Island

  "Do you personally think it does go on?"

  Susila smiled. "What I personally think is beside the point. All that matters is what I may impersonally experience while I'm living, when I'm dying, maybe when I'm dead."

  She swung the car into a parking space and turned off the engine. On foot they entered the village. Work was over for the day and the main street was so densely thronged that it was hard for them to pass.

  "I'm going ahead by myself," Susila announced. Then to Mary Sarojini, "Be at the hospital in about an hour," she said. "Not before." She turned and, threading her way between the slowly promenading groups, was soon lost to view.

  "You're in charge now," said Will, smiling down at the child by his side.

  Mary Sarojini nodded gravely and took his hand. "Let's go and see what's happening in the square," she said.

  "How old is your Granny Lakshmi?" Will asked as they started to make their way along the crowded street.

  "I don't really know," Mary Sarojini answered. "She looks terribly old. But maybe that's because she's got cancer."

  "Do you know what cancer is?" he asked.

  Mary Sarojini knew perfectly well. "It's what happens when part of you forgets all about the rest of you and carries on the way people do when they're crazy--just goes on blowing itself up and blowing itself up as if there was nobody else in the whole world. Sometimes you can do something about it. But generally it just goes on blowing itself up until the person dies."

  "And that's what has happened, I gather, to your Granny Lakshmi."

  "And now she needs someone to help her die."

  "Does your mother often help people die?"

  The child nodded. "She's awfully good at it."

  "Have you ever seen anyone die?"

  "Of course," Mary Sarojini answered, evidently surprised that such a question should be asked. "Let me see." She made a mental calculation. "I've seen five people die. Six, if you count babies."

  "I hadn't seen anyone die when I was your age."

  "You hadn't?"

  "Only a dog."

  "Dogs die easier than people. They don't talk about it beforehand."

  "How do you feel about...about people dying?"

  "Well, it isn't nearly so bad as having babies. That's awful. Or at least it looks awful. But then you remind yourself that it doesn't hurt at all. They've turned off the pain."

  "Believe it or not," said Will, "I've never seen a baby being born."

  "Never?" Mary Sarojini was astonished. "Not even when you were at school?"

  Will had a vision of his headmaster in full canonicals conducting three hundred black-coated boys on a tour of the Lying-In Hospital. "Not even at school," he said aloud.

  "You never saw anybody dying, and you never saw anybody having a baby. How did you get to know things?"

  "In the school I went to," he said, "we never got to know things, we only got to know words."

  The child looked up at him, shook her head and, lifting a small brown hand, significantly tapped her forehead. "Crazy," she said. "Or were your teachers just stupid?"

  Will laughed. "They were high-minded educators dedicated to mens sana in corpore sano and the maintenance of our sublime Western Tradition. But meanwhile tell me something. Weren't you ever frightened?"

  "By people having babies?"

  "No, by people dying. Didn't that scare you?"

  "Well, yes--it did," she said after a moment of silence.

  "So what did you do about it?"

  "I did what they teach you to do--tried to find out which of me was frightened and why she was frightened."

  "And which of you was it?"

  "This one." Mary Sarojini pointed a forefinger into her open mouth. "The one that does all the talking. Little Miss Gibber--that's what Vijaya calls her. She's always talking about all the nasty things I remember, all the huge, wonderful, impossible things I imagine I can do. She's the one that gets frightened."

  "Why is she so frightened?"

  "I suppose it's because she gets talking about all the awful things that might happen to her. Talking out loud or talking to herself. But there's another one who doesn't get frightened."

  "Which one is that?"

  "The one that doesn't talk--just looks and listens and feels what's going on inside. And sometimes," Mary Sarojini added, "sometimes she suddenly sees how beautiful everything is. No, that's wrong. She sees it all the time, but I don't--not unless she makes me notice it. That's when it suddenly happens. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! Even dog's messes." She pointed at a formidable specimen almost at their feet.

