by Paul Park
Cassia sat motionless on Sarnath’s lap, her head upon his thigh. He might have thought she was asleep, only sometimes he saw her nose wrinkle slightly as some new waft of putrefaction reached her from the master’s bed. Honest Toil was kneeling with the tears running down his face. Around them the room had emptied out. Only a scattering of villagers remained. Now a few more bowed their heads and rose to leave, responding to a small gesture from the hand of Canan Bey, dismissing them to do their work.
The master’s eyes were closed, and he had sunk down deep into his pillows, so that he was almost prone. “My head is full of shadows,” he complained. But then he roused himself. “Stupider,” he said. “Stupider and stupider. You carried this dead piece of bone from Camran Head? If we all carried on our backs the burden of our errors, just to remind ourselves . . .” His voice sank into nothing.
Canan Bey leaned forward. “Leave him now,” he whispered. “All of you.”
He was leaning forward across the master’s body, making a small gesture with his fingers. Then he bent down to wipe some spittle from the master’s lips, but at that moment the old man started awake. His eyes started open and he reached up to grab the student by the ear. “What are you doing?” he demanded.
“Sir,” said Canan Bey. “I thought you should rest. Perhaps you should rest, and I could change the dressing on your leg.” He tried to pull his head away, but the old man grabbed him tighter. “Please, sir, you’re hurting me.”
“No!” shouted the old man. Then he let go. He turned instead to Mr. Sarnath, who had begun to rise. “Talk to me!” shouted the master. “Talk to me—you understand. How long were you a prisoner of your own thoughts? You know what it means to wait and wait. Tell me—what did that moth mean to you?”
“Sir,” murmured Mr. Sarnath. “I took it as a sign.”
“It was a sign. And this”—here he lifted the skull up in his two hands, so that they could see its strange dead grinning face. “Is this also a sign? A sign for me? My God, my God, my God, my God, my God,” and these words were peculiar, for never before in his whole life had he called upon a deity, or even mentioned the possibility that one existed.
“No,” he said. “But take this and destroy it. Burn these papers.” Then he muttered something incoherent. Then he died.
Part Three:
Brother and Sister
“THE DAY THE MASTER DIED,” said Langur Bey, “he was attended at the end by Canan, Mayadonna, Palam, and myself. This was on the ninety-second of November of the fourteenth phase, near one o’clock in the afternoon. We had feared that he would die during the night—his pulse was very weak. But in the morning he revived somewhat. He even took a little bread. And he was resting comfortably. He did not appear to be in pain. We were discussing, as we often did, some point of natural philosophy—it was a favorite topic for him, the relation between natural philosophy and ethics. As I remember, he was making the point that in human intercourse, just as in science, it is important to select the simpler explanation: that it is always the simpler explanation that has a tendency toward truth.
“Toward noon he grew a little weaker. I remember he had fallen into a light doze, and we students were still carrying on the conversation, though in a distracted way, of course. It is what he would have wished; in any case he woke up. He was staring at the ceiling, and we could see his eyes were unfocused. And it was then that he called for all the townspeople to come in. He knew his time was growing short. He was too impatient even to listen to their questions, though some were bothering him with trivialities and emotional displays. He cut them off—there was no time for such things anymore. He cut them off so that he could pronounce his final discourse—you have it in your copybooks—on the nature of obedience and the suppression of the will, which I would like you to memorize by next Friday.
