by Tim Parks
She asked Martin what he would be doing this evening. He was going to the cinema. ‘Some Bollywood thing.’ He was trying to learn a little Hindi.
‘You’ve been here a long time,’ he observed. ‘You know the language and everything.’
‘Only five years. I came with my husband. He was doing research. Anthropology.’
‘How interesting. I’d love to meet him.’
‘He died just after New Year.’
It seemed extraordinary to Helen that another member of staff didn’t know these facts around which her existence revolved. But in the end why should he? Martin had arrived in March.
‘No, don’t worry, please,’ she reassured him. ‘It’s just that now I can’t decide whether to stay here in Delhi or move on.’
‘I suppose you have earned the right to go back home.’
Helen shook her head. The young man had a charming solemnity about him. His bare arm on the table was thick with soft blond hair. A teaspoon seemed very small between his fingers.
‘I never think of work in those terms,’ she said. ‘It had crossed my mind I might go out to Bihar to help with the kala-azar they’ve got. It won’t be hard to replace me here and I know kala-azar, I could be useful.’
‘That’s very courageous of you.’
‘It isn’t courage. It’s what I’ve always done.’
So many aid workers, Helen had observed over the years, came away to prove something to themselves, to do penance perhaps, then they returned home with no money in their pockets but a small fortune in moral capital: all their lives, whenever inequality raised its accusing face, they would be able to say they had given the world’s poor a whole year of their time. Helen was never going ‘home’, as they called it. She would never give her mother that satisfaction.
She said goodnight to the Dutchman and ran the routine supplies check with the departing doctor of the twilight shift. Dr Naik was a dapper little Tamil, very dark-skinned, with a clipped moustache and neat little teeth, neatly manicured fingers. They went through the emergency drugs inventory: antibiotics, anticoagulants, morphine. Every time Helen saw the green and white packs of insulin, she felt an intensification of awareness, a strong tide of self-knowledge rising within her. ‘Do it tonight, Helen. Spread my ashes in the Yamuna, right in town, with the rest of the rubbish.’
‘Fourteen boxes,’ she counted
‘Enough to slay a jolly elephant,’ the Tamil doctor laughed.
He hurried off and for a while she stood at the window watching the rain in a narrow alley. It fell steadily as though in a doomed but determined cleaning process, streaming down brick and boards, clattering on corrugated plastic. She thought of the water pulling the city’s dust and filth down towards the river, towards the sea. It would be raining hard on the monument to the dead children below the Wazi Bridge, washing away shit and ashes, dry seeds and fallen petals. Why had her work in the clinic lost its meaning when Albert died? Was it because she herself had opened the green and white box and administered the drug? He had tricked her into betraying her vocation and she could practise it no longer; was that it? Or had it been a test to see if she would really obey, like Abraham and Isaac? Perhaps I wasn’t really supposed to. I was supposed to stop at the last moment. ‘Maybe he didn’t want your help,’ Paul had said. Helen could make no sense of it. ‘I miss you, Albert,’ she muttered. ‘You shouldn’t have left me like that. You shouldn’t have made me do it.’
At 9 p.m. she took official control of the clinic. Dr Naik was gone. Not that she was alone. There was a night nurse, and half a dozen and more of the menial staff slept in the back courtyard, or, on nights like tonight, on mats in the canteen. I needed Albert all those years ago, she reflected, to escape England and to stay away. To escape mother and brother. Oh, but it was so much more than that. It was inexplicable. All at once Helen was extremely agitated. What a terrible loss of composure it had been, blathering to this sticky American. ‘That just isn’t me,’ she said out loud. ‘I refuse to be like that.’
A young man had been admitted in the afternoon with acute pains in his upper legs. At ten the nurse took his temperature and blood pressure and administered another sedative and anticoagulant. The diagnostic process would begin tomorrow. This wasn’t a fully trained nurse but a medical student getting experience, another Muslim girl. These were the corners the clinic had to cut. Helen sent her off to the staff office to rest. She spoke for a few minutes to a mother who was stretched on a mat beside the bed of her infant son. ‘He’ll get well now,’ Helen told the mother. ‘He’s through the crisis.’ She had been saying these things all her life. Then she went to sit beside Than-Htay.
