by Tim Parks
As he spoke these words, Helen James pushed her chair back, stood up and announced that she had to go. The clinic was always under pressure, she said, during these cold spells. John also wiped his mouth. His mother looked pale. ‘No, no,’ she told him quickly. ‘You stay here, darling. It’s so lovely to hear you getting excited about your work. So encouraging. Oh, John is eager to visit the Sufi tombs,’ she announced to the rest of the table. ‘If someone has time, perhaps they could take him this afternoon.’
There was an immediate buzz of offers. People seemed polite to the point of irony. ‘I’ll take you,’ the woman beside him said. She had a wide forehead, very fine dark eyes, but strangely narrow cheeks around pursed, full lips.
For a moment Helen held her gaze. ‘Thank you, Sharmistha. John: I’ll see you this evening, dear. Thank you everybody,’ she repeated, ‘thank you so much, you’ve been very kind,’ and she hurried out.
‘Poor old Helen,’ someone said after a brief silence. ‘She works so hard.’
One of the more elderly white men, three or four places down the table, leaned across to ask, ‘How is your mother taking it, John? Is there anything we can do?’
John was surprised. He swallowed his food. Mother’s motto, he said, had always been, Battle on regardless. Then he found himself telling an exemplary anecdote of how, in New Guinea – and this was big-time family legend – Mum had just gone on with her normal work at the clinic when the local tribe, complaining that Dad had put a spell on a girl that had caused her to lose her baby, had threatened to cut off and shrink her, his mother’s, head, not Dad’s, since it seemed that the way to take revenge in that part of the world was not to kill the man who had offended you, but his wife.
‘How very convenient!’ someone chuckled.
‘Well, these people were so surprised when Mum just went on running her surgeries and distributing medicines as usual that they left her alone. They sort of realised she wasn’t part of their world, I suppose. They couldn’t faze her at all.’
‘And Albert?’ someone said more soberly. ‘That must have been when he was writing Wau. How did Albert respond?’
‘Oh, I wasn’t born then,’ John told them, ‘I’ve only heard the story.’ But he added: ‘Dad was always anxious about everything, which was why he collected so much information but never actually did anything.’
It was a cruel remark, and at once John felt he ought not to have said this on the day of his father’s funeral.
The theosophy man was watching him. ‘There is more wisdom in what you say than you imagine, my boy,’ he said in his slow clipped accent. He smiled very faintly behind thick lenses.
It was some years since John had been called ‘my boy’. He pushed his chair back and felt ready to go.
The woman his mother had called Sharmistha must be twenty eight-ish, John thought, and quite short he realised now, but charmingly shapely, and she had brought along one of the older European men who turned out to be German. Were they in some sort of a relationship? John didn’t care. He still hadn’t replied to Elaine, who was used to receiving answers to her text messages at once, especially when some setback threw her into depression. On the other hand, it was the day of his father’s funeral.
‘For New Delhi, you need a good fast taxi,’ the German was saying brightly, ‘but in Old Delhi an autorickshaw is really the only way to travel; they have a better chance of sneaking through the traffic.’
The fog was even thicker now. The air was damp.
‘And I only brought light clothes!’ John protested. ‘I never imagined it could be like this here.’
‘Women aren’t allowed to go right into the tombs,’ Sharmistha was saying, as if to explain why she had had to bring Heinrich along. ‘Are you cold?’
‘A bit,’ John said.
Even with the heavy tarpaulin hanging over the frame of the autorickshaw the air was chill when they started moving at speed. The driver had what looked like a towel wrapped round his head. When they stopped at a light, John moved the tarpaulin to one side and found three helmetless boys sitting on a scooter only inches away, one carrying a milk churn in each hand. They were shouting and laughing in the exhaust fumes.