“And that was very near the end. He spoke a few words to Sarnath Bey, part of our mission to the Port of Caladon, who as luck would have it had arrived that morning. Cassia, you remember that—he was asking many careful questions, though his voice was weak, and then finally he paused. His face seemed to relax into a smile that was also grave and dignified; he lay there for some little time. He was lying near the window, and he asked for the screen to be removed. I remember it had just begun to rain. He asked Canan Bey to help him turn onto his side, and he looked out of the window toward a patch of bamboo trees, which at that time grew beside his house. And he said, and these were his last words, ‘There is another village in the forest, identical to this. The houses are laid out on the same plan. It sits, like this one, in a grove of almonds. Yet in those trees the fruits are made of gold, the leaves are made of silver. And in the center house there sits a teacher. He is waiting for me, and he has made a place for me among the last circle of novices.’ ”
Langur Bey, dressed in a white robe, sat cross-legged on a dais in the schoolroom. His left hand in his lap was pressed into a fist. Next to it, he had joined the fourth finger and thumb of his right hand over his palm. His hands were thin and long, his gestures graceful and precise. Now he took his hands out of his lap. He held his left hand spread out above his knee, and with the smallest finger of his right hand he wiped away a tear, a small accretion of white dust in the outside corner of his eye.
“For tomorrow,” he said, “please meditate upon these words, and ask yourselves especially whether in any way they can be taken literally, or if their meaning is purely metaphorical. Please ask yourselves also . . .”
Rael lay on his stomach with his hand stretched out along the matting of the floor. He was staring at the back of Cassia’s head; she sat ten feet in front of him with her back perfectly straight, and she had tied up the mass of her black hair, exposing her neck and the rims of her ears. Even at that distance if he stared hard enough, he could see the circle of small hairs between her shoulder blades, over the line of her white dress. Even at that distance he could catch the smell of her skin; he breathed deeply, and tried to separate that one small disappearing scent out of the stench of the Treganu all around him. Even at that distance he could make her sense his presence. He imagined the pressure of his stare reaching out like a long stick, touching her gently on that dark circle of hair until she shuddered without understanding why.
Or he could make her turn her head. He could make her turn her head and look at him. He could make her smile, just by releasing one small sound into the air, some breath or gasp or whistling tune, something to remind her that in this schoolroom full of alien creatures there was one who was like her, whose heart struck the same beat. Rael was lying stretched out on the mat. He raised his cheek up from the floor, and he was humming the first note of a small tune, very carefully and low, molding it and aiming it so that it would reach her ear and no one else’s.
“Sir,” said Langur Bey. “If there is anything that you would like to say to me, either on this subject, or on any other, I would be glad to listen and respond. As you can see if you consult your schedule, our session for today includes a period for questions, which however does not begin for fifteen minutes. Until then, I beg you to refrain from disturbing us with these noises, the meaning of which, if in fact they have a meaning, can only be clouded and obscure.”
Rael raised himself up off the floor. All around the little classroom the students had turned to look at him, all but one. His sister still sat with her back to him; all the rest had turned their strange, sad, thoughtful faces toward him. Strange and not strange—these were boys and girls he had grown up with. He knew them. Yet as always at times like this he found that he could barely tell one from another. Their separate individuality seemed to recede into their faces. Looking around, all he could see were the small characteristics that kept him isolated and apart: their frail, bony faces, their eyes too close together, their weak chins.
“Please, sir,” he said. “I beg to be excused.” It was a phrase that he had carefully rehearsed.
The teacher bowed his head.
Outside, the sun was sink
ing down the western sky. Rael paused on the veranda, rubbing his forearms, rotating his wrists. Then he tramped loudly down the wooden steps, and for emphasis he pounded loudly on the bamboo banister, making a racket that no one else in the entire village could have made, for of all of them he was the strongest and most powerful. A woman was squatting in the wet dirt near the pump; she glanced up to look at him, then she smiled and waved. She was washing out a piece of red cloth in a bucket.
Clouds of midges danced around her head. Rael squatted down next to her to wash his face. He washed under his armpits, and rubbed handfuls of water through his hair while the woman pumped the pump. “Lesson over?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Thinking in my thoughts is idiot fool.”
She clicked her tongue against the ridges of her teeth. “We are not all gifted in all ways,” she said, quoting a bromide of the master’s.
A leechfly, drawn by the scent of human blood, had landed on the lip of the bucket—a repulsive creature with a snout almost an inch long. Rael flapped his fingers and it drifted away. Anywhere outside the village, he would have crushed it gladly.
The woman said: “In six months Langur Bey will let you go to work. You’ll like that better, won’t you?”
