This Innocent Corner

by Peggy Herring

  On the way back to the hotel, I watch chaos unfurl outside the taxi window and try to come to terms with the fact Luna is gone. She can’t be dead. Can’t. She had a plan. Money. Razzak. She was too smart. If she’s not returned to the Chowdhury home, surely it was a conscious decision.

  An oncoming rickshaw squeezes by the taxi. Our driver swerves, but it’s so close, we collectively inhale and wait for the scrape. When it doesn’t come, the rickshawallah’s mouth contorts into cruel laughter. He glances into the back seat to see if he’s irked anyone important, and it is this calculated callousness that most upsets me.

  *

  No evidence exists in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel of the war waged on its front steps thirty years ago. It is hard to imagine that people quivered in fear, cowered beneath restaurant tables, desks and beds while mortars exploded on the street. It is impossible to imagine the screams. These manicured grounds had a trench dug through them, right next to where the swimming pool glistens today. Once, a bomb took out the glass front and the concierge’s desk. Today, it is a sedate hotel, just going about its five-star business.

  I send Falguni home in the taxi, and take the elevator back to my floor. Push the box to the back of the closet.

  It was the Intercontinental Hotel during the war.

  Back in Lansing, miraculously safe, I had watched television and tried to imagine what floor the camera was on when it filmed tanks rolling down the street. Through which window did they photograph the crows and vultures? Following the massacre the night I left – dubbed Operation Search Light by the army – the streetlights, lampposts and trees were heavy with scavengers. All that death to consume.

  I spent hours following the news. Mortar fire, strafing, tracer bullets – I came to understand a host of words I never imagined would be part of my vocabulary – when all I really longed for was to hear the names, see the faces, read the stories of the people I knew.

  And I waited for a letter from Luna.

  The conflict escalated. Slaughter, meetings, more slaughter, more meetings. The monsoon began. And ended. Eid arrived, and passed. Entire villages walked to India, only to find their existence threatened by another enemy: cholera. The Indian government appealed for international assistance. It came. Slowly. George Harrison gave a concert to raise funds.

  I watched. And still I waited for word from Luna.

  “A bit of fresh air once in awhile would go a long way with you, Roo,” my father said. He was a strong believer in physical activity to cure a multitude of ailments. But I was not to be torn from my place in front of the television.

  Images burned into my mind: a young man carrying the corpse of his emaciated wife to the border, unwilling to let go of her body or the hope that she might be saved.

  A refugee girl and her mother squatting in a concrete culvert, one of countless arches occupied by families who’d fled for their lives. A straw broom lay before them, a harrowing symbol of the woman’s futile attempt to restore order to their lives.

  Fatted politicians, safe in their offices, behind teak desks, meeting, meeting, meeting. Saying they were aware of the urgency. But stalemated by nothing more than their stubbornness and need to save face.

  But no mention of Luna. Or Razzak. Or any of the Chowdhurys. I thought about writing Amma, but decided it would be unwise until I heard from Luna.

  I waited for the bulky Sunday newspapers from New York and Washington, though reading them was no easier than watching TV. A Bengali doctor reported taking blood from young rebels to supply to injured Pakistani soldiers. He cried to the reporter that he had been forced to drain the blood of one freedom fighter, until all that was left was a corpse.

  Then, one day, finally, a name I recognized. Professor Selina Akhtar had been found dead in Rayer Bazaar. Naked, strangled, alongside other intellectuals and Bengali nationalists, her cotton saree was wrapped around and around and around her neck. It was the only time during the war I ever saw in the news the name of someone I knew.

  Still, I kept hoping, and reading about the atrocities. An orphanage in Lalmatia was shelled. An anonymous source in the army claimed it was no accident. The soldier candidly explained how rebels were hiding out in the orphanages, and even if they weren’t, eliminating Bengali children would help control overpopulation in East Pakistan.

