Soldiers of Paradise (19 page)

In those days, too, he had another patient. At first he had gone secretly. But as time went on he became careless, and visited in plain daylight, and brought his car. It was more convenient, so that he didn’t have to carry the gifts he brought—fruits and vegetables, blankets and warm clothes. And always things for the little girl: sweets, dresses, picture books. His father had had a dictum: “Stroke them and they bite you, whip them and they lick your hand.” As usual, his father had been half right. Her teethmarks still showed on his thumb from the first night he had washed her and changed her bandages, so at first he was careful not to touch her again, but sat and gave directions to her mother. Even so, the first few times, Jenny’s little body was stiff and frightened, her eyes full of suspicion when she saw him. But Thanakar was clever enough to be patient. He would dump the presents he had brought her carelessly onto the floor, and the next time they would show signs of her touch. And one day he brought her a doll with a white porcelain head, and she took it gravely from his hands.

Her fever and the pains in her chest yielded to antibiotics, and her infections dried. After two weeks she would smile when he came into the room, and after two weeks more she would wait for him by the window and run to greet him as he limped up the path. Then she would take him by the hand, and they would go for walks, or she would rub her cheek along the sleeve of his coat when they sat together on the bed. He would put his arm around her shoulder, and she would snuggle up against the soft material, sucking her thumb, peering at the picture book that he was holding in his lap.

As he watched the absorption with which she studied the illustrations, he felt a mixture of emotions. He had brought her all his own books, the ones he had loved when he was a child—stories of magic and fantasy, boys turned into eagles, adventures at the bottom of the sea. Some of the margins were marked in his own childish handwriting, and some of the pictures were torn in a way that brought back some urgent, long-forgotten memory. At such times, looking at her serious pale face, the way her legs dangled without touching the floor, he felt himself transported back to his own miserable childhood, the days of studying those same picture books while the endless winter howled outside. Then, reading, he had not been looking into the past, but to the future, a magic time when he would be a man and all wrongs would be righted, all insults savagely avenged. Now, looking back, he could remember a whole scene—some burning humiliation, and in the end he had run into his room, slamming the door, pulling the book violently from the shelf, so that the picture tore just so. Then, kneeling over it, he had put his finger on the tear, studying the picture without seeing it, as he was doing now. And in an instant, the boy raised his face to stare into the future just as Thanakar looked back into the past, their eyes meeting as if through a sequence of mirrors.

He, too, had been an only child, though the bedroom in his father’s house was not like this. His own room had been unusually luxurious, as if his parents had tried to expiate through luxury the guilt they felt at hating him for something that was not his fault. No, not hate, surely, but disappointment, and it amounted to the same thing, for he had hated himself loyally for their sakes. He remembered his mother holding her arms out, and he had limped into her arms. And all the way, across acres and acres of polished floor, he was studying her face, convinced that it was only through the most muscular exertions of her will that she was able to keep that mask of love over her face. Later he had come to realize how his own sensitivity was cheating him, but it didn’t help, because the cause was real: he really was a cripple, and he was their only child. In those days his limping had been worse. Every phase of winter, every phase of spring had brought with it a new therapy, a new series of operations, something that might show some progress and squeeze some dispensation from the priests. Each one had aggravated his condition, until he could barely walk. And even though he knew instinctively that he couldn’t begin to heal until they left him alone, still he submitted to every cure with masochistic glee. He took pleasure in the incompetence of surgeons. He had decided to become a doctor.