Rael felt the water trickle down his ribs. He brought his wet hands to his face and inhaled deeply, then he shrugged. In front of them, the neatly swept dirt street curled down into the forest.
She said: “It will feel good to use your strength.”
He doubted it. To the right and to the left, the street was lined with wooden houses upon stilts. He lowered his knee down into the mud, and lowered his head so that he could peer under the veranda of the nearest house. There was some movement in the dark, the scurrying of some animal or bug.
The woman didn’t hear. She was smiling at him. He smiled back.
* * *
Down at the bottom of the hill, the path wound round the edges of the paddy field. Rael stepped up onto the embankment. In the far corner of the field a group of men in wicker hats stood up to their ankles in water, and they were coaxing the village’s lone bullock into position with soft pats upon its rump. They were building something on the far bank, and the bullock was pulling a sledge loaded with sand: a stupid plan, thought Rael, because the bullock was crushing the young shoots of rice under its hooves. A few strokes with a split bamboo would have brought the beast onto the ramp, thought Rael, but instead it was wandering contemptuously through the field, losing sand with every turn, ignoring the melodious expostulations of the men.
A tall boy moved ahead of the beast to frighten away any minnows that might drift beneath its hooves. Standing on the embankment, Rael shook his head, seeing in the boy a premonition of his own future. The boy had been in school ten months before, but he had graduated last in his class.
Rael stretched his arms over his head, taking pleasure in the long, heavy muscles of his shoulders and his arms. Then he was gone, jumping down off the embankment and running east along the almond path. He was itching to get away; at moments like this it seemed to him as if there were a boundary around the village, a mental boundary beyond the barricade of thorns, a moment when the incoherent burden of his mind was finally lifted and he was free, leaping away between two trees appreciated only by himself, leaving the path and running up the dense and crowded slope, his bare feet leaving no mark and missing as if by a succession of small miracles all the sharp roots and thorns and edges of the forest—slipping through the undergrowth, protected from each clawing branch by an integument of sweat that covered his whole body. And even if he did from time to time feel a thorn rip across his skin, or if he gashed the instep of his foot against a stone, no matter, no matter, it made no difference; he had all the blood in all the world and he could run forever in that forest without drawing breath.
He ran up the bed of a small stream, and the slope was steep on either side. There were savak bushes and disgusting joberoot, each plant a nest of writhing leaves. Monkeys hurtled overhead among the limpus trees, their hairless bodies smashing clumsily among the upper branches, shaking loose a patter of small leaves and sticks, and disturbing a whole colony of anvil birds—he didn’t know these names, he didn’t care. But where the slope curled back upon itself, reaching toward the perpendicular, and the stream turned into a small rain above him, he stood up to his shins in a slough of mud and knocked the sweat out of his eyes.
Nearby, the remnants of an ancient bicycle protruded from the earth, a metal, twisting plant. Creepers stretched down through the rocks, and he reached out to steady himself with his left hand, while with his right he pulled a stick out of his yellow hair. He stood as if in a pit of wet black earth; near him a tree had tumbled down the cliff, clearing a gap in the forest canopy, and he could see the sun there burning like a blowtorch, that whole swath of sky a molten blue. And in the gap the anvil birds staggered unsteadily into the air, five feet long with little stubby wings, their heads encased with helmets of bright bone which made a whistling, whirring noise as they rose up.
It was a java tree, its fat trunk covered with a scarlet tar. Half its roots thrust up into the air; the other half was still embedded in the earth. Rael squatted down and pulled himself into the triangular cavity under the tree. When it fell, the trunk had cracked apart, and there was a fissure in the wood above his head. Rael pounded the heel of his hand against the bark, hoping to frighten away any biting lizard or constrictor that had made its home inside. Then he reached in and pulled out his equipment, which he had secreted there on previous visits: one long perfect spear of heartwood and a steel spike.
