Pack Up the Moon
Page 24
“I’m afraid not,” Blacky admitted. “Just visitors.”
“Well, you can turn yourselves right around the same way that you came, in that case,” she scolded with just a trace of a German accent. “I don’t have all day to sit around here and entertain hungry tourist hippies. Visitors indeed! Go on!” She poked Blacky and directed him point-blank to the van.
“See here,” Blacky stood his ground, “I am a doctor. Ich bin Arzt.”
“My English is very good, thank you. Excellent, in fact.” She rubbed the galaxy of freckles on her arm. “We have no use for German here. Or a weekend doctor, for that matter.” She squinted at Blacky. “I’ve seen your type before. Come in here and expect a grand tour and a hearty dinner. Go home and write an article—yes,” she turned to Wolfgang, who was trying to step from the van, “I see you with your big camera! Turn right around!” She turned back to Blacky. “—make a fine lot of cash and all your colleagues think you’re quite a guy! I’ve been through all this before.”
“It’s not that way at all,” Blacky sputtered, deciding at once—I could tell—that an article would be just the thing. “I don’t even have batteries for my tape recorder,” he swore, eyeing me combatively, for I was the one who was supposed to worry about such details and hadn’t.
The woman continued to rage. “What we need is a plumber. Our pump hasn’t run for three days. So unless one of you ridiculouslooking people happens to be a plumber, you can turn right around and get the hightail out of here! Go on.”
Blacky continued to try to reason with the woman. Reiner slipped off to have himself a look at the lepers around the back. I just knew he was going to photograph them, beating me to the punch.
“For God’s sake,” Blacky finally gave up, “we’ve been on the road for hours. Just tell us where the camping place is and we’ll come back at a more convenient time.”
“There hasn’t been a camping place around here for three years! Now you listen to me, young man,” she raged, “I’ve got three hundred men and women here who need facilities and if they don’t get some water I’m going to have another Ruhr outbreak. For that we might need you. Now round up your band of gypsies and get, please, back where you came from.”
She went on tirading for quite a while. I imagined Blacky thought he’d let her wear herself down, but she didn’t show any signs of slowing. He continued to reason with her and she just kept refusing us entry.
Finally, “Come along, Blacky,” Daisy sniffed, “we’ll find some other lepers somewhere else.”
But just then from behind one of the ugly buildings came a grinding, metal scraping sound, and then a gurgling slush.
The tyrant lady perked up her ears and dropped the box of wires she was holding. “My water!” she exclaimed and ran behind the house. Blacky was right behind her and I took up the rear. Sure enough, water streamed. Filthy water, but water nonetheless. It rose from an ancient rattletrap pump. And there stood Reiner, surrounded by some dozen lepers, very dirty with grease all over his guru shirt. He was holding a wrench.
“You did that?” the woman called in disbelief.
Reiner puffed up his chest and cocked one leg up on a pail. “Nothing to it.” He did a little sidestep of modesty.
“Reiner!” Daisy tripped toward him in her new fancy espadrilles. “You’ve saved the lepers!”
The forbidding Agnes, finally subdued, sat tall and stooping but smiling in her creaking rocker over a mug of Nescafé on the makeshift front porch. Now that she had her water she’d become hospitable and even friendly. An aged leper who still had the use of his hands poured boiling water into chipped mugs from a kettle. The damp coarse grains of Nescafé he doled out as though they were gold; everybody got half a teaspoonful. Still, it was the first trace of coffee any of us had had in quite some time and so we savored every wily sip. I did refuse the pitcher of warm milk that was passed around—though I longed for the taste of it—as I imagined it would be seething with leprosy germs.
Not one to let go of a good thing, Agnes had sent Reiner and Chartreuse off to see if they could repair a faulty loom. Blacky sat cross-legged on a mat beside her. He stirred his watery-brown liquid enthusiastically. “Whatever got you started in this line of work?” he asked her.