Looking out, then, through the vehicles squeezing into the junction and overflowing onto dry mud beside, the pedestrians picking their way between trucks and buses, a donkey cart piled high with scrap metal, John was struck by the frenzy and density of life here. Why had his father always chosen such places? Why had he never lived in a sensible town where you could get things done?
‘I’m sorry, I should have asked you what you do,’ he turned to Sharmistha. ‘I’ve only talked about myself.’
‘Heinrich is in psychiatry,’ she said. ‘He’s been in India twenty years.’
The man leaned forward and smiled. They were cramped in the autorickshaw.
‘But I’m not really at the university,’ Sharmistha went on. ‘I just write for scientific magazines and so on. At the moment I’m working with some people in the zoology department who are studying a spider that produces an unusually strong kind of silk. I’m writing a book about it for them.’
John made an effort to arouse some interest but was suddenly distracted by her perfume. He hadn’t noticed it before, something sweet and strong that drew him powerfully.
‘The team I’m working for,’ she was saying, ‘is mainly interested in the chemical processes by which the spider makes its silk. They are attempting to reproduce it synthetically. But your father was interested in patterns and layers of communication. That was how he got involved. He was convinced the whole web-making process was essentially a communicative structure.’
‘He would be,’ John replied.
‘And why are you so eager to see the tombs?’ she asked. ‘You have heard all about them?’
‘Not at all.’ John realised he was feeling ill. ‘Apparently Dad said I should go and see them, and the Taj Mahal. It’s in a town near here, isn’t it? God knows why. I only came for his funeral.’
There was a brief silence, then Heinrich leaned forward again. He had a high, bony, solemn face, a strong German accent. ‘It is because the Taj is another tomb,’ he said, ‘the most famous tomb in the world. It is your father’s way of inviting you to think how death is celebrated.’
‘That’s right!’ Sharmistha laughed. She was shaking her head. ‘That’s him! That is just the way your father did things, inviting others to think.’ Then in a lower voice she added: ‘It was very strange, you know, John, listening to you talk at lunch, because it was like listening to your father again. Yes! The same manner, the same voice, also sometimes the same facial expressions, even if you have very different faces. Albert was always very excited too about what he was doing, you know, though of course he would never have said the things that you said.’
John didn’t know how to respond to this. ‘How do you mean?’ he eventually asked, but the woman didn’t reply. They had arrived.
John had expected something grand, so when they climbed out of the rickshaw at the Red Fort he supposed it must be that. It seemed frighteningly solid and ugly with its huge ramparts; a great stronghold of death. Instead, Sharmistha took him by the arm and they set off in the opposite direction, through streets so crowded and confused and narrow, he felt alert, threatened.
‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’ Heinrich said.
Boys sat on broken walls and men wrapped in white gowns squatted on the ground in the thick of the passers-by where gaudy little temples were side by side with food stalls and carpet stores, a cluttered window advertising mobile phones.
They turned into narrower and narrower streets, passages even, and perhaps because of the fog, or maybe it was later than John imagined, the air darkened and there were steps now and arches, until, under what looked like a small portico, they had to stop and a man wanted to take their shoes and put shower-caps over their hair. They couldn’t go bareheaded to the tombs. They must turn their mobiles off.
John crouched a
nd undid his shoes. Heinrich was explaining about the Sufi tradition and who were the holy mystics buried here and saying it would be wise to drop a banknote beside a tomb at the appropriate moment, a twenty or a fifty, to have one ready anyway, as a sign of respect, even though there was absolutely no obligation, but John was hardly listening. What am I doing wasting my time here? he kept thinking. He still hadn’t had a proper talk with his mother. Perhaps I should have booked the very next flight back after the funeral.
Descending steps to the tomb compound proper, he became aware of the noise. Beside a small shrine a dozen men were sitting in a cement courtyard, swaying in white gowns to the steady beat of the drum, clapping their hands and singing tunelessly. Two smoking torches on the opposite wall made the place both darker and brighter than the day outside.
