The first time Jo came here was by sheer accident. Or, at least, that’s how she had viewed it at the time. Later, she occasionally wondered and once actually asked Francis whether he had ever so subtly led her here, or if his decision to recruit her had come later. But she had no doubt that she was already under their scrutiny when she came here the first time, clueless and upset about some insignificant lover.
Sometimes, she even wondered whether she had been recruited long before she realized it. Maybe the last couple of jobs she’d held had actually been in the service of Francis’s organization. To be sure, there had been some irregularities that were difficult to explain and which, when seen in the perspective of what she now knew, definitely pointed in that direction.
For example, none of her expenses were ever questioned and she didn’t hold back on her spending, flying first class, staying in five-star hotels, or occasionally checking into luxurious spas to recover from particularly tough jobs. Nobody ever said anything. Another peculiarity was that her secretary had followed her from one company to the next which in itself was not that strange, as they got along well. But a few times, Jo had caught the secretary knowing about her whereabouts, even though she distinctly remembered not telling her. By that time, Jo had learned to detect bugging devices in hotel rooms, and she had examined her own room once for the fun of it. She had found two miniature microphones. From then on, she routinely checked her accommodations, even at the monastery, and there were always hidden microphones. She left them where they were and took precautions when she wanted to do or say things that she didn’t want to broadcast.
Even here in her hut, there were microphones. She’d had the same hut for years, but every time she arrived, the microphones were in different positions. It amused her and gave her a peculiar sense of being taken care of.
The room’s complete lack of emotional definitions the absence of personal effect, the decorations bought in bulk allows her to see her life through a bird’s eye. A long stretch of days and nights, from her childhood with three brothers and a dead mother, through a youth full of aspirations and dreams, to her present life. One life. A life mainly spent in secrecy, spent in intense bursts of action alternating with periods of silence and peace. She’s used to assessing the world by her own standards, rarely having had the opportunity to share her deeper thoughts with anybody else. Not that she misses that, as such. Sometimes, though, she wonders if she’s viewing the world in a way peculiar to herself, or if she actually sees things, events, and people in the same manner that most people do. Or perhaps her perception of the world is distorted by her lack of opposition. Too much lonely rumination can convince anybody of her own superiority of thought.
She still visits her hometown once every few years to see her father, and during each visit, she marvels at the ugliness of it all. The clapped-up high-rises designed by uninspired junior architects, the trimmed lawns looking like plastic, the increasing number of phallus-shaped iron statues. Enormous constructions, hideous beyond description, in a town so bent in upon itself that the decor seems to crush the very soul out of its citizens. Life is reduced to the lowest common denominator, as if the town itself tried to compensate for the appalling lack of human aspirations in this grotesque way as if the God that few citizens still remember from their childhoods is a huge, masculine being determined to patronize the people who didn’t manage to escape the small city.
She does understand the need for a Christian God, who in his patriarchal way takes care of his flock; as well as the increasing use of psychologists and counselors to help people live their lives without responsibility. It’s a psychology rooted in Christianity: man as little, man as needing protection, man as not knowing what he does. Defining any human experiences, emotions, and thoughts in terms of infantile needs. Thwarted needs, that is. It seems to Jo that reducing the concept of man and woman to blubbering little lumps of need for appreciation, love, security is the ultimate betrayal of the ideal of mankind.
Grown-up men and women go through life in the firm belief that happiness is a human condition and all it takes is the right job, the right partner, and the right children for all to be well in paradisiacal suburbia. And if that doesn’t work, there is always therapy to help one get in touch with one’s right to happiness, one’s sense of boundaries, and one’s lost sense of self.
The comfort of the middle classes, at least in the part of the world Jo came from, is the very barrier to the greatness of mankind. There is not much left to fight for, and hence not many heroes are left.
People have swapped ideals, dreams, and aspirations for flat-screen TVs and open kitchens.
Jo has left all that behind. First with disgust, now with a heartfelt empathy for the souls lingering in bourgeois suburbia.
Even as a child, she went her own way, not needing the company of friends. Sharing a small house with three boisterous brothers was enough. She craved solitude, which might be one of the reasons she has fashioned her life this way.
From a very young age, everything seemed too easy for her. Whatever her teachers could come up with soon bored her. She kept her counsel, though; she was not one for making public displays of her feelings. Rather, Jo found other means of entertaining herself.
By the time she was fifteen, she had devoured most of the classics and had joined and left a number of different after-school classes. The only thing that held her attention for long periods was reading the newspapers and following the trails of crimes and events through research in libraries and occasionally in real life. She sensed she had the makings of a spy. It was an impression aided by the inherent secrecy of her father, who, although he had taken her to his office in a large international bank on a few occasions in her childhood, she now realized had never shown her his real place of work. She and her brothers learned early on not to ask too many questions. But whereas her brothers seemed content to accept the way things were, she was bent on discovering the truth.
