Leaning his forehead against his uncle’s shoulder blade, Saminda keeps one eye closed and narrows the other. The world flickers through moist eyelashes like his grandfather’s old super 8 films.
*
By late afternoon, they have reached Balapitiya and the bodies are starting to smell. Not overpowering yet, but sour, pungent, like a pot of buffalo curd left out too long in the sun. There are people stepping over debris, lifting their knees up high and gently placing their feet where it’s safe, covering the bodies with cloths. White flags of mourning have started to appear, but also clear plastic or strips of red and white shopping bags.
He sees a Bo-tree draped heavy with large coloured flags. As they get closer, he sees they are not flags but pieces of clothing – sarongs, T-shirts, shorts, skirts, baby clothes. Around the tree and along the path to the temple, monks walk, heads down. At the base of the Buddha statue, a little girl sits cross-legged with a cut on her head. Damp blood, still red, strings a ruby necklace round her throat. She looks up at Saminda’s face as the motorcycle rolls slowly by and the middle of her top lip forms a tiny v, just like his little sister’s.
Near a hotel in Hikkaduwa he notices suitcases, plastic chairs, a pool umbrella like a javelin in the ground. Wrought-iron screens caught against trunks, woven through with fishing nets, newspapers and leaves. Further along, a woman’s body is caught in the branches of a tree. Her long black plait wrapped like a noose around her neck. Children walk around silent, women drift with bundles on their heads, young girls with crying babies on their hips.
Before the light begins to dim, they continue on towards Galle. Going through the old Dutch gate to the fort, things seem almost normal. But as they emerge they see the cricket ground, completely flooded. In the centre, balancing awkwardly on the pitch are a red public bus and a battered yellow freight container. Water lies in stagnant pools, covering the grass with a brown sheen. Dead fish stare at the sky. They avoid the bus station, entombed in metal and wood and strewn with stranded bodies. They turn off along the beach road and weave their way through the turmoil at a walking pace.
Amongst the debris, they search for kilometre markers. It’s difficult to know how far they’ve come otherwise. Saminda knows they must turn off at the 111-kilometre mark. One hundred and eleven. Like Youhana’s score. When his uncle taps his knee and points to the marker, Saminda looks for the house of his best friend, Asanka. He looks for their food stall in front – the baskets of red rice and lentils, the heavy hanging stalks of bananas and clusters of yellow king coconuts, the bars of soap and packets of milk powder.
As his uncle slows to turn off down the road that leads to Saminda’s house, he sees a single plank of wood still partly covered with the bright red handbills advertising mobile phones that Asanka’s father had used as decoration when he rebuilt the stall just before Christmas. The monks had come down from the temple for the blessing. There is still a strip of the blue plastic bunting snagged on the broken piece of wood.
Entering the mangroves, the dirt path alongside the river becomes too slippery for the motorcycle, so they dismount and walk. As the river turns to face the coast, they first see the vehicles, then the shoes and clothes, and finally the bodies. Before the turn off to his parents’ house, the surface of the water is no longer visible. Just metal and cloth and tangled hair and bloated skin. And a sour smell like overripe wood apple pulp.
When they arrive at the house, they understand at once. Pieces of furniture tumbled down to the paddy field. Strewn sandals and toys, cooking pots and carpets caught in window frames and bushes. A fragment of his father’s radio balanced on the fence. His uncle says nothing. Just presses down on Saminda’s shoulder, fixing him to the place he’s in, and turns to enter the house.
Saminda waits without moving, eyeing his toes as they drill into the black sludge smothering the front porch. In pooled water by the edges of the concrete, a frayed shred of blue sky passes and unravels. His arms hang heavy by his sides with dread, and his tongue is swollen in his mouth. And still he stands and listens for a sign of life from inside the house, until the quiet starts to squeeze his chest and he has to get away. He runs up between the paddy fields, his feet skidding out from under him as he veers left and right around scattered objects. He crosses the main road, and heads up behind the temple and towards the school.
