by Paul Park
“Look around you,” the master had often said, and Mr. Sarnath often had repeated. Cassia was close to tears, yet still she took a breath. She stood on the bank of the pool and put her hand out to a flowered twig. She stripped off her dress and threw it on the bank, and then she stepped down into the cold water.
The stones on the bottom of the pool were sharp, and she moved carefully across them, until the water was around her shins. Dark, syrupy, fragrant water trickled down over a lip of moss and she stood underneath it, rinsing her hair, washing her arms and legs. Then, sputtering, she stepped away from it and, bending down, examined the insides of her thighs, combed her fingers through her pubic hair, poked gingerly at the lips of her vagina, for all that area felt bruised. As she did so, she heard a woman’s voice, a snort of laughter from the shore.
“You’ve got a pretty one, don’t you? I was listening to it all night, and it was music to my ears. Oh, yes, I remember that old music, though it’s been too long.”
Part Seven:
Brother Longo
SOME OF THIS VOCABULARY was strange to Cassia. But she understood the gist. She stood with one hand on her genitals and she crossed her other arm over her breasts, provoking more laughter from the woman on the bank.
She was small, wrinkled, and extremely thin, an albino specimen of a dark-skinned race, perhaps. She was sitting on some rocks under a mimosa bush, on the opposite side of the pool. Her pose suggested she’d been there a long while, though in fact the rocks had been unoccupied when Cassia had first come. Her skin was mottled, orange-colored mixed with white, her hair orange too, plaited in coarse, irregular braids which stuck out all over her head. She was not old; her teeth, few and widely spaced, were white and strong.
She wore a ragged but capacious red smock, unbuttoned down her chest, so that Cassia could see her wrinkled stomach and her ribs. Her eyes were bright and penetrating and blue.
Cassia had been so shocked to see her that she took all this in, staring evenly, her hand clasped over her sex. Cassia’s upbringing among the Treganu had been so sheltered that her instinct for modesty was not well developed. The posture was a reflex, and since it only seemed to invite ridicule, she soon abandoned it. Instead she turned her back. Splashing clumsily over the sharp rocks, she retrieved her dress and slipped it on.
“Ooh, and a pretty tail too! Lift it up and let me see what’s underneath. Sore this morning, aren’t you? I can see from here!”
Cassia was not modest. But she felt vulnerable as she splashed toward shore. Something in the events of the past night had scraped the inside of her heart, and it required the words of this strange, ugly woman to make her understand how raw she felt. And even though the morning was still fresh, and a red-throated, long-beaked bird still perched upon a twig above her head, Cassia broke into tears as she clambered from the pool and clambered up the bank.
But because she could hear the woman stir behind her, and because her cheeks were stinging and her eyes were full of tears, she mistook the way back to the garage, though it was only a few yards. Its roof was hidden in the trees. Confused, she continued past it, knowing she had gone too far, and yet not wanting to retrace her steps. She could hear the woman coming up behind her, scrabbling through the brush. And she had no wish to see Rael either at that moment: she just wanted to be alone among the rhododendrons and the frangipani bushes, someplace quiet where she could clean her face and sit down and recite a few choice precepts of the master. “Wanting is the thief of love,” perhaps.
Instead she stumbled up into a clearing near the path. There, a woman and two men sat by a fire. Cassia had smelled the smoke as she came up the last few feet, and heard also the sound of the guitar that one man was strumming. And yet the smell, the sound, had not suggested any thoughts to her; she smashed through the leaves into the clearing, and she was shocked to find it occupied.
But because emotion had so hampered her capacity for judgment, again, as they had been by the pool, her perceptions were unnaturally clear, unnaturally complete. It was as if her usual scrim of thinking and assessment had been torn—the drab, semitransparent curtain that is caught between ourselves and the bright world, and for a moment she was able to step through the rent. She looked around. Two men and a woman. She saw, before the note of the guitar had died away, the circle of bare earth ringed with smoldering logs to keep the bugs away. And in the middle a wide mat of palm next to the smoky fire, supporting several bundles of old rags and a row of playing cards. On the far side of the fire, stirring a tin bucket, crouched a squat muscular young woman with a wide face and enormous naked breasts, also big buttocks that were covered with black bark cloth from the pontu tree. Her skin glistened as if it had been oiled, and she was pregnant.