‘I cannot go in here,’ Sharmistha said, as Heinrich approached one of the small buildings. There was incense burning. A man stood on guard at the gate; a little boy tapped John’s arm and said, ‘Guide. Hello, sir. I am your guide. Twenty rupees.’ John felt ready to hit him. For some reason that mindless chanting and drumming made him shiver. He hated it with all his heart.
Inside the tomb, a building no bigger than a small bedroom, four men were sitting cross-legged at the corners of a green mound that must be the grave of the most holy man. Heinrich began to circle the grave silently. It was as though a mound of cement or compacted earth had been painted bright green and then lavishly sprinkled with the same marigold petals that the schoolgirls had spread on his father’s coffin. Another visitor was completely prostrate, blocking their path, murmuring prayers, actually kissing the ground, and evidently in an altered emotional state. And now John noticed that there was money in the shallow trough that went all around the tomb mound, quite a lot of money. But he was determined not to add any.
‘The tomb is guarded every moment of every day, for all eternity,’ Heinrich whispered.
John felt furious. There was a way, he was sure, in which his father had always been an utter fool.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘WOULD I BE right in supposing,’ the biographer asked, ‘that the truth about Albert’s death is that he didn’t want to be treated?’
Helen James had agreed to talk to the man. It was early evening in the lounge of the Ashoka Hotel. She had immediately felt better that morning when she had packed John off to Agra to see the Taj. She was proud of the boy, but he seemed superfluous. Then she had found herself disoriented at the clinic. It was distressing. She was aware of working without concentration or sympathy. All her life, wherever Albert got funding for one of his projects, she had offered her abilities, free of charge, at some local clinic. Her energy was never less than boundless. Under the glint of her rapid eyes, the sure touch of practised fingers on sore skin, even men and women of the most alien cultures surrendered their scepticism. Wagan, they called her among the Iatmul: witch doctor.
In the early years in Kenya and in New Guinea she and Albert had set up the clinics themselves and worked together: she examining infected wounds, listening to ugly coughs, distributing medicines, he doing all the lab and paperwork. Helen was a doctor, Albert a biologist. That was the thrust of their marriage, initially. They had both been eager to leave England. Each had needed the charisma of the other to make the break and each knew that the other could only be won and held by this willingness to leave everything behind. They would give their talents to the world’s poorest. No other explanation for their travels was required.
Then Albert backed off. Over a period of five or six years he had begun to doubt the wisdom of it. Switching from biology to anthropology, to kinesics, proxemics, cybernetics, he had developed his famous theory of non-manipulative study: any established culture is wiser than its foreign visitors and would-be benefactors; the clinic saved individual lives but it altered habits of mind, community traditions, attitudes to sickness and death; they were changes that would have incalculable consequences down the line. He wrote papers about delicate, self-correcting cultural ecologies – he was himself a delicate man – about complementary personality differentiation in complex social dynamics. Anti-establishment intellectuals loved him.
At that point, Helen had had John. It was a difficult time for her. An impetus had been lost. From being a couple, or a team, they were supposed to become a family. Did we ever achieve that? she wondered. Helen missed her work, the work she had shared with Albert. She missed healing people. And she couldn’t help her husband with the things he was doing now. Intellectually, he had moved away from her. Nor could she become a local woman; they were both agreed that a European could never be part of a pre-modern culture. Your Western consciousness blocked you. John, of course, had had to be sent to schools back in England. The boy came and went. So Helen began to use her medical skills in clinics run by local people along local lines, taking instructions from others. That was hardly intrusive, she protested.
Helen came to life in her work. She beamed at the native women, intimidated their suspicious menfolk. Examining a suppurated eyelid, pressing home a syringe, she was in command. Albert had seemed pleased with the compromise. ‘The choices I make apply to myself,’ he said, ‘and to no one else.’ At this point he was studying the relations between spoken word and physical gesture, between patterns of communication and collective ethos. Sometimes he would sit in Helen’s clinic for hours, talking to patients at random. He made sketches, took notes. A breakthrough paper was written: Prayer and Courtship Postures in Christian, Hindu and Muslim Cultures. The conference invitations began. Neither felt the need for another child.
