Due Preparations for the Plague

by Janette Turner Hospital

  The Velcro collar gives way.

  He pulls the thick clumsy mitts from his hands and a ripple of excitement and dread passes visibly through the other padded shades. His hands reach for the mask. It is off, and a cascade of long dark hair spills over the padded suit.

  Sam stares in shocked disbelief.

  How can …?

  This is not her father.

  Yasmina Shankara, the Bombay movie star, smiles mournfully and rakes her fingers through her hair.

  2.

  “Isn’t it strange?” Yasmina asks her companions. The flash of her eyes above her ugly suit and the movement of her slender wrists suggest someone whom shock and oxygen deprivation have removed to a different world. “Isn’t it strange what we think we fear absolutely, only to find at the last that it gives us wings? And isn’t it strange what we think we could never understand? My father used to say, ‘Yasmina, anyone who wears a watch does not understand time.’”

  “‘Daddy,’ I used to say, ‘you are so old-fashioned, you should live inside the temple compound all night instead of only by day.’” She laughs and her laughter is light and silvery and full of tranquil resignation, like the strands of small bells around a temple elephant’s neck. “‘Even in Bombay, Daddy, modern times have come,’ I used to tell him. ‘Gucci watches have come. Even in Bombay, time moves on, time flies, but you have been left behind with oxcarts and rickshaw wallahs.’

  “‘Time is air, Yasmina,’ he would tell me. ‘Time is ocean. Does the air we breathe move on? Does the ocean have beginning or end? All of time and all of matter is a blink in Shiva’s red eye.’

  “I thought it was old-fashioned Hindu gobbledygook, not modern at all. Isn’t it strange, now that I have no time left, that I understand what my father meant?” She is facing the eye of the camera, gesturing to her companions, inviting them to ponder this curious fact. “Suddenly I know it is so. Now. Here.” She looks around the cramped twilit space. “And where is here? We are underground, yes? In a cave? In a cellar? What country are we in? We do not know. What use are maps or watches to us now? We are nowhere. We are outside time.”

  She looks her watcher in his dark bloodshot eye. She raises her cupped hands as though releasing a dove toward the light. “Agit, my son, my dear little boy, I am sending the cloud messenger.”

  Her breathing turns ragged. She begins to cough. “My eyes, my eyes,” she murmurs. “There is salt in my eyes.

  “Agit!” she calls urgently. She gasps. Her padded chest heaves, she doubles over, but she raises her cupped hands above her head. She offers the chalice of her curved fingers to her son. “Agit!” she calls. “Here is time. Here is my father on the steps of the temple tank where he died; and here is the moment of your birth, Agit; and here is the beggar girl who lives at our gates, and here are the tinsel dreams I dreamed in Bollywood, and here we are, all of us in this strange place, bound together for a reason we do not yet know, with no time and all time in our hands.

  “And now I have no fear and no grief, because, do you see?”—and she is speaking in a singsong lilt, in ancestral patterns of Sanskrit chant as sages speak from stone steps by temple pools—“our story will go through time as Klidsa’s poetry passes through time, as his Cloud Messenger passes through fifteen hundred years and still settles in the minds of all exiles and of those who will die far from home.”

  She gives way to a spasm of coughing. “I am burning,” she murmurs. “I am drowning in my suit.” She sways. She closes her eyes.

  “Here is time, Agit. Here is Bombay.

  “When I was a child in Bombay, poverty frightened me. Once I struck a beggar child with my riding whip because he touched me.

  “Here is my father at sixty. He wants to give away his wealth and live like Gandhi. He wants to sit by the temple pool all day, he wants only to meditate on the thousand names of the Lord. But as for me, I want to put many, many layers of wealth between me and the children who die in the street. Inside the high wall around our house are lawns and fountains and peacocks and those who serve us. Outside is contamination. I leave our garden as rarely as possible, only seated in the back of our car.

  “Our driver gets out and opens the gates, and drives through, and gets out and closes them again. And there is the beggar girl who sits outside our gates, and always, day after day, she taps at my window and stares in and I open the window a crack and toss her a coin. I cannot bear to touch her or put the coin in her hand. She is covered with sores.”

  Yasmina begins to scratch the backs of her hands. She begins to cough again. She talks faster.

  “Year after year, day after day, I toss her a coin, and one day she is not there.