The water has reached only as high as the school’s front gate. He runs up the steps to the junior secondary section and to the Grade 7 classroom. Placing his foot on the ledge of the windows, he hooks his fingers through the mesh grating and pulls himself up. With one hand he reaches up into the damp space on top of the window frame. His fingers skim over the splintered wood and stop as they touch the faintly curled edge of a card. He slides it off the edge of the wooden beam and brings it level with his eyes. He studies the image, the vivid green background and the white-shirted figure sweating in the bright sun. Murali doesn’t look at him. He’s leaning forward, eyes wild and glaring at the batsman, mouth wide open, his left forefinger pointing skyward. Saminda knows he’s the best spin bowler ever. He knows he’ll beat Warne’s record once again. His dad says he’ll do it next year, for sure. His dad says they’ll go see him next time he plays in Galle. Saminda brings the card close to his face and smells the dust and damp. He squints until his eyes are focused on the sweating bowler’s face, on his bulging eyes, and then he brings it closer still, until it fills his field of vision and the image becomes a blur.
Grief
David Brooks
We are early – have to be, to greet the mourners – and sitting on a bench beside the open coffin. A strict ritual. Knowledge passed from funeral to funeral, by those who have been to so many. There has been discussion as to whether her face should be lightly veiled, as it was when we entered and the lid was first removed, or uncovered. Aldo wants it uncovered, and it’s at last his say. His mother. For some reason the funeral directors have made no attempt to disguise the wounds on her face and I can see now how large they are. But they are on her right side and we are seated on her left. Aldo touches her cheek tenderly – brushes it, rather, with the edge of his hand – then leans over, kisses her on the forehead. It is the first time I have ever seen him kiss her.
*
I am still thinking about the cat. A lingering image on the mind’s retina. A dying glow. You look into the light – at some lit object – and then close your eyes, and the light, the shape of the object, is still there, blurred at the edges, its features lost; some force emanating from within. Except that in this case it was not light. Was, and was not. Is not. A tunnel vision. A vortex down which, since it happened, I am always falling yet never seeming nearer or farther away. A kind of vertigo. And the mountains today like great waves there on the horizon, about to engulf us.
*
The old lady died on the Tuesday. Sad, but no great surprise. I’d heard her from the rooms below, for six weeks or more, shouting, calling out names, lost in the corridors of herself. Long days of silence and then it would break out again. She would. I don’t know what brought it on. The wind maybe. Or some weather inside her. Katia told me of her death almost matter-of-factly as I was talking with Igor on the balcony. There’d been a phone call in her study, and she came out. ‘Nona just died,’ she said, ‘at the hospital a few minutes ago. That was my father. He’s there.’ And we went on with our day, tentatively, not knowing what else to do, waiting for something to arrive, to break.
*
A nausea, perhaps. The overwhelming weight of being. But also something more, surely. The heart was wrenched, as if something had pried it open. The opposite of nausea. Not closed in by things, but offered them, in their depth. Or drawn by them, rushed into them. As if one were being sucked out of oneself. A force. A kind of gravity. The cat at its centre, there in the boot-room.
*
At Alex’s, while we talked at the table inside, our chairs angled towards the French doors so that we could see the view, the cats came, four, with a
fifth somewhere off in the forest – dying, Jacqueline said. All of them were scrawny, under-nourished. Jacqueline fed them but they never fattened. Village cats. Worm-ridden probably. Katia always annoyed that Alex and Jacqueline didn’t pay them more attention, offer more affection, see their condition. Katia rescued a white kitten from there two years ago, bonded with her instantly on the lawn, took her home. In twenty-four months she’s become sleek, independent, strong. Bianca. At the window, late at night, while I read. Waiting for entrance. ‘That one’s Bianca’s mother,’ Jacqueline says, pointing out a gaunt, long-haired tabby, oldest of the four. Looking as if she might be dying too. ‘No,’ says Jacqueline, reading our minds, ‘She has always looked like that.’ So many cats in these villages. You’d think they were the inhabitants, not humans.
*
This late afternoon – this late afternoon and on into the evening – I have watched a mass of clouds gather in the north-east and darken to a deep bruise-purple, and felt the pressure mounting within them, electrical, torrential. Couldn’t it be like that? The Outside? And now, just moments ago, seen the first lightning. A crack. A fissure in the sky.
