‘I’m going away for a couple of weeks,’ she said.
‘Where?’
‘Do you know that it’s lovable and maddening at the same time, that I knew you’d ask me that?’
‘Stop trying to put me off. Where are you going?’
‘You don’t want to know,’ she said, burning queens.
‘I do want to know. I wanna know where to break the door down, if you need me.’
She laughed. People laugh so often, when I’m being serious.
‘I’m gonna spend a couple weeks with Kavita,’ she said. ‘Alone.’
‘What the hell?’ I said, speaking my think.
She cocked her head to the side again.
‘Are you jealous, Shantaram?’
I wasn’t. I think back, now, and I know I was more jealous of the Russian writer, because he was a pretty cool guy, than I was of Kavita.
But Kavita had spoken harm at me, and I suddenly realised that it still hurt me. Karla wasn’t going to another lover, in my mind: she was going to someone who hated me.
I didn’t tell Karla then, that night, what Kavita had said to me. I should’ve said something. I should’ve told her. But it had been a rough night.
‘Madame Zhou paid a visit to the alley under this building, and warned me to stay away from Kavita. Do you really think it’s safe to be going away with her?’
‘What do you want from me?’ she snapped, all fire and furious pride.
‘What I want is to be the closest thing to you, Karla. It’s a sin for you to use that against me. Stop playing games with me. Tell me to leave you alone, or tell me to love you, with everything I’ve got.’
She was stung. I hadn’t seen it often: a reaction in her face or her body that she couldn’t hide.
‘I told you before about trusting me, and how it might get harder to do.’
‘Karla, don’t go.’
‘I’m staying with Kavita,’ she said, turning away from me. ‘Don’t wait up.’
She walked away. I watched her to the stairs, and then raced through my apartment to catch a glimpse of her as she walked to the taxi stand at Metro cinema.
Oleg came to stand beside me. She got in a taxi, and she was gone.
‘You’ve got it bad, bro,’ Oleg said sympathetically. ‘Your vodka is shit, by the way, but your rum is okay. Drink up.’
‘I gotta get clean, first,’ I said. ‘I’ll leave the shower ready for you. Make yourself at home.’
He cast a glance around him at the sparse room, the wooden floors gleaming like the lid on a lacquered coffin.
‘Okay,’ he said.
I stood in the shower, turning it on in bursts, fits and starts. The water in our building was carried in trucks, and pumped upwards into gravity feed tanks on the roof. Everyone in the building shared those tanks.
Trying not to waste water, I shut the shower off from time to time, leaning against the wall until everything that had happened with Concannon came back so hard that I shuddered, retching, and turned on the healing water again.
In the world we created for ourselves, it’s a lie to be a man, and a lie to be a woman. A woman is always more than any idea imposed on her, and a man is always more than any duty imposed on him. Men empathise, and women lead armies. Men raise infants, and women explore the exosphere. We’re not one thing or the other: we’re very interesting versions of each other. And men, too, cry in the shower, sometimes.
It took me a while to scrub the emotion from my face. Afterwards, while Oleg showered, I cleaned my gun as meditation, and stashed it in a hidden shelf beside my bed.
‘Your soap is shit,’ Oleg said, drying himself off. ‘I’ll get you some R-soap. It will scrape the barnacles off you.’
‘I’m relatively barnacle-free,’ I said, offering him the bottle. ‘And I like my soap.’
He offered me the bottle back, and I drank and offered it back, and he drank and offered it again, and I drank it back.
‘That’s my T-shirt,’ I noticed, mid-swappery.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘It’s so nice to put on something clean. I lived in the last one through a geological age.’
‘Keep it,’ I said. ‘I’ve got another one, where that one came from.’
‘I saw that. And two pairs of jeans. You travel light, man. If I borrow a pair of yours, do you mind if I roll the bottoms up? I really like that look.’
‘Roll them up to the Urals, Oleg. But turn down the smiling. If we get any drinkier than this, it’ll start to freak me out.’