The heartwood he had cut himself. During the long march to the village when Rael was still a child, Mr. Sarnath had from time to time explained the properties of certain plants. Cassia had learned them all; he none of them but this, for he had tripped upon the heartwood root and gashed himself so deeply that he had remembered when he chanced to find it in the forest. He had stripped away its leaves, its branches, and the soggy, fibrous flesh of its long stalk until the heartwood was laid bare. Yet it was so tough that even then he had not contrived to break it from its root.
So he had left it there, naked, pointed to the sky, half a day’s peripatetic journey from the village, and he had returned only when he found the spike. That he had scavenged from the wreckage of an old factory—one of the ruins in the jungle hills. Most of the metal had already found a second life—put to more productive uses in the village, but this spike he had found himself when there was no one else around. He had worn it sharp between two stones, and brought it to the heartwood tree. Then he had smashed the tree down to the ground and scraped clean his long spear.
Now he pulled it from his hole in the cracked trunk.
* * *
At that time, fifteen hundred days after the master’s death, Mr. Sarnath was living in a one-room cabin, which the novices had constructed for him at the top of the hill. As he got older he had drawn into himself, and he preferred to spend his time in solitary meditation. Cassia came up every day after school to care for him and cook his food.
The cabin was constructed on a frame of dry bamboo. Its walls were plaited palm. In the heat of the day, the dark interior was pierced with beams of light. One, stretching unbroken between a spot on the floorboards and a small hole in the roof, gave him particular pleasure, and often when the sun was bright he would spend an entire day seated on a comfortable cushion, watching that taut beam of light change color subtly in front of him, and change its angle by methodical degrees. Whatever countryside his mind was traveling, he found in that bright wire a small connection to the world, for without thinking he could see the turning of the earth, and see also with immense precision just what kind of day it was, by examining at any moment the metallic content of the wire—how much silver, how much gold, how much copper, how much brass.
He was never taken by surprise, for example, when the sun passed behind a cloud. He would close his eyes the instant before the beam of light was broke
n, and open them an instant after it had reappeared. Or when evening fell and the sun sank at last behind the teakwood trees, already he’d have turned his face away.
As evening fell he would get up. He would put on his dressing gown and he would sit out on his small veranda with a glass of water. He would watch for Cassia to come along the rutted track. At the crest of the hill there was a bald place in the trees with the cabin in the middle of it, built on thin and rocky soil. Mr. Sarnath could see from the veranda a hundred yards along the track, to where it emerged from the wood beside a banyan tree. And though in those days his mind was never concentrated on one thing, still part of him would watch for her, and he would wait for the sight of her in her white dress. Below the banyan tree the path fell steeply to the village; climbing up, she always paused to catch her breath beside the tree, just at the moment she came into sight.
Near sunset on the same evening that Rael drew his spear out of the hollow log, Mr. Sarnath was sitting out on his veranda at his desk, a small wooden table with a top of lacquered ebony. It supported an oil lamp, an inkwell, and six hundred sheets of paper scattered over a palm-leaf blotter. Among them in its nest of parchment lay the dull brown ancient, strange, distorted skull, covered with carvings, which he had taken from the customs deputy at Camran Head and carried on his back a thousand miles, all the time that Cassia and Rael were growing up.
Now he picked it up in his thin hands. With the sleeve of his dressing gown he polished it behind the jaw, where the deputy’s carving was most exquisite. Then he held it up to stare at it, looking deep into its eyeholes. They were rimmed with silver, and there was silver too behind its grinning teeth.
After the master died his senior students had tried to burn the parchment, as he had commanded. But it was treated with some chemical that rendered it impervious to fire. And so they had buried it too, buried it and the skull together in the same hole, obeying the master as completely as they could. Mr. Sarnath had been with them. But at about the same time that he moved out of the village and up into his cabin on the hilltop, he went out to dig it up, carrying a lantern and a mattock in the black of night. That night too he had stood polishing it, wiping the dirt out of its face, surprised to see that it was no different, that the paper which surrounded it was still intact, for the earth was full of vermin. Vermin crept out of the hole that he had made.