies close under the surface in children, took over. My mother’s failure to call exacerbated my sense of neglect. When I complained to the cook, he lifted the receiver and held it out to me: there was only silence, and I understood that the line was down. This often happened in Sri Lanka, so it seemed unimportant and increased my sense of injustice: my mother should have found a way around the problem. It was an endless day, characterised by grievances and tedium.

  ‘That night, I was woken by a bustle. There were voices: a woman’s, a strange man’s. My father came into my room. When he saw that I was awake, he sat on my bed. “One of my colleagues and her husband have come to stay for a few days,” he said.

  ‘“Why?” I asked.

  ‘“Their house was set on fire.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. They were red with exhaustion. He said, “A lot of the medical staff, Sinhalese and Tamil, left in a rush. But Dr Rajanathan is very brave. She insisted on staying and helping me. We’ve kept a skeleton service going.”

  ‘I laughed. I saw bony figures bending over patients, tending their injuries. My father smiled. He told me that early the next day, I was to take the train to Colombo in the care of one of his Sinhalese clerical assistants. He touched my hand briefly and said, “Go to sleep now, son.”

  ‘It was a time in my life when I was fascinated by the idea of character. I would scrutinise people I had heard described as “thoughtless” or “stubborn” or “generous”, trying to discover those traits in their faces. I woke early the next day, eager to study brave Dr Rajanathan, but she had already returned to the hospital. Her husband must have joined us for breakfast—I can’t remember him at all.

  ‘On the way to the station, our taxi passed a truck full of soldiers travelling slowly towards the centre of town: the army had been called out. I saw roofless buildings and others that were only charred remains. Broken glass twinkled beside the road. Very few people were about. Even the boy with the twisted legs had deserted his post at the hospital gate. I pointed this out to my father, who looked half asleep. He was unshaven and smelled stale. At the station, where we were met by the same profound quiet that hung over the town, there was no difficulty buying tickets. When our train pulled in it was almost empty; no Tamils were travelling that day. My father stepped forward to hand me up into the carriage, and I noticed then that his gait was lopsided. I remarked on his limp, and he shrugged, saying, “Someone threw half a brick at me.” He shook my hand and wished me a pleasant trip.

  ‘The clerk and I had a first-class compartment to ourselves. He was a podgy young man with an unctuous manner and a jiggling knee. I had disliked him as soon as he came forward to greet us at the station. When our train set off, he asked me an inoffensive question or two. I answered briefly and coldly, buried myself in my book and ignored him. Later, lulled by the movement of the train, I dozed off. When I woke, he was gone. He returned after a long interval and I said, peevishly: “Where were you? You’re supposed to look after me.” He said that he had been talking to a friend who was travelling third class—he had exchanged his own ticket for one paid for by my father—and assured me that I was perfectly safe. “You can’t be sure of that,” I said. “There’s been a riot. At any minute, I could find myself beset by grave danger.” It was the language of my storybooks, but as I spoke, I found myself swept up in its drama. My mind’s eye showed me a solitary hero making a last, gallant stand against an advancing horde. My self-pity brimmed over, and I said, “I’ll tell my father that you left me alone.”

&n
bsp; ‘The fellow’s ingratiating mask vanished at once. Years later, when I encountered the term “class hatred”, I saw that naked face. It wasn’t looking at me but at a child with a Batman T-shirt, a leather travelling case and French sandals. The clerk leaned forward and hissed, “Nothing will happen to you. Nothing happens to people like you.” The change in him frightened me, and he saw it. He settled back into his seat and, jiggling his knee furiously, told me that a group of about fifty Tamil workers—technicians and clerks, but also gardeners and cleaners—had asked permission to stay overnight in the hospital. Their homes were far away and they were too terrified to venture into the street. The medical superintendent installed them in two rooms on the upper floor of a laboratory that stood near the main hospital building. The lab was locked. But in the night, men armed with iron rods broke down the door and swarmed up the stairs.

