by Don DeLillo
“The fields are looking pretty grim. Only five rigs in action, I hear from Abadan.”
“Parts,” I said.
“Plus which the telex and telephone are down between Abadan and Tehran.”
“But you still hear.”
“I hear a little.”
“The bankers call it a black hole. Iran.”
“Have you seen the mosques? Isfahan is the place to go. I mean gorgeous. You have to spend time in the courtyards. Spend time, relax, check the tilework. I’d give anything to get up close to one of those domes. There’s a dome in Isfahan”—he shaped it with his hands.
We were stopped by traffic on the road around the old city. A man came through the fortified gate and stood at the car window looking in at us, a man with a bamboo stick, wearing a rag wrapped around his head, a military jacket with copper medals, a dozen bead necklaces, a filthy white robe, oversized army boots without laces, beads around his ankles and wrists. He had hair dyed red and carried live chickens. Rowser asked the driver what he wanted. Hundreds of people congregated near the gate. I tried to look past them into the old city. The driver said he didn’t know.
“I think I’m in New York,” Rowser said.
“That reminds me. I want to ask you about taking three or four weeks in early summer. I want to spend time with my son in North America.”
“l don’t have any problem with that.”
Rowser never said yes. He said, “I don’t have any problem with that.” Or, “I don’t see how it could hurt.”
“Will you still be with the firm?”
“No,” he said.
“It’s imminent then.”
“I don’t see any reason to hang around the halls. When the time comes, you have to have the grace to disappear.”
We were moving again.
“Did you ever remarry?” he said.
“I never got divorced. I’m only separated, George.”
“That’s a crazy way to live. Separated. Divorce teaches us things. You never learn anything being separated.”
“I don’t want to learn anything. Leave me alone.”
“I’m only saying do one thing or do the other.”
“I don’t want a divorce. It’s boring, it’s trite.”
“In these matters it’s best to terminate officially. That way you forget. File the papers in your steel cabinet.”
We crossed a river and pulled up in front of a tall gateway, locked for the night. Rowser spoke to the driver, who went to look for the watchman, returning in ten minutes with a man chewing betel leaf. We entered a vast garden with fountains and paved watercourses. At the far end was the tomb of Jehangir, a low red sandstone structure with a minaret at each corner. The minarets were octagonal, coming to full height in white marble cupolas. Rowser said something to our driver, who spoke to the watchman. The watchman took a socket wrench out of his back pocket and inserted it in an opening in the pavement, turning full circle. The fountains began to play.
We walked slowly toward the central chamber, hearing the sunset call to prayer from somewhere beyond the walls. A breeze blew Rowser’s tie over his shoulder.
“We all need a change now and then. This is basic to anyone’s sense of perspective. The type person I am, which is to say a plodder, go it slow, work the angles, worry it, piss blood over it, even this type person has to start over now and then. But maybe this type less than others. I personally hired you, Jim. This makes me responsible to a degree. I’m your sole contact with the parent. You’ll have a new man in the region. He’ll be hired directly by the parent or sent over from one of their other interests, other arms. It could be an uncomfortable arrangement. We’re identified with each other, you and I, in people’s minds. That’s all I’m saying. Give it some thought.”
We stood on a platform at the main arched opening, which jutted from a series of eight other archways. The exterior walls were inset with designs in white marble.
“I’m told there are better examples,” Rowser said, “but this is a basic Moghul tomb, except it doesn’t have a dome.”
He gestured with his free hand, indicating a dome. We went inside and stood a moment, waiting for the watchman to turn on a light. The sarcophagus stood under a vaulted ceiling. I circled it slowly, running my hand over the surface. Rowser set the briefcase between his feet.
“Take my advice,” he said. “Resign, find a job somewhere in the States, invest in real estate, start a retirement plan, get a divorce.”
The white marble surface was inlaid with semiprecious stones in seamless floral designs and in chaste calligraphy, shaped stones, jeweled stones, delicate and free-figured. The surface ran cool and smooth. Traceries of black Koranic letters covered the longer sides of the tomb with a smaller grouping on top. My hand moved slowly over the words, feeling for breaks between the inlay and marble, not to fault the craftsmen, of course, but only to find the human labor, the individual, in the wholeness and beauty of the tomb.
