by Robert Power
I wanted to ask her if he had eaten any raw animals, but I resisted.
CAFE SOCIETY
Davide owned the cafe–gallery in Hampstead Green, on the fringes of the heath. He was one of the earlier refugees from Persia, fleeing soon after the Ayatollah overthrew the Shah. Davide had designed the wrought-iron gates for the Shah’s palace in Tehran, so would have been an easy target for the culture police of the new regime.
But I knew none of this when I stood in front of him brandishing my first full-sized canvas. It was an abstract seascape in moody blues and whites and blacks. I’d seen an earlier exhibition at the cafe–gallery and had the audacity (with no training and very little finished work to back me up) to propose to Davide that he should host a solo exhibition of my paintings.
‘What do you think?’ I said to him. The canvas I was holding up was large and bold and the composition gave the impression of a jetty and the sky at night.
His expression gave me the impression he liked what he saw.
‘What else have you got?’ he asked.
‘Oh, plenty,’ I said, as confidently as possible.
‘You’ll need about twenty pieces to fill the space.’
‘No problem,’ I said.
‘How about I come by your studio to see your work?’ he suggested. ‘Early next week?’
So I spent frantic days bringing to some kind of fruition half-completed paintings, buying makeshift stretchers from the Turkish wood merchant on the high street, then varnishing and stretching the canvases onto the frames. By the time Davide arrived at my rented apartment in Islington, I had something of a show to present.
He was impressed enough to give me a chance.
The first show was a success, followed by one a year for the next four years. I get the chance to rent a studio in an artists’ collective and go on to have five group exhibitions. There are commissions and the blue tiger series. In all I sell about sixty paintings.
Maybe this makes me an artist. A strange, serendipitous and unintended consequence of the overthrow of the Shah of Iran.
ICEMAN
In early spring, when the ice thaws on the streets of Verkhnyaya Salda in Sverdlovsk Oblast, bodies emerge, some with a beer bottle clasped tight by frozen fingers. Hoping for one last gulp, one sip before slipping away into a blackout: a black-ice blanket. Sleep, not such a gentle or soft nurse on such a shivering midwinter night.
One of the icemen is identified as Valery Roshnikov. He had lost his life’s savings when the pyramid-selling bank closed without warning, not even a sign on the door by way of explanation. Valery, due to retire from the titanium factory at the turn of the year, had sat open-mouthed as the TV news showed the handcuffed bank manager being pushed into a police van. ‘Everything’s gone,’ cried his wife, ‘we’ve lost everything.’ Valery stared into space, too disturbed to utter a word, too shocked to be angry. He stopped going to work. Began drinking heavily. First at home, then strolling the streets late into the night. Sometimes he’d not come home. For days on end. Then he disappeared.
Waiting in the morgue to collect his body, Valery’s wife thought of the all the times they had spent together. The happy and sad. The births of children and the deaths of parents. And with a sigh and a tear, she thought of the new days they had promised each other: a blissful future of wine and roses, the soft sands of the Black Sea and an old age together.
EPIDEMIOLOGY
Like John Snow and the pump: the two had their own investigation to undertake.
Same breakfast in the modest hotel in Lhasa. A hotel with windows that opened, real keys to fit real locks embedded in bedroom doors, stairs to walk up and a garden and a fountain. Neither ate lunch as they visited the prefecture hospital outside Lhasa City. One began to feel queasy on the car journey back to the Tibet Health office. Next day she shared her story of the night: the dashes to the toilet, the sweats, the stomach pains. That’s when they tried to work it out. They realised they both had eaten the same food, even the apple the staff had left in the room.
‘I thought mine was bruised,’ said the one who was well, ‘but it was muddy, so I washed it in the boiled water.’
‘Aha,’ said the sick one. ‘I thought mine was bruised too. I ate it but didn’t wash it.’
QED.