  ‘I interrupted: “Why didn’t the police stop them?”

  ‘“The police,” repeated my escort. “Let me think: did we see the police at all yesterday? You know, I don’t think so. It must have been a police holiday.” From his tone, I could tell that his words were as deceptive as a conjurer’s silk handkerchief: they seemed ordinary but concealed something startling. I shrank back against my seat, not knowing if I feared a dove or a fist in my face.

  ‘The clerk went on, telling me that most of the people inside the lab escaped by jumping from the windows. A few remained trapped and were bludgeoned to death. He said, “There was a boy your age who was inside.”

  ‘He stared at me. I saw that he wanted me to ask what had happened to the boy, and I was too afraid of him to resist. I remember that it was difficult to form the words because my lips, my mouth and my throat were all painfully dry.

  ‘“What do you think happened? He was a cripple. He couldn’t jump.” He looked fuller in the face after he said it. More satisfied.

  ‘A week or so later, my father returned to Colombo. We were all back in London by the end of the year.’

  Ash paused. A few feathers of snow were wafting past his window. He had been about to write, ‘I’ve never forgotten that boy.’ But that wasn’t true. The boy was a silhouette at the end of a long, shadowy avenue into which Ash’s thoughts seldom strayed. He was in danger of falling into Cassie’s error of arranging random facts to make a story. Ash quit his email program without saving the message. The true, lasting bequest of those days in 1977 was not a faceless Tamil child but a sweet, recurrent dream. In it, Ash wandered in innocent perpetuity along grassy paths among magnificent ruins. They were emblems of a past that had no claim on him but was merely available to be studied or ignored. The trees that grew beside the monuments had leaves so large and solid they seemed to have been cut from metal. Ash could see the flat, green surface of the water in the reservoir. He could see the blackish lichen at the base of the stones. Once he had tried to tell Cassie about that dream. He had said something like, ‘It will explain who I am. It will show you how you might save my life.’ She had received his revelation in silence—an intimation of the cold-blooded way she would end their affair.

  When Ash stretched, his T-shirt rode up to show the brown rise of his belly. On the other side of the world, soldiers were dying in the desert so that people like Ash could stroll about in T-shirts while snow fell outside. These days, when Ash thought of Australia it seemed to belong less to his past than to a time to come, luminous and open-ended. He heard his wife moving about downstairs. In the end, things hadn’t worked out with the Iranian-Canadian anthropologist; when you’re still finding your way around, you make mistakes. Ash had gone on to marry his head of department. Recently, his wife had taken up the directorship of a research centre at Princeton; Ash remained at Rutgers. If he saw a familiar pattern forming, he refused to be disturbed. He left his study and went out onto the landing, where the clean lines in the modern painting that hung there had turned blurry and impressionistic—Ash realised that he was still wearing his reading glasses. He took them off and leaned over the bannister, sniffing appreciatively: there would be curry tonight.

  III

  THE MUSEUM OF ROMANTIC LIFE

  THE EXHIBITION OF PAINTINGS AT the Australian Embassy was opened by Professor Wilkes, a stately Aboriginal man. A specialist in international law, he was in Paris to give an address at UNESCO. The embassy, the work of a famous architect, was on a monumental scale. It was rumoured that the architect had sought to shrink the French down to size. The echoing corridors that could have passed as tunnels, the reception rooms vast as stations provided a heroic frame for long-boned Australians while turning the local service staff into beetles.