She peered at him under orange brows. “I was a social worker back in Germany.” She smoothed her lilac skirt. “That was my background. Years and years of taking in the most hopeless cases I could find in the postwar years. As time went on, so did the desperation of my charges. Then I heard an Indian bishop who was attending a nearby conference describe the appalling conditions of the lepers.”
The old leper stood directly behind her chair and nodded his head. He held the burning teapot in the palms of his hands. Agnes lit a cigar and continued. “I impulsively asked him if I could come and help. Well, the bishop hemmed and hawed, then finally gave his consent—on the condition that I pay my own fare,” she suddenly snorted, shocking Daisy so she jumped out of her seat. “One sunny day, much to the bishop’s surprise, I arrived with a little money, a packet of books about leprosy and the Hindu language, and dauntless bundles of energy. If I had known then what hurdles lay in front of me, I don’t think I would have felt so optimistic.” She swept a very weathered, sturdy hand in a broad gesture and smiled. “But as you see, in a way, it can be done!” She turned without looking at the man behind her and removed the scalding pot from his unfeeling hands and put it down on the floor beside her long feet. The man just stood where he was and continued to smile.
“The bishop did not know what to do with me, but he sent me out to a recently donated plot of land in the outskirts of Dehra Dun. I persuaded thirty lepers who made their livings naturally, by begging, to join me. They thought I was a rich philanthropist and their days of work were over. Ha! What a shock they were in for!”
There was a funny smell around the place, chlorine and formaldehyde. While Agnes spoke I peeked into her room. It was cheerful, lined with books and rows and rows of classical music albums. Agnes pursed her disapproving lips at me. “Nice,” I said.
“Yes, they are. Only I have to get up before dawn to hear them. After about six A.M. the electricity just goes kerplunk.”
A blind, partially limbless leper shuttled past the porch supported by a stick. “That’s Jagjivan, our favorite citizen.” Agnes chuckled. “He’s too far gone to work but he sits all day with the women who do, telling them all sorts of stories and fables. He’s got a wonderful wit. Everybody works nowadays, only his job is keeping the citizens’ minds off their troubles.”
Blacky shook his head in wonderment. “How do you ever get them to sustain themselves?”
“Well, the German Relief Organization agreed to finance the maintenance of the inmates for a while. I was busy learning by trial and error how to dress their wounds when Jürgen, a trained mechanic on vacation, dropped by to see what was going on. We desperately needed a latrine and he just pitched right in. With the help of the patients, he built one. It was the first time any of the lepers had known the experience of work that wasn’t begging. They grumbled a lot about the effort, but I think they really enjoyed it. When it was finished everyone sat around the thing for days admiring their work. And Jürgen. He wound up staying for two years.”
I glanced furtively at Blacky, praying he wasn’t coming up with any noble ideas.
“You must understand,” Agnes sighed, “what life means to a leper in India. There are more than a million cases and it is by no means confined to the lower classes. Many are educated, cast out from good families. Because of its terrible connotations, anyone contracting the disease hides it as long as possible so he may go on living in society. Because of that it’s usually in the advanced stages by the time treatment is sought.
“A leper must leave his home and family once his secret is learned. His wife breaks her bangles in the tradition of all widows, shaves her head, and wears the traditional white sari of mourning. There is nowhere for him to go, only begging from the
distance of a curb and watching the years rot away his miserable body. Even if he is successfully treated and cured, he is barred from everything, even religious services. Come along,” she said suddenly, jumping up, “I’ll take you on a tour.” She turned and glared at Wolfgang. “But no pictures. These people have their dignity. I insist you respect that.”
“Yes, of course,” Wolfgang said.
“Of course.” Blacky hurried to walk beside her.
“I got the idea to start the patients with hand weaving one unbearably hot August or September, I forget which,” Agnes was saying. “We all got together and built ourselves a loom. We were determined to become self-sufficient.”
We followed close by. Daisy was having a bit more trouble keeping up in my shoes. We entered a white building filled with snapping, whirring looms. It made a cheerful picture, all those yards of colorful woolen thread, and might have been a factory anywhere but for the fingerless, feelingless hands pushing and pulling at them. Layers of multihued carpets, wall hangings, and bedcovers littered the tables.
