The Brothers K (69 page)

Well, I was wrong, Nash. Though now that I’m here I see two very good reasons why I couldn’t imagine ’Nam from back home. One
reason was that a ’Nam could only mean that the leaders of my country were as crazy and cruel as King Herod. Maybe not that cruel as individuals, but running in a pack they sure were. And the other reason was that ’Nam means that I, who always felt so loved by Jesus, didn’t have the slightest idea what Christ’s love really is. It was this second part that scared me most, Nash. In fact it scared my mind shut. It slammed shut like a door whenever anyone warned me not to come here. Everett’s warnings especially confused me, because I knew he wouldn’t lie, but he was so full of anger and hate that his truths just didn’t feel true. So he with his good imagination and bad temper ran away to Canada. And I with my bad imagination and good temper came here, where I have seen and smelled and touched the things I found impossible to imagine. And now, too late, I understand Everett’s hate. Now I know that sure enough, Herod is alive and well and more powerful than ever, living in Moscow and Peking and Washington D.C. And what’s worse, at least for me: I no longer know what Christ’s love is. He’s lost me. I don’t know what He could possibly mean by this place, though I’m still struggling with all my heart to find out.

That pretty much says it, strange and sad as it must sound. One thing I’m sure of, Nash, and don’t ever forget this. No matter how nuts this war would of made me, I’d of loved you all my life, with all my heart, when I came home.

XOOX,

Irwin (your dad)

O
ne of Holy Mother India’s best-kept secrets—so Peter decided several months into his Fulbright year—was the thousand and one ways she had of making Westerners look like fools. Including even Westerners determined to live like Easterners.

During Peter’s three-week stay in an embarrassingly luxurious guesthouse at the University of New Delhi, a servant had literally come with the house—that is, the fellow could be found round the clock, perched like some sort of home appliance in a tiny, doorless nook near the bungalow’s back entrance. Embarrassed by the man’s minuscule quarters, by his servility, and by the concept of servants in general, Peter told his faculty hosts that the man’s services were not needed. To Peter’s surprise, his faculty friends politely but firmly insisted that he stay. So into my
brother’s life came an obsequious, incomprehensible little Tamil, Lakshman by name, who chose, despite Peter’s repeated attempts to send him home, to remain on call twenty-four hours a day.

Lakshman’s complete services, Peter soon learned, would have cost him two rupees—about 360—a day, and no one but Allah would have known had he allowed himself to be waited upon hand and foot. But Peter felt his relationship with Lakshman was, like all human relationships, a spiritual test, and his strategy in taking this test was to treat his servant as a perfect equal. Peter therefore insisted, to the man’s obvious consternation, on picking up after himself, making his bed, hand-washing his own clothes, buying and preparing his own food, making and serving his own tea, heating his own bath water, and so on. He also visited Lakshman in his little- appliance closet at every meal or teatime, to offer him a portion of whatever food or beverage he’d made for himself. This unstinting show of equality seemed to alternately agitate and depress the servant, but Peter kept at it. There were still two annoyances in their relationship, however: the first was that Lakshman insisted, no matter how many times he was corrected, upon addressing Peter as “Sahib;” the second was that whenever Peter was not asleep (and perhaps even when he was) Lakshman would emerge from his nook every half hour like a cuckoo from a clock, to come stand in the doorway of whatever room Peter occupied, and to politely inquire, in the one English sentence he had mastered, whether Sahib yet required his assistance. The latter annoyance was especially disturbing to Peter’s scholarly work, both because it broke his concentration and because he’d begun to detect a veiled air of hostility: for all his apparent servility, Lakshman’s relentless interruptions seemed silently to say that Peter’s fandangled attempts at “brotherhood” meant nothing to him, and that on the day Peter took himself off to whatever Western hellhole he’d come from, Lakshman would go back to serving a
real
Sahib with pleasure. After two weeks of this torment Peter ran out of patience, described the situation to his faculty hosts, and for the second time requested that the servant be sent away—

and that’s when he learned that Lakshman was assigned year round to the occupant of Peter’s bungalow and no other, that only by serving that occupant could he earn tips, that these tips were the sole source of income for the six kids, wife and mother-in-law with whom he shared an unplumbed one-room concrete apartment, and that, thanks to Peter’s fine notions of equality, Lakshman’s family had been begging their meals, or going hungry, ever since he’d arrived. Of course Peter was appalled—and
he deliberately lived, and tipped, like a pasha for the rest of his stay.