QUARANTINE
Some sights are imprinted on the mind: images that last and recur from time to time, to haunt, to tease. For the new doctor, a striking one was a scene he witnessed in Vietnam in the days when AIDS was new and deadly. He was taken by a local medical officer to a clearing in the jungle, some three hours’ drive north of Ho Chi Minh City (nee Saigon). It was an idyllic setting, surrounded by verdant forest and the sounds of the burgeoning wildlife. The young Vietnamese medic explained (quite proudly) how they brought all those who were HIV-infected to this isolation camp. There were three huts. The first was for new arrivals, the second for those who began to fall sick. The third was a hospice for those moving towards death. The image, the tableau, that stands out is when he was taken to visit the third hut, its occupants with bulging staring eyes and wracked bodies. The medic ordered them to attention and they hauled their bodies upright to pay obeisance to the Western visitor. And they did, to the man, obedient to the last. He’d like to have recalled some hope in their eyes (but this was the time of no hope). No, these men stood in line as he looked on with nothing to offer. The touch of a hand? A moment in time?
MOUNTAIN
He wonders what they are made of: memories, where do they hide, ready to reveal themselves? The three were in the Potala Palace (the Dalai Lama was not at home). Each had travelled widely in their lives. Each had stories to tell as they meandered through the thousand rooms, passed the tomb of the Fifth Dalai Lama, encased in three thousand, seven hundred kilos of gold (later one of the three would calculate the value at $105,464,800 at today’s price). Not to mention the precious stones embedded in the tomb. Then one of the three, the Chinese woman, tells of her time in Tehran and one Sunday walking up a mountain. Then he, the ‘calculator’, remembers the same hill and a day with two men and a woman walking up the steep incline, dust and heat and fellow travellers in burqas, laughing and puffing. How much had he forgotten, completely, until the memory was unleashed, rekindled?
THE EARTHQUAKE
It made me think that if I got out of Altai Krai alive and we returned to Volgograd then I’d buy that full-length leather coat that I’d thought was too expensive. We were three days into the aftershocks. The airport was closed. We’d spent two nights in the open (ever since the hotel manager had told us not to use the emergency exits as the building was unsafe). This fourth afternoon we were in a meeting in the basement of the Ministry of Health, a vast concrete mausoleum of a building that was a credit to Stalin and all things Soviet. But for all its solidity it shook and shuddered when the tremor hit. The image of a solid, impenetrable tomb must have passed through the minds of others aside from me. Some houses on the outskirts of the city collapsed, but the Ministry of Health HQ stood firm. That night we were told that all had settled and the airport had reopened. But not so. The very next morning our hotel rippled under the strain of another wave and shifted a full ninety degrees on its foundations. We all rushed to the exit, with no choice but to descend the perilous staircase. There, in the depths of the winter, we gathered and huddled together. Vodka and songs in classic Russian tradition. Waiting for this too to pass. And it did.
When we finally returned to Volgograd I swaggered into the fancy shop, placed the three hundred American dollars on the counter and walked out with the full-length leather coat of my dreams. Nowadays it is old and battered, but I wear it still. As a memory. As a badge.
AID
He was feeling proud – one might say justifiably so. He was walking along the promenade in Nha Trang, on the coast of Vietnam, on a mission with the UN. In more than one way he felt he had arrived: in Asia; in his dream public health job with an international agency in a place where it mattered. Deep in
his thoughts, basking in the exotic sounds and smells, he felt the touch of a hand on his arm.
‘Mister, mister,’ said the woman. She was of middle age, sitting on a bicycle and wearing a huge floppy hat. ‘Help me, please, Mister America.’
She grasped his hand for fear he might disappear. Her deeply lined face pleaded.
‘I help Yankees in war,’ she said. ‘Translator. Fixer. Now I’m beaten. No one. Not even cleaner. Pleases write letter to embassy. Tell them of me.’
A crowd had gathered. He pulled her hand away. Faces pushing into his space.
‘No!’ he said, ‘I cannot help. It is not my job.’
‘Please,’ she begged. ‘You must.’
‘No,’ he said, turning, running away.
TIGER
His middle son would make light of such a thing: nonsense, he would mock. But he knew better. The shape of the clouds and the breaking of the waves on the wall of the Jokhang Temple: the image of the tattoo on his ‘Celtic’ arm. The laughing Buddha with the babies in the entrance to the Keichi Hotel: the same as the statue in his porch at home. Tigers everywhere, even the caged one in the zoo of the Norbulingka Temple. He walks the pilgrim trail around the temple and chants the sutra he learnt in London, and then, at breakfast, it is played through the loudspeaker. He, his middle son, will remind him of coincidences remembered, noted, to be amazed at. He will listen to his line of reasoning, but is happy to recall the locked door of the temple, the keyhole and the urge to peer through. And there, a brightly coloured tiger painted on an ancient wall.