‘Got it, man. Smiling less. We R-people are nothing if not adaptive. Do you have music?’
‘I’m a writer,’ I said, passing back the bottle. ‘Of course I have music.’
I had a CD system, wired into aftermarket Bollywood speakers. I liked the way they blended everything I played into the same sound-ocean, the same whale of signals from some not entirely air-breathing place.
‘Your system is shit,’ he said.
‘You’re a critical motherfucker, Oleg.’
‘Actually, I’m just making mental notes, you know, of things I get for you that are better than shit.’
‘Whaddaya wanna hear, Oleg?’
‘Got any Clash?’
I played Combat Rock, and he jumped up to grab his guitar.
‘Cut to the last track, “Death Is a Star”,’ he said. ‘I know how to play that. Let’s play it together.’
We strummed Russian–Australian–Indian acoustic together, jamming with the faraway Clash in a hotel room in Bombay. We played the song again and again until we got the timing just right, and laughed like kids when we did. And the strings reopened the cuts on my fingers, and blood from the fight with Concannon stained the body of my guitar.
We got too drunk to play, and we were just beginning to stop caring about that, or anything else, when I found a messenger in my room. He was dressed in the khaki uniform of a messenger, and was holding a message in his hand.
‘Where did you come from?’ I asked, swaying to keep him in focus.
‘From outside, sir,’ he said.
‘Well, that’s alright then. What can I do for you?’
‘I have a message for you, sir.’
‘I don’t like messages.’
‘But it’s my job, sir.’
‘You’ve got a point. How much do I owe you?’
I paid the messenger and sat down, looking at the message. I didn’t want to read it. The English say no news is good news. The Germans say no news is no bad news. I’m with the Germans on that one. Something inside me, and I still don’t know if it’s the part that saves me or damns me, always says that I should tear the message up before reading it, no matter who sent it, and sometimes I do. But I had to read it, in case it had something to do with Karla. It didn’t. It was from Gemini George.
Dear Lin, old mate. Scorp and me have gone jungle. We’re searching for this guru, to lift the curse. Naveen gave us a good lead, and we’re starting on the canals of Karnataka tomorrow. Fingers crossed. Love you, mate.
I thought it was a happy, hopeful letter, and I was glad. I didn’t realise that it was a cry for help. I dropped the letter on my table, put good reggae music on my bad sound system, and we danced. Oleg danced for the fun of it, I think, but maybe the smiling Russian had demons of his own to release. I was thinking of the fight with Concannon, and I danced for absolution from victory: for defeating a foe, and regretting it.
The moon, our lonely sister, filters pain and harm from sunlight, and reflects it back to us safely, free of burn and blemish. We danced in moonlight on the balcony that night, Oleg and I, and we sang and shouted and laughed, hardening ourselves to what we’d done in life, and what we’d lost. And the moon graced two fallen fools, on a fallen day, with sunlight purified by a mirror in the sky, made of stone.
Part Eleven
Chapter Sixty-Two
Oleg moved in. He asked if he could sleep on my couch, and I agreed, which meant that I had to buy a couch. He went with me, and it took him a long time to make up my mind. The one he chose was in green leather and long enough to stretch out on, which he often did, soon after it was delivered.
When he wasn’t a field agent, with spike, chasing down lost loves with Naveen and Didier, he was on the couch, his hands folded across his chest, and talking issues out of his own psychological steppes. The Tuareg would’ve loved it.
‘Did you say that you could change your dreams, the other day?’ he asked me, stretched out on the couch, a week after he started at the bureau. ‘Actually in the dream, while you’re dreaming it?’
‘Of course.’
‘You mean, while you’re dreaming, and completely asleep, you can alter the course of your dream?’
‘Yes. Can’t you?’
‘No. I don’t think many people can.’
‘Let me put it this way, a nightmare is a dream I can’t control, and a dream is a nightmare I can control.’