In these local clinics, Helen had worked below her potential, seeing more patients than one could possibly give proper attention to. She had often been without the necessary diagnostic tools, without sophisticated medicines, without adequate facilities for care, without an interpreter. She had been thrown back on her intuition, which sharpened enormously. She could smell illness. ‘Albert studies the local ethos and pathos,’ she would laugh on rare social occasions, ‘while I pander to the vulgar desire to stay alive.’
Yet there was never any question of her withdrawing her devotion to her husband. Rather the contrary. Their travels had meaning now because of his brilliance: the theories he was developing would have resonance for what began to be called globalisation, the merging of all cultures. We were one of those special couples – this was the first thing she must tell this would-be biographer – who are totally dedicated to each other, because they have a higher goal. The mission came first, even if they had different ideas as to what the mission was. That was what made their marriage so sound.
But do we really want a biography? Helen worried today as she saw her patients at the clinic. She picked her way through the bodies in the waiting room. There was a man with a very severe testicular hernia. Helen couldn’t focus. Something wordless was gnawing behind these thoughts. Examining a deep abscess in a boy’s neck, she framed the question: how old is a woman, a widow, at fifty-three?
She had agreed to meet Paul Roberts at his hotel because she didn’t want him to see Albert’s books in the apartment. It would be difficult to stop the man going to the shelves and picking things up. She must go through everything herself first. But she had no desire to go through her husband’s work. She felt tired.
‘Who was that?’ John had asked the previous evening when she put the telephone down after the biographer’s call.
‘Just someone I have to meet,’ she told him.
Her son had watched her. The boy was sprawled on the couch with his Coke in his hand. He had turned the television on. Whenever John came home from school – home being Afghanistan, or Laos, or Zambia – there had always been a fridgeful of Coca-Cola for him. Helen loved his crude young appetite and it disturbed her. She wanted to be strict, she wanted to have him eat local vegetarian dishes, to understand that money doesn’t grow on trees, she wanted him to spend some time in the clinic where only the poorest of the poor came. She wanted to rub his yo
ung well-educated face in filth. And she wanted to spoil him and enjoy his youth and complacency. He seemed a stranger and she herself felt strange when he was here.
‘Tell me about Dad,’ John asked again.
Helen said she couldn’t talk. ‘He died right here,’ she sighed, ‘in our bedroom. You know he always said: You can’t balance the life equation without death.’ She frowned: ‘Maybe next time you visit I’ll be ready.’ Then she added: ‘He had a lot of pain, though he never let himself be nursed. You know how he was. At the end, he really wanted to die.’
As she spoke, John’s eyes never left her. It was uncomfortable. The boy was trying to get close. She wanted to embrace him, but knew she wouldn’t. Nor would she ever press him to come and see the work she did at the clinic. ‘The truth is, John love,’ she told him abruptly, ‘we’ve hardly any money. You know. It’s a problem. Now your father’s various grant incomes will dry up of course and I’m afraid there’s almost nothing in the kitty. You’ll have to support yourself as soon as possible.’
It was an exaggeration, but it did the trick. ‘Albert didn’t have any insurance,’ she explained. She was sitting at her place at the big table. ‘You know we never thought about that kind of thing.’
‘But how much money is there?’ John demanded. His mood changed. He became alert and aggressive, constantly shaking the empty Coke can as if to check whether there was any left. ‘I mean, if I’ve got to find other funds, I need to know when.’
‘You should go and see your grandparents when you get back,’ she said. ‘I’m sure they can help.’
Mother and son had argued then. It was unexpected and unpleasant. Helen certainly hadn’t meant to argue the very day of Albert’s funeral, but the boy was stubborn.