Gradually over the years, she pieced together a sketchy outline of her father’s secret life. After his wife died from cancer at a very young age, and maybe before, he kept a mistress in the city. But since he quite obviously had been trained in the art of concealment, Jo was probably the only one who knew. And even Jo never found out who the mistress was. She knew he secretly worked for the government and had played a not-insignificant role in the later stages of the Cold War. But as to the exact nature of his work, she couldn’t find any clues. He was old now, already retired for some years, and one of these days, she would just ask him, give him a chance to level with her.
It ran in her blood, this desire to keep things to herself and turn every stone to discover the truth. But she didn’t know how to go about actually being a spy, or even if there were legitimate job descriptions for that kind of occupation. All she could do was to refine the skills she believed to be essential spy skills, such as her research capability to uncover details about people’s lives that they didn’t necessarily want to be made public. She practiced on anybody she met, in all situations. She would observe people’s facial expressions and their body language to determine whether they were telling the truth. She taught herself lip reading and the art of imperceptible questioning. Another of her favorite pastimes was absorbing huge amounts of data and condensing it into a report no longer than ten lines. Drawing out the essence. Nailing the absolutely critical points. Training herself to prioritize.
She practiced moving in ways that allowed her to go unnoticed, becoming almost invisible. Jo was born with blessed with a very bland face, neutral to the point of anonymity, and a body that was neither skinny nor fat, neither small nor tall. She was the kind of person whom strangers rarely remembered meeting. When she got older, she trained with stylists to turn herself into very different people by altering her makeup, hair, and clothes. She could go from being a nasty-looking punk to the height of elegance in less than fifteen minutes. She could appear to be any age from seventeen to fifty. She not only knew how to dress and sty
le herself to achieve different looks, but she mastered the body language and speech to go with each profile. Her talent was that of an actress, while her need for public recognition was nonexistent.
When Jo was being herself, she moved in a very economical fashion. Controlled, deliberate movements coupled with a precise and measured way of speaking. She possessed an uncanny ability to appear absolutely still when talking to somebody. This alone was often sufficient to disturb most people’s self-possession. Over the years, Jo had become a woman whose soul was so far removed from the surface of her being that hardly anyone ever got to know it.
Despite her natural introversion, she had a talent for engaging with people in a way that made them want to confide in her. After a few words, her penetrating glance, and the uncanny stillness of her body, most nonprofessionals broke down and told her everything.
She read every book that she could find about spies. Fiction and otherwise. And waited for somebody to recruit her.
When she was twenty-five, she had completed her master’s degree in psychology, entered a prestigious management-consulting firm, lived in a small flat in central Copenhagen, and generally had a life envied by her peers. Not that she had many. Not that they would ever know what her real aspirations were.
Men came and went in her life. And still, no covert body came for her.
Her life’s desire was clear to her by then. She wanted nothing more than the ultimate freedom. And she had come to realize that, for her, freedom didn’t come through power or money, but through the ability to be everybody and nobody to be totally anonymous, to have the skills and desires of the chameleon. To be able to disappear and reappear at will.
It was in the winter of her twenty-seventh year that a brochure for a meditation retreat in Sri Lanka dropped into her mailbox. She handed in her application for a sabbatical, which, surprisingly, was granted. Arriving at the monastery in Sri Lanka was a shock to her system, and she hardly remembers the first months there. But gradually, she got used to the heat, the discomfort, the long hours of meditation, and the violent disturbances of her own mind.
Francis picked her up after she had been at the monastery for about six months, sent her to agent boot camp in Crete, and apparently forgot about her for another six months. She still recalls every word he used to convince her. She remembers her fascination with this man who was so cynical, yet so dedicated to fighting greed and corruption. It didn’t take long before he became her lover and for years she thought he was the first man, after her father, upon whom she actually depended for her happiness.
She’s wiser now. And she knows that he can never give her what she truly needs.
A gentle knock on the door of her hut interrupts her reveries.
Chapter 5
She’s been here a week now and planned to stay another two. Jo knows from experience that a meditation retreat of fewer than three weeks is a waste of time. It takes too long for the body to adjust to the heat, the humidity, the killing hours of sitting, and the monstrous custom of eating rice and curry at six in the morning and again at eleven, and then eating nothing for the rest of the day. She’d never been a big eater, but rice and curry Sri Lankan–style twice in the morning as the only food for twenty-four hours is a bit much, even for her.
It is the hour after lunch, when laypeople, nuns, and monks are expected to rest after having completed whatever physical labor they had been assigned that day. She has swept the dining hall and cleaned her own hut. The last part didn’t take long since the total area is smaller than her bedroom at home. Tiny kitchen, tiny bathroom, tiny bedroom. But enough. She loves her simple but functional hut. It has everything she needs. And absolutely no fuss. Just the bare essentials. The hut is built of stone with a sheet-metal roof. A covered porch runs the length of two sides of the small house, where big, open windows invite the rare cooling breeze.
Putting her feet up on the low wall surrounding her porch, she pours herself another cup of tea and opens her notebook, rereading the entries of the first seven days.