  From the narrow street they had emerged into the marketplace. The last of the sunlight still touched the sculptured spire of the temple, the little pink gazebos on the roof of the town hall; but here in the square there was premonition of twilight and under the great banyan tree it was already night. On the stalls between its pillars and hanging ropes the market women had turned on their lights. In the leafy darkness there were islands of form and color, and from hardly visible nonentity brown-skinned figures stepped for a moment into brilliant existence, then back again into nothingness. The spaces between the tall buildings echoed with a confusion of English and Palanese, of talk and laughter, of street cries and whistled tunes, of dogs barking, parrots screaming. Perched on one of the pink gazebos, a pair of mynah birds called indefatigably for attention and compassion. From an open-air kitchen at the center of the square rose the appetizing smell of food on the fire. Onions, peppers, turmeric, fish frying, cakes baking, rice on the boil--and through these good gross odors, like a reminder from the Other Shore, drifted the perfume, thin and sweet and ethereally pure, of the many-colored garlands on sale beside the fountain.

  Twilight deepened and suddenly, from high overhead, the arc lamps were turned on. Bright and burnished against the rosy copper of oiled skin, the women's necklaces and rings and bracelets came alive with glittering reflections. Seen in the downward-striking light, every contour became more dramatic, every form seemed to be more substantial, more solidly there. In eye sockets, under nose and chin the shadows deepened. Modeled by light and darkness young breasts grew fuller and the faces of the old were more emphatically lined and hollowed.

  Hand in hand they made their way through the crowd.

  A middle-aged woman greeted Mary Sarojini, then turned to Will. "Are you that man from the Outside?" she asked.

  "Almost infinitely from the outside," he assured her.

  She looked at him for a moment in silence, then smiled encouragingly and patted his cheek.

  "We're all very sorry for you," she said.

  They moved on, and now they were standing on the fringes of a group assembled at the foot of the temple steps to listen to a young man who was playing a long-necked, lute-like instrument and singing in Palanese. Rapid declamation alternated with long-drawn, almost birdlike melismata on a single vowel sound, and then a cheerful and strongly accented tune that ended in a shout. A roar of laugher went up from the crowd. A few more bars, another line or two of recitative, and the singer struck his final chord. There was applause and more laughter and a chorus of incomprehensible commentary.

  "What's it all about?" Will asked.

  "It's about girls and boys sleeping together," Mary Sarojini answered.

  "Oh--I see." He felt a pang of guilty embarrassment; but, looking down into the child's untroubled face, he could see that his concern was uncalled for. It was evident that boys and girls sleeping together were as completely to be taken for granted as going to school or eating three meals a day--or dying.

  "And the part that made them laugh," Mary Sarojini went on, "was where he said the Future Buddha won't have to leave home and sit under the Bodhi Tree. He'll have his Enlightenment while he's in bed with the princess."

  "Do you think that's a good idea?" Will asked.

  She nodded emphatically. "It would mean that the princess would be enlightened too."

  "You're perfectly right," said Will. "Being a man
, I hadn't thought of the princess."

  The lute player plucked a queer unfamiliar progression of chords, followed them with a ripple of arpeggios and began to sing, this time in English.

  "Everyone talks of sex; take none of them seriously--

  Not whore nor hermit, neither Paul nor Freud.

  Love--and your lips, her breasts will change mysteriously

  Into Themselves, the Suchness and the Void."

  The door of the temple swung open. A smell of incense mingled with the ambient onions and fried fish. An old woman emerged and very cautiously lowered her unsteady weight from stair to stair.

  "Who were Paul and Freud?" Mary Sarojini asked as they moved away.

  Will began with a brief account of Original Sin and the Scheme of Redemption. The child heard him out with concentrated attention.

  "No wonder the song says, Don't take them seriously," she concluded.

  "After which," said Will, "we come to Dr. Freud and the Oedipus Complex."

  "Oedipus?" Mary Sarojini repeated. "But that's the name of a marionette show. I saw it last week, and they're giving it again tonight. Would you like to see it? It's nice."

  "Nice?" he repeated. "Nice? Even when the old lady turns out to be his mother and hangs herself? Even when Oedipus puts out his eyes?"

