Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  "We may always hope," Philip said.

  "If anything happens to him, if anything happens...

  We waited. "Yes, Mr. Mahalingam?" Philip said.

  "I do not properly know what I would do. Because he is the youngest and the best and also the last, because there will not be any more unless I rid myself of my present wife and marry a younger one, which it is not according to my eclectic religion to do. You were wrong, Mr. Toomey, to say electric, I think you were having a joke with me. For the son in the middle is not intelligent and the eldest son is a great fool, and in little Jaganathan rests all my hope, so we must hope. And also pray," he said fiercely to me alone. "Pray pray."

  "I promise you," I said, "I will do that. And not only for your own son, but for all children in pain and danger. Including the daughter of Mr. Lee the grocer who, I understand, was admitted also last night."

  "With what disease?" Mahalingam asked Philip jealously.

  "A condition of the lower intestine. The prognosis is good," Philip said unwisely.

  "Intestines," Mahalingam sneered. "A girl. Chinese. A race of peoples that think themselves to be very clever." Yusof came from the kitchen into the dining alcove bearing a big partitioned dish of sambals, for we were to have a chicken curry. "Your boy,". Mahalingam confirmed to both of us. "How much do you pay him?"

  "The usual," Philip said. "He is well looked after." Mahalingam then loudly told Yusof in the special Malay of Tamils, the possessive morpheme punya used, for some reason, as a noun emphasizer, that he must be a good boy, loyal to his good master, undrunken, industrious and honest, not bringing dirty girls from the bazaar into his quarters, otherwise he, Mahalingam son of Sundralingam punya, would be on to him punya with visitations punya of various evil spirits, including the hantu hitam or black ghost punya. Yusof said nothing but looked toward Philip as if to know how seriously he must take all this, and Philip returned him a slight apologetic shrug.

  "They are superstitious peoples. Ghosts and spirits with floating lower intestines frighten them and make them do their work. They are stupid to believe such things can be seen when they cannot. For a spirit is of its spiritual nature invisible. It is serious study and not materials for superstition."

  "You know much about it, Mr. Mahalingam?" I asked.

  "It is a very curious thing, Mr. Toomey, and says much perhaps of ultimate constitution of the universe that invisible powers can rarely be employed to work good things. We cannot call spirits down to heal my poor little Jagana, than, who must be left to the mercy of human skills of Dr. Shawcross. But the spirits of destruction are ever eager to obey the call of even the unskilled caller upon them. This is a great mystery."

  "You mean it's an evil world?" I asked.

  "I did not say that, Mr. Toomey. I spoke of mystery. Destruction and creation are together with Siva and his wife Kali in mythology of Hindus. Evil and good are not words to be employed lightly. When we speak of good things we mean good for ourselves, which may not be good for eternal beings. But we are weak and ignorant and must live our human lives, and love of our own flesh and blood may be stupidity and foolishness in world of the eternal beings, but still Z9 to us it is real. He must, he must," with violence, "he must be made hale and hearty and safe and sound again."

  "I know," Philip said, "you have an eccentric that is eclectic religion, whatever it is, but there are orthodox Hindus who say all life is sacred. This means the mycobacterium tuberculosis and the spirochete as well as the worms and insects that Indian laborers here so laboriously remove from their shovels. Western medicine seeks to kill these organisms. Is this a blasphemy?"

  "We must," I said, "draw the line somewhere."

  Mahalingam shook his head sadly and much. "I can speak only of love and loss and human misery. My dear son is in your hands, Dr. Shawcross, and I wonder why at this moment we are sitting here with our whisky and in expectation of by the aroma a curry when we, meaning your good self, should be watching over him with the eyes of eagles. Though I recognize the necessity of brief relaxation from work and sorrow, yes yes, but still I wonder. Still, I am now in your house and that is a blessing of itself. It is a balance and a control of things," he added obscurely.

  "He's sleeping," Philip said wearily. "I telephoned Dr. Lim a little while ago," he lied. "He is sleeping peacefully. His pulse is near to normal though his temperature is still high. We can do nothing more for the moment."

  "Yes yes yes, I see that. In my house both you gentlemen have observed many photographs of friends and colleagues fixed to the door of electric and also, Mr. Toomey, eccentric icebox. As I now know you are a friend, Dr. Shawcross, I beg a little little favor, and that is of a photograph of yourself to join them. The one of yourself in batting posture at wicket should serve well and be deeply cherished. I ask only the picture, not the frame."

  "Well," Philip said, embarrassed, "this is a request that--Well, I suppose so. If I want to look at myself I suppose I can always look in the mirror."

