Soldiers of Paradise (13 page)

On the floor by the girl’s head lay a bowl full of vomit and wet feces. “This room is very dirty,” he said.

“Dirty, sir?”

“That’s what I said. Do you have any clean bedsheets?”

The woman looked up and shook her head. There was a hint of panic in her eyes.

“Never mind,” said the doctor hurriedly. He sat down on the bedside and ran his fingers over the child’s fine, almost transparent brown hair, not quite touching her. Even so, he could feel the fever in her head. Sweat glistened on the hairs of her upper lip. “How do you feel?” he asked.

The child said nothing, and turned away her face. Under her ear he could see a place where some cosmetic cream had dried in a thick crust, and he picked at it idly with his fingernail. It flaked away, and under it he saw a red birthmark, one of the many signs of the unclean. God had marked her. Thanakar put his finger on the mark. “How long has she been like this?” he asked.

“She was born with it. Sir.” There was a note of bitterness in the woman’s voice.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I meant the fever.” But he kept his finger where it was. “You are runaways?”

“Yes. They wanted to put her in prison. They said she was a witch.”

“It doesn’t matter. I am not the purge. But I’m surprised you let me see her. You must be careful.”

The woman seemed close to tears. “Oh sir,” she said, “I thought she was going to die. Her fever just goes up and up …”

“She’ll be all right. How long has she been like this?”

“Four days. What more can they do to us … ?”

“She’ll be all right. Tomorrow I’ll send something to take the fever down. In the meantime, you must try to keep her clean. I’ll show you. Bring me a bucket of warm water, soap, and towels.”

The woman started to cry, and one of the men in the doorway said, “There is no hot water, sir. No towels.”

“Cold water, then. And soap.”

“Soap, sir?” said the woman in despair.

“Yes. Soap. Is that so difficult to understand?”

“Don’t bully her, Cousin,” came the prince’s gentle voice.

Thanakar pulled the sheets away from the girl’s body. She turned her face back towards him and opened wide her eyes, staring at him without speaking as he moved his fingers down her body and unwrapped a grimy bandage around her knee.

“Why do you want soap, sir?” asked the woman.

The doctor bit his lips. “I want to wash her.” Under the bandage was a deep infected sore. Her whole knee was covered in a leaking crust of scabs.

The woman got to her feet and said some words in a strange language. One of the faces in the doorway disappeared.

The girl’s feet were encased in plastic shoes. As Thanakar removed them, she cried out. Underneath, her feet were covered with dirt and blisters. The shoes were several sizes too small. He took them off and laid them by the chamberpot. “She shouldn’t wear these,” he said quietly.

“No shoes, sir?” the woman asked, her voice tearful. “But shoes are good. Aren’t they?”

“Not these shoes. Look what they are doing to her feet. It’s a wonder she can walk.”

“She can’t walk, sir.”

The girl lay on her back. She was dressed in a ragged nylon smock, with buttons running down her chest. Thanakar unfastened several, and as he did so, he felt the air in the room change. The girl’s eyes widened and filled with fright. And behind him, the men who had been standing in the doorway came in and stood or squatted all around, staring at his hands. There was no hostility in their faces, only total absorption in his smallest movements, as if instead of simply peeling the smock back from her narrow ribcage, he were making an incision and peeling back the skin. A man came in with a bucket of water and half a bar of soap. Taking them from him, Thanakar started to wash her, with clever movements of his elegant white hands.

For Prince Abu, the tension in the room was hard to bear. With an unclear idea of stepping out into the street and waiting there, he wandered through the doorway. But as he passed the entrance to the other room, he stopped. Someone had pulled a curtain over the glass, but the door was partly open, and he looked inside.

It was something he had read about. In popular mythology, a man died only after he had made a total of 400 mortal errors. It was an idea that had grown out of the commentary on the 1,019th verse of the Song of the Beloved Angkhdt: “Sweet friend, how long have I known you? How many days have I sensed you near me, sleeping, waking, your body within reach. Without you, I would have made myself a hell long ago and furnished it with lies, and memories of four hundred women left unsatisfied. Dear love, you have taken these things into yourself. Love, you have saved me …” The text was obscure, but it had led to this, that blameless men with nothing left to sell would sell their blamelessness. A sick man would come in, afraid of death and damnation, the weight of his mistakes suddenly intolerable. And the confessor would take them on himself, one by one, a few at a time, into his own body, according to a simple ritual. The sick man would sit down and try to capture in his mind all the particulars of the sin that he wanted to expunge. On his lap he held a box of colored powders—black for bitter thoughts, red for evil actions, green for harmful words. He would make a selection, and holding some powder in the pouch of his lip, he would begin to talk about his sin, every aspect of it, germination and result, everything that weighed upon his conscience. Besides its foul taste, the drug was a powerful expectorant, and by the time the man had finished talking, he would have filled a stone basin with colored spit. Then he would rinse his mouth out with sweet water, and his confessor, after prayers and exhortations, would drink down the contents of the basin. And at the end, the sick man would have stepped back from the grave, and the healthy man would have taken one step towards it.