  "But he doesn't put out his eyes," said Mary Sarojini.

  "He does where I hail from."

  "Not here. He only says he's going to put out his eyes, and she only tries to hang herself. They're talked out of it."

  "Who by?"

  "The boy and girl from Pala."

  "How do they get into the act?" Will asked.

  "I don't know. They're just there. 'Oedipus in Pala'--that's what the play is called. So why shouldn't they be there?"

  "And you say they talk Jocasta out of suicide and Oedipus out of blinding himself?"

  "Just in the nick of time. She's slipped the rope round her neck and he's got hold of two huge pins. But the boy and girl from Pala tell them not to be silly. After all, it was an accident. He didn't know that the old man was his father. And anyhow the old man began it, hit him over the head, and that made Oedipus lose his temper--and nobody had ever taught him to dance the Rakshasi Hornpipe. And when they made him a king, he had to marry the old queen. She was really his mother; but neither of them knew it. And of course all they had to do when they did find out was just to stop being married. That stuff about marrying his mother being the reason why everybody had to die of a virus--all that was just nonsense, just made up by a lot of poor stupid people who didn't know any better."

  "Dr. Freud thought that all little boys really want to marry their mothers and kill their fathers. And the other way round for little girls--they want to marry their fathers."

  "Which fathers and mothers?" Mary Sarojini asked. "We have such a lot of them."

  "You mean, in your Mutual Adoption Club?"

  "There's twenty-two of them in our MAC."

  "Safety in numbers!"

  "But of course poor old Oedipus never had an MAC. And besides they'd taught him all that horrible stuff about God getting furious with people every time they made a mistake."

  They had pushed their way through the crowd and now found themselves at the entrance to a small roped-off enclosure, in which a hundred or more spectators had already taken their seats. At the further end of the enclosure the gaily painted proscenium of a puppet theater glowed red and gold in the light of powerful flood lamps. Pulling out a handful of the small change with which Dr. Robert had provided him, Will paid for two tickets. They entered and sat down on a bench.

  A gong sounded, the curtain of the little proscenium noiselessly rose and there, white pillars on a pea-green ground, was the facade of the royal palace of Thebes with a much-whiskered divinity sitting in a cloud above the pediment. A priest exactly like the god, except that he was somewhat smaller and less exuberantly draped, entered from the right, bowed to the audience, then turned towards the palace and shouted "Oedipus" in piping tones that seemed comically incongruous with his prophetic beard. To a flourish of trumpets the door swung open and, crowned and heroically buskined, the king appeared. The priest made obeisance, the royal puppet gave him leave to speak.

  "Give ear to our afflictions," the old man piped.

  The king cocked his head and listened.

  "I hear the groans of dying men," he said. "I hear the shriek of widows, the sobbing of the motherless, the mutterings of prayer and supplication."

  "Supplication!" said the deity in the clouds. "That's the spirit." He patted himself on the chest.

  "They had some kind of a virus," Mary Sarojini explained in a whisper. "Like Asian flu, only a lot worse."

  "We repeat the appropriate litanies," the old priest querulously piped, "we offer the most expensive sacrifices, we have the whole population living in chastity and flagellating itself every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. But the flood of death spreads ever more widely, rises higher and ever higher. So help us, King Oedipus, help us."

  "Only a god can help."

  "Hear, hear!" shouted the presiding deity.

  "But by what means?"

  "Only a god can say."

  "Correct," said the god in his basso profundo, "absolutely correct."

  "Creon, my wife's brother, has gone to consult the oracle. When he returns--as very soon he must--we shall know what heaven advises."

  "What heaven bloody well commands!" the basso profoundo emended.

  "Were people really so silly?" Mary Sarojini asked, as the audience laughed.

  "Really and truly," Will assured her.

  A phonograph started to play the Dead March in Saul.

  From left to right a black-robed procession of mourners carrying sheeted biers passed slowly across the front of the stage. Puppet after puppet--and as soon as the group had disappeared on the right it would be brought in again from the left. The procession seemed endless, the corpses innumerable.