‘Wow. How does it work?’
‘I’m writing a story here, Oleg.’
‘Oh, sorry,’ he said, his bare feet tapping against one another at the other end of the couch. ‘Go back to work. Utter silence from me.’
I was working on a new story. I’d thrown the happy story away. It didn’t end well. I was sketching some paragraphs about Abdullah, and thinking about a couple of stories built around him. There were eagles of narrative in him, each tale a winged contradiction, but I’d never written anything about him.
That afternoon I felt compelled to capture him, to paint him with words, and the writing came fast. Paragraphs bloomed like hydrangeas on the pages of my journal.
Years after that sunny afternoon at the Amritsar hotel, a writer told me that it was bad luck for the living, to write about the living. I didn’t know that then, and I was happy, in the pages I had on Abdullah: happy enough to forget about threats and felonies, enemies who hide in a smile, Kavita and Karla, and everything in the world, so long as nothing disturbed me, and I could keep writing.
‘What’s the story about?’ Oleg asked.
I put the pen down.
‘It’s a murder mystery,’ I said.
‘What’s it about?’
‘It’s about a writer, who kills someone for interrupting him while he’s writing. You wanna know the mystery part?’
He swung his legs around, and sat with his forearms on his thighs.
‘I love mysteries,’ he said.
‘The mystery is why it took the writer so long.’
‘Sarcasm,’ he said. ‘You should read Lermontov. The Caucasus is notorious for its sarcasm.’
‘You don’t say?’ I said, picking up the pen.
‘Can you really change your dreams?’
The pen in my hand drifted toward him, hovering above my elbow on the desk. I was hoping that it would turn into a caduceus, and I could use it to make him go to sleep.
‘I mean, how does that work? I’d love to change my dreams. I have some dreams, you know, that I’d really, really like to put on repeat.’
I closed the pen, closed the journal and got two cold beers, throwing one to him. I sat back in my chair, and raised my can in a toast.
‘To mysteries,’ I said.
‘To mysteries!’
‘Now, sit back, relax, and tell me what’s up, Oleg.’
‘Your Karla,’ he said, taking a sip of beer. ‘I know what you’re feeling, because I have my Karlesha, back in Moscow.’
‘Why aren’t you back in Moscow?’
‘I don’t like Moscow,’ he said, taking another sip. ‘I’m a St Petersburg boy.’
‘But you love the girl.’
‘Yes. But she hates me.’
‘She hates you?’
‘Hates me.’
‘How do you know?’
‘She paid her father to have me killed.’
‘She had to pay him? What is he, a banker?’
‘No, he’s a cop. A pretty big cop.’
‘What happened?’
‘It’s a long story,’ he sighed, looking toward the breeze of white curtains, fluttering on the sunlit balcony.
‘Fuck you, Oleg. You killed my short story. You can fill the space with your long story.’
He laughed bitterly. One of our purest expressions, a thing of our human kind: the bitter laugh.
‘I slept with her sister,’ he said, staring at his beer.
‘Okay. Not classy, but there are worse things that people do to people’s sisters.’
‘No, it’s complicated. They’re twins. Non-identical twins.’
‘Where are you going with this, Oleg?’
There was a call from the hallway. It was Didier.
‘Hello? Are you home, Lin?’ he said, as he walked through the open door.
‘Didier!’ I said happily. ‘Grab a seat, and have a beer. Oleg is venturing into territory beyond my couch, and you’re just the man to guide the way.’
‘Lin, I am afraid that I have many appointments, and –’
‘My girlfriend in Moscow hates me,’ Oleg said flatly, helplessly, ‘because she’s a non-identical twin, and I slept with her and her non-identical sister, at the same time.’
‘Fascinating,’ Didier said, settling himself into a chair. ‘If it is not an indelicate question, Oleg, did they have the same . . . aroma?’
‘Indelicate?’ I mocked. ‘You, Didier?’