  "Makan sudah siap," Yusof announced. The curry and the rice steamed on the table.

  "We must eat, yes, eat," Mahalingam sighed, getting up quickly and first. "My deep thanks," he said, going to the little display of photographs and, with remarkably nimble fingers for such great puddings of hands, freeing cricketing Philip from the staples at the back of the frame. "Now I know I have you with me all the time." The sort of thing I should have said and done, having a period of absence from home ahead of me, but Philip and I were British and not much, except about animals, given to sentimentality.

  CHAPTER 37

  The following morning we were both still exhausted after four hours and more of Mahalingam. Mahalingam's anxiety about his Benjamin had expressed itself in large appetite and atavistic table manners, a session of unashamed weeping, a phase of profound and anxious dyspepsia which Philip had to treat with a solution of baking soda inducing resonant relief, a request that we should all go and spend the night around little Jaganathan's bed, temporary anger at our unwillingness to comply, a maudlin assurance that despite everything we would always be his friends unless we harmed him in which eventuality he would demonstrate that he could be a proper pig, a desire to threaten over the telephone the nursing staff with direst consequences in the case of deterioration of the patient's condition, a long pseudophilosophical disquisition on the joys and agonies of paternity, a number of regurgitations of ill-digested school Shakespeare, a cadenza of ancient proverbs, a detailed account of his, Mahalingam's, career as a public servant, a Timonesque diatribe against an ungrateful Madras, vitriolic brief lives of treacherous friends and colleagues, and an embarrassing and most explicit catalogue of copulatory postures. It was no wonder that Mahalingam was heavily on Philip's mind: his first act on waking was to telephone the hospital and enquire as to the Benjamin's condition. The juggernaut had been apparently deflected from its crushing course, for Philip said "Good" and even tiredly smiled. "Call the father, will you?" he said. "Yes, at the waterworks. Thanks." He sat down to tea and toast and segments of pomelo on the verandah saying, "It looks as though the diagnosis was wrong. A sort of colitis, Lim thinks, just like the Lee kid. Constipation, so the mother stuffs him with aperients. Pain, so she pours in the laudanum. No wonder they couldn't get him to wake up. I've had meningitis a bit too much on my mind lately perhaps. Anyway, temperature's down and pulse near normal. That's a load off. Don't much like the look of the weather." Coiling clouds that seemed loaded with machine oil rolled as in slow pain. You could almost wring the air of humidity. "Monsoon time coming, though, have to expect it. Hits the lower part of the town badly when the rains start. The river overflows and some of them have to drag their bedding and kualis and umbrellas onto the roof. Crocodiles snap at them. I had an old Chinese year before last with an arm bitten off at the elbow. Snakes nest in the trees. Last year wasn't too bad. We may be lucky again. Anyway, thank God we're on a hill." He looked at me in a new way, appropriate to a joint avowal that Mahalingam had temporarily driven out. "You're
off today then?"

  "Noon train to Kuala Lumpur. Then Malacca."

  "How long, do you think?"

  "Well, look at it this way. I've written the novel pretty well backwards, one way of doing it. I have to have a couple of chapters with Raffles lamenting the silting up of the Malacca harbour and the general decay of the town. I need some Malaccan Portuguese phrases. I want the feel of the place. A week, no more."

  "Watch out for those rains. The railway lines get flooded." He spat out pomelo seeds and said, "I have to confess it's a bit of a relief. About this lad of Mahalingam's, I mean."

  "I know what your worry was," I said. "Mahalingam could be a very nasty customer. Nasty in a very Eastern way."

  "Five dollars for a quiet assassination. The orang kapak kechil, you know, Malays with little axes. They'll do anybody in and ask no questions. Lies and no witnesses. Though it would probably be that eldest of his, the zombie. I'm damned sure he's permanently drugged with something. The Old Man of the Mountains and the hashish eaters. Assassinus, assassin. Speech centres not working, acute motor responses, great speed. Could be some other narcotic. We'll never get to the bottom of the blasted East." Yusof came to say telefon, tuan. "That'll be the man himself, oozing with gratitude, slobbering down the mouthpiece so I'll get my ear wet." He went off. By the time I had finished my first cigarette of the morning he was back grimacing. "He wants to give me a big dinner. He's going to fill the whole rumah sakit with flowers. He's kissing my photograph, he says. I don't think I want you to go, Ken. My enemies are his enemies, he says, and who would I like to be seen off first."

  "The District Officer."

