The Pathless Sky

by Chaitali Sen

  “You need an ambulance.”

  “We’ve already called it in.”

  The guard walked him back to the truck. John got in and gripped the steering wheel to steady his hands. The two of them were watching him now. The other one looked nervous as John drove away.

  He drove a little further and pulled up on the side of the road to call an ambulance himself. He was sure his prisoner needed a doctor, a proper doctor, not a military doctor. He picked up his radio to call an ambulance but before he had a chance to figure out what to say, the prisoner, who must have been unconscious for a while, began to wail like a wild animal. He was pounding on the divider, so hard it made the front seat quake, and John realized the man was not restrained. His pounding lacked a distinctive metallic clink.

  John waited for the pounding to subside before he got out. “I’m going to open this door,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to talk to you.”

  Not a sound came back to him. He opened the door, expecting to see a huddle in the back corner of the truck, but before he knew what was happening the prisoner leapt out, pushing John to the ground and squeezing his hands around John’s throat. The man’s thumbs were lodged into his neck. He was incredibly strong, made stronger by grief and rage, and just when John was about to give up fighting, the hands around his neck slipped. He moved quickly, pushing the prisoner off him with all his strength and slamming his head into the bumper until his whole body went limp. Fresh blood poured from the man’s head into the dirt, but he was still alive, still breathing. His eyes still blinked. Tears spilled out of them, making tracks in his dirty cheeks.

  John could have left him there. He could have called the ambulance, as was his intention. He could have concocted a story about being knocked out and disarmed by a prisoner who got away, but it did not occur to him anymore to do those things. He went into the glove box for a spare pair of handcuffs. By the time he came back, the man’s eyes were closed. He was unconscious, and John hoisted him into the truck. He drove to the fort and deposited his prisoner, looking so damaged himself they sent him to the infirmary. When they’d finished wiping the blood off him, they’d discovered none of it was his own.

  In the canteen that night he saw the two checkpoint guards sitting together, not speaking. They caught him staring and forced John to look away, and that was all that ever passed between them.

  On his last Sunday he sat in his truck, gazing at the sunrise. All of this space and solitude had led him to make a decision about his future. He took his compass out of his pocket and read the engraving. The sea that calls all things unto her calls me, and I must embark. Mariam had chosen this for him. She had waited for him to find his courage and watched him open this gift with sweet anticipation. In turn he had given her nothing. A few fervent kisses and some promising words from a distance—scraps—that was all he had given her, and with certainty he would fail her again. He could never be the man he wanted for her. Mariam was something extraordinary. She had no idea of her own worth, yet he knew exactly what he was.

  He went to the side of the road and dug the heel of his boot into the dirt until he’d made a deep hole. He put the cool brass against his lips before he threw the compass into the hole, sealing it into the tightly packed earth.

  When he got back to Alexandria, he sat down to write her a long letter. All of the things he wanted to say were there on the surface of his mind, the terrible things that had happened since they last spoke and what he learned from them. Theirs was a country of firm boundaries not meant to be crossed, or rather, he didn’t have the strength to withstand the difficulties of crossing them. He knew what he wanted to say, but when he began writing, the words escaped him. In the end, the letter was brief. It only needed to help her let go of him, so that she could carry on with a fruitful life.

  Dear Mariam,

  I know it has been many months since you’ve heard from me. As you’ve probably guessed, my military service is over and I’m back in Alexandria. Over the last few months, I had a chance to do a lot of thinking about my future. I’ve decided to pursue a doctorate in Geology, which will be strenuous and time-consuming, and I’m afraid it isn’t realistic for us to move forward. You need to stay close to your parents and I can’t be of much help in your situation. We have to accept that fate was not on our side in this lifetime. I wish you all the happiness in the world, Mariam. You’re in my heart, always.

  It wasn’t the letter he wanted to write. Still, it brought tears to his eyes.

  Her response was two words written on a slip of paper torn from a notepad. I understand. He squeezed it into a tight ball and held it inside his fist. It’s done, he thought. It was finally done.

  He lost himself in the text of James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth and worked on his application. In the entire country there were three doctoral programs in Geological Sciences, one at Presidency College in Alexandria, one in Sulat, and another one at Mount Belet. Sulat was out of the question, with Mariam there, and he could see no reason to go back to Mount Belet. In January, he began his studies in Alexandria, happy for his mind to be occupied again. He found his chosen discipline to be utterly absorbing. In a way it was like falling in love, and this love consumed him for many years.

  * * *

  His final letter arrived. She came home from work and saw it on top of a pile of mail on the kitchen table. Her mother was sitting at the other end of the table, peeling potatoes, and they were both eyeing the letter at the same time. Mariam tore it open and read it right there. She knew, from his mother’s polite detachment and the months of silence, that this was coming, and it would make no difference if her humiliation came in the privacy of her room or in the kitchen in front of her mother. At least he was saying goodbye. A part of him must have wanted to simply slip away and fade from her memory.

