Vintage Ondaatje

  In twelve days, working at the Directorate of Scientific Research, they came up with the answer. Ignore the fuze entirely. Ignore the first principle, which until then was “defuse the bomb.” It was brilliant. They were all laughing and applauding and hugging each other in the officers’ mess. They didn’t have a clue what the alternative was, but they knew in the abstract they were right. The problem would not be solved by embracing it. That was Lieutenant Blackler’s line. “If you are in a room with a problem don’t talk to it.” An offhand remark. Singh came towards him and held the statement from another angle. “Then we don’t touch the fuze at all.”

  Once they came up with that, someone worked out the solution in a week. A steam sterilizer. One could cut a hole into the main case of a bomb, and then the main explosive could be emulsified by an injection of steam and drained away. That solved that for the time being. But by then he was on a ship to Italy.

  He keeps remembering one thing. He is in the white horse. He feels hot on the chalk hill, the white dust of it swirling up all around him. He works on the contraption, which is quite straightforward, but for the first time he is working alone. Miss Morden sits twenty yards above him, higher up the slope, taking notes on what he is doing. He knows that down and across the valley Lord Suffolk is watching through the glasses.

  He works slowly. The chalk dust lifts, then settles on everything, his hands, the contraption, so he has to blow it off the fuze caps and wires continually to see the details. It is hot in the tunic. He keeps putting his sweating wrists behind himself to wipe them on the back of his shirt. All the loose and removed parts fill the various pockets across his chest. He is tired, checking things repetitively. He hears Miss Morden’s voice. “Kip?” “Yes.” “Stop what you’re doing for a while, I’m coming down.” “You’d better not, Miss Morden.” “Of course I can.” He does up the buttons on his various vest pockets and lays a cloth over the bomb; she clambers down into the white horse awkwardly and then sits next to him and opens up her satchel. She douses a lace handkerchief with the contents of a small bottle of eau de cologne and passes it to him. “Wipe your face with this. Lord Suffolk uses it to refresh himself.” He takes it tentatively and at her suggestion dabs his forehead and neck and wrists. She unscrews the Thermos and pours each of them some tea. She unwraps oil paper and brings out strips of Kipling cake.

  She seems to be in no hurry to go back up the slope, back to safety. And it would seem rude to remind her that she should return. She simply talks about the wretched heat and the fact that at least they have booked rooms in town with baths attached, which they can all look forward to. She begins a rambling story about how she met Lord Suffolk. Not a word about the bomb beside them. He had been slowing down, the way one, half asleep, continually rereads the same paragraph, trying to find a connection between sentences. She had pulled him out of the vortex of the problem. She packs up her satchel carefully, lays a hand on his right shoulder and returns to her position on the blanket above the Westbury horse. She leaves him some sunglasses, but he cannot see clearly enough through them so he lays them aside. Then he goes back to work. The scent of eau de cologne. He remembers he had smelled it once as a child. He had a fever and someone had brushed it onto his body.

  THE GREAT TREE

  “Zou Fulei died like a dragon breaking down a wall . . .

  this line composed and ribboned

  in cursive script

  by his friend the poet Yang Weizhen

  whose father built a library

  surrounded by hundreds of plum trees

  It was Zou Fulei, almost unknown,

  who made the best plum flower painting

  of any period

  One branch lifted into the wind

  and his friend’s vertical line of character

  their tones of ink

  —wet to opaque

  dark to pale

  each sweep and gesture

  trained and various

  echoing the other’s art

  In the high plum-surrounded library

  where Yang Weizhen studied as a boy

  a moveable staircase was pulled away

  to ensure his solitary concentration

  His great work

  “untrammelled” “eccentric” “unorthodox”

  “no taint of the superficial”

  “no flamboyant movement”

  using at times the lifted tails

  of archaic script,

  sharing with Zou Fulei

  his leaps and darknesses

  “So I have always held you in my heart . . .

  The great 14th-century poet calligrapher

  mourns the death of his friend

  Language attacks the paper from the air

  There is only a path of blossoms

  no flamboyant movement

  A night of smoky ink in 1361

  a night without a staircase

  TO A SAD DAUGHTER

  All night long the hockey pictures

  gaze down at you

  sleeping in your tracksuit.

  Belligerent goalies are your ideal.

  Threats of being traded

  cuts and wounds

  —all this pleases you.

  O my god! you say at breakfast

  reading the sports page over the Alpen

  as another player breaks his ankle

  or assaults the coach.