  "Oh, be serious. He scares me, blast him. I tried to get out of the dinner invitation, but he said it was no mark of a friend to wish to repudiate gratitude, or something."

  "I won't go."

  "He knows you're going, I told him. He proposes taking you to the station in a hired Daimler with the KL Police Band playing. Flowers, flowers and flowers."

  "Be serious."

  "He thinks your benign presence has been as much a help as my scientific skill. Oh, he'll cool down as the day warms. Perhaps I ought to lend him one of your books and tell him you'll give him an oral examination on it when you get back. That may quieten him a bit. Of course you must go. I can easily put off that dinner till next week. I was only joking."

  At twenty minutes to noon Philip took time off from the hospital to drive me to the station. Mahalingam had arranged no enflowered Daimler. When the train for Kuala Lumpur came in, Philip and I realized that there was no repertoire of valedictory gestures that accorded with our relationship. No handshake, no Italianate embrace in the manner of Domenico Campanati. Just friendly cool banalities. Don't work too hard, take it easy, enjoy yourself, I'll be back. Waves as the train moved, waves and waves. The sky boiled and writhed over the jungle. A jungle reek wafted in on no discernible wind. I rang the compartment bell until a white-coated Chinese came. I ordered whisky and water. A departed passenger had left a copy of yesterday's Straits Times. Bridge column by Philip le Bel. Who was that? Father Chan, Chang. Ruffed and loses his trump trick. Make contact by telephone perhaps, anticipatory greetings to Carlo Campanati. No hurry. There was a curious story from Negri Sembilan in the middle pages. A Malay, Mohamed Noor, had fallen in love with a certain Aminah binte Lot. She rejected him for another, Haji Redzwan. Mohamed Noor sought revenge through services of local pawang or sorcerer. He employed sympathetic magic. Mohamed Noor made a crude drawing of the girl's face. This was hung from a clothesline in a scrub clearing. Spells were directed at the portrait and hand drums were beaten, scents of noxious herbs alight arose to inspissate the air beneath the hanging image. The girl took sick, wasted. Haji Redzwan discovered the sorcery but, despite the grace (which, reporter said, his name meant) bestowed by pilgrimage to Mecca, felt himself powerless to oppose Muslim cantrips to pagan spells. Nevertheless he intervened during eighth night of sorcery, gained possession of portrait, drew the incantations by a most heroic act of will onto himself. The girl recovered and he wasted. His uncle called in the police. No action could be taken against the pawang or the spurned lover, no crime being provable under prosaic secular laws which took no cognizance of attempted homicide by witchcraft. When the Muslim authorities stepped in, a plethora of suborned witnesses swore that this man was no pawang and the girl merely needed a course of Iron Jelloids and Brand's Chicken Essence, green sickness or something like. All ended happily, recovered Haji now married to his love and living in her kampong, following Negri Sembilan matriarchal law or adat perpatuan, he teaching Koran in village school. I would use that story. I would write it up, with suitable literary embroidery, when I got back to Philip. Money for jam or old rope.

  Alone in the Straits Settlement of Malacca (which, like Singapore and Penang, came directly under the British crown in those days, while the other, federated, states enjoyed a simulacrum of autonomy under British-advised native rulers), I saw clearly how much I needed Philip, and I marvelled at the mystery of a particular nonphysical love apparently driving out generalised physical desire. The thought of embracing Philipan abomination. But I had assumed that, like bowel movements and thirst, which are irrelevant to the soul, the libido would stir impersonally as the cells protected by the tunica albuginea would inexorably produce seed. But when, each morning, beautifully made halfnaked Yusof performed his balletic act of raising and stowing the mosquito net, I felt no distracted urge, no waking chordee rose. Perhaps the sight of yaws had traumatised me. Here in Malacca the atmosphere of prolonged convalescence after the illness of a turbulent history conduced to the maintenance of sexual calm.

  Wandering the town, crossing the bridge over the Malacca river which separated the native and the European quarters, or halves, surveying the ruins of the ancient cathedral, reading in the graveyard HIC JACET DOMINUS PETRUS SOCIETATIS JESU SECUNDUS EPISCOPUS JAPONENSIS OBIJT AD FRETUM SINGAPURAE MENSE FEBRUARIS ANNO 1598, made drowsy by the drowsiness of the Malayo. Portuguese, I knew that, if Philip had been with me, he would have illuminated nothing with briskness of wit or aptness of image. There was no scintillancy in his brain or speech. I could remember no occasion in Kuala Kangsar, sitting at dinner or after, lazing through the bazaar, walking by the riverbank, or on motor trips to Ipoh or Sungei Siput or Taiping, or venturing timidly into the suburbs of the jungle, when he was able to enclose an image or happening within the filigree cage of temperament or individual vision. There was nothing remarkable in Philip's body or brain; I had to resurrect and dust off a concept long discarded by the humanists whom I believed I had joined, namely the spiritus of the theologians, the entity you could define only negatively and yet love positively, more, love ardently, with and to the final fire. So, however reluctantly, a man may be brought back to God. There is no free will, we must accept, with love, the imposed pattern.