She was pouring a cup of broth into the bucket and stirring manioc greens with a charred stick. A man stood next to her, dressed in a long yellow robe that was embroidered with white thread. His hair was knotted at the back of his neck. Each of his cheeks was decorated with a spiral of white paint. He held a small mirror in the palm of his left hand, and at the moment when Cassia burst through into the clearing, he was retouching one of them with a sharp splinter of wood.
And finally the guitarist, propped up against a Y-shaped stump. He had a gigantic chest, gigantic arms and shoulders, and his hands were callused, massive. The neck of the guitar was wide, the strings were far apart, so that he could curl his mighty fingers onto them.
By contrast, his legs were thin as reeds. He sat cross-legged, his ankles locked above his knees.
In that moment of clarity, all was still. The charred stick was quiet in the pot. The splinter of wood was immobile in the air. The note of the guitar, hovering above them, seemed to emphasize, rather than diminish, Cassia’s perception of silence. But then the strange, chaotic world rushed in again; Cassia could hear the orange woman in the red smock crashing up behind her, and she half turned. A bird was in the tree above her head, a big, featherless carrion bird, stretching its leather wings.
The cripple laid his instrument aside. Cassia’s tears were drying on her cheeks, and even though the woman in the red smock now stood behind her at the clearing’s edge, she couldn’t give her more than part of her attention. This was because the pregnant woman by the fire had taken from a pouch at her waist six silver pods—hot sweet peppers which were Cassia’s favorite food in all the world. In four days she had eaten nothing but cold nuts and a few durian, and the smell of the hot food was making her weak, was filling her mouth with a sweet liquid, so that she wasn’t even aware of the woman coming up behind her until she smelled her breath. Cassia was hungry and she barely noticed even when the woman put her hand out to touch her.
“There, sister,” she said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I’ve got a dirty mouth. Everyone tells me so, but I don’t mean no harm.”
She spoke the traders’ lingua franca of the forest. Cassia moved forward out of reach, so that the woman’s hand fell awkwardly on nothing. “I told her she’s a pretty piece of tail,” she explained to the assembled group. “Though naturally the worse for wear—wasn’t I right?”
The pregnant woman grunted and then turned her head aside. The cripple was smiling; he had a fine strong face, with black brows and a short beard. The other man was holding one long-fingered hand out in fastidious disgust, which provoked more laughter from the woman in the red smock. “Don’t worry about him,” she said, as if to Cassia alone. “Or her either,” she continued, nodding toward the fire. “She’s as stupid as a lump. But the Prince told us to be kind to strangers, and besides, the food is hers.”
If the pregnant woman heard this, she gave no sign. With careful fingers she stripped the silver peppers and dropped them into the pot. And all the while she was looking to the clearing’s edge, where a stand of tall ferns filled up the space between the trees. Cassia could detect some movement there, and the heads of the ferns were twitching underneath the trees. Then closer, until the frontmost ferns were pushed aside, and two children
trundled out. It was a little boy, carrying on his back his infant brother.
They were dark-skinned, like their mother. The younger child was naked, while the older one wore only a ripped T-shirt, which showed signs of having once been green. He had a fat little belly and a deeply serious face; he trudged along like an old man carrying a sack to market until he stood next to the fire. There he tried to loosen his brother’s choke hold on his neck, without success until the woman intervened. The baby started squalling; she took him onto her capacious lap.
In the meantime, with her other hand, she had lifted the stick out of the pot. The cripple, moving adroitly on his knuckles, had picked a wooden bowl up off the mat. Holding it in his teeth, he swung himself over to the woman’s other side. Balancing upon his withered knees, he tried to thrust the bowl into the pot of food. The woman poked her stick at him, and for a while she succeeded in keeping him away. But at a certain moment her attention was diverted by the baby on her lap; he was kicking at his mother’s mountainous breasts, and the cripple, seizing the instant, raising himself up upon one hand, dug the bowl down into the hot manioc greens. Then he was away, avoiding once again the poking stick; with the bowl clamped in his teeth he swung himself over the bare ground toward Cassia until he was beneath her, balancing again upon his knees. Then with a smile upon his handsome face, he held the bowl up toward her.