It wasn’t until we were walking back through the garden that I asked our driver what the words represented. They were the ninety-nine names of God.
12
In the morning I went looking for Owen Brademas. The piece of paper I’d been carrying since Bombay contained a set of directions rather than an address. The address Owen used was the Old Campus, Punjab University, strictly for receiving mail, Anand said. If I wanted to find him, I would have to look for a house with a closed wooden balcony roughly halfway between the Lohari Gate and the Kashmiri Gate in the old city.
I made my way to the edge of the old city easily enough. From the street din of motorcycles and buses to the voices of the long bazaar. The thoroughfare narrowed as I passed through the Lohari Gate, a brickwork structure with a broad towerlike fortification on either side.
Once inside I began to receive impressions, which is not the same as seeing things. I realized I was walking too fast, the pace of the traffic-filled streets I’d just left behind. I received impressions of narrowness and shadow, of brownness, the wood and brick, the hard earth of the streets. The air was centuries old, dead, heavy, rank. I received impressions of rawness and crowding, people in narrow spaces, men in a dozen kinds of dress, women gliding, women in full-length embroidered white veils, a mesh aperture at the eyes, hexagonal, to give them a view of the latticed world, the six-sided cage that adjusted itself to every step they took, every shift of the eyes. Donkeys carrying bricks, children squatting over open sewers. I glanced at my directions, made an uncertain turn. Copper and brassware. A cobbler working in the shadows. This was the lineal function of old cities, to maintain an unchanged form, let time hang with the leather goods and skeins of wool. Hand-skilled labor, rank smells and disease, the four-hundred-year-old faces. There were horses, sheep, donkeys, cows and oxen. I received impressions that I was being followed.
Signs in Urdu, voices calling over my head from the wooden balconies. I wandered for half an hour, too closed in to be able to scan for landmarks, the minarets and domes of Badshahi, the great mosque at the northwest edge. Without a map I couldn’t even stop someone, point to an approximate destination. I moved into a maze of alleys beyond the shops and stalls. Intensely aware. American. Giving myself advice and directions. A woman stuck cow dung in oval disks on a low wall to dry.
I turned to see who might be following. Two small boys, the older maybe ten. They held back for a moment. Then the younger said something, barefoot, a bright green cap on his head, and the other one pointed back the way I’d come and started to walk in that direction, looking to see if I would follow.
They led me to the house Owen was in. One slender white man looking for the other, that boy had reasoned. What else would I be doing in those lost streets?
The door to his room was open. He reclined on a wooden bench covered with pillows and old carpets. There were some books and papers in a copper serving tray on the floor. A water jug on a small chest of drawers. A plain chair for me. Not much else in the room. He kept it partially dark t
o reduce the effects of the April sun.
He was reading when I entered and looked up to regard me in a speculative manner, trying to balance my physical make-up, my shape, proportions, form, with some memory he carried of a name and a life. A moment in which I seemed to hang between two points in time, a moment of silent urging. The house smelled of several things including the trickle of sewage just outside.
Owen looked a little weary, a little more than weary, but his voice was warm and strong and he seemed ready to talk.
(It wasn’t until I’d put my hand to the marble tomb, the night before, that I knew I’d try to find him, talk to him one last time. Wasn’t that the image he’d wanted me to retain, a man in a room full of stones, a library of stones, tracing the shape of Greek letters with his country-rough hands?)
“I’ve been preparing for this all my life,” he said. “Not that I knew it. I didn’t know it until I walked into this room, out of the color and light, the red scarves worn as turbans, the food stalls out there, the ground chili and turmeric, the pans of indigo, the coloring for paint, those trays of brilliant powders and dyes. The mustard, bay leaf, pepper and cardamom. You see what I’ve done, don’t you, by coming into this room? Brought only the names. Pine nuts, walnuts, almonds, cashews. All I can tell you is that I’m not surprised to find myself here. The moment I stepped inside it seemed right, it seemed inevitable, the place I’ve been preparing for. The correct number of objects, the correct proportions. For sixty years I’ve been approaching this room.”
“Anand speaks of you.”
“He wrote. He told me you`d been there. l knew you’d come.”
“Did you?”
