The Grammarian (4 page)

O
NLY A FEW
months before, the Germans had sent their warship the
Panther
to Morocco; the world was smaller, tenser; wars were waged over bits of land, scrambling for tokens of empire, seeing now in the light of modernity how little there was to own on earth. Some few months later, an American politician named Bingham, while wandering South America’s hills, had stumbled upon the ancient city of Machu Picchu. The photographs had been published in the European press: a city so high up it could be mistaken for heaven itself, buildings of stone, the mythical city of Vilcabamba, of which Bingham had heard rumors. The Agence Havas spoke to Bingham and he said, “In the variety of its charms and the power of its spell, I know of no place in the world which can compare with it.” No place. Lautens remembered. The glory of the Louvre was dimmed now, after
La Joconde
had gone missing; from the safety of a corner neighboring a Correggio, it had been stolen. Warships named after wildcats, dormant cities in the sky,
the abduction of a mysterious woman. The world grew smaller and larger at the same time.

I
NSIDE THE TRAIN
car, hushed conversations carried on in the glow of reading lights; Alexandre could hear, from a neighboring car, the wail of an infant.

It was autumn in Paris now, and Madeline took an umbrella with her, an overcoat to protect her from the grey skies, the ever-looming threat of rain, the early fall of night. She wore boots to arm herself against the slush of fallen foliage; she walked the children to school. She would wear a hat, hiding a tightly pinned bun. The cold air made her cheeks pink. Men looked at her—there was no one to escort her, to mark her as his own, to protect her from their leering. She was beautiful half because of true prettiness and half because she believed so deeply in her beauty.

She made dinner in the evening. There was, in their home, in the evenings, the warm, quiet hum of happiness. Madeline drank wine while she cooked. She would turn her head back and kiss Alexandre while stirring stew. The children played, they grabbed her legs, required kisses when they fell, someone to cut their meat. Alexandre had been jealous when Matthieu was born, though he never said as much. Madeline put them to bed with stories and songs and lavish kisses. She undressed and slipped into the sheets next to him and Alexandre would breath in a garden of roses, clean linens drying in the sun, put his hand on her hip, touch the silk of her nightgown, close his eyes in the darkness, watch Paris sleep under the light weight of a blue and black night, daylight slipping away, the city growing quiet. Then Madeline would turn into his chest; he knew his children were asleep in their
beds. His family was safe. The house was quiet. Tomorrow was promised. Alexandre could not, so long ago, imagine life any other way or have wished it differently.

Now, Alexandre was lulled to sleep by the heat and the train’s incessant rocking, its rhythmic sounds and motion.

L
ATE AFTERNOON
,
ON
the fifth day of his train journey, the train was held in a village station outside of Dharwar. The remnants of a railway collision two days before had yet to be moved off the tracks. From the station platform, as Alexandre stretched his legs, he could see in the distance mangled black railcars on their sides. Loud, coffee-colored workmen pulled the steel remains of the train off the tracks and into a nearby field.

Alexandre returned to his seat. Too distracted to read or write, he began to daydream. The previous summer, the Lautens family had spent a week at Madeline’s family home in Provençe. During the great flood that year, in January and February, many of Alexandre’s classes had to be canceled and he stayed home with Madeline and the children, and since then he had planned a summer holiday so the children could shake off any lingering feelings of their prolonged confinement and escape a city that was still in disrepair.

The days in Provençe were active with endless cycling, and on the last day the heat was wonderful on their tired skin, and he lay in his bathing suit on the sand. The beach was nearly empty. His muscles ached. The water was clear and blue, and while the children giggled, building their sand castle, he leapt up suddenly, and grabbing Madeline, carried her to the water and threw her in. She gasped and laughed as the coldness swept over her boyish form, which was graceful in a skirted
white swimsuit with pink flowers. He dove in after her. She climbed his body like a vine and he saw that feminine expression so long familiar to him: a woman ready to be seduced. His hair, which had only just begun to sprout silver at the temples, clung wet and black to his head. He kissed her mouth in the sea. The children ran in after them, and he caught Matthieu when he ran into the water; she, Catherine’s chubby, warm little body. They swam with the children and later walked along the water’s edge, looking for seashells. Alexandre’s was the throbbing heart of his home.

Matthieu found a starfish, and when he did, Catherine cried. Alexandre held her and she pounded her head angrily into his chest as he and Madeline laughed. They ate freshly caught fish for dinner with white wine, local vegetables, and warm, crusty bread; the soil in that region, the closeness of the ocean, made everything taste better, more delicate. In the air: thyme and lavender. He put the children to bed, still in their swimsuits, Matthieu still holding his prized find, Catherine exhausted from her own rage. He fell asleep deliciously tired, with his fingers interlaced with Madeline’s. They left sand on the sheets. Her skin smelled like salt. He hadn’t remembered ever feeling so content.

As the black steam engine continued southward, great and roaring, the smell of salt grew greater, and he was often overcome by the memory of his son sleeping, his taut pink fingers clutching a starfish.