  Introducing Professor Wilkes, Valerie, the cultural attaché, said, ‘We couldn’t get Robert or Germaine or Clive, but luckily Brendon was available.’ Valerie had the carrying voice and clear, brilliant complexion of someone who lives on an alp. When she first took up her Paris posting, she had lived in the same apartment building as Céleste. The two women got talking at the letterboxes one day; on learning that Céleste had grown up in Australia, Valerie invited her to dinner. Céleste accepted the invitation and controlled herself when informed that the great thing about France was that social class simply didn’t exist here—such a change from London, where Valerie had suffered as a girl. Even after Valerie moved to the Sixteenth Arrondissement, where one wasn’t subject to constant harassment by the homeless, invitations to ambassadorial cocktails continued to arrive. Céleste met Australian sculptors and language poets and conceptual artists and novelists. They lived at the Cité Internationale des Arts, where they had been awarded residencies by the Australian government. On learning that Céleste was a translator, the writers grew attentive. They would give her their books, expressing the hope that she might translate them into French. Céleste always made it clear that she worked from French to English and not the other way around. That meant nothing to monolingual Australians—at most, it signalled a reluctance that could surely be overcome. The writers invited Céleste to lunch and told her about their trials. No one in Paris had heard of them. They had gone swimming in the pool at Les Halles; the chlorine levels compared unfavourably with Australian pools. Waiters pretended not to speak English—either that, or they made idiotic remarks about kangaroos. Céleste saw that wounds had been inflicted. Setting out from home, the Australians, like fortunate children, had expected to be loved.

  Céleste met Pippa at the exhibition opened by Professor Wilkes. The first thing Pippa said was, ‘Didn’t you just die when Valerie came out with that stuff? I felt so ashamed. That poor man, having to stand there and listen to it. I went straight over afterwards and told him I loved his speech. He was just so dignified and lovely.’ Pippa was wearing coral lipstick, a green dress with a stiff, ruffled skirt like a lampshade, and awful shoes. Her head was too small for the massive skirt—she looked like a broomstick at a ball. When it was time to leave, she placed a red beret at a careful angle on her cropped hair. Effort so far in excess of achievement couldn’t fail to move. When Pippa looked around at the sound of her name, her skirt seemed to turn more slowly than her hips. Her big teeth, contrasting with her neat little features, would always surprise when she smiled. She agreed readily to meet for a drink near Céleste’s apartment in the Ninth.

  The spring had been cold, but the appointed evening was breezeless and mild. The homeless man who lived in the tiny triangular square at the end of Céleste’s street was singing on his bench. As she walked past, he lowered himself onto the bench and continued to sing. Once he had lived in the telephone box at the apex of the triangle, but it had been removed some years earlier; now it was easier for the street cleaners to hose away the cigarette butts and rotting food scraps that collected around him. He disappeared every year in the depths of winter but returned, with the swallows and the pushy leaves, in early spring.

  His song and his smell followed Céleste in gusts. Then came a street that led her past trays of syrupy pastries, and mounds of green and pink marzipan-stuffed dates. Célest
e was unmoved by sugar, so the Tunisian cakes held no appeal. But she always paused before the window of the couscous restaurant next door. Here, a diorama in a fish tank presented dunes of pale and red sand, two camels made of polished stone, and a miniature cactus. From the top of the highest dune, a key rose like a standard—a small, old-fashioned key, made of brass, with an oval head. Within the oval, two arabesques formed a sideways figure of eight. It was this key, out of place yet weirdly fitting, that fascinated Céleste. What had it once unlocked? It was easy to believe that it had a message for her—like all charged objects, it didn’t belong to the realm of reason but to the empire of mythology and dream.

  At the cafe, the pavement tables had been liberated from the glass box that shielded them from the cold. Céleste sat down at a table that had just become free. The onset of winter was a drawn-out descent into a well, but there was no mistaking the beginning of spring—that was as decisive as the first note at a concert. For the first time in six months, Céleste was wearing shoes instead of boots. The shoes were Fluevogs from eBay, plum and pink with hourglass heels. On her way to the cafe, Céleste saw men notice her legs and women her shoes. She was wearing them with a boxy blue suit she had found in a flea market when she first returned to live in Paris. The skirt had been a little loose in the waist then; now, thirty years later, it was a little tight.