A Son Of The Circus (33 page)

But, just then, a belch so alarming he failed to recognize it as his own awakened Dr Daruwalla from these imaginings; he shifted in his hammock in order to confirm that his daughters had not been violated by either the forces of nature or the hand of man. Then he fell asleep with his mouth open, the splayed fingers of one hand lolling in the sand.

Dreamlessly, the noonday passed. The beach began to cool. A slight breeze rose; it softly gave sway to the hammock where Dr Daruwalla lay digesting. Something had left a sour taste in his mouth – the doctor suspected the vindaloo fish or the beer – and he felt flatulent. Farrokh opened his eyes slightly to see if anyone was near his hammock – in which case it would be impolite for him to fart – and there was that pest Punkaj, the worthless servant boy.

‘She come back,’ Punkaj said.

‘Go away, Punkaj,’ said Dr Daruwalla.

‘She looking for you – that hippie with her bad foot,’ the boy said. He pronounced the word ‘heepee,’ so that Dr Daruwalla, in his digestive daze, still didn’t understand.

‘Go away, Punkaj!’ the doctor repeated. Then he saw the young woman limping toward him.

‘Is
that him? Is that the doctor
?’ she asked Punkaj.

‘You wait there!
I
ask doctor first!’ the boy said to her. At a glance, she could have been 18 or 25, but she was a big-boned young woman, broad-shouldered and heavy-breasted and thick through her hips. She also had thick ankles and very strong-looking hands, and she lifted the boy off the ground – holding him by the front of his shirt – and threw him on his back in the sand.

‘Go fuck yourself,’ she told him. Punkaj picked himself up and ran toward the hotel. Farrokh swung his legs unsteadily out of the hammock and faced her. When he stood up, he was surprised at how much the late-afternoon breeze had cooled the sand; he was also surprised that the young woman was so much taller than he was. He quickly bent down to put on his sandals; that was when he saw she was barefoot – and that one foot was nearly twice the size of the other. While the doctor was still down on one knee, the young woman rotated her swollen foot and showed him the filthy, inflamed sole.

‘I stepped on some glass,’ she said slowly. ‘I thought I picked it all out, but I guess not.’

He took her foot in his hand and felt her lean heavily on his shoulder for balance. There were several small lacerations, all closed and red and puckered with infection, and on the ball of her foot was a fiery swelling the size of an egg; in its center was an inch-long, oozing gash that was scabbed over.

Dr Daruwalla looked up at her, but she wasn’t looking down at him; she was gazing off somewhere, and the doctor was shocked not only by her stature but by her solidity as well. She had a full, womanly figure and a peasant muscularity; her dirty, unshaven legs were ragged with golden hair, and her cut-off blue jeans were slightly torn at the crotch seam, through which poked an outrageous tuft of her golden pubic hair. She wore a black, sleeveless T-shirt with a silver skull-and-crossbones insignia, and her loose, low-slung breasts hung over Farrokh like a warning. When he stood up and looked into her face, he saw she couldn’t have been older than 18. She had full, round, freckled cheeks, and her lips were badly sun-blistered. She had a child’s little nose, also sunburned, and almost-white blond hair, which was matted and tangled and discolored by the suntan oil she’d used to try to protect her face.

Her eyes were startling to Dr Daruwalla, not only for their pale, ice-blue color but because they reminded him of the eyes of an animal that wasn’t quite awake –not fully alert. As soon as she noticed he was looking at her, her pupils constricted and fixed hard upon him –also like an animal’s. Now she was wary; all her instincts were suddenly engaged. The doctor couldn’t return the intensity of her gaze; he looked away from her.

‘I think I need some antibiotics,’ the young woman said.

‘Yes, you have an infection,’ Dr Daruwalla said. ‘I have to lance that swelling. There’s something in there – it has to come out.’ She had a pretty good infection going; the doctor had also noticed the lymphangitic streaking.

The young woman shrugged; and when she moved her shoulders only that slightly, Farrokh caught the scent of her. It wasn’t just an acrid armpit odor; there was also something like the tang of urine in the way she smelled, and there was a heavy, ripe smell – faintly rotten, or decayed.

‘It is essential for you to be clean before I cut into you,’ Dr Daruwalla said. He was staring at the; young woman’s hands; there appeared to be dried blood caked under her nails. Once more the young woman shrugged, and Dr Daruwalla took a step back from her.