“But when you stood in the door I didn’t recognize you at all. I was surprised, James. I wondered who you were. You looked familiar—but in the damnedest way. I didn’t understand. I thought something was happening. Am I dying, I wondered. Is this who they send?”
“You took it calmly, if you thought I was a messenger from the other side.”
“Oh I’m ready,” he said laughing. “Ready as I’ll ever be. Counting the cracks in the wall.”
There was a pale gray booklet in the copper tray. Kharoshthi Primer. I picked it up and turned the pages. Lesson number one, the alphabet. Lesson number two, medial vowels. There were seven lessons, a picture on the back cover of a stone Buddha with a halo inscription in Kharoshthi.
“The ragged mob squats in the dust around the public story teller,” he said. “Someone beats a drum, a boy wraps a snake around his neck. The storyteller begins to recite. Heads nod, heads wag, a child squats down to pee. The man tells his story at a rapid clip, spinning event after event, this one traditional, that one improvised. His small son passes through the audience with a wooden bowl for donations. When the storyteller interrupts his narrative to consider things, to weigh events and characters, to summarize for the latecomers, to examine methodically, the mob grows impatient, then angry, crying out together, ‘Show us their faces, tell us what they said!’ “
He was a wanderer. He wandered by bus and train and walked a great deal, walked for six weeks at one point, rock-cut sanctuary to stone pillar, wherever there were inscriptions to look at, mainly ancient local languages in Brahmi script. Anand had offered to lend him a car but Owen was afraid to drive in India, afraid of the animals on the road, the people asleep at night, afraid of being stuck in traffic on some market street with crowds moving around the car, men pushing, no space, no air. The nightmarish force of people in groups, the power of religion—he connected the two. Masses of people suggested worship and delirium, obliteration of control, children trampled. He traveled second-class on crowded trains with wooden seats. He walked among the sleeping forms in railroad stations, saw people carry rented bedding onto the trains. He slept in hotels, bungalows, small cheap lodges near archaeological sites and places of pilgrimmage. Sometimes he stayed with friends of Anand, friends of other colleagues. He would reflect. A lifetime of colleagues with their worldwide system of names and addresses. Bless them.
The rusty tin villages, the brick kilns, the water buffalo silvery with mud. His bus always seemed to sit between diesel trucks shooting smoke. Near Poona a dozen people sat under a banyan tree, all wearing pink-white gauze. In Surat he wandered down along the railroad tracks, finding a shadow city that stretched from, was part of the real city. The uncounted were here in shacks and tents and in the street. The streetcorner barber and eye doctor. The ear cleaner with his mustard oil and little spoon. The shaver of armpits. Life swarmed and brooded in the pall of smoke from a thousand cooking fires. Hindi graffiti in blue and red. Swastikas, horses, scenes from the life of Krishna. A man in an Ambassador picked him up on the road outside Mysore. The man drove with his hand on the horn, moving bullocks and people but at their own pace, in their own weary time. He was young, with a faint mustache, a ripe underlip, and wore a green shirt and sleeveless pink sweater.
“You are from?”
“America.”
“And you are liking India?”
“Yes,” Owen said, “although I would have to say it goes beyond liking, in almost every direction.”
“And you are going exactly where at the present moment?”
“Just north. Eventually to Rajsamand. This is the major destination, I would say.”
The man said nothing. The car was wedged for a ten-mile stretch between a pair of diesel trucks. HORN OK PLEASE. A long line of trucks, a hundred trucks with turquoise grills and cabs full of trinkets and charms, stood along the road outside a gas station, tanks empty, pumps empty, waiting for days, drivers cooking over charcoal fires. Men in one village wore only white, women in a field in flared red skirts. The high-pitched voices, the characters engraved in stone. All over India he searched for the rock edicts of Ashoka. They marked the way to holy places or commemorated a local event in the life of Buddha. Near the border with Nepal he saw the fine-grained sandstone column that was the best preserved of the edicts, thirty-five feet tall, a lion seated atop a bell capital. In the countryside north of Madras he found an edict on forgiveness and nonviolence, translated for him two weeks later by one T. V. Coomeraswamy of the Archaeological Museum in Sarnath. To the study of Dharma, to the love of Dharma, to the inculcation of Dharma.
The man took his hand off the horn.
“Rajsamand is actually the name of a lake,” Owen said. “It’s somewhere in the barren country north of Udaipur. Do you know the place by any chance?”
