Anil's Ghost

by Michael Ondaatje

  I held her eyelids up with my thumbs. I shook her until she saw who it was. She didn’t care. I’m here. I love you, I said. She closed her eyes, it seemed to me in disgust. Then she was in pain again.

  I can’t give you any more, I said, I’ll lose you completely. She put her hand up and made a gesture across her throat.

  The train was sucked into the tunnel and they moved within it, shuddering in the darkness.

  Who was she, Gamini? She could not see him. She touched his shoulder and could feel him turn towards her. He brought his face close to her. She could see nothing in spite of the muddy flicker of light now and then.

  What would you do with a name? But it wasn’t a question. He spat it out.

  The train came into daylight for a few seconds, then slid into the darkness of another tunnel.

  All the wards were busy that night, he continued. Shootings, others to be operated on. There are always a lot of suicides during a war. At first that seems strange, but you learn to understand it. And she, I think, was overcome by it. The nurses left me with her and then I was called into the triage wards. She was full of morphine, asleep. I found a kid in the hall and I got him to watch her. If she woke he was to come and find me in D wing. This was three a.m. I didn’t want him falling asleep, so I broke a Benzedrine and gave him half. He found me later and told me she was awake. But I couldn’t save her.

  There was a train window open and the sound of the clatter doubled. She could feel the gusts.

  What would you do with her name? Would you tell my brother?

  Someone kicked her ankle and she drew in her breath.

  When Leaf left Arizona Anil didn’t hear from her for more than six months. Although during every moment of her farewell she had promised to write. Leaf, who was her closest friend. Once there was just a postcard of a stainless-steel pole. Quemado, New Mexico, the postmark seemed to read, but there was no contact address. Anil assumed she’d abandoned her, for a new life, for new friends. Watch out for the armadillos, señorita! Still, Anil left a snapshot on her fridge of the two of them dancing at some party, this woman who had been her echo, who watched movies with her in her backyard. They’d sway in the hammock, they’d consume rhubarb pie, they’d wake up at three in the morning entangled in each other’s arms, and then Anil would drive home through the empty streets.

  The next postcard was of a parabolic dish antenna. Again no message or address. Anil was angry and threw it away. A few months later, when working in Europe, she got the phone call. She didn’t know how Leaf had found her.

  ‘This is an illegal call, so don’t say my name. I’m cutting into someone’s line.’

  (As a teenager Leaf had made long-distance calls on Sammy Davis Jr.’s stolen phone number.)

  ‘Oh Angie, where are you! You were supposed to write.’

  ‘I’m sorry. When’s your next break.’

  ‘In January. A couple of months. I may go to Sri Lanka after that.’

  ‘If I send you a ticket, will you come and see me? I’m in New Mexico.’

  ‘Yes. Oh yes . . .’

  So Anil returned to America. And she sat with Leaf in a doughnut shop in Socorro, New Mexico, a half-mile from the Very Large Array of Telescopes, which minute by minute drew information out of the skies. Information about the state of things ten billion years ago, and as many miles out. It was here, in this place, that they caught up with the truth in each other’s lives.

  Originally Leaf had said she had bad asthma, that was why she had moved into the desert for a year, disappearing from Anil’s life. She had got involved with Earthworks and was living at The Lightning Field near Corrales. In 1977, artist Walter De Maria had planted four hundred stainless-steel poles high in the desert on a flat plain a mile long. Leaf’s first job was to be a caretaker of the lodge. Powerful winds swept in from the desert and she got to witness storms, because during the summer the poles drew lightning onto the plain. She stood among them, within the electricity, the thunder simultaneous around her. She had just wanted to be a cowboy. She loved the Southwest.

  Now Leaf met Anil near the Very Large Array—the telescope assembly that picked up languages of data out of the universe above the desert. She was living alongside these receivers of the huge history of the sky. Who was out there? How far away was that signal? Who was dying unmoored?

  Well, it turned out Leaf was.

  They sat facing each other during the meals they had together every day at the Pequod. Anil felt the giant telescopes in the open desert belonged to the same genre as Leaf’s beloved drive-ins. They talked and listened to each other. She loved Anil. And she knew Anil loved her. Sister and sister. But Leaf was ill. It would get worse.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I just keep . . . forgetting things. I can diagnose myself, you see. I have Alzheimer’s. I know I’m too young for this, but I had encephalitis as a kid.’

  No one had noticed her illness when they had worked in Arizona. Sister and sister. And she had left without telling Anil why she was really leaving. With all the solitary energy she could draw on, she had gone east to the New Mexico deserts. Asthma, she said. She was starting to lose her memory, fighting for her life.

  They sat at the Pequod in Socorro, whispering into the afternoons.

  ‘Leaf, listen. Remember? Who killed Cherry Valance?’

  ‘What?’

  Anil repeated the question slowly.

  ‘Cherry Valance,’ Leaf said, ‘I . . .’

  ‘John Wayne shot him. Remember.’

  ‘Did I know that?’

  ‘You know John Wayne?’

  ‘No, my darling.’

  My darling!

