The Cat's Table

by Michael Ondaatje

  *

  SOMETIMES WE FIND our true and inherent selves during youth. It is a recognition of something that at first is small within us, that we will grow into somehow. My shipboard nickname was ‘Mynah’. Almost my name but with a step into the air and a glimpse of some extra thing, like the slight swivel in their walk all birds have when they travel by land. Also it is an unofficial bird, and unreliable, its voice not fully trustworthy in spite of the range. At that time, I suppose, I was the mynah of the group, repeating whatever I overheard to the other two. Ramadhin gave it to me accidentally, and Cassius, recognising its easy outgrowth from my name, started calling me that.

  No one called me ‘Mynah’ but the two friends I made on the Oronsay. Once I entered school in England, I was known only by my surname. But if I ever got a phone call and someone said ‘Mynah,’ it could be only one of them.

  As for Ramadhin’s own first name, I rarely used it, though I knew it. Does knowing give me permission to assume I understand most things about him? Do I have the right to imagine the processes of thought he went through as an adult? No. But as boys on that journey to England, looking out on the sea that seemed to contain nothing, we used to imagine complex plots and stories for ourselves.

  Ramadhin’s heart. Ramadhin’s dog. Ramadhin’s sister. Ramadhin’s girl. It is only now that I see the various milestones in my life that connected the two of us. The dog, for instance. I still recall our playing with it on the narrow bunk bed during the brief time it was with us. And how it had at one moment come over to me quietly and fit its snout and jaws between my shoulder and neck like a violin. Its scared warmth. And then with Massi, our fitting together too, cautious and nervous as teenagers, and then quicker and more delirious at our discovery of each other after Ramadhin’s death, almost knowing we could not have come together without it.

  Then there was the story of Ramadhin’s girl.

  Her name was Heather Cave. And whatever was still unformed in her at the age of fourteen, he loved. It was as if he could see every possibility, though he must have also loved what she was at that moment, the way we might adore a puppy, a yearling, a beautiful boy who is not yet sexual. He would go to the Cave family’s flat in the city to coach her in geometry and algebra. They sat at a kitchen table. If it was sunny they would sometimes have a tutorial in the fenced garden that bordered the building. And during their last half-hour, as a little informal gift, he got her to speak of other things. He was surprised at her harsh judgements of her parents, the teachers she was bored by, and some ‘friends’ who had tried to seduce her. Ramadhin had sat there stunned. She was young but not naïve. In many ways, she was probably more worldly than he. And what was he? A too-innocent thirty-year-old, in the cocoon of that small immigrant community in London. He was not active or knowledgeable about the world around him. He was supply teaching as well as tutoring. He read a good deal of geography and history. He kept in touch with Mr Fonseka, who was in the north – there was supposedly a rarefied correspondence between them, according to his sister. So he listened to the Cave girl across the table, imagined the various spokes of her nature. Then went home.

  Why didn’t he break the spell of that high-flown correspondence with Fonseka by mentioning her? But he could never have done that. Fonseka surely would have known how to sway him away from her. Although how much of a realist was he about teenage character that can be brutal beneath the veneer? No, it would have been better for him to have confided in Cassius. Or me.

  On Wednesdays and Fridays he went to the Cave flat. On Fridays the girl was clearly impatient, as she would be leaving to join her friends when the tutorial was over. Then one Friday he found her in tears. She began talking, not wanting him to leave but to help her with her life. She was fourteen and all she wished for was a boy named Rajiva, someone Ramadhin had met one night in her company. A dubious one, he had thought. But now Ramadhin was forced to listen to all the boy’s qualities and what seemed a caustic and too-casual passion between them. She talked and Ramadhin listened. There had been a sneering dismissal of her by the boy in the company of his friends, and she as a result felt abandoned. She wanted Ramadhin to go to the boy and say something, somehow represent her; he could, she knew, talk well – and that would perhaps bring Rajiva back to her.

  This was the first thing she had ever asked him to do.

  She knew where Rajiva would be, she said. The Coax Bar. She would not, could not, go herself. Rajiva would be with his friends, and now they were ignoring her.

  So Ramadhin went in search of the boy, to persuade him to come back to Heather. He entered that strip of the city – somewhere he would never have gone – walking there in his long black winter coat, scarfless, against the English weather.

  * * *

  He enters the Coax Bar on his knight’s mission. The place is turbulent – music, loud conversation, and smoke. He goes in, a plump, asthmatic Asian, looking for another Asian, for Rajiva is also from the East, or at least his parents are. But one generation later has a lot more confidence. Ramadhin sees Rajiva in the midst of his friends. He gets close and attempts to explain why he is there, why he is speaking to him. There are many conversations taking place as he tries to persuade Rajiva to accompany him back to the flat where Heather is waiting. Rajiva laughs and turns away, and Ramadhin pulls the boy’s left shoulder towards him and a knife comes out naked. The blade doesn’t touch him. It touches just his black coat above the heart. The heart Ramadhin has protected all his life. There is only the slightest pressure from the boy’s knife, its force no more than the pushing or the pulling off of a button. But Ramadhin stands there shaking in this loud surrounding. He tries not to inhale the smoke. The boy, Rajiva – how old is he, sixteen? seventeen? – comes closer, with those dark brown eyes, and inserts the knife into the pocket of Ramadhin’s black coat. It is as intimate as if he had slid it into him.