Sitting with his arm around the little girl, sometimes he felt he loved her because of the mark on her cheek. It was a large red mark near her left ear, and a priest would say that God had pinched her underneath the ear before releasing her into the world, to mark her with His curse. They had said something like that about his leg, though her case was much more serious because she was born like that, and because her family was poor. He wondered how she had escaped growing up in prison, but by the time he and Jenny had become close enough to sit like that, side by side, he no longer spoke to her parents much. At first they had been eager to please. They had accepted his gifts with a humility that had made him wonder whether he was doing the right thing. They kept the house clean for his visits. But after Jenny was well and he kept coming, they changed. The woman became surly and uncommunicative, the man increasingly nervous. Gradually the dirt started to come back, as if cleanliness were just a whim of his which they no longer wanted to indulge. Thanakar didn’t care. Even though he understood how they were beginning to fear him, to wish their poverty didn’t oblige them to accept his gifts, still they did accept them. As long as they did, the doctor felt that he could come when he pleased. Their nervousness and sullenness made him impatient. Surely they could see how clean his motives were. They thought he was trying to steal her. But her poverty was part of what he loved, her stupid parents and her filthy house. But if he didn’t feel capable of explaining this to them, it was because in another sense he realized that their fears were justified, that every smile she gave him took her farther away.

He loved the way they loved her. Other parents would have given her up to the judicial system and forgotten her, but these had become outlaws for her sake. He thought about his own parents. For a long time he had felt as if he owed them nothing, because of the pain of those operations on his leg. But yet, how unfair children are. He had been so eager. Perhaps, if he had not been so eager, his parents would have desisted after the first few failures. They could not have been expected to understand that his eagerness was a way of gathering up justifications to use against them in his heart. It was the way he had found to overwhelm his spontaneous feelings for them—the natural love of the miserable for the magnificent. In Jenny’s parents he had seen at first some of that same love in the way they had treated him, and now he saw some of the work it took to bury it. They were unfair to him, like children.

 

“I’m worried about your health,” he told Jenny’s father. The man was sitting alone in his consulting room with his head in his hands, his snuffpots around him on the floor. The doctor stood in the doorway, and as he spoke the man raised his face, handsome, with his daughter’s pale skin and perfect features. He blinked, as if unable to recognize his guest, and then got wearily to his feet to make the gestures of respect. He was very thin.

“Don’t get up,” said Thanakar.

“I would prefer to stand, sir.”

Thanakar shrugged. “I’m worried about your health,” he said again.

“You’re too good, sir.”

Thanakar examined his voice for traces of irony. He found irony mixed with unhappiness in equal parts, but even so it would have been enough to make him give up, angry, if he had not already rehearsed what he was going to say: “I want you to stop this. This employment. If you continue, you’ll die. You’ll be dead in a thousand days.”

The man sighed. “What must I do, sir?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think you’d be sorry to give it up.”

“It’s my work, sir.”

“Yes, I know,” said Thanakar, irritated. “What I mean is, I could help you to find something better.”

“You are too good.”

“Damn it!” cried the doctor. “Why do you insist on turning me away? I want to help you. Do you think I come here for myself?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes. Yes, of course. If we can’t be polite, at least let us be sensible. You’re right, of course. But we both have something to offer. Haven’t I given you enough money to give this up, to start something new?”

“What, sir?”

“Well, what is your name?”

“Pentecost, sir.”

“Not that name. Your working name.”

“Wood.”

“Were you a lumberman?”

“Carpenter, sir.”

“Skilled?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So why can’t you set yourself up somewhere? I’ll give you the money. Who’s the chaplain of the guild here? I’ll talk to him.”

“I have no papers, sir. Surely you must realize that. I ran away from … home, when Jenny was born. They were going to put her in prison.”

“I see.”

“I don’t think you do, sir. Otherwise you wouldn’t leave your car down in the square and walk here in broad daylight. Do you think a man like you isn’t noticed? As for my health, I’m grateful for your concern, but I don’t have a single client now. God, I wish I’d had the strength to turn you out after the first night, but my wife was begging me, and how was I to know you’d be so … careless? I wish I’d had the strength to run away. Now it’s too late.”

“Is that what you want?” asked Thanakar, after a pause.

“Don’t you understand? My daughter is the only thing I have. Up until now, there was never a way for me to hope even the smallest hope for her. But you’ll be able to do something for her, won’t you, sir? You’re a powerful man. You’ll find some way to protect her. That night you came, she was so sick. And now she’s well. Don’t you think I’m grateful for that? Sincerely?” He looked sincere, his hands clasped in front of him, his dark eyes.