  ‘Do you think they can hear us?’ Leaf asked. ‘That giant metal ear in the desert. Is it picking us up too? I’m just a detail from the subplot, right.’

  Then a splinter of memory returned and she added, awfully, ‘Well, you always thought Cherry Valance would die.’

  . . .

  And did she? Sarath had asked, when Anil told him about her friend Leaf.

  ‘No. She called me that night when I had fever, when we were in the south. We always would phone each other and talk till we fell asleep, laughing or crying, trading our stories. No. Her sister watches over her, not far from those telescopes in New Mexico.’

  Dear John Boorman,

  I do not have your address but a Mr. Walter Donohue from Faber & Faber has offered to forward this to you. I write on behalf of myself and my colleague Leaf Niedecker about a scene in an early film of yours, Point Blank.

  At the start of the film, the prologue as it were, Lee Marvin is shot from a distance of what looks like four or five feet. He falls back into a prison cell and we think he might be dead. Eventually he comes to, leaves Alcatraz and swims across the So-and-so Straits into San Francisco.

  We are forensic scientists and have been arguing about where on his body Mr. Marvin was shot. My friend thinks it was a rib glance shooting and that apart from the rib break it was a minor flesh wound. I feel the wound to be more serious. I know many years have passed, but perhaps you could try to remember and advise us of the location of the entry wound and exit wound and recall your discussions with Mr. Marvin as to how he should react and move later on in the film when time had passed and his character had recovered.

  Sincerely,

  Anil Tissera

  A rainy-night conversation at the walawwa.

  ‘You like to remain cloudy, don’t you, Sarath, even to yourself.’

  ‘I don’t think clarity is necessarily truth. It’s simplicity, isn’t it?’

  ‘I need to know what you think. I need to break things apart to know where someone came from. That’s also an acceptance of complexity. Secrets turn powerless in the open air.’

  ‘Political secrets are not powerless, in any form,’ he said.

  ‘But the tension and danger around them, one can make them evaporate. You’re an archaeologist. Truth comes finally into the light. It’s in the bones and sedime
nt.’

  ‘It’s in character and nuance and mood.’

  ‘That is what governs us in our lives, that’s not the truth.’

  ‘For the living it is the truth,’ he quietly said.

  ‘Why did you get into such a business?’

  ‘I love history, the intimacy of entering all those landscapes. Like entering a dream. Someone nudges a stone away and there’s a story.’

  ‘A secret.’

  ‘Yes, a secret . . . I was selected to go and study in China. I was there a year. And all I saw of China was this one area about the size of a pasture. I didn’t go anywhere else. That’s where I stayed and where I worked. Villagers had been cleaning a hillock and had come across earth of a different colour. Something that simple, but teams of archaeologists came. Under the different-coloured grey earth they found stone slabs, under these they found timbers—huge timbers that had been cut and stripped and nestled together like a great floor in some mead hall. Only of course, it was a ceiling.

  ‘So it was, as I said, like an exercise in a dream where you are made to go deeper and further. They brought in cranes to lift the timbers out and underneath them they discovered water—a water tomb. Three giant pools. Floating there was a lacquered coffin of an ancient ruler. Also in the water were coffins with the bodies of twenty female musicians along with their instruments. They were to accompany him, you see. With zithers, flutes, panpipes, drums, iron bells. They were delivering him to his ancestors. When they removed the skeletons from the coffins and laid them out there was no damage to any of the bones to reveal how the musicians had been killed, not one fractured bone.’

  ‘Then they were strangled,’ Anil said.

  ‘Yes. That’s what we were told.’

  ‘Or suffocated. Or poisoned. A study of the bones could have told you the truth. I don’t know if there was a tradition of poisoning in China at that time. When was it?’

  ‘Fifth century B.C.’

  ‘Yeah, they knew poisons.’

  ‘We soaked the lacquered coffins with polymer so they wouldn’t collapse. The lacquer had been made out of sumac sap mixed with coloured pigments. Hundreds of layers of it. Then they discovered the musical instruments. Drums. Mouth organs made from gourds. Chinese zithers! Most of all—bells.

  ‘By now historians had arrived too. Taoist and Confucian scholars, specialists in musical chimes. We pulled sixty-four bells up out of the water. Till now no instruments from this period had been found, though it was known that music had been the most significant activity and idea of this civilization. So you would beburied not with your wealth but alongside music. The great bells removed from the water turned out to have been made with the most sophisticated techniques. It seemed each region of the country had its own method of bell-making. In those regions there had been, literally, wars of music. . . .

  ‘Nothing was as important. Music was not entertainment, it was a link with ancestors who had led us here, it was a moral and spiritual force. The experience of breaking through barriers of slate, wood, water, to discover a buried women’s orchestra had a similar mystical logic to it, do you understand? You must understand their state of acceptance somehow of such a death. The way the terrorists in our time can be made to believe they are eternal if they die for the cause of their ruler.

  ‘Before I left they had an event where everyone who had worked there came to hear the bells being struck. It was at the end of my year. It took place in the evening and, as we listened, we felt them physically, lifting into the darkness. Each bell had two notes to represent the two sides of the spirit, containing a balance of opposing forces. Possibly it was those bells that made me an archaeologist.’