  When I thought of daughters

  I wasn’t expecting this

  but I like this more.

  I like all your faults

  even your purple moods

  when you retreat from everyone

  to sit in bed under a quilt.

  And when I say “like”

  I mean of course “love”

  but that embarrasses you.

  You who feel superior to black and white movies

  (coaxed for hours to see Casablanca)

  though you were moved

  by Creature from the Black Lagoon.

  One day I’ll come swimming

  beside your ship or someone will

  and if you hear the siren

  listen to it. For if you close your ears

  only nothing happens. You will never change.

  I don’t care if you risk

  your life to angry goalies

  creatures with webbed feet.

  You can enter their caves and castles

  their glass laboratories. Just

  don’t be fooled by anyone but yourself.

  This is the first lecture I’ve given you.

  You’re “sweet sixteen” you said.

  I’d rather be your closest friend

  than your father. I’m not good at advice

  you know that, but ride

  the ceremonies

  until they grow dark.

  Sometimes you are so busy

  discovering your friends

  I ache with a loss

  —but that is greed.

  And sometimes I’ve gone

  into my purple world

  and lost you.

  One afternoon I stepped

  into your room. You were sitting

  at the desk where I now write this.

  Forsythia outside the window

  and sun spilled over you

  like a thick yellow miracle

  as if another planet

  was coaxing you out of the house

  —all those possible worlds!—

  and you, meanwhile, busy with mathematics.

  I cannot look at forsythia now

  without loss, or joy for you.

  You step delicately

  into the wild world

  and your real prize will be

  the frantic search.

  Want everything. If you break

  break going out not in.

  How you live your life I don’t care

  but I’ll sell my arms for you,

  hold your secrets for ever.

  If I spea
k of death

  which you fear now, greatly,

  it is without answers,

  except that each

  one we know is

  in our blood.

  Don’t recall graves.

  Memory is permanent.

  Remember the afternoon’s

  yellow suburban annunciation.

  Your goalie

  in his frightening mask

  dreams perhaps

  of gentleness.

  THE STORY

  for Akash and Kamlesh Mishra

  i

  For his first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives.

  Journeys, winding paths,

  a hundred small lessons

  and then the past is erased.

  Some are born screaming,

  some full of introspective wandering

  into the past—that bus ride in winter,

  the sudden arrival within

  a new city in the dark.

  And those departures from family bonds

  leaving what was lost and needed.

  So the child’s face is a lake

  of fast moving clouds and emotions.

  A last chance for the clear history of the self.

  All our mothers and grandparents here,

  our dismantled childhoods

  in the buildings of the past.

  Some great forty-day daydream

  before we bury the maps.

  ii

  There will be a war, the king told his pregnant wife.

  In the last phase seven of us will cross

  the river to the east and disguise ourselves

  through the farmlands.

  We will approach the markets

  and befriend the rope-makers. Remember this.

  She nods and strokes the baby in her belly.

  After a month we will enter

  the halls of that king.

  There is dim light from small high windows.

  We have entered with no weapons,

  just rope in the baskets.

  We have trained for years

  to move in silence, invisible,

  not one creak of bone,

  not one breath,

  even in lit rooms,

  in order to disappear into this building

  where the guards live in half-light.

  When a certain night falls

  the seven must enter the horizontal door

  remember this, face down,

  as in birth.

  Then (he tells his wife)

  there is the corridor of dripping water,

  a noisy rain, a sense

  of creatures at your feet.

  And we enter halls of further darkness,

  cold and wet among the enemy warriors.

  To overcome them we douse the last light.

  After battle we must leave another way

  avoiding all doors to the north . . .

  (The king looks down

  and sees his wife is asleep

  in the middle of the adventure.

  He bends down and kisses through the skin

  the child in the body of his wife.

  Both of them in dreams. He lies there,

  watches her face as it catches a breath.

  He pulls back a wisp across her eye

  and bites it off. Braids it

  into his own hair, then sleeps beside them.)

  iii

  With all the swerves of history

  I cannot imagine your future.

  Would wish to dream it, see you

  in your teens, as I saw my son,

  your already philosophical air

  rubbing against the speed of the city.

  I no longer guess a future.

  And do not know how we end

  nor where.

  Though I know a story about maps, for you.

  iv

  After the death of his father,

  the prince leads his warriors

  into another country.

  Four men and three women.

  They disguise themselves and travel

  through farms, fields of turnip.

