The smell of boiling rice and then a girl smelling of gardenias passed close by. Heat from a basement vent billowed silk round her knees. Black jacket over a peacockgreen sari, like rainwater down the small of her back and over and off the parliamentary curve of her buttocks. Raga-like a cat whined, cryhighing wheymilk mews, arched its back, bannered its oilspotted tail in slinking underoverunder barbed wire to paw an orange rind.
Rain-on-concrete smell rose from the wet street and. Up ahead. Eucalyptus pip, dead neon cube swung from the plastic flap that billed the cigarettes, mints, dailies and mild Danish pin-ups for sale in the up ahead kiosk.
Sam touched his breast-pocket, tight with that morning’s mail. A postcard of fog from Justine (Dear S., bad weather / good food / good nitelife / As for symposium – having miserable time – wish you were here instead / Have enjoyed (enjoyed!) local colors / See ya soon / J.) And a letter from his father, bearing a Dutch postmark.
He stopped, added rapidly the coins in his palm and pointed. Quickly, moderately, the man in the kiosk counted down the cigarette columns to six, clucking his tongue for each tapped column. He lifted the light brown package, nodding a question.
-Right, unfiltered, Sam said, putting the money in Prahesh Sen’s free hand before taking the package. He unwound the yellow foil, stripped off the brittle clearsheet and slid the cigarettes into his pocket.
-What’s up, Mr. Sen, he said.
-The gas bill, Sen laughed, exposing his healthy gums and the broken ivories of his mouth.
-that’s what’s up. You’ve come for one of Gupta’s girls?
-Not today, no, Sam shrugged, I’m just in the neighborhood.
-Gupta was robbed, did you know? Sen asked, gleeful and leering, tugging his old man’s cap closer over his ears.
-You’re kidding, robbed? How much did they take the old bastard for?
-He’s not saying, Sen said, clapping his hands with delight.
-but he chased them down the street! …. in his underwear! …. in the rain! …. with a gun! …. and old lady Gupta roaring like a mad buffalo from the balcony!
Sam laughed, shaking his head. Gupta, pillar of the community, shaggy paunch barely harnessed by his white shorts, wearing his wife’s flamingo slippers, plunging down the whorehouse steps while his girls and their customers parted the hazeblue curtains above him, waving an unloaded revolver in the churning downpour and cursing the mothers the fathers and the sisters of all swift criminals.
-I’m sorry I missed it, he said.
-Oh, Sen said, he was a wild man!
Still laughing he turned away and began to fiddle with a small gold and black radio covered with old-styled grillwork. He slid through several stations and fixed it on a series of drones, static-ridden human voices, bubbling with vowels.
-I must chase you away now, he said over his shoulder, the soccer match will soon be on.
-Who’s playing? Sam asked.
-Melbourne and Goa, Sen replied automatically, a proud smile pursing his lips.
-Ah. Well, Mr. Sen, may the best team win.
-What? Sen said, turning his face fully to Sam, politely smiling with pretended attention.
-I’ll talk to you later,
Sam lifted his hand.
The old man nodded, smiled and turned up the volume.
At the ten-foot wall that ran for several blocks beyond the kiosk, Sam stood and looked at the posters. Most of them were indecipherable, either rain or language serving as ‘comprehension’s condom’, to quote. Whom? Sam didn’t know and didn’t care.
A girl, skin a Dravidian black, silked from her diamond navel to her feet, advertising a visiting troupe of Sri Lankan dancers. To her left, Arjuna, breastplate of rubies and newsprint, played the straight-man to Krishna’s wry athletic shadow. The pair leaned against a chariot crowded with archers, as relaxed as though it were the bar in Persse Murphy’s pub, and heralded a dramatic Gita, already some months past. Below, diatribe’s festering political cousin, red and black geometrical blockages and a row of clenched fists like a vine of scarlet tomatoes. And above the black, flame-ensconcing dancer was a large white rotund something, spired with a streak of rain. A mosque, perhaps, or was it something to eat? Temple of Cheese.