The ward lights were dimmed on the twenty beds with their institutional green covers, white sheets. The windows were open to let in what freshness could penetrate the fly screens. The whir of overhead fans and the patter of the rain mingled with the sighs and snores of the patients. One man in his forties lay awake staring at the ceiling, his turban still pinned in turban shape on the low shelf beside him, his long greying hair matted on the pillow. An adolescent girl tossed from side to side. Albert had sat through many night duties in this and other clinics, partly to help when they were short-staffed, partly because he was interested to know how far culture-conditioned behaviour penetrated sleep habits. It was another eccentric project. Muslims who rose in the night to pray, for example. Did they sleep in a Muslim way? Albert was perfectly capable of staying awake all night, watching and taking notes, coming home to mimic a snore or, on one occasion, a sleepwalker. Sometimes he would talk in a low voice to a sufferer who could not sleep; language was not an issue; he was always able to tell the prayerful man which way to look for Mecca. Helen had admired his thoughtfulness and discretion.
But on other occasions she had betrayed Albert during night duties. She had made love to pleasant young doctors like Martin, and even not so pleasant doctors, even downright pigs, selfish, power-driven men like her brother. She liked to do that, to make these men want her, to have sex and feel nothing for them, nothing at all. Why had she told Paul that? Why expose your life to the very man who could pick up a pen and write everything down? Or was it because he could do that? She would never go home to her loathsome mother, her bragging, disgraceful brother, the whole ugly, conspiratorial, profoundly hypocritical ethos of her childhood world.
But why did I hate it so much?
Sitting on a stool in the dim ward, by the bed of this sick young man, Helen was struck by a kind of amazement at how she had grown up, the person she had become. How had it happened? ‘We talked about everything in theory,’ she murmured out loud, ‘didn’t we Albert? We talked endlessly about how people develop different personalities in their different countries and different circumstances, how each mind is integrated with its origins. But we never talked about us. We never really talked about my family, about my war with Mother and Nick.’
Helen murmured these words out loud as if her husband were there beside her. ‘And we never talked about your brother’s room either, come to think of it.’ For all Albert’s interminable analysis of every possible form of communication, they had never actually spoken about the freshly wiped photograph of the fatal girlfriend. ‘I have shown you,’ he had said, closing the door, and the conversation was closed forever.
At no point had it crossed Helen’s mind to leave Albert for the other men she had sex with, the doctors, administrators, occasionally even patients. None of them had had a tenth of her husband’s intelligence and tenderness. None of them knew how to combine knowledge and silence. They were chatterboxes. They wanted information without understanding. Talk talk talk. Mother talked endlessly too. Helen hated talkers. Nick had boasted interminably about his girlfriends, his cars, his money. Her brother was a fool. It was Albert’s silence that held me, she realised, his determined quietness. How strange.
I must not chatter to the American, she decided. ‘Don’t,’ Helen ordered herself. ‘Don’t talk to him.’ Albert had known
so much, but kept silent. It was his silence together with his knowledge that was so compelling. Albert had understood her relationship with her mother and brother. Without discussing it he understood she must leave that battlefield. She must leave England. There was no need to discuss why. Otherwise I would have done nothing but fight them all my life; it would have eaten me up. I would have achieved nothing.
Yes, Albert understood, Helen remembered. Actually, it was hard for her to think of anything he hadn’t understood. His knowledge encompassed mine. The only irony was that at the end of the day none of that extraordinary intuition had been turned into a real scientific breakthrough. At the end of the day Albert had failed. ‘All important communication,’ she had read from one of his papers to a conference in Los Angeles, ‘takes place without language, or behind language, or in spite of language.’ She could see the professors didn’t understand. These things were hard to demonstrate. They weren’t like a room you could show full of cobwebs, a photo on a bedside table.
‘You wrote your papers for me,’ Helen said quietly, ‘didn’t you Albert?’