‘Funny you should say that,’ Oleg muttered, searching Didier’s face. ‘They did have the same smell. Exactly the same smell. I mean, the same smell . . . everywhere.’
‘That is indeed a rare phenomenon,’ Didier mused. ‘Exceedingly rare. Did you happen to notice the length of their ring fingers, compared to their index fingers?’
‘Can we get to the part where her father tried to kill you?’ I suggested, thinking that I had writing to do.
‘Marvellous,’ Didier said. ‘Tried to kill you, eh?’
‘Sure. See, it happened this way. I was in love with Elena, and nothing ever happened between me and her sister, Irina, until one night, when I was very drunk, totally razbit.’
‘Razbit?’ Didier asked.
‘Smashed, man, I was totally smashed, and Irina sneaked into my bed, naked, while Elena was at the neighbour’s place.’
‘Wonderful,’ Didier enthused.
‘It was completely dark,’ Oleg continued. ‘Very dark. We had blackout blinds on the windows. She smelled like Elena. She felt like Elena.’
‘Did she kiss you?’ Didier asked, a master of sexual forensics.
‘No. And she didn’t speak.’
‘Precisely. That would have given her away. She’s a clever girl.’
‘Elena didn’t think so, when she came back, switched the light on, and found us making love.’
‘No talking your way out of that one,’ I said.
‘She threw me out of my own apartment,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure that’s even legal. I mean, I’m still paying the rent from here. And her father put up the threat of prison bars, between me and the woman I love.’
‘I don’t think Elena felt very loved, Oleg.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean Irina. When we made love, drunk and all as I was, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. She was a maniac, in all the right ways. I was mad for her. I still am.’
‘Marvellous,’ Didier smiled. ‘But what happened?’
‘I managed to get a message to Irina, asking her to run away with me. She agreed, and we planned to meet at midnight, at Paveletsky Terminal. But she told Elena our plans, and Elena came to see me, asking me not to take Irina away. I talked to her, but I refused. I met Irina
at the station, and we were running away together, then she stopped me and asked me if I was really sure that it was her I loved, and not her twin.’
He paused, searching for the right way through his hedge of recollection.
‘Yes?’ Didier asked, stamping his foot a little. ‘What happened?’
‘We were standing together, in the shadows. She asked me how I could be so sure that it was really her and not Elena that I loved. And, you know that moment when a woman asks you for the truth? And you know, you really, clearly know that it’s the last thing you should do?’
‘Yeah,’ we both agreed.
‘I told the truth.’
‘How bad?’ I asked.
‘I told her that I was absolutely sure that it was her I loved, because just to be completely certain, I had slept with Elena again, when she’d come to see me, two hours before. And it was nothing, with Elena. I hardly enjoyed it at all. So, I was certain that Irina was the one for me, and it wasn’t just the fact that I was pretty drunk that night, and I kind of hallucinated how good she was.’
‘Oh, shit.’
‘Merde,’ Didier agreed.
‘She took a swing at me,’ he said.
‘I want to swing at you myself,’ Didier said. ‘It is a disgrace to tell any woman the unembellished truth.’
‘You dug that grave yourself, Oleg,’ I laughed. ‘And neither one forgave you?’
‘Their father put professional bad people on my case. I had to run, and run fast.’
‘Tough break,’ I said. ‘Serves you right, for falling in love with a policeman’s daughters.’
I turned to Didier, who was sitting back in his chair, his legs crossed, and his hand supporting his chin.
‘Any advice?’
‘Didier has a solution,’ he declared. ‘You must wear two of those T-shirts, that common people wear, under your shirt, for two weeks. You must not wash with soap, or hair products. Only water. You must not wear scent of any kind, and you must not brush against any person wearing scent. And you must not wash the shirts.’
‘And then?’ Oleg asked.
‘And then you mail the T-shirts in two packages, one to each of the twins, with only two words on the back – Leopold’s, Bombay.’