Limbless lepers smiled to greet us but kept on working. Agnes rambled about gossiping, hollering, making special note to compliment the finer, more intricate pieces she examined. “Oh, Lord!” she cried out. “I’ve forgotten to send someone for lotto cards! I’ll be right back.”
With that she marched out the door, leaving us alone in a room of curious, half-eaten-away faces. With the boss gone, the women felt a little bolder, made jokes about Daisy’s sexy miniskirt and laughed happily. Jagjivan sat on the floor of the threshold and noisily sucked his pipe.
Chartreuse enthusiastically demonstrated to the men outside how to take their normal game of checkers and turn it into “strip” checkers. They watched him with intense concentration. We all stood laughing at Chartreuse’s attempt to make them laugh with his striptease.
Agnes returned with her hair askew. She walked right up to me. “It is surprising,” she smiled cheerfully, “how fast you find yourself not trying to avert your eyes from the gruesome mutilations and stumps, eh? You see, when you are surrounded by a clean and healthy atmosphere you can look at it as though it is a treatable disease rather than a hopeless, frightening plague. The inflicted become fellow human beings that are within your comprehension. When a man grovels in the gutter like an animal—pah, you can’t help reacting to him as though he were one, no?”
“Oh, yes!” I agreed.
“The beggars in the city call for pity and the coins are thrown with pity. But pity leaves the receiver still begging. And why shouldn’t human beings like you and I not give a higher side of the coin: compassion?”
I took a step back, knocking over a bolt of purple fabric. Three women raced to pick it up, not one of them sporting a full set of fingers.
Agnes, engrossed in her speech, went on. “These workers not long ago lay on the street like all the other animals. I can’t say now that their faces shine with the light of holy redemption but once again they are part of the human race.
“But where,” Agnes went on, “are the rupees, the millions of dollars that people in the West give every week on Sunday for those who really need help? Where is it? Where does it go, all this money we never see, eh?”
I stood there staring back at her, dimly regretting the glittering bangles I’d splurged on in Nepal.
“We will leave our workers to their work,” she said, steering me into the fresh air. Her sneakers, I noticed, were battered with holes and laced up with red string. “You’re headed back to Dharamsala, are you?”
“Yes, we are.”
“The home of the Dalai Lama.” Agnes made a sign of respect. “He might be a king. But he is also a refugee, like the rest of his people. The Chinese have chased all the Tibetans of power away. They’ve murdered many and, naturally, stolen much treasure. Ah. Even the holy ones are driven out.”
“Not many holy people left in the world anymore.” I nodded.
Agnes looked at me with shock. “Don’t say that. Even where you’re going, up in those hills, there are many hermits in the caves. Great hermits. Of course there are charlatans and tricksters, too. Their powers are quite strong and very real.” She let go a caustic snort. “They achieve these powers by sacrilegious means, such as consumption of their own feces when the moon is full, reciting ancient and diabolical chants. Of these you must beware. And another thing: the monkeys. They live there in tribes. The most enlightened monkeys of their race. Unfortunately, they are quite frisky and they are also pranksters. You must be careful because they are dangerous.”
I was just about to tell her my own sad monkey tale, when Daisy and Reiner—the man of the hour—waved to us as we walked down the path. They were surrounded by stubby-nosed leper children who wanted cookies, a story, a smile.
“I wonder where Blacky is?” I said.
“I asked him if he would give me some aspirin for my arthritis, and he went back to your van. I suppose he’s found the clinic by now.” Agnes chortled. “I’ll take you there.” We strolled along a winding path toward a building set in the shade of some nice old trees.
“I have to say it’s very pretty here sometimes,” I said. The clouds had cleared away and I noticed someone had planted flowers. I looked sideways at Agnes and thought, She must have been a picture once. “Did you,” I ventured, “ever marry?”