Another one of Mother India’s little practical jokes began one day, in Hyderabad, when Peter decided the time had come to purchase a piece of cloth suitable for a turban, both to protect himself from sunstroke and to conceal his crowd-attracting blond braid. What happened this time was that he did find a suitable piece of pale blue cloth, learned to wrap it in several traditional styles, and for the better part of a month wore it constantly, gradually growing numb to the hundreds, if not thousands of incredulous stares he continued to receive anyhow. He then learned, from a blushing female Rhodes scholar at the University of Madras, that his fine blue turban was of a color and cut of cloth which Hindu women use only as underwear. Peter managed to laugh as he ripped it off his head and presented it, with a bow and a strangled thank-you, to the woman. But he also proceeded to spend more time than ever shut up in hotel rooms and libraries, immersed in his work.

The longer Peter stayed in India the more necessary he found it to shelter himself from the crowds and the heat, the overspiced food and black marketeers, the chaotic bazaars and abused landscape, the prying children, countless beggars, overabundance of life, overabundance of death. Yet the more skilled he became at sheltering himself, the more he felt as though something inside him, some kind of inner circuitry, had ceased to function. Emotionally, and at times physically, he felt disconnected from himself. Unplugged. When he’d try to look inside himself he’d see nothing particularly frightening; things were just a little fuzzy, a little vague in there. His mind was still sharp, his scholarly work was going well, and he had made several Indian friends in academic circles. What his life sometimes reminded him of, actually, were the nights he’d spent as a boy back in Camas reading forbidden books under the blankets by flashlight—except that this time it was Mama India he was hiding from.

He did finally write to a favorite adviser at Harvard and described his “unplugged” sensation—albeit in somewhat fuzzy terms. And the adviser—one Dr. Ramchandra Majumdar, a British-born Indian, but an experienced traveler in East and West—wrote back promptly, showing a touching but necessarily fuzzy concern as he ventured to guess that Peter’s uneasiness might stem not from his struggles with the difficult culture but from “a temporary state of spiritual aridity.” Peter was most grateful for this diagnosis. Spiritual aridity is an impressive-sounding thing by which to be made fuzzy. Before receiving Majumdar’s letter he’d feared
his true pathology might be something more along the lines of “scared of running around like an imbecile with women’s underclothes on my head again” or “scared of catching the screaming shits again.” But those were Camas thoughts, puppy thoughts, sloppy thoughts, weren’t they? Dr. Majumdar knew more than he about these matters, didn’t he? So, yes, Pete would think.
Spiritual aridity. That’s what I’ve got
. And when, at times, he would recognize his complete lack of conviction in this diagnosis, he would immediately calm himself by thinking:
But of course. Because lack of conviction is exactly what aridity is …

T
here are kinds of human problems which really do seem, as our tidy expressions would have it, to “come to a head” and “demand to be dealt with.” But there are also problems, often just as serious, which come to nothing that we can recognize or openly deal with. Some long-lived, insidious problems simply slip us off to one side of ourselves. Some gently rob us of just enough energy or faith so that days which once took place on a horizontal plane become an endless series of uphill slogs. And some—like high water working year after year at the roots of a riverside tree—quietly undercut our trust or our hope, our sense of place, or of humor, our ability to empathize, or to feel enthused, and we don’t sense impending danger, we don’t feel the damage at all,

till one day, to our amazement, we find ourselves crashing to the ground.

Peter had one of these kinds of problems.

M
arch 25, 1971, posed a different sort of problem for Everett. A statistical difficulty, primarily. Natasha had lived with him, they had shared their lovely continent together, for forty-four days. And March 25 was the forty-fifth day since she’d left him. The forty-four best days of his life followed by forty-four days of sodden hell. And today the hell began to outnumber the happiness. What should he do about this? What sort of observance should he observe? If he decided to mourn, when would the mourning end? But if he decided to celebrate, it was like celebrating her absence—and he still wanted her back!

