Questions of Travel (19 page)
IN A HOTEL ROOM
in Prague, Laura answered the phone. Meera Bryden said, “Laura, darling.”
The man who had traveled to Prague with Laura—a photographer she had met at the
Wayfarer
Christmas party—reached for the remote.
“Darling, the saddest, saddest thing,” said Meera’s voice in the shocking silence. “Theo’s dead.”
He had fallen asleep drunk, choked on his own vomit, died. Lewis Bryden, having let himself into Theo’s house two days after he failed to turn up to a dinner party, found him in the kitchen on a puffy leatherette couch.
Over the days that followed, Laura suffered the usual emotions, violent and banal. What was unexpected were the tiger stripes of jealousy. At the funeral, she could barely look at Lewis. That Theo should have entrusted him with a key! The man was a fool. How dare he appear haggard when Laura’s mirror had returned a face that was tightly composed? She noticed with satisfaction that he was showing signs of baldness. And his head continued to give the impression that it would come away readily from his shoulders. Laura saw herself wielding the axe.
Gaby Shapton had her brother’s solid black brows and none of his beauty. There were children about her, one an angel, all self-conscious with a sense of occasion. She bent over a dark head, retying a bow.
Laura went up to her, blurted, “I’m so sorry.”
Theo’s sister was a short, soft woman with an unfocused gaze. It gave her a wide, inhuman look. Her clothes hung from her in folds like a hide. She gripped Laura’s fingers and said, “Oh, so am I.”
The memory of the night when she had seen Theo up to bed wouldn’t leave Laura. She stood once more on the landing, glancing first up, then down the stairs. She remembered the awful pictures. She saw the doors shut against her like graves.
She realized,
There was no window on the top landing.
She was back in Prague; alone this time. She emailed Bea: Had Theo ever talked to her about reading for hours under a window on the top landing when he was a child? No, replied Bea, but he had often spoken of the pear tree outside his bedroom window and how much he had missed it when it had to be cut down.
Laura thought about all these things. She saw red apples in a market and thought about the apple tree in Theo’s garden—its girth and reach. When she returned to London, she looked up Gaby Shapton’s address. She wrote a letter, shoved it under a folder, read it a few days later, threw it away, wrote another.
Gaby’s reply arrived before the end of the week.
The stories Theo used to tell you were our mother’s. My guess is she never spoke about her family when she first came to live in England. What was the use of remembering what had gone forever? At school she was a dirty Hun who couldn’t speak English. The past must have seemed as if it belonged to someone else, an adored youngest child in Berlin.
I think it was only when she had children of her own that Mutti allowed herself to remember. She was always telling us about Berlin, stories used to pour from her. It seemed perfectly usual to me, I thought everyone’s mothers talked like that. She had the most amazing memory, heaps better than I can do when my kids pester me to tell them about when I was a little girl. It was like Mutti was looking into a book, describing the pictures there. She remembered everything, toys, curtains, puddings, the rain dashing against the small window with the round top, the doctor whose breath smelled of soup, the mignonette in my grandfather’s buttonhole, the workbasket mandarin with the nodding head. She used to talk and talk, and it was so vivid, it was like seeing everything yourself. It’s not really surprising Theo believed he had. Reading about the mandarin made me cry. I’d completely forgotten it till your letter.
Mutti loved Theo best. You’re supposed to love all your kids equally, but everyone knows that’s not how it works. I was a tomboy and a daddy’s girl. But Mutti and Theo spent hours together, Mutti talking about Berlin, Theo taking it all in. When I think about it now, what strikes me is how happy Mutti looked when she was telling us her stories. Although “telling us” isn’t quite right. We were beside the point, in a way. I think she was happy because word by word she was collecting up everything she’d lost, recovering the past for herself.
After the divorce, when Dad moved to LA, I used to go out there for the summer. Theo always refused to come. I remember taunting him about it, this must have been when he was about eight, calling him a cowardy-custard who was too scared to go on a plane. I went on and on, and at last he said, “I might not be able to come back.” There was such anguish in it, it stopped me in my tracks. One way or another, the favorite pays.
After Meera’s phone call, Laura had left the room in Prague, left the man in it without a word, left the hotel. It was a glorious afternoon, blue-skied and cold. She walked across a square that went on and on, she walked along the river, first on one bank, then the other, she crossed and recrossed a famous bridge. A queue of patient, scarved tourists waited for Kafka’s castle, another for an organ concert. Laura passed a street portraitist, and people eating pickled vegetables behind glass. There was a terrible sentence in her mind:
Now he no longer lacks a conclusion.