‘Another tiger waiting, just for you?’ the son would say.
‘Yes! Yes!’ says the father. ‘Yes!’
LIPODYSTROPHY
‘I find it really hard to say this ….’ Barry, one of his longestsurviving patients, one of those who had beaten all the odds, stutters, leans forward with his head in his hands.
‘Take your time,’ replies the doctor, pushing a box of paper tissues across the desk.
Barry shakes his head, as if to rattle his brain into action.
He stands up.
‘It’s this.’ He points to the large lump on the back of his neck. ‘The buffalo hump, they call it … and this.’ He runs his hand over his pot belly. ‘Like a pregnant woman. And my legs and arms are like pins.’ He pats his flattened backside. ‘And my butt’s disappeared.’
The doctor looks and listens, chewing on the end of his pencil. How excited they all were when the big breakthrough was announced and, at last, after a decade of death and hopelessness, drugs had been developed and trialled to treat HIV infection. No longer a ticket to the executioner’s table; rather, a chronic, manageable disease.
‘I’m … we’re … so grateful,’ cries Barry, ‘it seems shameful to complain when so very many have died. Friends, lovers. But I used to have such a great body. It was my pride, my asset. I was a gym bunny before they’d cloned them. But look at me now.’
The doctor does look at this man standing before him, and does see the warped and misshapen body. He is sympathetic, but he is a clinician and a pragmatist. But you are alive, is what comes to his mind.
‘We think it is the protease inhibitors that cause this,’ he says, in a tone more dispassionate than he’d intended or expected. ‘Lipodystrophy is the term. It refers to wasting and redistribution of body fat.’
‘And this?’ says Barry as he points to two indented lines, like deep razor-cut scars, running down each cheek.
‘Yes, we’ve noticed that in patients on therapy.’
‘And they all notice it in the bars and clubs,’ says Barry urgently, passionately. ‘It says: “Here I am and I’m HIV positive, steer clear”.’
He laughs and cries and slumps back down in the chair opposite the doctor.
‘I stay at home. I keep the curtains drawn. I see no one,’ he says in a soft diminishing voice. ‘And no one sees me.’
The doctor ponders this brave man before him. A man who has battled disease, who has been saddened beyond sadness by terrible deaths, by excruciating loss. A man who has survived. The doctor stands up and walks around the table to where his patient sits. He puts his arm around this shrunken, shrinking man.
‘We’ll get there,’ he whispers in his ear, ‘together we’ll get there.’
DOGS HERE AND THERE
There are dogs of Lhasa. There are dogs of New York. Dogs of New York go to day care, play school, while their owners sit in the office and fret over Alfie and Minnie, Rex, Fifi and Sam. Dogs of Lhasa follow the pilgrims around the Jokhang Temple, sniffing the feet of prostrate monks, copulating when the chance arises, when the heat is on, the time is right. Dogs of New York wear tartan jumpers and little hats to keep out the cold and go to fancy-dress parties on the weekends. In the Barkhor District, the dogs rummage over the rubbish tips; their fur is matted and their skin is scabby; they limp or lie in the sun as the townsfolk pray and chant. They take a kick, a bucket of water or a scrap of meat in equal measure, the act divested of its identity. In Manhattan, psychologists and groomers open up shop for anxious mum, dad and pet. The dogs of Lhasa walk proud and free, unshackled, innocently unaware of the rarity of their pedigree.