Abu had read about this ritual, but he had never seen it. There in the dark room, by the light of a single candle, he saw a fleshless, toothless, bald old man and a pale young one. They sat opposite each other on wooden chairs, leaning over a stone pot set on the floor between them. Both were too absorbed in what they were doing to notice the prince standing in the doorway.

The old man had almost filled the basin with black juice. “It was wrong, I know,” he mumbled. “But it wasn’t my fault. My wife hired her when I was gone from home. I wouldn’t have objected, not that, but still, there was something unnatural about her. Something wicked in the way she disturbed my sleep. I couldn’t sleep. I thought about her constantly. I neglected my business. It wasn’t natural, not for a girl like her. A serving girl, from the lowest family …” He spat a jet of juice into the bowl and then continued more distinctly. “She wasn’t good looking. It wasn’t that. She looked … vulnerable. Weak. It maddened me. She was a witch, I tell you. It wasn’t my fault.” The juice ran down his chin.

“No excuses,” said the young man.

“No. Of course not. That’s not what I mean. I was bewitched, yes. I thought about her. Nothing dirty. I thought about her.” He emptied his mouth again.

“Don’t lie,” said the young man. The old man sighed, rubbing his hands together in his lap, hunched over the basin, and when he continued, he was almost inaudible.

“I used to imagine her naked,” he confessed. “At night I used to lie in my bed and imagine her … breasts.” His voice trailed away.

“Her breasts.”

“Her breasts, yes,” the old man repeated loudly. He sighed. “I used to imagine touching them.”

“How many times?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I didn’t do anything. At least, not like that. I used to …” His voice died down to nothing, and he emptied his mouth into the bowl.

“Tell me.”

“I used to beat her. I would find fault with her work.”

“Stop,” commanded the young man. He held out the box of powder and motioned towards the red compartment. Sighing wearily, the other took a pinch of red and put it in his lip. Then suddenly he pitched forward and clapped his skinny hands to his mouth.

“Keep it in,” commanded the young man. “Don’t spit it out.”

The old man’s eyes and nose were streaming water. “God, it burns,” he cried when he had recovered speech.

“Yes, it burns,” agreed the young man softly. He held out the box again.

“Ah, God, no more. Not again. Have pity.”

“Take it.”

Moaning and weeping, the old man took another pinch.

“Now, tell me. What did you do?”

“I … I beat her.”

“Louder. Stop mumbling.”

“I beat her.”

“How many times?”

“I … I don’t know.” The man was weeping and wringing his hands. “I can’t remember.”

“Think. Visualize each time.”

There was a pause. And then: “I beat her seven times.”

“How hard?”

“Not hard. I swear to God not hard.” The old man smiled pathetically. “I’m not strong. She was a healthy girl. At least …” He spat red drool into the pot. Abu could see it clearly, floating on a puddle of black. Action floating on the surface of the mind, he thought. He raised the bottle to his lips, but the movement changed the shadows on the floor. The old man looked up and sat back in his chair. “Who are you?” he cried, red drool running down his chin. “What are you doing here?”

Prince Abu moved out of the doorway to let the light fall on his uniform. The old man stared at him, astonished. The juice made strings of liquid down his clothes.

“I’m sorry,” said the prince. “I’m sorry to disturb you.” But the two men sat there staring without moving. “My cousin is a doctor,” he explained to the sin eater. “We came to see your daughter.”

Still the men said nothing, and then slowly, as if unwillingly, they got to their feet to make the compulsory gestures of respect, knuckles to their foreheads, hiding their eyes.

“No, please,” stammered the prince. “Never mind that. We came for the carnival. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you. Please continue with your …” He broke off, embarrassed, and stepped back through the doorway and out into the passage. From the other room there came a yell of pain, and he could see Thanakar rising from the bed, holding his finger.