The light grew low in India now, as evening came, yet again. The debris of the accident up ahead and been removed from the tracks, and Alexandre’s train lurched cautiously forward. He opened the cumbersome window of his car, unhinging the metal fasteners, and happily breathed in the warm, floral air, opening the top of his shirt to feel the breeze against his chest. Alexandre lit a cigarette. He could hear
the black-suited dining steward making his rounds, the clinking of the dishes as they knocked into each other with the movement of the train. He could smell the hot food. It was pleasant but predictable. Tonight he would not join his fellow passengers; around him he saw them moving down to the dining car. A few upper-class Indians with children at Cambridge and Oxford, Anglo-Indians who would never be at home in that land of Shakespeare and Chaucer, the English military men and administrators, their families, all changed into their best suits and dresses to dine. He wished rather to eat alone with his daydreaming. At times like this, he found it hard to maintain a polite amount of curiosity about strangers; they were merely partners in this journey, and he saw no need to make more of what amounted to a coincidence of no particular importance.

He wasn’t typically a recluse—Alexandre liked the company of others. But this train ride had been ruined for him on the second day when, as he was unconsciously muttering to himself while writing, a man in a bowler hat in the neighboring seat raised an eyebrow and, looking at him with icy coldness, said, “Please keep your thoughts to yourself. Your ramblings are disturbing my reading. No one else is interested in what you are writing there.” The man then disappeared behind his newspaper.

Alexandre had been too surprised to respond beyond a lamely raised eyebrow and “Excuse me?” before returning once again to his notebook. Alexandre’s mind went reeling—that that man, that wretched man probably went to church, and sat there every Sunday, superior and loathsome. An hour of piety each week but so lacking in compassion for his fellow man, this fellow rider along this journey, how ridiculous it seemed to Alexandre. That small, nasty exchange
had colored his whole trip, and the night that it happened he fantasized about slitting the man’s throat.

After dinner, it was routine for the men to gather in the gentlemen’s lounge car for drinks and cigars. There they could wear their shirtsleeves and loosen their ties. Alexandre had joined them the night before, but their talk bored him endlessly—it was all the same—a cousin to the Parisian parlor room conversation that he had always tried so hard to avoid: gossip about the upper-class English families they all knew or at least knew of—the Hawleys, the Bakers, the Austins. Their estates and summer homes in Simla and Dharamsāla and other hill stations and their relations back home, and the various details and luck of their financial interests at home and abroad, complaining without self-regard of the ridiculousness of the native Indians. The English talked with the glee of gossiping schoolgirls about their fallen countrymen who had taken up with native women. They were able to maintain an exterior of manners around natives of high standing—doctors, lawyers and academics—but when no native was in sight, even those Indians were often referred to as coolies and darkies. Full from dinner, Alexandre made his excuses to the crowd heading toward the lounge car, and pulled from his attaché case his Pierre Loti.

Alone in the train car now, Alexandre opened the window, lacing his fingers through the protective iron bars. Alongside the train, a band of pretty, painted
hijras
in bright, colorful saris winked at him, blowing kisses and holding out their large, masculine hands for change. Their eyes were lined in black coal and fluttered seductively. Alexandre smiled drowsily; flashes of gold and pink and red and blue went by. He felt the wind blowing through his thick hair, and closed his eyes.

T
HE TRAIN AT
long last entered the southern provinces.

This was a part of India that, while ruled by the British, was more meagerly populated by them than was the north of the country, and a degree of the native chaos in politics and culture remained. The men were darker, the women thicker, and very few of the North Indians with their Mediterranean coloring were to be found here. When they were in the South, they too, and perhaps more markedly, held their southern brothers in contempt. To the European, these shades of brown and black were less distinct. Alexandre was hundreds of miles west of Bombay, a thousand miles southwest of Calcutta, a light-year, a bout of daydreaming, the better part of a hemisphere from Paris.

2

T
HE DAYS BEGAN
a clear grey—the light almost white—before sliding gently into blue and yellow, the morning sun pushing at first gently and then forcefully into the windows of his train car. The station hands in the villages shouted in Kannada. In the afternoons, the air and land became gold, and everything was colored by this strong sun, at once beautiful and dangerous to the European constitution. English women, at risk of heatstroke and fainting, retired at this time of day to the safety of the ladies’ cars, away from the sweltering heat.

India was a green place: jackfruit trees, coconuts and bananas, jasmines, roses, moonflowers, grasses the colors of the sea, or like blades of silver; tomato, aubergine, okra, fruits and vegetables for which no English or French names existed, hyacinth, mangoes the lyrical shape of a woman’s breast, rice and wheat, bougainvillea. This part of India sprawled out great and wide, in shades of brown and green, before melting into a peerless line of seawater that crashed in waves like diamonds, emeralds and sapphires. The view moved somehow seamlessly from buildings in the grand style of London, Amsterdam and Paris, to magnificent Hindu temples and Mughal mansions, to shantytowns and water-filled rice paddies and barren fields of brown made sterile by enforced indigo, opium and tobacco production. As the train rolled along the eastern coastline of the continent, Alexandre watched the ocean melt into the sand, which pulled at the water and surrendered it like a woman’s fickle hand, opening and closing and at long last
submitting to the water’s departure as the evening came in, and the tide fell low under the silvery light of the moon.