*
Igor left, in any case, not knowing what to do. I waited for Aldo to return from the hospital, anticipating his grief. But when he came back he put the car away, went into the downstairs kitchen for a while, then came out and went down to the fields. Perhaps he was sobbing down there. I don’t know. And as to what Katia was feeling, there are times I can’t tell that either, especially when it comes to family. Her grandmother hated cats. And Katia had claimed to hate her grandmother for hating them.
*
You carry such things around with you. I was sitting on the terrace of that strange hotel a hundred kilometres away, a fortnight later. Who ever heard of a hotel room without a table, a chair? And so I’d come downstairs. It was quiet on the terrace, and shaded by the building, out of the sun. A broad, calm view of slopes covered with trellised vines, mountains capped with snow even at this late stage of summer. And in the vineyard just below the terrace a dirt track, leading off along the edge of the vines, turning at the end into a small wooded area, disappearing from sight. What is it about a track that makes one walk along it in one’s mind, wonder what one would see? Grasshoppers, I thought suddenly, or a butterfly, a large bee on some thick clover beneath a vine-stock. And silence. There would be silence. That as soon as you listened to it would be full of busyness, the constant whispering and shuffling of things, the breathing that becomes almost a hum, a soft shrillness answering from within. Would the track reach the mountains, if I followed it? This dream, of all tracks merging, everything connecting, drawing you …
*
As the priest delivered the eulogy I was looking at the stones. The cracks in them, the spaces between, the broken places. Filled with crumbled mortar. Here and there droppings that Danaja’s broom didn’t catch. Of mice, not rats. Too small for rats. Evicted temporarily but watching from somewhere. Rafters, cracks in the walls. To come out and re-occupy when all was finished. This chapel not much used. Another year, two, before the next disturbance. Light filtering through dust motes. Tiredness in the priest’s voice, or just a studied calm, as he went through the formulae, holding something at bay. That hugeness inside us, outside us.
*
She had fallen. I had been working at my desk and there’d been a commotion below, muted: I couldn’t hear any sign of panic. A dragging of furniture, metal frame on tile, that can only have been her bed. Without the language I can’t help much, think I am only in the way. And others were there in any case. And then, ten minutes later, Aldo, asking for Katia though he knew she wasn’t here. And explained, although I only half-understood. Except that he needed to tell. I understood that. That she had fallen. Hurt herself. And went away, with a kind of shrug. His shrug. As much to the world as to me.
A few minutes later an ambulance arrived. I watched from the upstairs window as they brought her out. She looked unconscious, head back as if in mid-gasp, a wound on her cheek, another above her eye. Not much blood. Why do I think it thickens, in the elderly, almost reluctant to leave?
*
He had been there, Aldo, in the hospital, at her bedside. She’d complained of feeling sick, wanting to vomit, and he’d called for a nurse. By the time someone came she’d passed out and her eyes had rolled back. They had taken her away, and left him there waiting. Soon they returned and told him she had died. He told this to Katia that night, late, after I had gone to bed. They would not use the church for the funeral, nor the priest, not this one. No surprises there. They’d use the small chapel in the cemetery instead, and arrange for someone else to come. They’d have to spend the next day cleaning. The chapel stank of mice – or rats, who knew? Katia thought rats – and there were droppings everywhere. I offered to help, but no, she’d do it with Danaja. It was all arranged.
*
I don’t remember when it was I saw the moth. On the light-fitting over the sink. There are moths here day and night during the summer, as there are anywhere when you leave the doors and windows open to catch the night air. Souls, people say. Psyche. This one of a bright green I’ve never seen on a moth before. Uniform, unvariegated, the colour of a grass-blade in late-summer sun. An after-image of day. But why? So that I would see it? Carry it into my sleep? As if it needed a ride somewhere, and I were psychopomp.