  A woman who spoke on the condition that she remain anonymous, told of a week’s worth of sexual enslavement at the military cantonment. She serviced sixty-two soldiers. She remembered because it was the same number as the age of her father when he died. She was released on a deserted street in the middle of the night and warned: don’t think of telling anyone, as if you would be believed anyway, you are noshto now. Spoiled. Rubbish.

  A Bihari man threw a torch onto a thatch-roofed house in a village where a widow, her mother-in-law and five children were sleeping.

  And a freedom fighter, for no apparent reason, shot a young, naked boy running down the street in the back. The war had ended twenty-four hours earlier. It was one week before Christmas 1971.

  With still no letter from Luna and no mention of the Chowdhurys and their friends, I had substituted. The boy who had his blood drained became Shaheed. The sex slave became Luna or, almost unthinkable, Amma. The torched family, Kamala’s. The gun-mad freedom fighter, driven insane by the violence that battered him day in and out for nine months, Hasan.

  I remember how unbearable it was not to know what had really happened, and to be unable to find out.

  Outside the hotel window, darkness begins to settle over the city. Here and there, streetlights and signs are turned on. A big blue bus rumbles around a corner, despite a traffic cop’s frantic waving. The beggars thin out, children leaving first, then the women, finally the men.

  And it is only then, when I decide to turn on the lights in my room, that I remember what was missing from the Chowdhury’s lawn.

  A guava tree. It was small but sturdy, planted in the centre of the front lawn. In the months I was there, Amma tied chunks of brick to jute rope and suspended them from its branches to train them to grow down and apart. From the moment the blossoms appeared, she tied a net around its top to ensure the fruit would be saved from the birds. Her efforts were rewarded. “Look Robin,” Amma said. “Not a branch out of place, every fruit perfect.” She ran her hands lightly over the leaves.

  There was no sign of the tree now. In its place was nothing.

  *

  The ferry I take back home to Saltspring Island is not crowded, but as usual, the trip’s most garrulous passenger finds me on deck. I spot her immediately out of the corner of my eye, her radar working overtime, and successfully locating the one place she is least wanted. She wears binoculars and one of those jackets which withstands cyclones, hurricanes, typhoons, monsoons and cataclysmic flooding. “Splendid day,” she says. “Makes one glad to be alive, don’t you think?” I’d roll my eyes if they weren’t paining so much.

  I have a nasty flu. Aches began just as I was leaving the hotel. Fever rose in me at the airport. Over the Pacific, I believed I was watching myself in a movie. Then, as we disembarked in Vancouver, I spotted Hasan among the passengers: Hasan with a family. Hasan with his arm around a woman, ushering two small boys along the gangway. Hasan pulling suitcases off the luggage carousel. But each time I was about to call his name, he lifted his head or a hand, half-turned his shoulder, and I understood these were fever-induced hallucinations.

  “It’s gorgeous. Take a look if you like.” The tourist proffers her binoculars.

  “No.” I head for the upper deck.

  During the flight home, I reflected upon what I had discovered in Dhaka. I thought about it as we bumped along the jet stream. I turned Beth’s revelations over and over again in my mind, trying to scare up new angles and fresh light. My rising fever bore down on my imaginings until they assumed grotesque shapes. When they became too monstrous to stomach, I wou
ld go to the claustrophobic washroom and splash water on my face.

  On the upper deck of the ferry, seagulls dip alongside and cavort in the wind. Their beady eyes follow the movement of sandwiches and chips from hand to mouth. The tourists laugh like children at their antics. But next to tourists, gulls are the most irritating creatures, so perhaps they deserve one another.

  If only Amma had received my letter. If only I’d been able to see her alone before Hasan told her I was back. We would have talked. I would have pointed out how Hasan had started everything with the nasty way he treated Luna, and ultimately his actions had harmed us all. Though he is her son, Amma recognizes his shortcomings. She would have understood my position, and everything would have been smoothed over between me and the Chowdhurys. Maybe we would even find Luna together.

  I imagine Amma’s embrace – softer now, but the strength that made her the hub of the wheel around which her family revolved would still be evident in her squeeze. “You have returned, just as you promised,” she would murmur into my skin. “It is God’s will.” She would give me three brushy kisses and I would be enfolded once more in the scent of her talcum powder.