Nobody spoke to her, although she wore thin clothes and no coat and walked crying and clutching her hair. A green saint sat on a green horse. She passed marble men.
The frosty weather was back, or had never gone away, when Laura returned to Prague to research her story the following month. It was so cold that as she passed shuttered shops one evening, looking for somewhere to eat, her eyes began to water. A woman stopped her under a streetlamp; a soft North American voice inquired if she was okay. A few blocks on, there was another woman, a girl really, with thick yellow plaits and a knitted hat. She let go of her boyfriend’s arm and put out a hand to detain Laura, offering impenetrable syllables of consolation or help; reassured by a smile, she continued on her way. Laura walked on, dabbing at her eyes with a glove. Then she found that she was crying in earnest. On waking, her mind still reached for Theo. But already there were whole hours in a day when she didn’t think of him. And he had been dead less than a month. Forgetting was the real meaning of death. The same thing had happened with Hester. But Laura hadn’t minded so much, then. Her great-aunt had been old. She had always belonged to
the past.
Caught up in finals, caught up in the future, Laura had let the old woman go, as a tourist looks for the last time on a landscape that has contained happiness: reluctantly, even sorrowfully, while picking up a bag with a sense of onward motion. Life asserted itself as one small betrayal of the dead after another. It began beside the bier, with an adjustment to a ribbon. Laura vowed, I won’t forget, Theo, I won’t forget. Tears continued to well. Behind her eyes, a picture arose; it was the meal she craved, something starchy that steamed.
A LETTER ARRIVED, ADDRESSED
to Ravi. It contained a sheet of paper on which the security code for the building was printed above a stylized drawing of a vase of flowers.
Freda was still holding her small silver phone. She had alerted the police and arranged for the security code to be changed. She had the rather baffled air she wore when the planet didn’t fall into step, but repeated the first thing she had said: “It’s only a frightener. Otherwise there’d be no warning.”
Ravi thought of the man in sunglasses casually clicking his pen. He thought of Hiran in the Mercedes, looking out at billboards and bikes. The house of fear rose and rose with no need of a blueprint: an airy edifice to which it would always be possible to add yet another wing. He realized that he was looking at a picture of the rest of his life.
He would leave at once, he said.
“And go where? Home to your mother? A rooming house like the one you were in? They’ll be expecting you to go to those places.”
The topmost branches of the tree beside the balcony cast uncertain shadows on the living-room wall. Ravi couldn’t stop looking at them: the soft shapes, the way the light probed.
Freda took him to a flat in Havelock Town. It was rented by a friend of hers, a Frenchman. Ravi saw an eagle, beaky and hunched. That bird’s face was one of those that had floated over him in those first sleep-shrouded days; he remembered the shy, wild smile. The fridge contained only a bottle of vodka, two limes and a mineral-water spray. “There is nothing better for the complexion,” said the Frenchman, squirting water into Ravi’s face. The flat was dim, and the air-conditioning fit for icebergs; small ones had sprung up in corners. They turned out to be glass ashtrays, many of them full of butts.
Every night, fully clothed and shivering under his coverlet, Ravi heard footsteps and whispers in the garden. There was no tree at the window here, only a winding, thick-limbed creeper. Its black roots, rummaging in the earth, intruded on the dead. Hiran’s voice found its way out and followed his father. It warned of
a devil with long ears.
But the devil who came had worn wraparound glasses—no one had mentioned his ears.
Ravi returned to work. A week later, a drawing was delivered to the Frenchman’s flat.
“You can’t go on working. They’ll just follow you home. You have to go right away.”
At one in the morning, Freda had driven him, via insanely circuitous routes and two checkpoints, to a five-star hotel.
Ravi went on protesting in an undertone while the desk clerk accepted her Visa. She said, “It’s not a problem, actually.” And finally hissed, “I can afford it, you know.”
The clerk slid a keycard over the counter. He avoided looking at Freda, but understanding quivered in the glance, immediately screened with lashes, that he offered Ravi.
Freda’s logic was severe. Even if Ravi could find new employment, he would be traced. He needed an income. Therefore he had to leave the country.
She said, “What about studying abroad? I remember Malini saying you were thinking about it.” So they had talked about him! Ravi’s scalp crawled—he could imagine what his wife had said. He wanted to lie down and go to sleep and never wake up. He also wanted to hit Freda Hobson, or at least shut her in a drawer where he need never see her again. He began to tell her about scholarships and application procedures and the unlikelihood of succeeding. Freda addressed a fool: “Obviously, we can’t risk waiting till next year.”
Of late, she had often worn that pinched, thin-skinned look. Now her eyes snapped, there was a new light in her face. She can’t wait to be rid of me, Ravi thought.