“Ah,” he cried. “She bit me. Like a wild animal.” And then he smiled.

“They have their reasons.”

“But we are good men, aren’t we? We do our best. We treat them kindly.”

“And if we were bad men and treated them cruelly, what defense could they have? That’s the point. What law restrains us? I have seen my own father knock a servant’s teeth out with his fist.”

“He must have been provoked.”

“He was not provoked at all,” exclaimed Thanakar, irritated by his friend’s lack of imagination. “He was a cruel man. Maybe not always, but after a lifetime in the army. It’s the life we lead. You know that for every two like us there are twenty like him. They think God himself gave them their tattoos.”

“Then I’m thankful to be unfit for military service. You should be too.”

“I should be. Do you know where we’re going?”

“I’m following you.”

They were walking arm in arm, because they had walked too far for the doctor’s bad leg. He stopped for a moment under a streetlamp in the small deserted street, to take his weight off it, to lean on Abu’s shoulder. Looking up into his face, he thought he saw some resemblance there to the prince’s sister. Seeing her fifteen days before, at the commissar’s dinner, he was surprised that brother and sister could be so unalike. Under the streetlamp, he took pleasure in reconstructing the memory of her features from her brother’s face. Prince Abu was balding, fat, sweet, ineffectual, sweating heavily even in the cold night, his eyes bright and rebellious under folds of unhealthy skin, as if they were held prisoner in his face. Again, his lips were fat, but under them his teeth were white and delicate, like pearls hidden in a flapping purse.

In his sister, it was as if the barriers of flesh were stripped away, and Thanakar could imagine that their skulls would look the same. Their teeth, their eyes were similar.

“Why are you looking at me?” asked Abu, smiling.

“Do you mind if we wait here for a minute?”

“If you like.”

In a way, her eyes were like her husband’s too. Perhaps that’s what bound the three of them together in that strange house, the lack of harmony between their faces and their eyes. She was a perfect example of her class, docile and submissive. It was part of the obligation of her name always to speak pleasantly. But even though by law and custom she was forbidden ever to make any bitter judgment or any harsh remark, yet her eyes complained. The brightness, the bitterness in them combined with the perfection of her manners to make a tension that seemed sexual.

“What are you thinking about?” asked Abu.

“Your sister.”

“Did you like her?”

“In a way.”

“I wish you could have married her. She is just your age.”

Since meeting her at dinner, Thanakar, too, had speculated what it would have been like if she had married him and not the old commissar. Their families were connected; it would have been a likely match, if not for his leg. He would have been a prince and married her, and his children would have inherited his house and income. He would have broken down the barriers of the courtesy that she had learned in school, and in time she would have become a free woman, capable of loving. It was a stupid fantasy, without detail in his mind, because as always his leg wouldn’t permit him to limp over the first if. His child would never wear his clothes. For this reason, he thought, it was too much to expect him to forget what small privileges he had. Abu could shake beggars by the hand, drink from polluted cups. What did he care?

Abu laughed. “How stern you look.”

“Shall we go?”

They walked away into the dark beyond the streetlamp, and at the end of a long alleyway they found a makeshift barricade of garbage and concrete, lined at the top with barbed wire and sheets of corrugated iron. They walked along it till it joined another, higher wall, and at the gate a wide, vacant face, shiny in the light of an acetylene lantern on a pole, looked out at them through a hole punched in the wall. It looked a long time out of bulging, expressionless eyes, motionless, unresponsive to inquiry, entreaty, threats, silence. Framed in the square hole, it seemed less a human face than a picture on a wall. It seemed deaf and blind. But Abu laughed, and at once the face changed, its lips twisting into a silent grin, revealing long antinomial teeth. That was all; there was no more movement, but from behind the wall came a shuffling and a banging, and the gate swung open on wire hinges. A man stood in the gap, gigantic and muscular, dressed only in a pair of cotton breeches, roughened to look like leather. Unlike the gatekeeper’s, his face was animate. And he spoke, too. Sound bubbled on his lips, nonsense syllables set to a frothy tune, as if he were laughing to music. With his palms, he beat a loud, complicated rhythm on his thighs and his chest, finishing with a roll across his belly, which he distended for the purpose. “In!” he shouted, in rhythm with the slaps. “In! In! In! In! In!” He stepped aside.