“Marry?” Her face took on the strains of a cello. “No, I never did. I guess because at the time when I was a girl, all the marriageable men were at war. And when they came back I went off to India. I can’t say that I feel as though I’ve missed anything, though.” She laughed outright and rivets of wrinkles filled up her face. Nice wrinkles. Not like those ugly, overpowdered ones you see at charity luncheons and afternoon movies. She relit her cigar. “I’ve got a family big enough to keep me busy. Right now we’re counting our pennies to buy more land between here and Rishikesh. We’ve almost got it, too. When that happens we can build a new colony and produce more work. And,” she hastened her step, “I’m not really alone, am I? I have my music and my books. The hardness of my life comes when I have to turn away lepers who ask for entrance. Every day they come. Every day I condemn them to a life of begging by saying no.”
We reached the clinic and I caught sight of Blacky before he became aware of me. He was stroking the head of a small child. Sometimes, seeing his goodness, I had the feeling I would never be able to hold on to him, that he would need to be kind to everyone and that I would never find within myself what it would take to live with a sort of a saint. I walked up to him and touched his shoulder. “Would you prefer to stay here? Is that it?”
“The thought did cross my mind,” he admitted.
“But?”
“But, with my specialty, I think I can do more good where I am.”
“Yes, of course.” I sighed. “I, I, I” was always his tune, it came to me. What about “us, us, us”? I grumbled to myself. If this guy didn’t have some sick girl between us, it was an important illness itself. He was just too good for me. If I wasn’t going to be first now, I supposed I’d never be. I might as well try to get used to it. It was a good lesson for me to learn. Why did I think I was supposed to be number one, anyway? I ought to be grateful to be the sidekick to such a wonderful person. One of the lepers, a girl about my own age, was managing to get to her feet with a stick. She hobbled past. I caught a whiff of her decaying smell and I thought, Why do I spend so much of my time preoccupied with dread? Compared with this girl’s, or Tupelo’s, my complaints were nothing but vanity!
At the gate, as we were about to leave, Agnes took my hand warmly and smiled. “I’m not alone here, you see.” She picked one of the children, a scabby, grubby little boy, up into her arms. “Three years ago they planted a piepa tree up the hill there.” She pointed to an attractive spot in the distance overlooking the camp. “And when the tree is big enough, and I am old enough, they will build a little house for me under it.”
“May I photograph that tree?” I asked her.
She waved us away.
On the road back to Dharamsala I was full of my own thoughts and only half aware of what was going on, but then I was distracted by Wolfgang unloading the film from his camera. I kind of looked at him because of the way he slipped it into a can. Then I realized why. He was trying to do it in a sneaky way.
“What did you do?” I confronted him, my hand on his wrist. “You filmed the lepers?”
“Wait until you see the footage I got,” he snorted. “This here is award-winning stuff.”
“Wolfgang, you have no scruples! She specifically asked you not to!”
He gave a short growl of disgust. “And how will she ever know?”
“I wouldn’t have done that if I were you,” I said. Gone were the days, anyway, when I was his pet, that was clear.
He made a cockeyed, know-it-all face. “That’s why I’ll get a first at the Berlin Film Festival and you, missy, will still be shooting bathing suits and wedding gowns in Tenerife.”
“No, I won’t,” I shot back but I saw that he was embarrassed. I said gently, “Wolfgang, we used to be such good friends. And now … how did this happen?”
“I know exactly what happened.” He spit the words out savagely. “Chartreuse had the bright idea to fix you up with Blacky.”
That’s ridiculous,” I said. “You’re nuts.”
“You’re right,” he said, “I was.”
“Claire won’t be in Tenerife,” Daisy said for me, “she’ll be a doctor’s wife in Munich, raising little kiddies.”
“I’m hungry,” Blacky announced. I noticed he didn’t say something to back me up. Then he laughed uproariously and said, “I can’t get that picture out of my mind of those fellows playing strip checkers!”
Chartreuse grinned with him.
Blacky continued. “And when some poor chap is down to his undershorts he can snap off a finger. You know, if it comes down to it. Can’t you see the table in the middle of the night? A shoe, some shirts and pants, and—ho ho—a nose or two!”