  Her mother had long stopped what she was doing. Neither of them said a word. Mariam put the letter back in the envelope and went upstairs to her room.

  A few weeks later, she saw the widower again. He grabbed her elbow as she walked down the street and asked if he could take her home. He must have been watching her long enough to see that she’d lost all her confidence. She went with him, right then, and all afternoon made him the object of her furious desire. After that, they met every Saturday until the end of winter. At the end of winter he asked her if they would ever be more than this. He said the neighbors were beginning to talk, that they had noticed her coming to his door every Saturday like an expensive prostitute, and if it got back to his children he would never forgive himself.

  Even though she cared nothing for the widower, she cried all the way home. Like her mother, it wasn’t her privilege to be wanted. Once she accepted it, after more time went by, she was able to realize that she wasn’t unhappy. Her days had a certain rhythm that pleased her. She enjoyed her work and found tranquility in her home life. Best of all, her father had turned a corner. He was speaking and walking with more confidence. He was moving about the house and carrying on rudimentary conversations. One day Mariam came home from work and saw a photo album sitting on the kitchen table. “Your father had me rummaging through boxes looking for that,” Mama told her. “It’s his album from his student days. He wants you to look at it with him.”

  Mariam was touched. She took the album to her father in the living room. He sat up when he saw her, and she joined him on the sofa with the album open across their laps. There were pictures from all over Europe, some of himself but mostly of his friends, strapping Germanic lads with broad grins, young women with blond hair that fell in curls to their shoulders. He pointed to the pictures, trying to say the names of the people and places, and in some cases his pronunciation, especially of the German cities, was perfectly clear. Munich. Stuttgart. Berlin. Mariam complimented him. “Your German is very good.”

  They came to a picture of her father and mother together, sitting in an outdoor cafe. Her mother’s hair w
as windswept, wisps of it falling across one cheek. He was sitting close to her, his arm behind her shoulders. They made a stunning couple.

  “She could have been a film star,” Mariam said.

  “Yes,” he agreed, tapping the photograph. He had loved her then, and Mariam imagined their buried grief to be a kind of magnet, pulling them together, even if it was that same grief pulling him away years later. Suddenly, Mariam was moved to do something she had not done since she was a child. She leaned over and kissed her father’s cheek.

  “Mary,” he said, patting her hand. He called her Mary now because “Mariam” was too difficult to pronounce, something about the shortness of the syllables. They stopped trying to correct it a long time ago. He couldn’t say his wife’s name anymore either—Arifah—but now he called her “love,” and it was beautiful when he said it.

  She didn’t mark the passing of time, but it passed quickly. In three years, the war archives were catalogued and prepared for public use. At the end of it, Mariam was proud, but she fought off a sense of mourning having once again lost something that had enthralled her. She was twenty-six years old, and just beginning to think of her future. She wanted to find her own path before it was too late. She wanted to go to Paris. She wanted to fall in love again, but properly. She wanted to continue her studies, perhaps in library science or in a different field. She realized there was so much even in her own country she hadn’t seen. She had never been to Alexandria, for instance.

  One afternoon she was dreaming like this, thinking about Paris, when she noticed an old man waiting for assistance at the reference desk, a slight little man with crinkly eyes. He must have been trying to get someone’s attention for a while.

  Mariam approached him. “Is anyone helping you?”

  “You, I hope,” he said amiably. “I’m Dr. Malick. Head of Geology.”

  “Of course. I recognize the name.”

  He seemed delighted by that. “I have a reference packet I need compiled as soon as possible. I’m taking my students to Alexandria for a regional conference. I’d like them to know who they’re meeting.”

  “Sounds important,” Mariam said.

  He passed her a paper with his handwritten notes. “Forgive me if my writing is unclear. These are articles I want to include. Is this all right?”

  “I can figure it out,” Mariam said. There were about eight articles, all with multiple authors. None of it meant anything to her until she came upon one name, Merchant, and the initial after it.

  “Do you know all these authors?” she asked.

  “I do.”

  “This Merchant, J, is he around twenty-six, from Alexandria?”

  “He is. Do you know him?”

  Mariam smiled. “I think I did know him, at Mount Belet. I was there for a short time.”

  “It must be him,” Dr. Malick said. “He’s at Presidency now. Bright young man. Quiet.”

  “What a coincidence,” she said.

  “Was he interested in geology even then?”

  Mariam hated to disappoint him. “He was eighteen,” she said. “He was interested in many things.”

  That amused the old man very much. “I think I get your meaning. And what is your name?”

  “Mariam.”

  “Mariam, shall I tell him you said hello?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Anything else?”

  Mariam couldn’t think. “Tell him I’m doing well, if he asks.”

  “I’m sure he will ask,” he said.

  After he left, Mariam ran to the stacks to look for the journal containing the article. She was eager to read it, to see if she could hear John’s voice in it. Once she read the first paragraph, she couldn’t continue without laughing. Not a word of it made any sense, yet somehow it did sound like him.