NIGHT-TIME ON HAMPSTEAD HEATH
In the dead of night the Vale of the Heath took on a new life. Long gone to bed were the dog walkers and joggers, the commuters and kite-flyers. The night, and its veil of dark, belonged to the men. The ‘nursery slopes’ (so named) were for the neophytes: for those new to sex in the open, sex in the pitch-black, sex (for want of a cliché) in the raw. Further along the tracks, deeper into the thicket, chains rattled, groans grunted, the air salted. Positioned every few yards, obeying the code of total wordless silence, men stood and waited. For a turn, a nod, a trick. And in the midst it all (the love, the freedom, the blatant physicality) small cuboid boxes glowed fluorescently in the dark, carefully placed in the fork of a tree, nestled in the thick plumage of a hedgerow or bush. Here and there, lime and orange, apple-green and capsicum-red coloured boxes filled with precious gifts on this summer day of 1995: condoms, lubricants, and just for the fun and hell of it, sugar-coated jelly beans and sherbet lemons. Candies to be crunched between teeth, exploding into hushed mouths, watering with love and lust and longing.
RANTHAMBORE
When I told him I was Irish, Govindan, the manager and chief warden of the national park, lit up. ‘Ah … your ambassador is also here with us. You must come to tea at the lodge. The ambassador will be thrilled to have a countryman along.’
On the terrace of the lodge tea and cakes were served on silver platters. The lake spread out below us and a host of birds of varying species were enjoying the cool of the early evening. I was telling the ambassador of the conference that had brought me to Delhi when I heard the sound of the langur monkeys in the trees to our right. A piercing shriek: a warning sound. I knew what it meant and leapt to my feet, mid-sentence. The treetops were alive with agitated, howling monkeys. And there, but two hundred metres from the lodge, was a magnificent tiger. I ran down the stairs so as to be on level ground. Out in the open the tiger turned and looked at me full on. For a magical moment I held his gaze, then continued to run: a dream come true.
TEMPLE WALK
He takes the smooth stone from the bedside table and presses it to his lips. Then he dresses, leaves the hotel and walks the short distance to the Jokhang Temple. Carrying his stone in his cupped hands, he once again joins the pilgrims in their circling of the temple. Round and round he goes, noting, as he walks, the eight landmarks: the prayer poles, the small temples, the ancient tree, the stone kilns where the incense burns. He uses his runner’s watch to map the route, to locate the landmarks around the 0.84 kilometre circuit. The intervals between the landmarks are 0.01, 0.21, 0.32, 0.48, 0.56, 0.82, 0.83, 0.84. Inside the temple he finds eight small stones. He completes another circuit with the stones, dousing them in the smoke, touching them on the prayer poles. In the airport lounge going home he sketches out his plan, studies his map, im
agines the placing of the stones in the park near his house, circling, chanting: a secret garden all of his own thousands of miles from Lhasa.
MEXICO
He knew what he’d do. Go to Tijuana and buy a weight of pure cocaine. Then just walk back across the border, through the checkpoint. Cool as a cucumber. Take the bus back to San Diego, the plane to London, meet the Scarfaced Scot in ‘The Tiger’ at Hackney Wick, keep a chunk for himself and sell on the rest. He’d been working with the Drug Enforcement Agency guys in California so no one would suspect him. He’d walked that crossing twice already, never got stopped, not even a hint of it. They only bother with the Mexicans. Perhaps he’d get Big John from Camden, New Jersey, to go with him. Hang out in the markets, buy some trinkets for the kids (maybe one of those papier-mâché donkeys you hang up and hit with a stick), fool around with the hookers. Stay the night. Do the deal while John’s asleep, so he’s none the wiser. Sweet as a nut.
Anyway, it didn’t happen. He got messed up on a jug of margarita and some killer weed with his worst friend from Chicago and missed a connection or two. Which was just as well, given what transpired a month after he got back to London. The Scarfaced Scot (his erstwhile business partner), plying the trade in their pub, was apparently stepping on the wrong toes. One night a group of Jamaican Yardies, brandishing machetes, chased the Scarfaced Scot upstairs. Scarface jumped out the second-floor window and ended up a terrible mess. The invaders set fire to the pub.
But the Tijuana plan sure seemed a good one at the time.
ON SAFARI
‘Where’s the cross?’ she said, mild panic setting in. The young couple from San Francisco had run ahead. They’d said they would leave a cross marker made from stones to show us where to turn, where to head off down the ridge and into the valley. That should have been half an hour ago. Dusk was settling in and it wouldn’t be long before the wild animals (leopards, lions, dogs) of Chimanimani came out for their nightly hunt. Dark was falling quickly and Katie was getting scared.