* * *
The woman in the red smock was Mama Jobe, he explained. Efe was the cook. The man with the painted cheeks was Karan Mang.
The cripple spoke in a careful, cultured city accent, lying on his back on the palm mat, staring up at the sky while Cassia sat by him and ate. For a little while she was so hungry she could think of nothing but the food, and then it was all gone. “Thank you,” she said, wiping her mouth.
The baby was quiet now. The little boy stood by his mother, his hands clasped around a cup of greens. Karan Mang had retreated to the border of the trees, where he sat upon a fallen log. He had a metal basin between his feet, and he was washing his hands carefully, finger by finger. “He came last night,” explained the cripple. “This is a resting place along the path. I don’t think he’ll stay with us. He’s carrying a message from an important personage.”
Cassia glanced at him, and she collected in return a brief disdainful look, a flutter of long eyelashes. She turned back to the cripple. “What’s your name?” she asked.
He smiled. “At this moment I have none. ‘Servant of God,’ I call myself. But in two days’ time my oath will be fulfilled. Then I will stand up, and pick up my old name again.”
Mama Jobe flopped down on Cassia’s other side, a radish root clutched in her hand. “All things are possible with God,” she said, shaking her head.
“Or I will not,” continued the cripple softly. “In any case, the oath will be fulfilled.”
“What oath?” asked Cassia.
“He made an oath at the midsummer festival,” said Mama Jobe. “Under risen Paradise. To sit that way, the way the Prince sat on his final ride.”
The position of his withered legs—his knees turned out, his ankles crossed on top of them—had once been popular among mystics and teachers. Mr. Sarnath, when he meditated, had often sat in the same way, sometimes for half an hour at a time. “I was the strongest runner in my zone,” the cripple said. “It was the gift I made to God.”
He was lying on his back, his face turned to the sky. One hand was folded underneath his head; the other chafed the beads of an amber necklace, which hung down on his chest.
Mama Jobe had split the radish with her thumbnail. But she was looking anxiously toward Karan Mang, who was unwrapping a small package of silver foil. “Baklava,” she muttered. “The Prince tells us to share everything we have.”
“And to avoid covetousness,” the cripple reminded her. “Remember when he was in prison, and he told the people not to envy him, for he would soon be dead.”
They were both smiling, and Cassia smiled too. “Who are you talking about?” she asked politely. But Mama Jobe just stared at her, and the cripple raised his head up from the mat.
“Well, if you don’t know, I’m not the one to tell you,” said Mama Jobe after a pause. She had levered out the pink meat of the radish. Now she was scraping her thumbnail along the worthless husk, suddenly industrious, and she was avoiding Cassia’s eyes.
But the cripple was looking at her calmly. “Where are you going, child?” he asked.
Putting one massive palm flat on the ground, he pushed himself upright, aided by a deft movement of his spine. Then he balanced himself on his frail hams and leaned forward toward her, his finger in the air. “Where are you traveling, along the path?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Cassia. “I was with Rael.” Just saying his name brought back all the misery of the long night. Where was he now? She could not imagine he had stayed in the garage; she raised her head and looked around the clearing. Perhaps he was standing in the woods somewhere invisible. Perhaps he was standing in the rhododendron trees beyond the clearing’s edge. He would not come to find her, not with these people here.
“I was following Rael,” she said.
And in a little while, she went on. “They built a train from Cochinoor. The university reorganized our town.”
Next to her on the palm mat lay a row of playing cards. She examined the one nearest her hand, a nine of stones, painted in bright colors. She put her hand out to touch it, aware also that the Servant of God was studying her too, just as intently. “Where are you traveling,” he said again, “along this path?”
“This is the road to Brother Longo’s house,” added Karan Mang. “Brother Longo Starbridge.”
He had finished his pastry, and now again was washing off his hands. He skimmed his fingers over the water in the basin. His voice was harsh and full of aspirated consonants. It did not suit his face, and Cassia found his accent difficult to understand. She had barely finished puzzling over the last words when Mama Jobe spat out a clot of insults and invective in some foreign language. Even when she relapsed into common speech, she was using words that Cassia didn’t know. “Eunuch!” she said. “Stupid catamite!”