  I leave the deck and enter the cabin. I find a seat, close my eyes and lean my head against the cool window. Passengers come and go, but no one else disturbs me for the rest of the trip, leaving me instead to my nightmares. They multiply and cluster like lenses on the surface of a fly’s eye.

  By the time the ferry reaches Long Harbour, I surrender to the fever. I will not make it home unassisted. Moreover, I don’t care. I carry my bag and the Chowdhury’s box toward the taxi stand anyway, and open the tinted glass door on the only car that is ever parked there. Len Harrington Jr., a young, foul-faced man with three days of stubble on his chin slumps over the wheel as though dead. Other than the name, he bears no resemblance to his father who, sadly, for those of us who depend on a taxi to get around the island, retired last year.

  Len Jr. jerks awake, peers over the rims of his mirrored sunglasses as though I have just committed a criminal act. His look is so familiar, my own flesh and blood Surinder having mastered and made much use of the same expression of indignation. “Sorry,” I say in a tone that makes it clear I’m not, and climb in. I sink into those pine-scented vinyl seats until I believe I will never reach bottom.

  He sighs, and makes a huge fuss as he climbs out of the cab. I hear fumbling outside. The trunk opens, something thumps, thumps again, then the trunk closes. He climbs back into the cab and snaps his seatbelt closed.

  “Extra twoonie for handling luggage,” he says testily. But he could have left it there for all I care.

  I know well the hill we climb out of Long Harbour; it leads to the seclusion I cherish. Too many hours have been spent in the company of others this past week. I long to be swallowed in the solitude of my home, my old stone schoolhouse. It’s a miracle on this wooded isle.

  “Turn here,” I say, though I think Len Jr. knows. He grunts. Thank god he’s not prone to chattiness.

  We pull into a long dirt lane, behind one of the farmhouses near St. Mary Lake. The cab goes over a rut and my head opens like a crater. My eyeballs are pulled into the back of my head, the muscles taut. I close my lids and pray for the end of this trip.

  And then we stop.

  Len Jr. whistles. “Will you look at that.”

  I open my eyes to see what has uprooted an entire sentence from his mouth. It’s my home. The roof has collapsed.

  It must be fever. I’m hallucinating again. But as soon as my feet touch the ground, I know I’m not imagining this wreckage. The wet smell of ruin that hangs over my house proves its existence. Like a sleepwalker, I tread through damp grass. All the windows on this side are broken. Late afternoon sun glares off a splinter of glass barely attached to the frame. At the back, a section of the roof remains aloft, though it seems suspended by nothing. A single shingle, hanging by a nail, is stirred by a small breeze, then falls. I finish my circle at the front door.

  What happened? Sure, the roof leaked when rain was heavy – but a couple of dabs of tar would have fixed that. I look to the trees which sheltered me. Perhaps a fallen branch? But they appear intact. An earthquake? A wrecking crew? A meteor? My explanations become absurd as I struggle to make sense.

  I find my key, turn it in the lock, but the door will not open. I rattle the knob, push on it, and when the door doesn’t give, I ram my shoulder against the wood.

  Whump. And again. Whump.

  “Wait,” Len Jr. calls through his window. “Be careful.” My house groans. I step back. “Lady, you need help.”

  I laugh hysterically at his colossal understatement.

  *

  When I saw the stone schoolhouse for the first time six years ago, the collapse of the roof – the whole house in fact – seemed imminent. Everything was run down, broken, stained, corroded and dirty. Cobwebs festooned the ceiling and corners. Squirrels, field mice, wasps and who knows what other forms of life nested in every possible cranny. A couple of windows were boarded up, most of the rest cracked. The tin chimney for the pot-bellied stove was rusted through, and the toilet, scaly and discoloured, would tolerate nothing being flushed, which made me wonder how all those students and their teacher managed to get through the day.