  "Stay at the rest house, I need to know exactly where you are." So the telephone could link us, the clumsy crackling colonial trunk lines of those days, singsong Chinese operatrix in Kuala Kangsar calling to Ipoh sister, KL sister, then sister in the Malacca exchange? Not really, since there would be nothing to say except "I miss you," which would redden us both with its sentimentality. It was enough for Philip to picture me in a known setting, even though unvisited by him, since all rest houses were the same, tea from blue cups in the morning, the ghostly overdarned mosquito net at night. And I, following in memory his daily routine, could see him more clearly than he me. But one night I tried to call him at home and was told by the singsong voice that the line was down outside Ipoh, winds and heavy rain, that men were with difficulty trying to heal the cut and it might be two days. I was thus rebuked for my sentimentality by the monsoon itself, which was now on its way to Malacca.

  I had, after five days, my Stamford Raffles surveying the silted harbour and dreaming of a new port. He read the tombstone of Father Peter, S.J., second bishop of Japan, dead in Singapore Straits in 1598. Singapore, what was that? A mangrove isla
nd that nobody wanted. He noted, with his characteristic scholar's interest, the Portuguese showing the Malays how to number, not name, the days of the week, except for Sunday, domingo, hari minggu. He meditated on Saint Francis Xaxier, who turned half-baked Muslims into half-baked Catholics but personally directed the firing of the fleet of the Achinese invaders. A sense of the Malayan past was what the novel needed, and it was all here in the sleepy Malacca which Chinese millionaires chose for their retirement.

  I awoke in the middle of the night to the first heavy rains and knew I had better get back. I awoke to a watery dawn and a single thump of the heart that bounced me on the comfortless mattress. Philip speaking loudly the name Ken. There was trouble. There was very large trouble. Before breakfast I asked the number one boy to get me the Kuala Kangsar number. He tried. No can do. Line still down. I chafed, packing, at the thought of the long journey ahead, the furious sky, tree trunks blocking the line, the line itself drowned. In the rest house jam ban there was the odor of something other than the last occupant's gases, worse than faecal, inorganic and malevolent. Someone had, since my last use of it, pencilled on the whitewashed wall a crude picture of an animal head sprouting human toes and fingers. The effluvium rose to it. I tried to shake my head clear of visions. A hotbed of vice, intolerance and ignorance, also superstition. The doctor here will tell you so. Saint Francis Xavier fired the Achinese raiding ships. I saw him in white robe and rosary girdle, superhumanly high, alone on the summit of Mount Ophir, his arms out as though blessing but really ready to drop on the agreed signal to fire.

  I was mostly alone in my compartment traveling to Kuala Lumpur. At brief stops named for rivers which were themselves named for animals, quacking Chinese with ducks in baskets, Bengalis in dhotis with portable strongboxes, Malays with nothing but a mouthful of sireh got on, got off. A ginger Englishman in his twenties, a junior government official from his disdain, shared the last miles with me, saying nothing, making no gesture of kinship in a strange land, reading The Four Just Men by Edgar Wallace. The rain raved and the train rocked in tempest but, cleaving an unending sheet of water like a ship, it ploughed on to the federal capital. Kuala Lumpur station was colored with all the faces of the East but always the same pair of feet sandaled or bare in multiplicate, the platform a grey stone shore of these scuttling crabs, their reek of damp rising to the burnt smell of soaked tar hair. I entered the long crowded refreshment room that was steamily rank and pushed my way to the counter. The rain slanting to the southwest was mercilessly deafening on the roof. The telephone, local calls free, was at the end of the bar under a tradesman's calendar showing a smirking geisha, the Chinese year and the Islamic year and their unreadable lunar months and, staunch and shaky as reason, December 1924. I ordered brandy and asked for the telephone directory. Two sallow planters drank Tiger and talked of cricket at the Oval. Cut to square leg and damn near put out the square-leg umpire's eye for him. So many Changs in the book. I looked up St. Francis Xavier's Church, Batu Road. There was a presbytery number. One moment please. "Father Chang?"