Three Continents (52 page)

She didn't hurry but walked with slow steps toward the phone, slowly picked it up, and was silent for a moment while she threw me a doubting look. I nodded to her in impatient encouragement. She had to speak. I listened. She said Michael was found; she apologized for troubling the embassy; she thanked them for their efforts; she hung up, not looking at me, and not happy with what she had done.

I had no more time for her. I had to get started. I told her I was going to my room, in case Crishi and Michael tried to call there, and asked her not to move from hers, so as to answer the phone from hers. When I approached my room, I saw someone standing outside it and was surprised to find it was Paul. I said “I thought you were sick.” “I am sick. Bloody sick. But I have to take you to the train.” As I let us both in, I asked “Did Crishi call you from Dhoka?” Paul said “Get your things together; we have to go. The train leaves in two hours, and if you miss the connection, there won't be another one for three days.”

I decided to pack only a small overnight bag. Someone else could send the rest after me, or whatever had to be done with it. I asked Paul if Crishi had said anything about bringing some of Michael's things. He didn't hear me. He was lying back in a chair with his eyes shut, his hair damp on his forehead. I was very quick with my packing, for I still had to go and see Renée. I left Paul in the room, promising him I would be back very soon; he nodded—I think he wished I wouldn't
come back at all and he could stay there resting forever. Although the room was air-conditioned, I turned on the ceiling fan so that a breeze blew refreshingly over his wasted face.

Renée overwhelmed me with questions—or rather, first, with reproaches: She asked where we had been all day, said that she had been trying and trying to reach us, that she hadn't dared leave the room in case we called. The room did seem as if someone had been shut up in it too long. The feral quality that was part of Renée's personality was strong in the air, no longer that of a wild youthful tigress but of one who had grown desperate from restless pacing in a cage. Desperate and maybe a bit mangy too—I don't think Renée had had her bath for some time; one could tell with her because she perspired so strongly that her odor overcame even the potent scents she used. The room was littered with her underclothes, which she had taken off and left lying where they were, and she had also pulled out everything she possessed in an attempt to pack up.

“I thought we were leaving,” she explained. “I was getting ready. But instead you disappeared and I hear all sorts of rumors from the bearers—where is he, for God's sake?” For a moment I wondered if she meant Michael or Crishi, but of course it was Crishi. I said “He called—this minute. Actually he called for you. He tried to get you here, and then with great difficulty he got through to me instead. He just had time to give me a message for you before we were cut off. What rumors did you hear?”

“Not about him, about Michael: how he got in a fight with the Bhais. What message did he give you?”

I told her first where he was, and before she could protest at his taking off without warning, I said how I hadn't known either but had woken up in the morning to find him gone. Well, that was true, at any rate. I gave her the message—I said I didn't know what he meant about the consignment but that Crishi seemed to think she would? She nodded gloomily, she paced up and down in her usual way, her arms crossed over her bosom; she was sunk in thought, and I let her think for a while, though I took a quick glance at my watch because of not wanting to miss the train.

At last she stopped pacing and stood in front of me and said “All right, I'll do it, but it has to be for the last time. Absolutely the last time, Harriet.” She had forgotten I had told her I didn't know what it was about but took it for granted that I did: that I was in with them on everything. She asked me if I was coming with her, but I said no, he had told me to stay in Delhi and wait for further messages here. As I said this, I looked at her with the same direct and serious gaze Crishi had when he told lies.

She put her hands on my shoulders and looked back into my eyes. Yes, she trusted me, we were comrades now, we were united forever. She said “I promise you, it'll be the last time. I'll never let him take these sort of risks again. And he won't need to, will he? It's all changed now, isn't it?”

“Oh yes,” I said. “It's only a few more days before we're twenty-one.”

Suddenly, impulsively—in a great access of maybe affection, maybe gratitude, maybe some fear of what might happen—she took me in her arms. This was entirely unexpected from Renée, who was not demonstrative by nature, and certainly had never been so to me. But now she loved me very much and drew me very close.

I felt uncomfortable—for one thing, I couldn't return her ardor. I'm afraid I held myself as rigid as a broomstick within her embrace; and I kept thinking about the time and having to wait three days if I missed the connection! She didn't notice—she was whispering into my neck, “I'm so glad it's you, Harriet, and that we can be together, the three of us.”