  Outside was a tangle of blackberry canes, salal, stunted cedar, fruit trees too old to bear anything other than scabs of lichen, and grass, clover, vetch and buttercups, layer upon layer choking itself to death. In the centre of the yard, partly hidden beneath a snare of ivy, sat a charred, jagged tree stump – struck by lightning long ago was my guess. The only part of the property intact was the stone of the walls.

  As soon as I touched the stone, I knew I had found a safe haven. A spot to rest. Away from the world.

  I bought it.

  It wasn’t until I moved in and cleaned it up that I saw it wasn’t as bad as I had thought. Those broken windows, tall and narrow, faced directly east and west, and welcomed the sun every day it chose to appear and bade it good-night as it set off in the direction of Vesuvius. In one of the western windows, a large Garry oak budded in early spring, was home to dozens of songbirds through the summer, and for two glorious weeks, flocks of frantic hummingbirds, dive-bombed for the caterpillars that plummeted from the boughs on fine threads like tiny arthropod paratroopers. When the birds departed, the leaves turned brown and dropped. I loved to watch the light and shadows on its scrappy boughs change with the seasons.

  I’d never seen a ceiling like the one in my schoolhouse. Higher than a church’s, it climbed acutely to a dark distant v. From there, everything fell into the heavy walls. I couldn’t understand what held it aloft. I looked for solid cross-beams, support posts, interior walls that could bear the weight, but there were none. I supposed the technique used was from another era, a long-forgotten skill swallowed in the homogenization of the home construction industry.

  I felt awed by the space that towered above me, but by no means small, lost or unworthy. The stones outside were never far from my consciousness. When I was alone in that house for the first time, I felt comforted in a way that I hadn’t since I’d lost Graham four years earlier.

  *

  Graham and I lived in East Vancouver in a bungalow built during the war; small, grey and boxy, stuccoed in and out like a bad case of acne. The neighbourhood was full of the same type of house. But it was all we could afford. Like any family just starting out, we made use of thrift shop furniture, public transit, and do-it-yourself everything. But I didn’t mind. With Graham, everything was a novelty. Even refinishing the hardwood floors ourselves was exciting. When we were through, the least accessible corners of the floor glistened as though wet.

  Surinder, barely four years old when we bought the house, joined our industriousness. A portent of her future self-sufficiency and ability to master everything effortlessly, she learned the contents of the toolbox and proved h
erself quite capable of fetching tools on command.

  I canned and froze my way through the summer months. Our neighbour’s damson tree gave a bountiful crop one year and when they offered us the works, saying they were sick of them anyway, I didn’t hesitate. Graham and I were in that tree the same afternoon, perched on the mossy branches like two looting crows into somebody’s picnic lunch. We dropped the fruit into Surinder’s outstretched hands. I lined up the jars on a basement shelf, a handsome row.

  I sewed all Surinder’s clothes, mended everything, even leotards and underwear.

  This was how we lived for years: me, Graham, Surinder. I hardly thought of Dad anymore, Dhaka and the Chowdhurys were fading memories upon which I had nearly given up, and I never missed home.

  Graham worked summers as a casual landscape gardener – a day or two in North Van, another in Point Grey. It was the best he could do. Under-educated on paper and slightly tainted by politics, Graham was no different than other draft dodgers – good, steady work was hard to come by for them. He kept crazy long hours when a new garden was going in, then sat idle for days waiting for the next call. But after three or four years, and the government’s official nod to draft dodgers, he was able to set up his own business. We scrimped some more and bought a used, but serviceable pick-up. Tools. “Cast your eyes on a masterpiece,” he said the day the truck came back with his company name painted on the side: Graham Livingstone Urban Jungles.

  On his own, Graham worked longer hours, all twelve months of the year. There was enough winter gardening in Vancouver to keep the money coming in, though he’d leave home later in the morning and return before dark. But summers, we’d hardly see him.

  It was early September, well before the rains. Surinder was at school that afternoon. I was home, probably making or fixing something. Then the hospital called.

  Graham died around about the time my cab crossed Main Street. Heart attack.