  “‘Where is the beggar girl?’ I ask.

  “‘She died,’ says our driver. ‘The porter found her body this morning.’

  “‘What did she die of?’

  “‘Of hunger,’ he says.

  “At night, in my bedroom, her eyes float in the dark like bloodshot moons, and I have fled from her, but like her I am hungry. I am famished. For years and years, I am hungry for wealth, for fame, for more wealth and more fame, for more houses in Paris and Majorca and New York. But now”—she turns to the red eye high above her in the room—“see how she has found me with her bloodshot eye? See how she has waited for me to recognize myself?”

  Yasmina is coughing badly. She presses her hands to her face, and the skin of her cheeks blisters and breaks. She rubs her padded arms and blinks rapidly with her bloodshot eyes. She talks faster and faster.

  “Now I die her death, covered in sores, but I must tell you this story, Agit, before I leave you. I must pass on Klidsa’s great and beloved Sanskrit poem which has been told before and will be told again, over and over, and you in your turn must retell it and pass it on.

  “A year ago, Bollywood made a movie of Klidsa’s Meghaduta, and this is the story of The Cloud Messenger: a yaksha is sent into exile from the Himalayan paradise and banished to the end of the world. He is sent to the farthest point of the idea of South, where the monsoon coast of Kerala slides up against the edge of the earth. The yaksha is dying of lovesickness for his mountains of snow and for his lady. He summons a cloud. Go, sweet cloud, he says, and tell my love … He gives the cloud directions for the long journey north.

  “In the film—do you see me, Agit?—I am in the marketplace buying strands of jasmine for my hair—” she lets her hair fall forward over her face and braids it with imaginary flowers—“and the first wet cloud of the monsoon floats by, and in that fog I stumble and fall across a beggar child, and I draw back with horror, because it is she, it is the girl again, the girl who sat at the gates of my childhood, but the cloud …”—she makes motions of bathing herself in the toxic air that surrounds her—“the cloud envelops me with the smells of my homeland, curries cooking, cinnamon, incense, the smell of my father and my mother, the sweet smell of my son, my Agit, and the beggar girl says to me, ‘Everything returns. Nothing can ever be lost.’”

  Yasmina coughs. She bats her hands at the toxic mist. “Go, sweet cloud …”

  And then she begins to struggle for air, and to writhe. “Tell my son,” she gasps, “tell Agit—”

  Her voice is stretched out, racked, in a long rising siren of agony, unbearable—

  The scene is cut.

  Blank screen on which appears only the lettering of a name, a place of birth, a date.

  Yasmina Shankara

  Born Bombay, 1952

  There is the sound of a flute.

  3.

  Nine shadow-beings converge. They have become, it would seem, one organism, multicelled, and an atavistic decree has gone forth: due ritual is required; due obsequies must be performed. The message passes as it must pass through an ant colony or a swarm of bees. The shadow-beings kneel in a circle. The tangled body-knot of Yasmina Shankara is their sun. A murmuring is heard, a sense of chant, though all sounds through the speaker tubes of the gas masks are weirdly distorted. But yes, there is choral mourn
ing, a keening in nine-part harmony, each being, no doubt, conferring such rites as his or her own tradition suggests.

  Another swarm-message seems to pass from each to each. One by one, with bowed head, each padded wraith kneels by the body and touches it with the “forehead” of the mask. And then, nine pallbearers, they carry Yasmina to the corner beneath the red eye.

  Silence.

  Stillness.

  A sound like muffled hoofbeats approaching from a great distance off.

  One of the shadows is clapping his thick-mittened hands. The sound swells in a long crescendo—swarm knowledge again—and each wraith is making galloping sounds, glove thumping glove.

  Then he who began the drumming pulls off his gloves and rips at his Velcro collar, and Daniel Schulz, the Yiddish writer, tosses and catches his headpiece as though it were a ball. Soccer ball. He bounces it off his knee, kicks it neatly backward off his ankle, catches it, bounces it off his head. He tosses the ball to someone else, and the catcher passes it on, and then everyone is catching and passing, tossing the ball, and tiny Daniel Schulz, aged seventy, with his creased face and silver hair, vibrant in the murky reddish light, throws back his head and lifts his arms to the watching devil’s eye and throws a goal.