But when she let me go, she said in quite a different voice, “I couldn't live without him, you know. I wouldn't. I wouldn't consider it for a moment.” She put her hand in the pocket of her negligee, and there was a little bottle of pills in there. She held it in the palm of her hand and invited me to look at it as at a precious object. “It's nothing to me,” she said. “I wouldn't care a damn. I'd just take a handful—” She cupped her other hand, threw back her head, and made the gesture of throwing a handful of pills into her mouth.

I uttered a shocked sound, then closed her hand over the bottle in her palm and said “Oh no, Renée, you mustn't think of such a thing—and why should you, ever?” I pressed my
own hand affectionately over her closed fist.

“He knows,” she said in a warning voice. “He knows I'll do it.”

“You'll never have to,” I promised—and got out as fast as I could: no time to stand on ceremony, I had a train to catch.

My plan was to pick up the bag I had packed, rouse Paul, and get going. I had forgotten Sonya; or had edged her out of my mind. But when I returned to my room, she was there. All she said was “I'm coming too.” I began to protest, but she was absolutely adamant. Paul said “You'll miss your train.” I picked up my bag hurriedly and tried to kiss Sonya goodbye. “I'll be back in a day or two, with Michael,” I promised. She repeated “I'm coming too.” When I went out with Paul, she followed us. She came with us in the taxi we took to the station; she was wearing the clothes she had put on to go to the embassy. She had no baggage of any kind, not having had time to pack anything, only her white purse.

At the station she gave Paul money to buy a ticket for her as well as for me. I had given up arguing with her, hoping to lose her in the crowd. But she clung to me while I pushed my way through and went up and down stairs and across a bridge, in search of the right platform. Paul explained that the train we were taking didn't have an air-conditioned section so we would have to go in an ordinary first-class compartment. He installed us in a coupé and stood outside the barred window, waiting for the train to leave. Everyone stared at us—I guess we made a strange threesome, Paul and I in old jeans, and Sonya in her floral dress, with white hat, shoes, and purse. Paul was urging me through the window to remind Crishi about his passport; I only half-listened to him, for I was making a last-minute attempt to persuade Sonya to go back to the hotel. Vendors tried to sell us oranges and magazines, and in fact were successful with Sonya, who felt sorry for them. Other vendors came, selling tea and buns and plastic dolls. She bought from everyone. Paul explained where we were to change trains; he said he would leave us now, because he felt so rotten. He didn't go far—I saw him stretch himself out on a stone bench on the platform. He lay between a fat peasant in a
dhoti
and with Shiva marks on his forehead and a very thin poor woman who may have been
a beggar and was eating something messy from a leaf. People pushed and shouted and spat all around him, and skeletal red-clad porters, balancing huge metal trunks on their heads, screamed for passage way. Paul didn't stir; he lay in the middle of it all, utterly spent and gaunt, his eyes shut, stubble on his face, the soles of his feet as black as any beggar's or holy man's. And like any holy man, he appeared beyond everything, beyond every desire except for rest and peace.

O
UR compartment, or coupé for two, had only two bunks in it, one on top of the other. I climbed up the ladder to the top bunk, where my head was very close to the fierce little black ceiling fan. A door led to our bathroom with a brown-stained washbasin and WC and immemorial sewage smells seeping through the disinfectant. Before the train started, a sweeper went in there to give a last officious wipe around, and was rewarded by Sonya; and also a bearer in a frayed and food-stained uniform came to make up our beds and take our orders for meals. We were entirely self-sufficient in this little box of a compartment; and for the next twenty-four hours the two of us might as well have been sealed in a capsule and hurtling through uncharted regions. First it was day, then night, then day again; it didn't make much difference except that our box got hotter and grimier. Although we kept the window tightly shut, soot and cinders came through the cracks. There was nothing to see outside beyond an immense flat space wrapped in a pall of dust; at night the dim blue-colored bulb cast a ghostly light around the compartment. The train stopped several times at little wayside stations; both by day and by night, it seemed to be the same men who came up to our window with pitchers of tea, and the same raucous, incomprehensible cries of hawkers and railway officials were heard along the platforms.