First day: The night is pitch black, stinking hot, hellishly humid, and alive with snakes and mosquitoes and all sorts of crawlies. It is too alien by far. Had my first bites already. Mosquitoes the size of small birds. Or so they seemed in the scant light from my only lamp in the bedroom. Better take the malaria pills.
What on earth am I doing here?
Met with chief monk, Master Nayana. A glow of glee and compassion in his old, rheumatic eyes. The mere sight of him forced tears to my eyes and flooded me with feelings of love, gratefulness, and profound sadness. He always has that impact on me. He is the essence of grace. And as usual, I was given much more time that is normally allocated to laypeople. Monks hovering nearby, puttering around, waiting their turn. I’ve grown used to it by now. Even come to consider it my right. Susceptible ego.
Master introduced me to a nun I haven’t met before. I gathered he wanted her to be my companion during my stay. His English is terrible and my Sinhalese nonexistent, so I didn’t quite understand why, exactly, I need a companion. Never had one before. Her name is Ayaa Amora, a woman so tiny and fragile that at first, I thought she was a fourteen-year-old girl. But it turns out she’s nearly fifty and has been a nun for close to forty years, ever since her parents died. She reminds me of my grandmother when she was in her late nineties, and the clock was turning back so that she became as frail as a small child. With each day that passed, she literally shrank. When she died, I could easily carry her in my arms.
This child-woman nun is eerily skinny, with huge, shining eyes and the most adorable smile. She has without a doubt transcended this earthly connection, but whether due to enlightenment or madness I can’t tell. Maybe there really is no difference. She’s love incarnated; the personification of everything beautiful.
I am twice her size and yet I shrivel in her presence. I could bend her in two, yet she takes care of me.
On our way to my hut, we met one of the younger monks. And Ayaa threw herself at his feet, prostrating fully. I could barely restrain myself. Here was a woman who has been a nun for almost forty years, who is as pure as a human being can possibly be, prostrating before a mere Czech who is still in his novice years and whose ego hangs as densely around him as a shadow! It was all I could muster not to yank her up and punch him.
During the night, I woke up with a gasp. Terrorized. Claustrophobic. It was too dark, and I was scared. Frightened of the dark, of the snakes, of malaria. Scared of everything known and unknown. I felt strongly that I would not last the night. That death would come for me. Turned the fan off for a moment and the air stopped completely in a bedroom that felt like the inside of a coffin.
Spent the rest of the night staring down the fear and waiting for morning meditation at five.
Fortunately, I know that it’s always like this on the first night. Death introduces itself, and I have to spend a night getting used to the abyss. It will pass.
Second day: Early morning meditation went well. Calm, stable concentration. Distractions lasting only a very short time. Quite easy to regain focused attention. The second meditation during late morning was much harder. Fought sleepiness and discomfort. Thoughts kept wandering off. My body ached from sitting on the hard concrete floor with only a slim cushion for comfort.
People mistakenly think going into retreat is a silent experience. Well, it isn’t. At least not if you choose forest or jungle monasteries, where cacophonies of birdsong, garden machines, distant voices, the monks’ chanting, and low-flying military airplanes create the backdrop for meditation. There is plenty of opportunity to be distracted, which of course makes it an even greater challenge. And then, of course, there is the inner dialogue, which can easily keep one entertained. Dialogues, monologues, explanations, imagined conversations, conversations that have already taken place. Images of people and events. To-do lists and sudden ideas and inspirations. Heaps of stuff in the mind to keep it busy for hours if you let it. Which I did in the late-morning meditatio
n. Too hard to resist. I lost out to my mind.
Ayaa sat in front of me. She was already deep in meditation when I got there, and I guessed she would be for a long time after I left. I’ve seen her sitting for more than six hours at a stretch. That is, without moving at all. She’s sitting in the traditional Sri Lankan female position, legs bent to her right, leaning slightly to the left. Absolutely still. With no cushion, only a thin cotton sheet between her bony body and the concrete floor. Nobody can sit like that without having conquered the pain threshold of ordinary people.
Later in the afternoon, when I took a stroll across the grounds with Ayaa, a young boy suddenly threw himself at my feet, and I recoiled in horror. Ayaa reassured me that “it’s our culture to worship our elders” and I recalled her prone on the ground in front of the Czech monk, who is uncommonly disgusting. And young enough to be her son, except she probably has never as much as held a boy’s hand. But then again, he is a man, and that trumps being an elderly female.
Came across two large iguanas within a few minutes today. A young one and an old one. The old one looked exactly like a dinosaur. A great, ancient dragon that belonged in a fairy tale, not creeping around in the twenty-first century. There is something truly heroic about them. They are the ultimate survivors. Their dignity renders them untouchable.
Third day: Early morning, or rather, late night. A sole figure presumably a man, as no woman ever sits in front in this country sat on the high platform in the meditation hall with his back to the room. Like the rest of us, his body was completely covered by a mosquito net suspended from a two-meter frame, his robes pulled up over his head. In the creeping, predawn shadows, he looked like a Spanish inquisitor, a harbinger of death, a silent nightmare, just waiting for you to slip up.
Game of Greed Page 4