The tavern was narrow and dark, only a little longer than the length of the bar itself. At this hour it was not yet crowded and Sam sat down on a wicker stool at the bar, out of the door’s polar range. No one was behind the counter. At one end a middle-aged woman with a briefcase at her feet sat reading a newspaper, a slim glass half empty before her. She looked up for a moment, adjusting her eyes to the midlight gloom in which he sat, and looked back down, rustling visibly but silently the pages as she folded them back. At the other end, harbored between the window’s slit venetians and the edge of the bar, two young men sat at a small circular table to which a third chair was drawn up. The two, one in brown poncho, fingerless gloves and snowwhite turban and the other in mere shirtsleeves, were playing a boardgame. As Same watched, the man in the shirtsleeves looked up. After a moment, with his eyes still on Sam he jutted a foot noisily onto the seat of the empty chair and spat an opaque gout upon the floor. The other man looked up with a start at his companion and then at Sam and gave an asthmatic laugh, small white teeth fierce with mirth.
Sam looked away, first at his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar, nose and ears redchapped with cold, and then down the length of the black and white polished counter, towards a door that stood barely ajar. A light went on and then off and an Indian woman came from the room into the bar. She lifted the wooden arm that joined the end of the counter to the wall and dragged a stool under it, with which she propped the door open. She banged the wooden arm down hard again and latched it, then tugged at a chain that hung down alongside the mirror. A dozen radish-shaped bulbs at the upper edge of the mirror sprang weakly into light. They cast a pallor on Sam’s face, in the glass his eyes looked sunken, a bloodless ghoul’s. The small room she had come out of, or what Sam could see of it, was bare and naked-looking, a spatter of red lepering the base of one wall.
The woman was in her twenties and very small and as she came down the bar towards him Sam saw that she was pregnant. She held both hands, small and slender fingers of chocolate, crossed upon her belly as if warming them there. Her face was round and smooth, her eyes so dark they appeared to be pupilless, her nose wide like a child’s.
The man in the shirtsleeves said something softly, leering at her with bestial friendliness. She pouted her mouth in his direction and then smiled and said in English:
-Fool! Always listening to tales!
He laughed and slapped his knee and then said something else, even more softly, almost a purr, his tongue scooping tenderly behind his lower lip.
-Pig! she laughed, lifting her hand and kissing her fingers at him.
He howled with laughter, while his turbaned companion smiled fixedly and gripped the table to prevent its being overturned.
-What can I give you? she asked Sam, sliding a cork coaster in front of him.
He ordered a beer which she brought quickly, followed by a delicate glass similar to the woman with the newspaper’s. They had no ice, she told him, to which he expressed indifference. The beer was milky and warm, with a bitterness that its warmth made palatable. He drank slowly, enjoying the peculiar sensation of a thawing head, the skin at his cheeks and temples crawling, faintly burning.
Sam slid the envelope from his pocket, opened it, and absorbed the momentary shock of his father’s crabbed and boxlike script.
Dear Sam,
Are you well? why have you not written me? I have been ill since the middle of the summer but am better now. I was in an asylum in Maastricht for several weeks & was quite gone out of myself until Hans Peellaert brought me home for I had no money by then & this is where I now am (Delft) with Hans & Pia his wife whose a big gargantua of a woman – a good cook & a good catholic too though shes had little influence on me there (as you can imagine) Hans has found me a job with a movie firm so I’m back in my proper sphere (or soon to be that is) – its more technical than I’d like but beggars cant be choosers can we? & its not like it was in Mexico so I’ll do okay. Hans is good friends with the big wheels in this firm & will put in a good word or two for me I know – they are mostly jews I think but never mind I always say and some of them are odder birds than I’ve worked with before (from what Hans tells me) but I’ve thrown in my lot with odd birdfellows before & will keep my mouth shut & my nose clean.