All their married lives Helen had been convinced that her husband would go down in history as one of the great thinkers of his age. She had felt safe with him, proud of him, proud she had married him. And instead he had achieved nothing. All Albert’s thinking had come to nothing. The slut in Chicago had destroyed him, Helen decided, drained him of his energy. A man with that dusty room behind him would never have touched an underage prostitute. She knew it. She knew it was his father who had wiped the picture. He hadn’t needed to tell her. What else could she do but work like mad to have his name cleared? Then just as the battle was won he had stopped making love. He had stopped all physical contact.
‘Why? Why did you do that, Albert?’
Helen sat still on Than-Htay’s bed, listening to the breathing and turning and sudden sighs of her patients, clasping and unclasping her hands. Albert never spent a night in a hospital bed, she remembered. Not once. Wasn’t that extraordinary?
She closed her eyes. Here it came again. The thought was returning, the thought that all this other thinking led to: it was not for fear of physical suffering that Albert had asked her for death. That’s the truth and you must face it. It wasn’t for fear of pain and drugs.
‘It was our marriage ending,’ Helen whispered. ‘Wasn’t it, Albert?’
Or rather, it was Albert not letting it end, not while he was alive. That was the suffering he didn’t want to go through, or her to go through; that was the thing that must not happen. Their marriage mustn’t end. If we ever had a real wedding ceremony, she realised, but now she didn’t speak the words out loud, it was when he had said, ‘Let’s do it now, Helen. Let’s do something that can never be undone.’
Than-Htay coughed. His coughing woke him. It became a fit. Chest jerking with convulsions, the adolescent pulled himself up on his elbows in the half-light. Others in the ward stirred. Helen stood and reached a hand behind his head, propped him up, wiped his mouth with paper towels. Breathing again, his eyes registered no surprise to find her there. His whole expression was one of resignation and defeat.
‘Are you okay?’
The boy coughed. His ribcage stiffened.
‘Are you all right?’ She asked in Hindi, in Gujarati.
He didn’t respond. He spoke no words and made no signs.
Even if he doesn’t hear much, he must have seen my lips move, Helen thought. He must know what I’m asking.
The boy lay back on the pillow. There was a look of reproach in his eyes. He wants to die, she thought. Or he is waiting for death. He has nothing. No family, no energy, no future. All his memories are bad.
Helen stood up, crossed the ward and turned left into the corridor. She walked briskly down to her office at the end, let herself in, unlocked a cupboard and drank directly from a bottle of Royal Challenge. She paused, holding the cap over the neck of the bottle, as if about to screw it back on, then drank again. She and Albert had both become regular drinkers over the last few years. Routine got them through the day, then there was that gap between work and sleep when one drank. They talked a lot when they drank, but never about the things that mustn’t be talked about.
Helen took another long slug and looked at herself in the cheap glass of the cupboard. She saw the bottle pressed between her lips, her eyes gleaming softly above it.
‘You treated me as a god, not a man,’ Albert whispered.
Helen stiffened and lowered the bottle. When had he said that?
‘Albert?’ she called softly.
She couldn’t remember. Had he? Or is it now? Did he say that now?
‘You treated me as a god, Helen.’
The drink has gone to her head. But it was true I put him on a different plane. I always did, from the beginning.
Is he standing in the shadows behind her? She didn’t turn. Could he be watching?
She had treated Albert as a god. Yes. Above morality, above conflict. All other men were nobodies. Paul is a nobody, she thought. Paul was looking for a god when he turned to Albert. But Albert always turned such people away.
Now the American was trying to make a saint of her.
She had wanted John to worship Albert. Instead the boy criticised. John was petulant and resentful. He clung to me and criticised. I mustn’t live with Paul, Helen decided. I will start to blather. I will start to undo everything we did together. She saw now that actually that would be the only way to give a future life meaning: she must undo what had been done with Albert. She must let him go, let him shrink into something smaller and more human. ‘Well I won’t,’ she muttered. It was ugly. It was farce. She lifted the bottle again, again took a long slug, screwed the top back on and locked it away in its cupboard.