Three evenings later she was back in his room, with a beer she had bought at the bar. She told him what he already knew: Sri Lankans who applied for residency abroad could wait years for a refusal. Freda had talked to a few foreigners, friends who could be trusted and were knowledgeable, and everyone had advised her that Ravi should try for a tourist visa. It was quicker than applying for residency and likelier to succeed.
Once at his destination, he could apply for asylum, went on Freda. “Can you get a letter from your university saying you’ve got a job to come back to? You won’t get any kind of visa without one.”
Ravi saw that she had anticipated everything, including any objections he might raise. She was saying, “I’ll need your bank details so I can transfer money into your account. You’ll need proof you can support yourself when you get to the other end.” She would
take care of
his ticket as well, she added, raising her chin. She had the potency of a figurine placed out of a child’s reach: tempting, expensive, not to be touched.
The hotel room contained only a single chair, and Freda had ignored it. There are people who fit themselves into rooms, and those around whom space is arranged. Ravi had seen policemen, journalists, his grief-maddened, terrifying father-in-law take on the imprint of Freda’s will; rooms were the least of it. With her spine against the headboard, she sat with one denim leg stretched on his bed. There was a large, faceted stone on her hand. It had been bought on a visit to Galle when Ravi was still living with Freda; she had thrust it at him as soon as she returned to the flat. “Isn’t it super-gorgeous? A green amethyst. I had to have it. It’s the color of the bay where I was swimming this morning.” What a ridiculous reason to buy a ring! The woman could afford real stones: rubies, emeralds. An amethyst meant one thing only: quartz.
Freda’s springy hair had grown; Ravi watched her lift it away from her neck. He remembered two saris that had called to each other, dark hair clipped above two pairs of ears. Friendship was conducive to imitation and doubling. He was traversed by a vision—brief, unwelcome, shockingly explicit—of Freda naked and inviting on the ivory spread.
She was saying, “Actually, we might run into a problem. As soon as any embassy runs a check on you, they’ll find out about the murders. No one’s going to believe you’re just taking a holiday after that. You won’t get even a tourist visa if an embassy thinks you’re likely to be applying for asylum when you get there.” The back of her hand trailed across her mouth, wiping away beer. That she drank alcohol was one of the things about her that fascinated and repelled Ravi. Glancing around the room as if enthralled by its bland orthodoxy, she said, “But we’ll just have to chance it, I suppose.” Then she went away.
Five minutes passed. She scratched at his door. “Ravi, it’s me.” She came in and sat down on the chair and ran a contemptuous eye over the curtains. “There
is
another way you could get a tourist visa, actually. I just can’t make up my mind if I should even mention it.” She moved her hands—there was white fire and blue. Ravi found himself the object of her knock-you-flat look. “There’s an Australian. At the high commission.” Freda sounded uncertain, explaining what would be required of Ravi, but he was the one who lowered his gaze.
When she had finished, he was silent for some minutes. Then he asked how Freda knew about this man.
“J-P.” That was the Frenchman. “He got a Tamil boy out that way last year. We’d have to arrange everything through J-P, actually—the Australian guy’ll pull out if he gets so much as a hint that anyone else knows. And it might come to nothing. He’s super-cautious. Only one or two a year.”
If the Australian accepted, went on Freda, he took care of various tricky formalities: the police check, for one. “It’s a vile way to do things, of course. But he does help men who are in danger.”
When she said, “Before he decides, he’ll want a photo of you.” She looked away at last. Plucking an imaginary thread from her jeans, she murmured, “Of course we could just keep trying Canada or Ireland or wherever in the hope that someone’ll give you a tourist visa. I completely see why that might be what you’d prefer.”
Ravi said, “No. I’ll do it. If this man is willing.”
“It would be marvelous if you could go to London, of course. But Australia’s rather good, as it happens. I know the perfect person in Sydney.” Her composure was back; her voice was as polished as her hands. Ravi saw that he was to be disposed of thoughtfully and with minimal inconvenience to Freda; Australia was perfect, actually. Freda Hobson, who knew people in Sydney, in New York, in Ho Chi Minh City, was running the world again.
The Frenchman had what Freda called
a genius idea.
She was unpacking a small, wheeled suitcase as she spoke. It contained a daypack, thick-soled runners, German sandals, a camera, clothes. There were also sunglasses and a First Boston baseball cap. While he waited for his visa, Ravi was to adopt the guise of a migrant on a visit home. As soon as he had changed into his new jeans and a T-shirt with a Nike swoosh, Freda drove him to a different hotel.