But enough about me – I’m doing fine except for a bit of a money squeeze (if you could perhaps see your way to sending a little something my way? – I havent forgotten how youve helped me out in the past Son, & you know I know you know I’m grateful as you know I am
Write to me Sammy, if youre not too busy, its not right for us to lose touch & I’ll be the first to admit I’m at fault but I have tried. I think about you and Louise every day & have told Pia all about the two of you & she thinks I should come back. Who knows? Things dont always work out, do they? Lifes no bed of roses & you have to lie in it. Pia lights candles for us I think or maybe just for me when she goes to church – catholics are funny that way always lighting candles & carrying on but I guess the others the protestants are pretty much the same but better with money have you noticed that? well I have. Do you ever see your sister? It would do wonders for an old mans piece of mind to know that you two were friends but I am maybe asking too much.
Well Sammy, write as I said before & enclose a recent photo of yourself & one of Louise if you have a spare so I can see if youve changed. I am care of H. PEELLAERT for letters & I am also still at the Banque Credit Lyonnais in Amsterdam should you need to send me anything. Think well of me now & then.
All my Love,
Papa
Having read the letter through once Sam put it away, then took it out and reread several lines before folding it into his pocket again.
Lifes no bed of roses. Sam put his head in his hands and tried to visualize his father’s face but saw instead Justine, tricked out like Olivier’s Richard III, stalking a massive butterfly down a hedged, sunlit path. The effort depressed him.
Lifting his glass he tilted it slightly, softly blew a hole in the center of the foamy head and suddenly, like a gregarious catfish, his father’s face wavered into his mind, set in a grin, a cracked wildness sparkling his pale green eyes, as when Sam had found him, hiding among the guests’ overcoats in the hall closet, or shaking coins out of a pair of someone else’s pants, or any of a number of other mildly shameful acts he had been caught committing, his defense already evident in the amusement splitting his face. ‘I either laugh or run’ he had said in forgotten circumstances, and whether it was intended as advice or confession Sam had been unable to decide.
-Oh, God, Sam laughed quietly, his eyes brimming with unexpected scald of tears.
To be cursed with an unruly family. He supposed that only his sister Louise was properly normal, and she was perhaps too normal. But he had divorced them all years ago it seemed, maintaining tenuous connection through the odd cheque to his father, the odd letter to his sister to let them know that he was not, by a dog’s grace, dead yet.
The woman watched him drink, her lips tightening like a cat’s and then loosening into the fat fullness of a girl aware of herself. After a while she pulled a small stool from under the counter and sat down, not quite opposite him. She spread open a magazine and began examining the photos slowly, with sleepy interest, humming a low melody over a display of tall blond girls in high heels and fur raincoats, jitterbugging in unconvincing abandon amid a grove of date trees.
Guided, lucid, open. Some man, a child like herself? Love, the black flowering of her name unpinned from her round skull, tugtwisted into a hundred rat tails of skingrazing softness, throttled breath through arched nostrils, her face caressed by drifting fingers, pausing at her temples, alongside her open eyes, down from her brow to her fleshy earlobe, lozenge of dark blood, touching the base of her skull, the strong pulse like a girl’s name, whispered and repeated.
She moved her hand along the edge of the counter, unconsciously her fingers moved to a distinct point and then returned to her side, rotating one of the large black buttons on her smock, rubbing an eye gently, and then gliding out again as though in obedience to simple gravity. Sam watched her fingers coming and going, her lips moving like a sleeper’s, forming words like blandishments which she kept to herself.
He took the last mouthful of ginger-scented, urine-colored beer, and a cold constriction withered him inside, unconnected with digestion. Love’s impulse was to be good or bad, a hungry idiot disowned by his father. To take this child, baby and all, for a few hours of communication, of handheld silence, and all Gupta’s girls could wait for eternity.
Sam turreted his coins on the counter and stood up. As he pulled the door behind him the woman looked up, a strand of thick hair lifting from above her dark eyes in the sudden draft.
