I knew something terrible was coming. Oh, Lord, I thought, he’s going to tell me he’d got her pregnant! But that wasn’t it at all. He went on. “She was so beautiful. I thought, I must send her to someone else so I might date her. Really, that was my first thought.”
“Gee, thanks for telling me that.”
He ignored this. “She had this mole on her shoulder blade she wanted removed.”
Yes, I acknowledged silently. I knew the scar. I’d kissed that scar and she had writhed in a gossamer way.
“Very tiny, but angry,” he went on. “She wanted it removed. You only had to look at her to know she was healthy. I sent her over to Frank Mullermai in Dermatology. I knew he’d take care of her. He’s a good man. But then her tests came back. I couldn’t believe it. She—” He stopped talking and looked at me. “She had—she has cancer.”
I shook my head. Tupelo? No. Tupelo would eat you for supper. She wouldn’t have cancer. No. What was he talking about? The sky had become thick and still. Blacky lit his Wills’s Flake cigarette.
“What kind of cancer?”
“Melanoma.”
“What do you mean? Will she die?”
“I can’t believe she’s still alive,” he said through closed teeth.
“But she’s not sick!”
“She will be soon. I don’t like that cough she’s got. That’s why I’d like to get—”
“Yes, of course,” I said. Then, unable to stop myself, I added, “And so you asked her to marry you.”
He set his jaw. I thought he was going to say he most certainly would marry her. But he said, “I’ll stick by her until,” he looked away, “until she—”
I blurted, “But why did she come on this trip if she’s going to die?”
“And what should she do? Stay in Munich and wait for it? You don’t have any idea what it’s like. It’s not as though it were early on and something could be done. All Mullermai could say was, ‘If she’d only come in a few months earlier!’ And to think she’d put it off because of some idiotic publicity photo session she wanted to look perfect for!” he flared at me. I’d never seen him so angry. “That’s why I could never say a word,” he went on, spitting his words through clenched teeth. “She doesn’t want anyone to know! She doesn’t want horror and pity in people’s eyes. You can’t blame her. I told her I would help her through it. I promised her I wouldn’t let her suffer. I won’t.” He scrubbed his knee with his fist. “I won’t.”
“But, your mother’s ring …” I said stupidly.
“Tch. It’s not my mother’s. It’s hers. She bought it for herself when she found out. She said it was the color of my eyes and when she looked at it she’d remember I wouldn’t let her suffer. ‘It cost a fortune!’ I reprimanded her when I found out what she’d paid. Can you imagine what a fool I am? Do you know what she said? She was very calm. She said, ‘But it’s beautiful. And who else will buy me such a ring in my lifetime? So what difference does it make?’” He leaned his head back and breathed out, relieved at last to share the burden of this terrible knowledge. “What difference does it make,” he said again, rocking his head.
We sat looking at the road to Rishikesh.
I thought of the glitter of that emerald stone. How I’d envied her!
“It’s very still again,” he said finally.
“Yes,” I said, “the wind’s died.”
Just as we said it, thunder rumbled. A rickshaw took off toward the Ganges. I remember that moment as though it were etched into my consciousness. I tried to think of all the times I’d misinterpreted her words, her actions. And after Bamiyan when I’d fallen ill and Blacky had chosen to stay with me because he’d thought I was going to die first. For a split second I relived Tupelo coming into my sickroom, where I lay presumably dying. I remembered how I’d thought she was checking to see if I was almost dead. Perhaps, I realized now, she’d been coming to see what it looked like, this dying. How she must have felt! Oh, it couldn’t be! She was too beautiful to die so young! Everyone is going to die, but knowing someone is close to death—oh, it changes everything!
He’d put us in gear and the van had begun to roll. “No!” I cried out mindlessly.
At that moment Narayan came running out to wave good-bye. He climbed the wall and stood on it, waving. Swamiji plucked his way from the dark inside and stood in his doorway. It occurred to me just then that Blacky hadn’t answered my question. I thought, Oh, what’s the difference? All the wasted time on jealousy! What good was it? Life was too precious, every solid moment of it. The best thing to do would be to forget all about it. We waved to Narayan and Swamiji and drove away.
The rain came down. It was just minutes later we drove into a flock of vultures, huge vultures. They smacked the van with such force we thought they were in the van.