  They are private and shy

  in an unknown, uncaught way.

  In the hemp markets

  they court friends.

  They are dancers who tumble

  with lightness as they move,

  their long hair wild in the air.

  Their shyness slips away.

  They are charming with desire in them.

  It is the dancing they are known for.

  One night they leave their beds.

  Four men, three women.

  They cross open fields where nothing grows

  and swim across the cold rivers

  into the city.

  Silent, invisible among the guards,

  they enter the horizontal door

  face down so the blades of poison

  do not touch them. Then

  into the rain of the tunnels.

  It is an old story—that one of them

  remembers the path in.

  They enter the last room of faint light

  and douse the lamp. They move

  within the darkness like dancers

  at the centre of a maze

  seeing the enemy before them

  with the unlit habit of their journey.

  There is no way to behave after victory.

  And what should occur now is unremembered.

  The seven stand there.

  One among them, who was that baby,

  cannot recall the rest of the story

  —the story his father knew, unfinished

  that night, his mother sleeping.

  We remember it as a tender story,

  though perhaps they perish.

  The father’s lean arm across

  the child’s shape, the taste

  of the wisp of hair in his mouth . . .

  The seven embrace in the destroyed room

  where they will die without

  the dream of exit.

  We do not know what happened.

  From the high windows the ropes

  are not long enough to reach the ground.

  They take up the knives of the enemy

  and cut their long hair and braid it

  onto one rope and they descend

  hoping it will be long enough

  into the darkness of the night.

  STEP

  The ceremonial funeral structure for a monk

  made up of thambili palms, white cloth

  is only a vessel, disintegrates

  completely as his life.

  The ending disappears,

  replacing itself

  with something abstract

  as air, a view.

  All we’ll remember in the last hours

  is an afternoon—a lazy lunch

  then sleeping together.

  Then the disarray of grief.

  On the morning of a full moon

  in a forest monastery

  thirty women in white

  meditate on the precepts of the day

  until darkness.

  They walk those abstract paths

  their complete heart

  their burning thought focused

  on this step, then this step.

  In the red brick dusk

  of the Sacred Quadrangle,

  among holy seven-storey ambitions

  where the four Buddhas

  of Polonnaruwa

  face out to each horizon,

  is a lotus pavilion.

  Taller than a man

  nine lotus stalks of stone

  stand solitary in the grass,

  pillars that once supported

  the floor of another level.

  (The sensuous stalk

  the sacred flower)

  How physical yearning

  became permanent.

  How desire became devotional

&nbs
p; so it held up your house,

  your lover’s house, the house of your god.

  And though it is no longer there,

  the pillars once let you step

  to a higher room

  where there was worship, lighter air.

  Linus Corea from ANIL’S GHOST

  A few years earlier a story had gone around about a Colombo doctor—Linus Corea—a neurosurgeon in the private sector. He came from three generations of doctors, the family name was as established as the most permanent banks in Sri Lanka. Linus Corea was in his late forties when the war broke out. Like most doctors he thought it was madness and unlike most he stayed in private practice; the Prime Minister was one of his clients, as was the leader of the opposition. He had his head massages at Gabriel’s at eight a.m. and saw his patients from nine till two, then golfed with a bodyguard at his side. He dined out, got home before curfew and slept in an air-conditioned room. He had been married for ten years and had two sons. He was a well-liked man; he was polite with everyone because it was the easiest way not to have trouble, to be invisible to those who did not matter to him. This small courtesy created a bubble he rode within. His gestures and politeness disguised an essential lack of interest or, if not that, a lack of time for others on the street. He liked photography. He printed his own pictures in the evening.

  In 1987, while he was putting on a golf green, his bodyguard was shot dead and Dr. Linus Corea was kidnapped. They came out of the woods slowly, unconcerned about being seen by him. It meant it did not matter to them and that frightened him more than anything. He had been alone with the bodyguard. He stood beside the prone body and was surrounded by the men who had shot him from a distance of forty yards precisely through the correct point in the head. No thrashing around.

  They spoke to him calmly in a made-up language, which again increased his anxiety. They hit him once and broke a rib to warn him to behave, and then they walked back to their car and drove away with him. For months no one knew where he had got to. The police, the Prime Minister, the head of the Communist Party were called in, and all were outraged. There was no communication from kidnappers wanting payment. It was the Colombo mystery of 1987, and offers of rewards were made throughout the press, none of which was answered.