Not understanding, Cassia concentrated on the tone, which was composed in equal parts of anger and of fear. Unconcerned, Karan Mang had drawn a symbol with the heel of his slipper in the dirt, and then obliterated it by pouring out his basin over it. Now he sat polishing his fingernails, a prim expression on his mouth.
But the Servant of God sat next to her, studying her face. Cassia glanced at him nervously, then bit her lips. She was aware that he was still assessing her, and that his decision, when it came, would be final and irrevocable. “Let me see your hands,” he said. She held them out. Supported by one massive forearm, he leaned toward her.
His own hand, as he raised it from the ground to enclose the two of hers, was the more remarkable—callused and strong, and covered with smudged lines of symbols in black ink, which ran from the base of his palm up to his fingertips. They were meaningless to Cassia, yet seemed somehow portentous, especially when combined with the careful way he studied her own naked hands. Cassia also was aware that Mama Jobe was leaning in to look. Even Karan Mang seemed interested, though Efe, seated on a stump with one child between her knees, the other at her breast, had closed her eyes to blissful slits.
“Have you always had this mark?” asked the Servant of God. He was chafing the middle of her right palm between her finger and thumb.
In fact she had not seen it before. It was a rough, mottled octagon between her headline and her heartline, lighter than the ordinary color of her skin.
“I was born in December of the tenth phase,” she said. “My father was named Sarnath.”
Mama Jobe’s gaze was sharp and piercing. The cripple didn’t look up right away; he sat forward on his ruined legs, chafing the mark upon her hand. “That I doubt,” he said, and when he raised his eyes they seemed unnaturally large, unnaturally liquid. “Where is the other one?�
� he said. “Is he also here, upon the path?”
She thought he meant Rael, perhaps. She looked around, trying to sense Rael’s presence underneath the trees. There was a hibiscus bush not yet in bloom, a hundred yards beyond the cripple’s shoulder. Perhaps he was there, waiting for her among the tight new buds. She shook her head.
The cripple chafed her hand. “These are the days of grace,” he said. “With Paradise above us—until tomorrow night we can be free and open with each other. Nothing happens now by chance, and nothing now can harm us, till my oath is at an end. Will you come with us? Efe has brought food.”
Distracted, Cassia shrugged her shoulders. Or perhaps Rael was there beyond the ferns, standing in the open, only motionless and silent, hidden in plain view. Often when they were children she had marveled at the way that he could disappear into a patch of woods, merging with the dappled shadows like a leopard or a faun.
She knew he would not show himself. Angry, frustrated, she forced herself to listen to the cripple’s voice: “For these two days, until the festival, the path is free to all. Open to all. Tonight we sleep at Brother Longo’s mission. Will you join us? I would like him to see what I have seen.” Between his finger and his thumb, he squeezed the mark upon her hand.
While he was speaking, Efe had gotten to her feet, and she was breaking camp. She emptied the uneaten manioc onto a big waxy leaf, and with a piece of twine she made a package out of it. This she accomplished with the infant clasped to her hip, while the child took the bucket and trudged off with it. He returned a moment later dragging it along the ground; it was full of water, which his mother used to wash the bowls. That chore finished, she retreated to the far side of the clearing and, still in plain sight, squatted down upon the ground. The urine descended from her body in a noisy, smoking stream; it scented the air, and she was squatting down and holding the infant out in front of her at arm’s length, and she was making faces as it clucked and fretted, its big head lolling in a circle. Then she moved a few steps away, and sitting down with her legs stretched out in front of her, she perched the infant upon her thighs and encouraged him also to relieve himself. After a few minutes she was rewarded with a few ambiguous drips, which fell down into the crack between her legs. In the meantime, the child had dragged out from the ferns a conical woven basket, almost as tall as he, with a tumpline around the open end. This he balanced against the Y-shaped stump and commenced to load with blankets and bundles; he would lift a bundle up above his chest to drop it over the basket’s lip, and then he would climb up onto the stump to tamp it down with the charred stick.