We rushed out to see the damage but, oddly enough, we were pretty much intact and so were the vultures—though one of them hobbled in the rainy distance behind us, then took off and we lost him. We’d rammed into them with such force, I was sure at least one of them would be dead. The throngs of people passing by on foot and bicycle hardly reacted to what had just happened. I found it hard to believe, but all was well. We climbed back into the van and as we joggled along through the ruckus, I returned to telling myself over and over that I would never be jealous again. And not only that, but the worst of it was the tiny, desperate seed of relief, yes, relief, that it was not me who was going to die. Not yet. Oh, thank you, God, not yet!
I got my rabies shots in a humming little suburb of Katmandu. The officials seemed to think I would need a series of only six days, not ten. We were both glad for this; the sooner we would catch up to the others—for now there was an urgency we both shared.
Ten o’clock each morning we would all line up at the health clinic—there were always at least seventeen possible rabies victims. I had to show them my American passport.
The thing was, the others—almost all children—had to have those fat needles. It was embarrassing to have such special privileges in front of them. The little boy before me—he must have been about eight—made not a whimper as they placed the fat needle into his stomach and plunged the stiff fluid in. I couldn’t very well cry out after that.
Blacky kept a forbidden bottle of apricot brandy for medicinal purposes. I made good use of it that week. And we spent a lot of time in each other’s arms. At first I thought he was consoling me. Then I thought we were consoling each other, both putting off facing Tupelo and her inevitable illness waiting for us up in the Himalayas. There was a little of that I guess. But the van those mornings was filled with love. “Shut the window, quickly,” he would say. I loved his voice, the unusual, churning timbre of it. I wanted to own him, really, his lovely feet and hairless toes. There was a pulse in his throat I wanted, too.
The Nepal sun through the orange plaid curtains would fill the bed and he would fill me with insistence. We could hear people passing by. We’d parked our van very close to the clinic. We lay on our souvenirs and embroidery, rolled over them, creasing our naked backs with their imprints, and he would climb between my legs and I would moan with the pain and rapture of our now very constant lovemaking. The van would lurch and bobble.
Blacky had a normalcy about him, a clean and plain lust without deviance. It was a time to reap. He must have been crazy about me, my young American body with its ardent center, and yet when I look back on our lovemaking it is my lovemaking I remember most; my greedy thirst for him, with my tender body wanting more and more, and the fear and hope of what would happen next, and what would take him forever away from me. Even then I knew to be here now, aware that bliss lasted not at all forever. I held each moment like a jewel in the palm of my hand, like a pulsing dove lulling only on furlough until its own intended flight.
chapter sixteen
The Kuloo Valley was like a ride into a Chinese teacup. The landscape rose up Himalayan heights and down rice paddy chasms. Tension bridges spanned outlandish drops. Cher
ubic Buddha faces on the narrow roads. Backs bent over with small-car–sized packets of straw. There were no more Hindu or troubled Muslim faces. The inhabitants mellowed in their pace, their mood, their manner, the moment the altitude rose. The Dauladhar Range was pebbled with sweet beings, complying, moving right off the road in the wake of the van. Not like those below, who would bob their heads belligerently as you shaved them by an inch. Even the faces on the water buffalo turned pretty.
I peered at the women through the window in their costumes of reds, blues, and yellows; gold in their noses; turquoise headdresses; clusters of necklaces jangling. Pad pad paddy, they scurried aside with their moonfaces and cranberry mukluks; innocent children old and young: refugees from Tibet.
“What if we can’t find the others?” I worried, unpacking layers of clothes and putting on everything I owned to ward off the chill.
“They know we’re coming,” Blacky reassured me. “They picked up the cablegram at the American Express when they passed through Delhi. I’m quite sure they know you’re alive.” He smiled cheerfully. “They just expected us some days ago. They couldn’t know about the rabies shots, though, could they?”
“No.”
“You know,” he said excitedly, “Swamiji told me about a wonderful leper colony hereabouts.”
“Wonderful?” I replied skeptically, plunging my arms into a sweater.
“No, I mean in the sense that would be a wonderful experience. Worth the entire trip. You know, Claire, there aren’t that many lepers left in the world.”
“That’s good news.” For a moment I thought he was going to turn off and take us there. But of course there was Tupelo to think of now, and so we continued on our way.
The frosty air was thin as a willow, cracking and whirling the night about, winding through the first town, Dharamsala, its stores on stilts and crumbly buildings and tea shops forming a tiny boulevard. Bicycles and wagons were everywhere. We passed through there and continued farther upward into thick and furry trees, past running streams to what was once an English officer’s retreat, huddled snuggly in McLeod Ganj.