Than-Htay doesn’t want to live, Helen told herself. It was curious how Albert hadn’t wanted children of his own but found surrogate children everywhere, boys and girls. He had made friends with Than-Htay at once. He liked to make friends with people who couldn’t follow him, people who wouldn’t push themselves forward as intellectual disciples. Disciples embarrassed Albert.
Since the patients were quiet now, Helen could have lain down; she had a mattress in her office. The nurse would do her rounds at midnight, at two, at four. Then there would be the call to prayer from the Jama Masjid, the call to another day without Albert. At six Dr Devi would come. But all that seemed very far away. These thoughts had brought an idea. No, it isn’t a new idea; not new at all; on the contrary Helen is aware that she has been thinking about nothing else since her husband died.
She walked through the ward and unlocked a small service room that opened onto the courtyard behind the clinic. She unbolted the main door, pushed it an inch or two and looked out. The rain showed no signs of relenting. The big plants in their pots were taking a beating. There were bougainvillea and jasmine. There were fresh herbs for the clinic’s kitchen. Between four high brick walls, the yard was dark and separate, but infiltrated by the noise of the city. Delhi’s interminable horns had begun again after the storm; there was the splash of a broken gutter, cries and laughter from the building opposite where lights flickered behind coloured drapes on the second or third floor.
Helen listened. Behind this courtyard, she knew, was a huge pressure of population, Old Delhi, so many people living in poverty, many of them Muslim survivors of Partition. ‘One day’s sectarian violence can wipe out all the lives you saved in thirty years,’ she muttered. But such accountancy was pointless. It is pointless to look for reasons for what you’ve done. You did it and that is that.
I don’t want to see John, she decided. I mustn’t. Helen senses now that her son is near. She feels he is in Delhi. He has come. What’s he doing here? she wondered. Why is he persecuting me? ‘John is a burden,’ she said out loud. For his own sake it would be better not to see me. He needs to be free from these roots, or this rootlessness. Explaining wouldn’t help. With Albert’s death, I’ve lost the faculty to keep silent
, she realised. She had lost her equilibrium. I’ve started chattering. Well, she mustn’t chatter to John. You absolutely mustn’t.
All at once a loud shrill laugh rang out from across the courtyard. A voice rose over the patter of the rain, then another. It was a piercing woman’s voice, then a man roaring his appreciation. A moment later someone put on some music, a twanging sound. People were having fun, they were living, perhaps they would soon be making love.
Than-Htay will never make love, Helen thought. The idea came with the force of something you just knew and that was that. The boy will never make love. And nor must I.
Than-Htay has lived through things, Helen realised, that stripped him of all desire to live, all desire to talk. It was in the past. It was incurable.
How strange that she had betrayed Albert so easily when he was alive and struggled so hard now he was dead.
It was because Than-Htay had no desire to live, Helen thought now, looking out at the rain, that Albert had not pushed him to return to the clinic for treatment. Obviously. Albert wasn’t afraid of other people’s despair. Had he been alive now, Helen would have attacked him fiercely for that decision. We would have argued fiercely. But now, without his presence to fight against, she realised that part of her had always agreed with Albert, part of her had always suspected he was right.
Was that why he mocked me? He knew my protests were pointless; I could never really fight clear of him. Now it was as if Helen must be both people in one, she must argue with herself inside her head the way Albert used to argue with her, she must watch herself the way he watched, mock herself as he did. She must mock herself.
It was exhausting.
In the darkness a crow had started to caw. The sound was uncanny in the black rain. It rose and fell monotonously, caw caw caw, until it was hardly a sound at all, but a rhythm, an invitation to darkness and rain. The twang of the sitar faded. A window had closed. Instead the bird animated the darkness, perched on a ledge somewhere. It gave a pulse to the rain. Helen imagined its throat swelling and shrinking. Caw, caw. Then she heard a beating of wings. Another bird arrived. The sound doubled. The rhythm strengthened like gathering waters. Caw, caw, caw, caw.