  He takes a long deep breath. He bows. He gives the impression of someone who has just been awarded the Nobel prize of untrammeled speech. He makes a thunder of hoofbeats again by slapping his hands against his arms.

  “Riddle,” he says. “What is this sound that never stops?”

  Clippety-clop, clippety-clop, go his hands.

  “Answer: the horsemen of Death,” he says. “Still they gallop and still they fail utterly to extinguish wonder.”

  Clippety-clop, clippety-clop, he drums and drums, but now he beats dance time, ragtime, now he is tapping his feet. His accent is thick, and even though he speaks English, one hears Yiddish.

  “I must share with you, my friends, this huge joke. Before the masked horsemen of Death boarded our plane, I was going to the Festival of Yiddish Literature in New York. But before even I am flying to Paris, in Tel Aviv, a journalist wishes to interview me. He is from the Jerusalem Post. Why do you write in Yiddish? he wants to know. He is ambitious, a young intellectual, the belligerent kind who have all answers before they ask questions. It is a fossil, this Yiddish, he says. It is the yoke of our bondage, the sign of linguistic subjugation. Why do you cling to our chains?

  “‘We must still tell stories,’ I say, ‘because the Horsemen of Death still gallop.’

  “But now we stop them with tanks, he tells me. Not with tales of magic, but with tanks. What use are the rabbis who fly and the golems as big as the world? You write stories for those who retreat from the world and for children.

  “‘It is true that I write for children,’ I say. ‘I write for my great-grandson, David.’

  “And it is so.

  “David, I am telling this story for you. I want you to laugh.

  “Once upon a time, in the days of the Baal Shem Tov, first of the zaddiks, when pogroms rained upon the face of the earth, and when Death, in his black suit and his black gas mask, galloped through the towns on his great black horse, in those days, the Baal Shem Tov told stories because there was no escape, and the followers of the Baal Shem Tov lived in the land of even so.

  “Our villages are plundered, he told them, our houses are burned, but even so, the spark of the divine cannot be quenched, and where the spark of the divine touches, there is dancing and play.”

  Daniel Schulz picks up his gas mask again and tosses it to someone else, who passes it on. “This is my last will and testament, little David,” Daniel says, as the game of catch proceeds. “This is my gift to you: that you live long in the land of even so.

  “Ahh, ahh …” Daniel misses a catch. He wrings his hands and rubs his bloodshot eyes. “Ahhh. My eyes! My eyes! I cannot see!” He vomits mucus and blood. “Even so,” he gasps. “Even here. Hold my hands … let us dance in Death’s waiting room.”

  And a circle forms, mittened hand in mittened hand. It is a slow dance, very slow, though Daniel Schulz speaks faster and faster.

  “It is told of the Baal Shem Tov that during the feast of Simhat Torah … disciples dancing … such abandon, such wildness … ring of blue fire above their heads …”

  Daniel Schulz, dancing slowly, blinded now, draws his breath raggedly and shakes his fist at the red light above his head. He speaks with difficulty. “What … can you take? … Cannot take dance.

  “David, David … your great-grandfather’s blessing … Dance!”

  He falls. “Even so,” he whispers, and the circle breaks and hovers around him, and his dance, horizontal, intensifies in a last writhing, convulsive—

  CUT

  Lettering on blank screen:

  Daniel Schulz

  born in Warsaw, 1917

  Survived Auschwitz

  A bugle plays taps.

  4.

  “Mom, Joe will tell you. I tried to get home for your birthday, but it looks like I’m not going to make it. I’m sorry, Mom.” The young man pounds on the floor with his gas mask as though he is smashing someone’s skull. He stands and addresses himself directly to the red eye. “Billy Jenkins here.” He bows melodramatically, then clowns a little, making rabbit ears with his fingers, making goggles with his hands and peering through them. He wiggles his hands, adjusting an imaginary focus. “Hey, that’s better. Happy birthday, Mom. You know what’s weird? I camped at Paris airport all night to make standby for this flight. Slept in my sleeping bag, and it was worth it. I was the last standby, the last one let on. I was so happy, I called Joe from the gate. They were boarding already. I said: Joe, surprise, surprise, I’ll be there! Don’t let Mom know, it’ll be a surprise.

  “Got that one right, didn’t I?

  “Not the kind of surprise I meant.