Within our neutral space, Sonya spoke of matters close to her heart. I fitfully slept while we chugged on and on and
on; I don't think Sonya slept at all. She didn't lie down but sat up on the seat in her elegant silk dress, which had got very crumpled, and there were smudges of soot across her face where she had wiped off the perspiration; her coiffure was blown apart by the fan directly over her head. Was she talking to me? I guess she was, since no one else was there, though I couldn't hear her too well from the top bunk. She spoke about Grandfather, and about Manton and Lindsay and the new baby. She spoke about Michael—a lot about Michael, not as he was now but as he had been when he was little, as far back as when he was a baby. She spoke of him entirely in the past tense. She said that as soon as she had seen him at a few months old, she had known that he was a very old soul who had come to us from far back, having passed through many births in many strange and wonderful countries.

The small station at which we had to change trains was like the other ones where we had stopped along the way. We had to wait there a long time—so many hours we lost count of them. At first we sat in the waiting room, but it got very hot and the atmosphere was fetid because of the crowd of poor people waiting with their babies and bundles of food. Then we sat on the platform, under an asbestos roof, hoping that some fresh air would blow in from the open sides. Here too there were a lot of people, some of them passengers and others come to pass the time or with nowhere else to go. A beggar had got in, a crazy woman in a strange assortment of rags, who didn't ask for alms but shuffled along with a guttural chant that may have been an invocation or a curse. The passengers were sitting or lying asleep on their luggage laid out on the platform. Sonya and I didn't have any luggage except for my overnight bag, so we squatted on that and on a shirt of mine, with our backs propped against a pillar that held up the roof. Flies and hot air came in from the flat empty space beyond the station; far in the distance, across the vacant landscape, a line of hills or undulations shimmered. Sonya's white hat had slipped down over her eyes; she wiped flies or drops of perspiration from her face. She didn't complain of the discomfort but went on talking in the same way as in the compartment, and on the same subjects.
As for me, I was only impatient for our train to arrive and for the next—the last—stage of our journey to begin.

It was the middle of the night when we arrived, and two Bhais were there to meet us. This station too appeared to be identical to the others we had passed—a roof over a platform, set in surrounding wilderness. The Bhais had brought a very old Daimler, with torn leather seats, and they put Sonya and me in the back while the two of them sat in front with the driver. They didn't talk to us and couldn't understand what we asked them, like where Michael and Crishi were; they didn't talk to each other either. We drove through utter darkness—it was as though the entire landscape, or country, had been blotted out. It seemed to me that our whole journey had been like that, ever since we had left the hotel: in darkness, in a country shrouded in dust, a region of invisibility, which we had traversed encapsulated within our own thoughts and fears.

I had no particular expectations of the place where they were taking us—if I thought anything, it was that it would be the Rawul's palace. But when we finally arrived at our destination, it wasn't a palace but a comfortable sort of family house, with some good pieces of furniture and carpets, and at the foot of the staircase a marble statue holding up a lamp. Here the Bhais handed us over to some exceedingly ancient men in exceedingly ancient uniforms, who were so polite that they walked backward before us, saluting all the way, with Sonya saluting back at them, in appreciation of their nice old-fashioned manners. If they were surprised to see two of us instead of one, they didn't show it. First they ushered me into the room designated for me—I took a quick look around and was utterly reassured, seeing Crishi's pajamas laid out on the bed and his silver dressing set (given by Renée) on the dressing table. I followed Sonya to see where they were taking her, and this turned out to be an equally comfortable bedroom with everything in it that anyone could want. One of the old men was hastily making up the bed, and another was spraying DDT in the bathroom. I felt reassured for Sonya too, and that we were both safely at our journey's end. But she—still in her white hat and floral dress, both bearing every mark of our journey—didn't seem in the least reassured.
There was something wild in her look around the room that was being made comfortable for her (another old man came by with a set of matching towels); and while I was cheerfully kissing her good-night, she clutched me and said “But where are they?” I laughed at her: “Where would they be this time of night? You didn't expect them to wait up for us till three
A
.
M
.?” “You're right, darling,” she said, not at all happily. “We'll see them in the morning,” I said. She nodded.