  ‘Twenty murdered women.’

  ‘It was another world with its own value system that came to the surface.’

  ‘Love me, love my orchestra. You can take it with you! That kind of madness lies within the structure of all civilizations, not just in distant cultures. You boys are sentimental. Death and glory. A guy I know fell in love with me because of my laugh. We hadn’t even met or been in the same room, he’d heard me on a tape.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Oh, he swooned over me like a married man, made me fall in love with him. You’ve heard the story. How smart women become idiots, ignore everything they should keep on knowing. By the end I wasn’t laughing too much. No bell-ringing.’

  ‘Was he in love with you before he met you, do you think?’

  ‘Well, that’s interesting. Perhaps it was the habit of my voice. I think he’d listened to the tape two or three times. He was a writer. A writer. They have time to get into trouble. I had been asked to chair a talk at a conference given by a teacher of mine, Larry Angel. A lovely, funny man, so I was in fact laughing a lot at the way he thought and put things together with his nonlinear mind. We were onstage sitting at a table and I introduced him, and I guess my microphone was on and I was chuckling as he gave the lecture. The old guy and I always had a good rapport. Favourite-uncle atmosphere, slightly sexual but definitely platonic.

  ‘I guess the writer, my eventual friend, also had a nonlinear mind, so he was getting the jokes. He had ordered the tape because he was interested in researching burial mounds or something, a rather serious subject, and he wanted information, and details. That was our meeting. In proxy. Not a big moment across the universe . . . We were on a high wire for three years during our relationship.’

  *

  Their first adventure together: Anil drove her unwashed white car that smelled of mildew to a Sri Lankan restaurant. It was just a few months after Cullis had heard her on the tape. They were driving through early-evening traffic.

  ‘So. Are you famous?’

  ‘No.’ He laughed.

  ‘A little?’

  ‘I’d say about seventy people who are not relatives or friends would recognize my name.’

  ‘Even here?’

  ‘I doubt it. Who knows. What is it, Muswell Hill?’

  ‘Archway.’

  She opened the window and yelled.

  ‘Hey, listen, everybody—I’ve got the science writer Cullis Wright in my car! Or is it Cullis Wrong? Yes, it’s him! He’s with me today!’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She rolled up the window. ‘We can check the gossips tomorrow, to see if you were busted.’ She rolled down the window and this time used the horn to gain attention. They were stuck in traffic anyway. Maybe from a distance it looked like a fight. An angry woman half out of the car gesturing towards someone within, trying to get passersby on her side.

  He nestled back into the passenger’s seat, watching her loose energy, the ease with which she swept her skirt up to her knees and leapt out of the car once more after pulling the hand brake with a grunt. She was now waving her arms, banging on the dirty roof of the car.

  He would remember other moments like this later—times when she tried to strip off his carefulness, tried to unbuckle his worried glance. Making him dance on one of the dark streets of Europe to a small cassette player she pressed against his ear. ‘Brazil.’ Remember this song. He sang the words with her on that Paris street, their feet dancing over the painted outline of a dog.

  He sat there, pressed against the back of his car seat, traffic all around him, watching her torso through the car door as she yelped and pounded on the roof. He felt he had been encased in ice or metal and she was banging on its surface in order to reach him, in order to let him out. The energy of her swirling clothes, the wild grin as she entered the car again and kissed him—she could have broken him free. But as a married man he had already pawned his heart.

  She left him eventually in the Una Palma motel room in Borrego Springs. Left nothing of herself for him to hold on to. Just the blood as black as her hair, the room as shadowed as her skin.

  He lay in the dark room watching the twitch of his arm muscle flick the knife into movement. He drifted, a boat without oars, into half-sleep. All night he could hear the faint whir of the hotel clock. His fear was tha
t the beating in his blood would stop, that the noise on the roof of the car as she reached for him would end. Now and then a truck hushed by, twisting light. He fought sleep. Usually he loved the letting go. When he wrote, he slipped into the page as if it were water, and tumbled on. The writer was a tumbler. (Would he remember that?) If not, then a tinker, carrying a hundred pots and pans and bits of linoleum and wires and falconer’s hoods and pencils and . . . you carried them around for years and gradually fit them into a small, modest book. The art of packing. Then he would be off scouring the wetlands again. How to make a book, Anil. You asked me How, you asked What’s the most important thing you need? Anil, I’ll tell you. . . .

  But she was on the night bus climbing out from the valley, locked for warmth in her grey ferren—half cloak, half serape. Her eyes inches away from the window, receiving the moments of lit trees. Oh, he knew that look in her, realigning herself after a fight. But this was to be the last time. No second chances. She knew and so did he. Their life of sparring love, tentative abandonment, the worst and best of times, all the memory of it balanced as on a clearly lit lab table in Oklahoma, the bus stirring its way up into the mist, passing the small towns in the mountains.

  Anil’s body hunched into itself as it became colder. Still, her eyes did not blink, she would not miss any movement this last night with him. She was determined to underline their crimes towards each other, their failures. It was just this she wanted to be certain about, although she knew that later there would be other versions of their fatal romance.