  “It’s so weird that it’s gotta mean something, but I sure can’t figure out what. I mean, what am I doing here with all these Martians? I don’t come from the same planet as these guys, and I sure don’t buy this marshmallow shit about death. Peace and light, dancing? Forget it? I’m madder than a hornet in a jar. I’m twenty-two years old, I just graduated, I don’t want to die, and I damn well won’t. I may be late for your birthday, Mom, but I’ll get there, okay?

  “What the hell is the matter with you wimps?” He swings around to address the alien Martians, his back to the red camera eye. He flails his arms like a preacher. “What is this? Obedience training? The man says Die, so you lie down like good little doggies? Get off your padded asses, you losers”—he has moved to the wall and is running his bare palms across its surface—“and start feeling for fissures and for cracks, because that’s how—oh shit, my eyes …!”

  He shields his face with his arms and leans his back against the wall and rocks himself. “Jesus H. Christ, that’s the mustard gas,” he says. “Attacks the eyes first. I just got a B.S., I’m a chemistry student, right? Okay, so this is what you all need to know, listen up.” He looks like Oedipus, blinded, his eyes puffy and closed, his arms lifted, his pronouncements oracular. “We got sarin and mustard gas here. Mustard gas’s never lethal, okay? You got that? Temporary blindness, then blindness, but it can’t kill us off.

  “The sarin can, in minutes, lungs and blood and sputum, that’s what—” He draws in deep shuddering breaths. “Oh shit, clogging up my lungs already. That’s what got ’em. Asphyxiation.” He jerks his head to the bodies beneath the red lamp of Death. “Oh heck, oh heck, my eyes! This is worse than peeling a hundred pounds of onions at summer camp, which I had to do at Camp Saranac the year I was twelve. Remember that, Joe? Man, what a punishment.

  “And why?

  “All I did was lead a panty raid to the girls’ camp.

  “Weird thing, though—it’s freaking me out, the stuff I’m remembering—next day, the day after the onions, was Girls’ Camp Visit, and I’ve got a face like the Pillsbury Doughboy, all puffy and red, my eyes bloods
hot. No way I want any girl to see me, so I go crawling off into the woods, feeling sorry for myself and hard done by, and I’m climbing over this humongous fallen tree that came down in a storm, and I bump into—well, I thought she was a goddess, she was that gorgeous, long blonde hair down to her bum. She’s wearing tight jeans and a halter top, and get this, she’s got bloodshot eyes and tears running down her cheeks.

  “So I say: ‘Did you get onion duty too?’

  “She just stares at me like I’m holding a gun at her head. She stares and stares and she doesn’t move and doesn’t say a word. And I stare back because she’s so damn beautiful, the sort of girl who can give you wet dreams for years when you’re twelve years old. I’m scared to speak, you know, in case she’s not real, in case she disappears, and because I’m nervous, this stupid thing comes out of my mouth. ‘You dumb, or something?’

  “And then she gets up and just walks away. Two nights I dream about her. Two days I’m figuring how I can get to see her again, I’ve got to see her, I’ve got to see her now my swelling’s gone down and I’m back to my good-looking self.

  “Then the third day, at breakfast, we get this announcement. Her body’s been found in the lake. Her picture’s on the Saranac Times, front page.

  “I haven’t thought of her for ages, but it’s come back to me because of my eyes. This mustard gas’s worse than onions even, so look, so look, I’m losing track of things here …

  “So look, to get back to serious business, we’ve each got max, about eight minutes, right? We’ve gotta work like a team, like a relay, make good use of our time, eight of us by eight minutes, that’s an hour to find a way out. Hopeless with the gloves, so we each take our turn with bare hands, right?”

  He is reading the walls with his fingertips as though they were braille. “What is this stuff? It’s not brick, it’s not stone, well, it feels like stone, but there aren’t any joins, it’s not cement …” He moves faster and faster, reading surfaces, working his way through the library of the walls. He scratches it with his fingernails. “I think it’s chalk. I think it’s some sort of chalk, no, limestone, maybe. Hard chalk. But that’s porous, you get it?” There’s excitement in his voice. He’s moving faster and faster, feeling higher up the wall. “Can somebody lift me?” And two of his fellow prisoners do, making a saddle with their arms. “Higher,” he commands. “Higher. I can’t feel the ceiling yet. Lift me up to the red light, that’s where we should—”