‘So … where do you want to do it?’ she asked, looking around.

At the taverna, the bartender was watching them. In the lean-to restaurant, only one of the tables was occupied. There were three men drinking feni; even these impaired feni drinkers were watching the girl.

‘There’s a bathtub in our hotel,’ the doctor said. ‘My wife will help you.’

‘I know how to take a bath,’ the young woman told him.

Farrokh was thinking that she couldn’t have walked very far on that foot. As she hobbled between the taverna and the hotel, her limp was pronounced; she leaned hard on the rail as they climbed the stairs to the rooms.

‘You didn’t walk all the way from Anjuna, did you?’ he asked her.

‘I’m from Iowa,’ she answered. For a moment, Dr Daruwalla didn’t understand – he was trying to think of an ‘Iowa’ in Goa. Then he laughed, but she didn’t.

‘I meant, where are you staying in Goa?’ he asked her.

‘I’m not staying,’ she told him. ‘I’m taking the ferry to Bombay – as soon as I can walk.’

‘But where did you cut your foot?’ he asked.

‘On some glass,’ she said. ‘It was sort of near Anjuna.’

This conversation, and watching her climb the stairs, exhausted Dr Daruwalla. He preceded the girl into his rooms; he wanted to alert Julia that he’d found a patient on the beach, or that she’d found him.

Farrokh and Julia waited on the balcony while the young woman took a bath. They waited quite a long time, staring – with little comment – at the girl’s battered canvas rucksack, which she’d left with them on the balcony. Apparently, she wasn’t considering a change of clothes, or else the clothes in the rucksack were dirtier than the clothes she wore, although this was hard to imagine. Odd cloth badges were sewn to the rucksack — the insignia of the times, Dr Daruwalla supposed. He recognized the peace symbol, the pastel flowers, Bugs Bunny, a U.S. flag with the face of a pig superimposed on it, and another silver skull and crossbones. He didn’t recognize the black-and-yellow cartoon bird with the menacing expression; he doubted it was a version of the American eagle. There was no way the doctor could have been familiar with Herky the Hawk, the wrathful symbol of athletic teams from the University of Iowa. Looking more closely, Farrokh read the words under the black-and-yellow bird: GO, HAWKEYES!

‘She must belong to some sort of strange club,’ the doctor said to his wife. In response, Julia sighed. It was the way she feigned indifference; Julia was still somewhat in shock at the sight of the huge young woman, not to mention the great clumps of blond hair the girl had grown in her armpits.

In the bathroom, the girl filled and emptied the tub twice. The first time was to shave her legs, but not her underarms – she valued the hair in her armpits as an indication of her rebellion; she thought of it and her pubic hair as her ‘fur.’ She used Dr Daruwalla’s razor; she thought about stealing it, but then she remembered she’d left her rucksack out on the balcony. The memory distracted her; she shrugged, and put the razor back where she’d found it. As she settled into the second tub of water, she fell instantly asleep — she was so exhausted – but she woke up as soon as her mouth dipped below the water. She soaped herself, she shampooed her hair, she rinsed. Then she emptied the tub and drew a
third
bath, letting the water rise around her.

What puzzled her about the murders was that she couldn’t locate in herself the slightest feeling of remorse. The murders weren’t her fault — whether or not they might be judged her unwitting responsibility. She refused to feel guilty, because there was absolutely nothing she could have done to save the victims. She thought only vaguely about the fact that she hadn’t tried to prevent the murders. After all, she decided,’she was also a victim and, as such, a kind of eternal absolution appeared to hover over her, as detectable as the steam ascending from her bathwater.

She groaned; the water was as hot as she could stand it. She was amazed at the scum on the surface of the water. It was her third bath, but the dirt was still coming out of her.

It was her parents’ fault, she decided. Her name was Nancy, she came from an Iowa pig-farming family of German descent and she’d been a good girl all through high school in a small Iowa town; then she’d gone to the university in Iowa City. Because she was so blond and bosomy, she’d been a popular candidate for the cheerleading squad, although she lacked the requisite personality and wasn’t chosen; still, it was her contact with the cheerleaders that led her to meet so many football players. There was a lot of partying, which Nancy was unfamiliar with, and she’d not only slept with a boy for the first time; she’d slept with her first black person, her first Hawaiian person, and the first person she’d ever known who came from New England – he was from somewhere in Maine, or maybe it was Massachusetts.