The man said nothing.
“An artificial lake, I believe. Essential for irrigation.”
“Precisely!” the man said. “This is what they do, you see.”
“Marble embankments, I’ve been told. Inscriptions cut into the stone. Sanskrit. An enormous Sanskrit poem. More than one thousand verses.”
“That is precisely the place. Rajsamand.”
“Seventeenth century,” Owen said.
“Correct!”
The cows had painted horns. Blue horns in one part of the countryside, red or yellow or green in another. People who painted cows’ horns had something to say to him, Owen felt. There were cows with tricolor horns. There was a woman in a magenta sari who carried a brass water pot on her head, the garment and the container being the precise colors of the mingled bougainvillea that covered the wall behind her, the dark reddish purple, the tainted gold. He would reflect. These moments were a “control”—a design at the edge of the human surge. The white clad men with black umbrellas, the women at the river beating clothes in accidental rhythms, hillsides of saris drying in the sun. The epic material had to refine itself in these delicate aquarelles. Or he needed to see it as such. The mind’s little infinite. India made him feel like a child. He was a child again, maneuvering for a window seat on the crowded bus. A dead camel, stiff legs jutting. Women in a road crew wearing wide cotton skirts, nose rings, hair ornaments, heavy jewelry dangling from their ears, repairing broken asphalt by hand. HORN OK PLEASE. In the upper castes they calculated horoscopes pre
cisely. He learned a few words of Tamil and Bengali and was able to ask for food and lodging in Hindi when necessary, and to read a bit and ask directions. The word for yesterday was the same as the word for tomorrow. Professor Coomeraswamy said that if he asked some one for details of his life, the man might automatically include details from the lives of dead relatives. Owen was taken by the beauty of this, of common memories drifting across the generations. He could only stare at the round face across the desk and wonder why the concept seemed somewhat familiar. Had he discussed it himself on one of those bright-skied nights with Kathryn and James?
“White city, Udaipur. Pink city, Jaipur.”
Whole cities as aspects of control. Astrology as control. The young man was delivering the car to a rental firm fifty kilometers away. This seemed to be his job, delivering cars, driving cars, and his strong hand on the horn indicated it was a job that nourished some private sense of imperium. His name was Bhajan Lal (B.L., thought Owen routinely, checking the map for names of towns in the area) and he was interested in talking about the approaching solar eclipse. It would happen in five days, being total in the south, and was very important from scientific, devotional and cosmic standpoints. His manner was remarkable for the element of reverence it contained, a stillness he hadn’t seemed to possess, and Owen looked out the window, wanting not to dwell on this cosmic event, the trampled bodies it would produce, the voices massed in chant. He was happy simply looking. The humped cattle turned at the bamboo pole, threshing stalks of rice.
“We are having the moon come across the sun, which is much the larger body, but when they are in line we are seeing one is exactly the size of the other due to relative size and relative distance from the earth. People will bathe in holy places to correct their sins.”
Divinities of increase. In the countryside he heard horns and drums and followed the sound to a temple of granite and marble set in a compound that included shrines and incense stalls, people squatting against the walls, beggars, touts, flower-sellers, those who watch over your shoes for a couple of weightless coins. Owen recognized a statue of the bull mount of Shiva and walked past the musicians and across a tiered porch into the temple vestibule. It was time for the sunset puja. A white-bearded pink turbaned priest threw flowers toward the sanctum and these were immediately swept up by a man with a fly switch. There were people with marigold garlands, a man in an army greatcoat, two women chanting, figures bundled on the floor, half sleeping, with betel-stained mouths, one of them concealed behind a kettledrum. Owen tried intently to collect information, make sense of this. There were coconuts, monkeys, peacocks, burning charcoal. In the sanctum was a black marble image of Lord Shiva, four-faced, gleaming. Who were these people, more strange to him than the millennial dead? Why couldn’t he place them in some stable context? Precision was one of the raptures he allowed himself, the lyncean skill for selection and detail, the Greek gift, but here it was useless, overwhelmed by the powerful rush of things, the raw proximity and lack of common measure. Someone beat on hand drums, a green bird sailed across the porch. He was twenty-five miles from Rajsamand, in the Indian haze.