The problem troubled him enough to keep him in bed an extra ten minutes. He then muttered, “Fuck it” and began Day 45 with three boiled eggs.

·  ·  ·  ·

B
ut an hour or so later, when the coffee reached his brain and he began prowling his nearly bookless bookshelves for printed material, Everett found a grease-spattered 1929-vintage cookbook called
Thoroughly Modern Menus
. Assuming it had been abandoned by a previous tenant, Everett had never given it a glance. But in rifling quickly through the yellowed pages, he first discovered the name Maggie Lee on the inside cover, and then—folded neatly inside—Natasha’s handwritten recipe for lasagna.

His first reaction to this intimate relic was a mild heart attack. Then his mouth started to water. He loved lasagna. Natasha’s most of all, dammit. But wait now. What about
Everett’s
lasagna? True, it didn’t sound promising. But he was tired of moping, tired of hurting, tired of his three-egged Anthropoidal Borborygm Cooks Dredge for Everyman breakfasts. His behavior had been so corpselike he hadn’t even squandered his last paycheck yet. And it was Day 45. So he decided, by damn, to drive to the city, buy the makings for Everett’s World’s Best Lasagna and a decent bottle of wine, invite his memories of Natasha to dine with him that evening, toast those memories by candlelight, and then tell them, for the last time, to leave him the hell alone.

He drove the forty miles to Victoria—and Papa Dominic’s Italian Deli—in an hour. And with his reborn desire for life came a reborn love of strong opinions: the discussion he got into with old Dom on “Southern Catch-all” versus classic Romagna lasagna, earthenware versus cast-iron casseroles, chuck versus neck beef versus sausage versus chorizo, crushed-canned versus strained-fresh tomatoes, oregano versus basil, nuances of marinating, simmering, baking, kinds of Parmesan, kinds of pasta dough, kinds of pasta cutters, and so on, took another two and a half hours, led to insults, and even to violence (old Dominic twice grabbed Everett’s cheeks and shook them, making his gums rattle, and the second time Everett grabbed a handy bag of breadsticks and boffed Dom up side the head). But his reborn enthusiasm and strength of opinion also led to many delicious taste tests, to a few free ingredients, and to a shared snack of cappuccino and crushed breadsticks with his fine, ferociously opinionated new friend.

When he and Papa Dom finally loaded up the three bags of hotly contested makings, the jug of cheap Chablis (for cooking, Everett lied) and the bottle of fine Italian Chianti (for formal Natasha-toasting and sipping) and started to carry them out to Everett’s car, they were amazed to find that it had begun to snow. Hard.

“A spring snow!” Everett said wonderingly.

“Means a somebody’s heart’s a broken,” Papa Dom said, giving his head a rueful little shake.

Everett didn’t quite drop his groceries, but he came close. “Did you
have
to say that?” he croaked.

The old man gaped.
“Your
heart? My Everett’s heart’s a broken?”

Everett stared at the snow, unable to speak.

“Come back inside!” cried the old man. “I’ll make you lasagna myself!”

“This whole outing,” Everett said, when he found his voice, “my whole purpose in life today, Dom, is to go home alone, and to make this lasagna myself.”

The old man understood. They loaded the groceries into the Olds, hugged each other goodbye, and solemnly promised to eat lasagna together soon.

Everett drove the forty miles home in a near whiteout, ten miles an hour for four hours.

S
hyashyakook was pretty, though, all covered with snow, and silent. And when he turned down his transformed driveway he scared up a snowshoe hare—the first he’d ever seen—then three blacktail does, whose retreating white rumps were being disappointedly scoped by the lascivious Chekhov. Everett rolled down his window to greet him: “Hey, Booger.”

“Yehhhhhhhh?”
The goat actually said this. It was his one word.

“Come on up to the house. I got some celery for you.”

“Yehhhhhhhh?”

Parking the car and stomping into his cold kitchen, he shouted,
“Betty! Bud! Kitten!
I’m home!” It used to crack Natasha up. It was a mistake now. He made a mental note to devise himself a new greeting, kicked the snow off his shoes, unloaded his makings, rolled up his sleeves, washed his hands, then heard a horrid chewing sound on the corner of the house. “Oops. Forgot.”