Sam walked slowly away from the little bar towards the final block. The beer nestled warmth but his teeth chattered, the wind razoring at his face and ears. A slim girl crossed the street diagonal to the sidewalk, carrying a grocery bag, a rolled newspaper under her arm. She glanced at him as she turned the corner down a side street, unreadable eyes of Parvati.
Beside the last house but one Sam stopped to light a cigarette. From the steps leading down to the sidewalk a young boy stood up and came towards him. He was eight years old at the most, but looked younger in his oversize red sweater. His black hair hung in girlish locks around his ears. Stopping in front of Sam he opened his hand, palming to him the yellow distention of a hand-rolled cigarette. Sam looked at the boy’s stony face for a moment and then smiled and bent towards him, striking another match. The boy lifted the cigarette, brought it carefully to his mouth with his thumb and all four fingers and held it into the flame till the tip began to smoke and glow. Quickly and shyly he turned his head and blew out the match before Sam could shake it. Sam laughed and the boy smiled with an upward movement of his eyes and then moved away, tending to his cigarette.
Sam angled his own between his lips, his hands buried in his pockets. Looking up he saw through the frosted powdery window above him an older woman, washing her hair. The window was uncurtained, the room well-lit, perhaps a kitchen. Under the woman’s cotton shift her breasts moved slowly, gentled by the motion of her soapy hands, like flowers in an undertow. Steam flecked like breath from within, peeling and unpeeling, the woman’s arms and head merely woman-shaped as the glass fogged over.
Sam exhaled sharply, shivered, and walked on. Looking back he saw the boy in the red sweater still huddled by the wall, watching him. Sam lifted a hand and waved. The boy watched him.
Eyes of Parvati. A long night ago, the cold weather just beginning to take hold after sunset. Sitting in Vagrants’ Lane, not far from here, forlorn music drifting over the black water. He had imagined it, filling in the unknowns with faces and bodies that defined his love: Indian movie-music erupting from Gupta’s massive Berliner record player, throbbing the streets of Little Punjab with amplified wailing, the heart-attack pattering of the tabla, magnificent and joyously indiscreet over the strung lights and crashing fireworks that brickled liquid streamers, collapsing in moth-soft showers all around.
He would be glad to see spring, to wheelbarrow the seed trays down the long sand paths under the fish-eyes of Dr. Kuuromykka. He thought of the little song the woman patient had sung as they worked. He had not been able to make out the words, but it always came to him as: black white love has no eyes / red blue you’re my sunrise
What did women want? All those poor women kept forever in the white halls of St. Cecilia’s, or the women in Punjab? Parvati, the bargirl, Gupta’s lovely prisoners?
A laundry list of possibilities flickered in his mind. And one by one the colored letters hissed, snickered, and went out. As though the words to the puzzle were girls themselves, mocking him for the bad poetry that filled his head. With so pretty, so light a mockery. Was there nothing then so pure but that his gaze would eventually fret out its darkest vein, glance through it with a touch of corruption?
Sam let his arms hang down to his sides, allowing his coat to fall open, allowing the icy wind to bathe him back to his senses. He thought very carefully that although the wind had told him nothing, this was what the wind had told him. Truth wandered on a parallel street, in a stagger and drunken meander to anyone’s eyes but his. past unnumbered doors, and boarded or broken windows, navigating the sea of waste stone, greeting the shadows and the shards of light by their proper names, with only the vigilance of softpadding cats and bloated sooty rats, pausing in their tracks to do the math of leaping, worry the distance between caught / not caught.
Brightness Park lay below him, ten minutes away at a leisurely sloping plod, through a landscape of such desolation and abandonment that it was impossible to imagine anyone or anything stopping midway. Even the wind refused to linger long enough to set the dust spinning. For just a moment he considered turning around. Another bar, another drink, spending out the last bits of cold day in a strange woman’s dark room. There was always tomorrow, there was always maybe.
Sam threw his cigarette aside into the last ditch of the kingdom of rubble and began to walk downhill towards the music he could not quite hear, floating up from the park.