  ‘You can give that to her,’ Rajiva says. It is a dangerous yet formal gesture. What does it mean? What is Rajiva saying?

  An unstoppable shudder in Ramadhin’s heart. There is a burst of laughter and the ‘lover’ turns away and, with the swarm of his friends, moves on. Ramadhin goes out of the bar into the night air, and begins to walk to Heather’s flat to tell her of his failure. ‘Besides,’ he will add on his return, ‘he is not good for you.’ He is suddenly exhausted. He waves to a taxi and climbs in. He will say … he will tell her … he will not speak of the great weight he feels against his heart … He doesn’t hear the driver’s question the first few times, coming from the front of the cab. His head bows down.

  He pays the taxi driver. He presses the bell to her flat, waits, then turns and walks away. He passes the garden where they have had the tutorial once or twice when it was sunny. His heart still leaping, as if it cannot slow or even pause. He unlatches the gate and goes into that green darkness.

  I met the girl Heather Cave. It was a few years after Ramadhin’s death, and was in some way the last thing I did for Massi and her parents. The girl was living and working in Bromley, not far from where I had gone to school. I met her at Tidy Hair, where she worked, and took her to lunch. It had been necessary to invent some story in order to meet her.

  At first she said she could hardly remember him. But as we continued talking, some of the specific details she recalled were surprising. Though she did not really wish to go much further than the official, but still incomplete, evidence of his death. We spent an hour together, and then we went back into our own lives. She was no demon, no fool. I suspect she had not ‘evolved’, as Ramadhin had wished her to, but Heather Cave had settled into a life that she herself had chosen. She had a young authority within it. And she was careful, and cautious with my emotions. When I first brought up the name of my friend, she diverted me easily with some questions into talking about him myself. I proceeded to tell her about our journey by ship. So that by the time I asked her again, she knew the intimacy of our relationship and painted a more generous version of him as her tutor than she mig
ht have presented to a person who had not known him.

  ‘What did he look like in those days?’

  She described his familiar largeness, the languid walk, even that quick smile he would give out, just once, as he was leaving you. How strange, I thought, that it was only once, for such an affectionate man. But Ramadhin would always leave you with that very genuine smile, so it would be the last thing you saw of him.

  ‘Was he always shy?’ she added after a moment.

  ‘He was … careful. He had a weak heart he had to protect. It was why his mother loved him so much. She did not expect a long life for him.’

  ‘I see.’ She looked down. ‘What happened in the bar … what I heard was, it was only noise, there was nothing violent. Rajiva’s not like that. I don’t see him any more, but he wasn’t like that.’

  There was so little to hold on to in our conversation. I was clutching wisps of air. The Ramadhin I fully needed to understand in order to bury was not catchable. Besides, how could that fourteen-year-old have comprehended the desire and torment he had felt.

  Then she said, ‘I know what he wanted. He’d go on about those triangles and maths riddles about a train going thirty miles an hour … or a bathtub holding so much water and a man weighing ten stone gets into it. That was the kind of stuff we were learning. But he wanted something else. He wanted to save me. To bring me into his life, as if I didn’t have my own.’

  We keep wanting to save those who are forlorn in this world. It’s a male habit, some wish fulfilment. Yet Heather Cave, even in her youth, had known what Ramadhin probably wished for her. And yet, in spite of having asked him to do something for her that night, she had never accused herself of his death. His participation was governed by his own needs.

  ‘He has a sister, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am married to her.’

  ‘So that’s why you came to see me?’

  ‘No. Because he was my closest friend, my machang. One of my two essential friends, at one time.’

  ‘I see. I am sorry.’ Then she added, ‘I remember that smile so well, whenever he left the flat, as I closed the door. It’s like when someone says goodbye on the phone and the voice becomes sad. You know that change that happens in a voice?’

  When we got up to leave, she came around the table and gave me a hug, as if she knew that all of this was not for Ramadhin’s sake, but for mine.

  ONE SUMMER NIGHT, in our garden flat on Colliers Water Lane, as I walked back into the living room during a party, I saw Massi, across the room, nudge herself off the wall to dance with someone we both knew well. They danced at arm’s length so they could see each other’s faces, and her right hand lifted the shoulder strap of her summer dress and shifted it slightly – she was glancing down at it, as he was. And she knew he was.

  All our friends were there. Ray Charles was singing, ‘But on the other hand, baby.’ I was halfway across the room. And without needing to see anything more, or to hear a word being said, I knew there was some grace between them that we ourselves did not have any more.

  Such a small gesture, Massi. But when we are searching for an example of what we no longer have, we see it everywhere. And it was a few years since we ourselves had ridden bareback out of the loss of your brother, something neither of us could deal with on our own.

  * * *

  When Massi and I broke up, it was in truth most devastating to her parents, whereas we both hoped to be calmer in our relationship without the marital role. But, it turned out, we would not see each other any more.