She flunked out of the University of Iowa at the end of her first semester; when she went home to the small town she’d grown up in, she was pregnant. She thought she was still a good girl, to the degree that she submitted to her parents’ recommendation without questioning it: she would have the baby, put it up for adoption and get a job. She went to work at the local hardware store, in feed-and-grain supply, while she was still carrying the child; soon she began to doubt the wisdom of her parents’ recommendation – men her father’s age began propositioning her,
while
she was pregnant.

She delivered the child in Texas, where the orphanage physician never let her see it — the nurses never even let her know which sex it was – and when she came home, her parents sat her down and told her that they hoped she’d learned her ‘lesson’; they hoped she would ‘behave.’ Her mother said she prayed that some decent man in the town would be ‘forgiving’ enough to marry her, one day. Her father said that God had been ‘lenient’ with her; he implied that God was disinclined toward leniency twice.

For a while, Nancy tried to comply, but so many men of the town attempted to seduce her – they assumed she’d be easy – and so many women were worse; they assumed she was already sleeping with everyone. This punitive experience had a strange effect on her; it didn’t make her revile the football players who’d contributed to her downfall – oddly, what she loathed most was her own innocence. She refused to believe she was immoral. What degraded her was to feel stupid. And with this feeling came an anger she was unfamiliar with – it felt foreign; yet this anger was as much a part of her as the fetus she’d carried for so long but had never seen.

She applied for a passport. When it came, she robbed the hardware store – feed-and-grain, especially – of every cent she could steal. She knew that her family originally came from Germany; she thought she should go there. The cheapest flight (from Chicago) was to Frankfurt; but if Iowa City had been too sophisticated for her, Nancy was unprepared for the enterprising young Germans who frequented the area of the Hauptbahnhof and the Kaiserstrasse, where almost immediately she met a tall, dark drug dealer named Dieter. He was enduringly small-time.

The first thrilling, albeit petty, crime he introduced her to involved her posing as a prostitute on those nasty side streets off the Kaiserstrasse – the ones named after the German rivers. She’d ask for so much money that only the wealthiest, stupidest tourist or businessman would follow her to a shabby room on the Elbestrasse or the Moselstrasse; Dieter would be waiting there. Nancy made the man pay her before she unlocked the door of the room; once they were inside, Dieter would pretend to surprise her – grabbing her roughly and throwing her on the bed, abusing her for her faithlessness and her dishonesty, threatening to kill her while the man who’d paid for her services invariably fled. Not one of the men ever tried to help her. Nancy enjoyed taking advantage of their lust, and there was something gratifying about their uniform cowardice. In her mind, she was repaying those men who’d made her feel so miserable in feed-and-grain supply.

It was Dieter’s theory that all Germans were sexually ashamed of themselves. That was why he preferred India; it was both a spiritual and a sensual country. What he meant was that, for very little, you could buy anything there. He meant women and young girls, in addition to the bhang and the ganja, but he told her only about the quality of the hashish – what he would pay for it there, and what he would get for it back in Germany. He didn’t tell her the whole plan – specifically, that her American passport and her farm-girl looks were the means by which he would get the stuff through German customs. Nancy was also the means by which he’d planned to get the Deutsche marks through Indian customs. (It was marks he took to India; it was hashish he brought back.) Dieter had made the trip with American girls before; he’d also used Canadian girls — their passports aroused even less suspicion.

With both nationalities, Dieter followed a simple procedure: he never flew on the same plane with them; he made sure they’d arrived and passed through customs before he boarded a plane for Bombay. He always told them he wanted them to recover from the jet lag in a comfortable room at the Taj, because, when he got there, they’d be doing some ‘serious business’; he meant they’d be staying in less conspicuous lodgings, and he knew that the bus ride from Bombay to Goa could be disagreeable. Dieter could buy what he wanted in Bombay; but, inevitably, he’d be persuaded — usually by the friend of a friend — to do his buying in Goa. The hash was more expensive there, because the European and American hippies bought up the stuff like bottled water, but the quality was more reliable. It was the quality that fetched a good price in Frankfurt.