“You make me feel ashamed,” said Thanakar.

“Oh no, sir. We’re nothing without you. You’ve been so kind. She’s happy when she’s with you. Don’t think I can’t see that.”

 

Because he was ashamed, Thanakar packed his bag and set out for the mountain.

He took an elevator up to the topmost roof of his wing of the palace, and from there the way led up dozens of flights of steep stone steps. It took almost an hour to climb. The way was unguarded; it was never used, for most traffic drove along the roadway and up through the fifteen gates along the other side. Thanakar didn’t want to cross that many barriers. Even in his car it would have taken longer, for at each gate they would have found ways to delay him, though in the end they would have had to let him pass. On foot, the path was difficult for him, and he took time to rest whenever the stairs broadened past a deserted blockhouse or abandoned barbican. The bishop no longer had the men to guard all the entrances up into the prison. Even at the top, the gate was unguarded. Out of breath, Thanakar stood under the gigantic arch, letting his gaze pass idly over the inscriptions: justifications for the prison’s existence, six-foot letters in a language nobody could read. Behind him, far below, the city stretched away into the hills. Far in the distance, he could see the towers of the bishop’s palace, the Temple of Kindness and Repair, glinting in the afternoon sun. The air was rich and quiet. Sparrows quarreled at his feet.

He passed in underneath the arch and stood squinting across a stone parade ground, one of four, almost a mile across. Flies buzzed, and here too the air seemed still and drowsy. The mountain, so big that even from here you could only see a part of it, rising up layer by layer, circle after circle of black battlements, filling the sky, disappearing into the clouds—even the mountain had a drowsy aspect, as if the crimes committed there were so ancient and bulky, so much an indissoluble part of the rock, that they had lost their urgency. They had no voice. The air was perfectly still. The building slouched on its foundations like a bloated old dictator peacefully sleeping in his chair.

A company of soldiers came out through a postern gate on the far side of the parade ground. Their needlelike footsteps, the click of their boots, the officer’s sharp cries seemed blunted at first by distance and the heavy atmosphere. The doctor picked up his bag and shuffled towards them, and as he did so, the sounds regained their edge—the steelshod boots, the metallic clash of their weapons—until he came near and they wheeled to face him, saluting in formation, smashing their rifle butts to the stones. Then everything was quiet once again as they waited for him to cross along their front, but it was a different kind of silence, tense with embarrassment and broken by a noise the doctor had not noticed before, the ragged patter of his limp.

Thanakar moved down the line, feeling unusually deformed. But he put his shoulders back and, as was his unhappy custom, examined their faces to see if they were laughing at him. They weren’t, but for him the soldiers’ earnestness gave them a collective irony that would have been dissipated by a single quivering lip. Thanakar searched eagerly for some sign of mockery, but there was nothing, just popeyed boyishness and stiff black uniforms. They were so young. Thanakar passed the officer, a dark clean boy, his face frozen into a rictus of subservience, and the doctor felt his first contemptuous instincts being polluted by a small amount of sadness. There was no reason for young men to be clever if they were going to die so soon. The eternal war in which their fathers and grandfathers had fought was all around them, yet it was easily forgotten. There was no news, not even lies; there never had been. But Thanakar caught wisps of rumors from his cousins in the army. Even they knew nothing. There was fighting near the city now. You could hear the guns sometimes—where? North, east, west—you only saw it indirectly by how many things were missing: how empty the shops seemed, how pitiful the food available to the poor, how few men in a crowd.

The soldiers marched away, and Thanakar crossed the rest of the parade ground. He entered the mountain through a small postern, thirty feet high, carved in the shape of the twenty-first bishop’s open mouth. The stairs led up his tongue. Inside, all was submission and subservience, though as he penetrated the dingy corridors, the cell-like offices so small they made you forget where you were, the wardens and the guards seemed increasingly sullen. He was abusing his right. They knew it, and they hated him for it. At the checkpoints, he held his palms up with contemptuous nonchalance, and they were powerless to disobey. They knew better than anyone the penalties for disobedience.