  "Dead," said Oedipus as he watched them pass. "And another dead. And yet another, another."

  "That'll teach them!" the basso profundo broke in. "I'll learn you to be a toad!"

  Oedipus continued:

  "The soldier's bier, the whore's; the babe stone-cold

  Pressed to the ache of unsucked breasts; the youth in horror

  Turning away from the black swollen face

  That from his moonlit pillow once looked up,

  Eager for kisses. Dead, all dead,

  Mourned by the soon to die and by the doomed

  Borne with reluctant footing to the abhorred

  Garden of cypresses where one huge pit

  Yawns to receive them, stinking to the moon."

  While he was speaking, two new puppets, a boy and a girl in the gayest of Palanese finery, entered from the right and, moving in the opposite direction to the black-robed mourners, took their stand, arm in arm, downstage and a little left of center.

  "But we, meanwhile," said the boy when Oedipus had finished:

  "Are bound for rosier gardens and the absurd

  Apocalyptic rite that in the mind

  Calls forth from the touched skin and melting flesh

  The immanent Infinite."

  "What about Me?" the basso profundo rumbled from the welkin. "You seem to forget that I'm Wholly Other."

  Endlessly the black procession to the cemetery still shuffled on. But now the Dead March was interrupted in mid-phrase. Music gave place to a single deep note--tuba and double bass--prolonged interminably. The boy in the foreground held up his hand.

  "Listen! The drone, the everlasting burden."

  In unison with the unseen instruments the mourners began to chant. "Death, death, death, death..."

  "But life knows more than one note," said the boy.

  "Life," the girl chimed in, "can sing both high and low."

  "And your unceasing drone of death serves only to make a richer music."

  "A richer music," the girl repeated.

  And
with that, tenor and treble, they started to vocalize a wandering arabesque of sound wreathed, as it were, about the long rigid shaft of the ground bass.

  The drone and the singing diminished gradually into silence; the last of the mourners disappeared and the boy and girl in the foreground retired to a corner where they could go on with their kissing undisturbed.

  There was another flourish of trumpets and, obese in a purple tunic, in came Creon, fresh from Delphi and primed with oracles. For the next few minutes the dialogue was all in Palanese, and Mary Sarojini had to act as interpreter.

  "Oedipus asks him what God said; and the other one says that what God said was that it was all because of some man having killed the old king, the one before Oedipus. Nobody had ever caught him, and the man was still living in Thebes, and this virus that was killing everybody had been sent by God--that's what Creon says he was told--as a punishment. I don't know why all these people who hadn't done anything to anybody had to be punished; but that's what he says God said. And the virus won't stop till they catch the man that killed the old king and send him away from Thebes. And of course Oedipus says he's going to do everything he can to find the man and get rid of him."

  From his downstage corner the boy began to declaim, this time in English:

  "God, most Himself when most sublimely vague,

  Talks, when His talk is plain, the ungodliest bosh.

  Repent, He roars, for Sin has caused the plague.

  But we say 'Dirt--so wash.'"

  While the audience was still laughing, another group of mourners emerged from the wings and slowly crossed the stage.

  "Karuna," said the girl in the foreground, "compassion. The suffering of the stupid is as real as any other suffering."

  Feeling a touch on his arm, Will turned and found himself looking into the beautiful sulky face of young Murugan.

  "I've been hunting for you everywhere," he said angrily, as though Will had concealed himself on purpose just to annoy him. He spoke so loudly that many heads were turned and there were calls for quiet.

  "You weren't at Dr. Robert's, you weren't at Susila's," the boy nagged on, regardless of the protests.

  "Quiet, quiet..."

  "Quiet!" came a tremendous shout from Basso Profundo in the clouds. "Things have come to a pretty pass," the voice added grumblingly, "when God simply can't hear Himself speak."

  "Hear, hear," said Will, joining in the general laughter. He rose and, followed by Murugan and Mary Sarojini, hobbled towards the exit.