*
Katia is at loggerheads with the priest, a new appointee. Over an old transgression, on his part not hers. When they were at university together. A drunkard, and violent. She’s had him banned from the house, by order of the bishop who’s been inundated by calls to bring the previous priest back. His response to ban the previous priest from the parish entirely, so that the new one can get on with it. But now Nona is dead, and Katia’s parents have bitten the bullet, gone to the bishop’s house, caught him and his minions at breakfast. He’d have looked petty to refuse. A special dispensation. The previous priest allowed back, just this once.
*
Heavy rain the night before the funeral. Air clear in the morning, all the haze washed out. The far mountains outlined clear against the sky, mist like a white skin on the plain, peaks floating above it unanchored, cut adrift. I’d been worried that the grave had already been dug and would now be filled with water, but no, they must watch the weather. Came early in the morning and dug it then. Three men, who by the time the funeral had commenced had changed into suits. In the same small plot as her husband, dead forty-five years now. How would they do it? Dig until they find a trace of him and then place her on top? His coffin rotted now, surely. Gone. These things you don’t think about until you need to. So many bodies in that small cemetery. And how will they manage with me? Not so hard I suppose. I will be ashes in a jar. Katia will hold me.
*
A thought crosses the mind. Or is it a vision, a glimpse? This of the moth – as if I were with it – in the garden somewhere, feather-light in the corners of darkness. Dreaming me, moving on.
*
A week after. The eighth-night Mass. Has she been waiting, for this final permission? Aldo is anxious that he not have to go alone, but the church is being painted; the first floor of the gallery next door is to be used instead. And Lucia, Katia’s mother, is still on crutches after her operation and can’t handle the stairs. He comes to ask Katia to go with him, knowing full well her fury with the church, and she too at first refuses – he has left it too late, the dinner is already on the table – but then unexpectedly relents. Leaves the meal half-eaten. She will be half an hour, no more.
I sit and watch the sunset. Half an hour, forty-five minutes, an hour. People are walking back from the Mass in first darkness. More people than I would have thought, but then Nona has been here a very long time. And then suddenly, from the courtyard, Katia’s voice calling, urgent. I go to the landing. She is holding something to her chest. A cat, she says, and it’s dying, might be dead already, she can’t tell. Bring water. Bring food. By
the time I get down she has laid it on its right side on the floor of the boot-room. She rushes into the house to get a syringe, so that she can feed it the water drop by drop.
I watch it in the pool of yellow light, can see no movement. Long, thick hair, matted, gaunt, either very old or very ill. Both. It must weigh almost nothing but already the gravity has flattened it against the tiles. It. Him. Her. Such sad stillness. And then suddenly the right forepaw stretches, lunges almost, a spasm, and goes limp again. Within seconds Katia is back and tries to coax it to drink from the syringe, but the water simply runs out onto the floor. We place rags in the alcove at the side and she moves it there. There is no resistance in its body. It droops in her hands like something already far off. As we finish our dinner she tells me the story. That she’d seen the cat in the grass by the road, as she was walking to the Mass, sick, obviously dying, and straight afterwards had run back there, to find that it had moved to the other side. Robbie had called from his porch to say that it had been there for three days already, and the woman next door to him had been feeding it. She had checked next door, no one was there, so she had gathered it up and brought it home. When I express consternation that people have been walking past it for days and that no one has taken it to a vet, she tells me that I still don’t know these people. For them it’s just a cat. It, not he, not she.
*
It was later, just after ten, I think. I had been reading some dry philosophy, bored, skimming, looking for something. I suppose you could say my mind wandered, without in any way signalling that it was doing so. And there was a sudden tunnel, a vision. I was looking at the cat – although it was impossible, although I was at my desk and it was downstairs and across the courtyard, in the boot-room – as if through a portal, or port-hole, surrounded by darkness, in a pool of hot, rancid light. And had just realised what I was seeing – that it was the cat, so deep and so burdened with its dying – when the wave struck and whelmed over me and I was submerged in it, fighting for breath. Of anguish, a sadness beyond measure. And I was standing there, before Katia – there was nowhere else to go, the sobs breaking from me, despite all I could do to hold them.
The Best Australian Stories 2016 Page 22