  PART TWO

  Alexandria

  FIVE

  Dr. Malick of the University of Sulat Province was a spry, wiry man in his fifties, with thin strands of hair that seemed drawn to some heavenly body wanting to lift him upwards. His papers were mostly technical, minor in scope. He seemed to relish the practice of geology, the tools, the products, the meditative fieldwork, the craft rather than the theory, as if he wanted to know only what was there and capture it with an artist’s hand, with little interest in the forces that created it. His talks were so tightly focused, so fixed on one object, in this case a single, intensely detailed map of English Canal illustrating the difficulties of mapping around an urban center where the geology is often obscured, that he often left his listeners wondering if he’d been speaking in a long, extended metaphor and they’d failed to grasp it.

  In this seminar he led a debate on the continued use of manual plane-table mapping, despite the new technologies that made it obsolete. He argued as well for the remapping of regions as the understanding of the geology of those regions evolved. In the end, there was no denying the beauty of his hand-drawn maps, and the depth of the story they told. “A map is never truly finished,” he said. “It can’t capture the whole story but it is an endeavor, a labor of love, and no satellite picture can compare to that.”

  John liked that description. Something about the tenderness of it moved him, and yet it was so expected. “Sulat is for lovers” was a phrase they used at Presidency to belittle their method. John’s own graduate program, at Presidency College, was more theoretical, tailored for those whose overwhelming ambition was to emigrate, and as such it often felt rootless. The program at Presidency was about testing what could be known, about stretching into the far reaches of time or geography in order to know what was intuitively thought to be unknowable. At Presidency every question about the earth’s evolution was worthy of research, whether or not it was useful, whether or not there were sufficient resources for conducting the research and actually reaching any viable conclusions. Then there was the Mount Belet program, growing rapidly but underrepresented in this seminar room. Mount Belet was for the capitalists, the sons of industrialists who wanted to expand their wealth. They were not scientists so much as gentleman pirates.

  And over there in the outer-province of Sulat was Malick, toiling away on his maps. John was certain the insult of the refrain, Sulat is for lovers, would be lost on Malick. Wielding enough influence to bring together the country’s three academic geological programs, with all of their philosophical differences, Malick had proven the utility of love.

  When the seminar ended, John’s advisor, Nehemia, asked him if he was coming to lunch. John watched Malick as he carefully rolled up his maps, while everyone around him stood up and fled the room.

  “Yes, you go ahead. I’ll bring Malick.” John liked Malick. He was interesting, and he and John had developed a certain rapport.

  He’d only met him six months earlier. From the beginning John had watched him with too much intensity, heavy with curiosity about this man and his home in English Canal, the place he inhabited alongside Mariam. It was ridiculous, after three years without a word between them, to look at him and think of Mariam. She was lost to him now. That was the choice he had made, for good reason, but his body never did come to understand it.

  Now, the room had emptied out and Malick spoke up. “Are you going to sit there staring at me or are you going to help?”

  John got up to help, holding up the long tubular cases so that Malick could place his rolled-up maps inside and seal them up.

  “You look tired,” Malick said.

  “I didn’t sleep last night.” He had not been sleeping, not for weeks. “I was working on my dissertation.” For his dissertation he was analyzing the formation of the metamorphic bedrock along the Alexandria uplift in order to map the peaks and elevation of the crust that had once stood above it, a mountain range as high as the Himalayas. Now it was all numbers that ceased to make sense.

  “It isn’t going well?” Malick asked.

  “I th
ink most of my data is wrong. I think it’s all wrong.”

  “What does Nehemia say?”

  “He said I should figure out what’s right about it, get it done and move on.”

  “He has a point. I don’t even remember doing my dissertation. I know the topic. I have it somewhere in a box. But I don’t ever look at it or think about it. Hardly anyone continues to pursue their dissertation topic after they have their doctorate.”

  “I can’t imagine abandoning it,” John said.

  “You find another angle. Good research takes years, John. You don’t have that kind of time. Finish it. Get your doctorate. Then you go on to the study that’s going to make your career. Can we lock these up somewhere?” Malick asked.

  “Leave them here. I’ll lock the room.”

  Malick agreed and stood up. Suddenly his whole demeanor changed. His hands flew up in an animated flutter. “I almost forgot. I met a young lady last week who said she knew you at Mount Belet.”

  He must have said Mariam’s name. It happened so fast, her name like the flapping of wings. He imagined her talking to Malick, remembering her lovely mouth. He wondered if she had smiled or blushed, or if her voice had carried any signs of loss. “Where did you see her?”

  “At the library,” Malick continued. “I asked her if you were interested in geology even then, and she said you were eighteen, that you were interested in many things.” This had Malick in stitches. “I told her you were very bright and quiet.”

  “Quiet?”

  “She seemed proud to have known you.”

  John waited for more but that was all. Malick had nothing more to add.

  “Did she say anything else?”

  “She said hello. She said to tell you that she was doing well, in case you asked.”

  They walked in silence out of the building and down the street toward the restaurant where the others had gathered for lunch. They were almost at the door.