  Did the years fall away when I saw her move the strap of a summer dress not more than a quarter-inch, so that I interpreted it as an invitation to that mutual friend? As if it were suddenly essential for him to see that small sunless part of her shoulder. I say this long after the bitterness and accusations and denials and arguments. What was it that made me recognise something in the gesture? I walked into our narrow garden and stood there listening to the night traffic racing past Colliers Water Lane that made me think of the constant noise of the sea, and then all at once of Emily in the darkness of the Oronsay, leaning back against the railing with her beau, when she had glanced for a moment at her bare shoulder and then up at the stars, and I remembered the sexual knot beginning to form in me as well. All of eleven years old.

  I’ll tell you the last time I thought about Ramadhin. I was in Italy and, curious about heraldry, asked a docent in a castle for an explanation of all the crescent moons, their tips facing up. A series of crescent moons and a sword, I was told, meant members of a family had taken part in the Crusades. If only one generation participated, then the crest would have just one crescent moon. And then the guide added, unasked, that having a sun on your crest meant you had a saint in your family. And I thought, Ramadhin. Yes. He leapt, all of him, into my thoughts, as a sort of saint. Not a too-official one. A human one. He was the saint of our clandestine family.

  Port Said

  ON THE FIRST of September, 1954, the Oronsay had completed its journey through the Suez Canal, and we watched the city of Port Said approach and slide beside us, the sky dark with sand. We stayed up all night, listening to the street traffic, the chorus of horns and street radios.

  Only at dawn did we leave the deck and climbed down several levels into the heat and the prison-like light of the engine room. This had become a habit of ours each morning. Here the men lost so much sweat we’d see them drink tepid water from the emergency fire pails while the turbines around them swivelled, flinging their pistons. Sixteen engineers on the Oronsay. Eight for the night shift, eight for the day, nursing the forty-thousand-horsepower steam machines that drove the twin propellers, so we could travel through a calm or a storm-filled sea. If we were there early enough, as the night shift ended, we followed the crew into the sunlight, where they stepped one by one into the open shower stall and then dried themselves in the sea wind, their voices loud in the new silence. It was where our Australian roller skater had stood just an hour earlier.

  But now, as we docked in Port Said, all turbines and engines stilled, and there was a different purpose and manner among the crew. Their anonymous work became public. The passage through the Red Sea and the Canal had resulted in desert sands blasting millions of fragments of canary-yellow paint off the sides of the ship, so while we lingered for a day in that Mediterranean port, sailors hung in rope cradles, scraping and repainting the yellow hull, and the Engineers and Electricals worked among the passengers in the hundred-degree heat, securing the ship for the final leg of the voyage. The Wipers blew oil sludge out from the pipes, collecting the black phlegm-like substance into barrels. As soon as the ship was free of the harbour, they hauled those barrels up to the fantail and dumped them over the side.

  Meanwhile, sections of the hold were being emptied. A brief afternoon rain continued down three levels into the base of the hold as workers, soaking wet, rolled seven-hundred-pound drums towards the mouth of the waiting crane, and hooked the chain and each drum to an I beam. They grabbed and steered tea chests and carpets of raw rubber towards the opening. Bags of asbestos broke apart in mid-air. It was angry, fraught work. If a person lost his grip on a container, it could fall fifty feet down into the darkness. If someone was killed, the body was rowed back to the harbour and it disappeared there.

  Two Violets

  BY NOW THE status of Mrs Flavia Prins on the Oronsay was considerable. She had been a guest at the Captain’s Table, and was invited twice onto the bridge for Officers’ Tea. But it was the combination of Aunt Flavia with her two friends and their skills at duplicate bridge that gave her power within the A Deck salons.

  Violet Coomaraswamy and Violet Grenier, ‘the two Violets,’ as they were referred to by all, had represented Ceylon in numerous Asian bridge tournaments from Singapore to Bangkok. They were therefore superior to the usually listless card players during the voyage, and these women, not revealing their professional status, cut a swathe with their gambling, searching out a different
wispy bachelor every afternoon and making him join them in a couple of rubbers.

  The games were in reality a slow interrogation as to the availability of the man, with a possible courtship in mind, as Miss Coomaraswamy, the younger Violet, now happened to be trawling for a husband. And so, though she was in fact the most Machiavellian player of the three, Violet Coomaraswamy pretended modesty at the card tables in the Delilah Lounge, underbidding and faltering when she could have pounced. If she happened once or twice to play a Three No Trump like a genius, she blushed and credited her luck in cards, not, sadly, her luck in love.

  I still imagine those three ladies surrounding and ensnaring solitary gentlemen who were out of their depth, not even aware they were in fatal waters. The bangles and brooches tinkled and shimmered as the two Violets and Flavia laid their cards down for the kill, or clutched them shyly to their bosoms. All through the Red Sea there was hope that one middle-aged tea planter would succumb to the charms of the youngest hunter among them. But he proved more gun-shy than they had thought, and during our landfall at Port Said, Violet Coomaraswamy stayed in her cabin and wept.