Blacky wove the van around the last right-angle turn and pulled to a stop between the blue night and the kerosene-lit street. A waterfall dropped enchantingly from an evergreen peak. Tea shops clustered up and down the rowlike, wide way, humming with voices and warm yellow flickers. Wooden buildings, some on rickety slender poles, stuck upright like splintered boxes right and left of the Buddhist Stupa. There was open-air all day and night devotion in the backyard of the Dalai Lama’s temporary palace. Tiny, strangely garbed Tibetans with rosy skin and gentle expressions circled the prayer wheel even at night. They touched the walls and turned the wheel while it clanged, each sound a prayer. Children bundled up like panda bears reached up and rang the bells along the side. It was such an eerie, yet a friendly sight.
Blacky parked the van and slammed his door shut. We were both keen to find the others after weeks of separation but a thrill of joy ran through me just to be in this magical place. I am well, I congratulated myself, taking great gulps of the delicious air. And we would meet the Dalai Lama, perhaps even photograph him! Blacky had been talking about it for so long I’d begun to think of it as his destination, his goal. But now, suddenly being in this place where all night devotion turned the prayer wheel, I recognized something: I felt as though this was it, this was the place you dug toward as a child with your shovel when you aimed for the other side of the world. It was the most exotic place I would ever experience, the other side of everywhere. I knew it then. I know it now. How far we’d come! I could hardly believe it was happening. As I stepped from the stuffy warmth of the van there were more stars than darkness and I thought I’d arrived in Shangri-la.
We headed for the Kailesh hotel, where groups of other Western travelers sat over miniature tables gobbling noodly soups. CHAPADEE AND TEA said the sign on the wall, TWO RUPEE. A feeling of dread overtook me then. I didn’t know what I’d feel seeing Tupelo. She would by now be physically changed. Was I to feel guilty having kept Blacky from her when she needed him most?
Blacky found a table with two mended chairs in the corner and we shuttled them over to the warmth from the potbellied stove. There was a proprietor at a massive wooden desk directly in the middle of the room. He wrote exotic-looking numbers into a cloth-bound blue book while his daughter sat owlishly on his comfortable lap. His wife, dressed in the traditional Tibetan apron, bustled about the tables carrying away empty plates and scolding customers who hadn’t finished. I diverted to the restroom—not much more than a rattletrap enclosed chamber with a hole in it, and then I hurried back, not wanting to miss a thing. I loved the smells of McLeod Ganj, coal and kerosene and wood fires, delicate incense and vegetables cooking. We ordered noodle soup, which was delicious, and buttered tea, which took some getting used to.
Children with round faces and snotty noses leaned without fear across my knees. They touched my red hair, braceleted my wrists with colored paper.
The Westerners spoke openly from one table to the next, trading travel information and discussing meditation courses to be taken at the ashram or the library outside of town. On the side tables there were more than a few well-worn copies of the everpopular Tibetan Book of the Dead.
We were just about to inquire of the next table if they knew of a film company hereabouts when, at that very moment, in floated Reiner. But it wasn’t the Reiner we knew, it was some sort of high priest of a Reiner, done over in burgundy robes.
He was pleased to see us, if not outwardly very expressive. He glided over to us, pressed his palms together in welcome, and lowered himself, spine rigid, into a chair. All this in three short weeks. I felt like saying, “Snap out of it!” but I didn’t. Everyone’s entitled to their day in the impersonation world. I reminded myself of the heavy French accent I’d affected around New York before I’d ever left Queens.
He took my cheeks in his thumb and forefinger and studied my eyes. “Well,” he said, “you look like the devil but you’re alive.”
“Where are the others? Where’s Isolde?” I charged.
“They’re most of them down at the ashram taking a class.”
“What about the movie?” I said.
“All in due time.” He smoothed the air with a patting-down hand. “There’s no rush.”
“I can’t believe we just ran into you like this,” I said. “I imagined we’d be going from hotel to hotel.”
“Oh, everyone haunts the same spots. They’ll all wander in here in a little while. I’m delighted to get to see your first impressions. You don’t get a second chance at a first impression.”
Blacky said, “I parked near the waterfall. Is that all right? I didn’t see any signs.”
Reiner raised a benedictory hand. “Everything is all right, man.”
I squirmed in my seat, impatient to see the rest of them.
“What a wonderful place!” Blacky marveled.
Reiner said, “The palace of the Dalai Lama is just down at the end of the street. The whole village of two thousand is in reality a refugee camp Mrs. Gandhi has given them. They’re homeless, actually, waiting to be let back into Tibet. I don’t think they will be, though.” He surprised me by spitting out the window. “The Red Chinese are already using their photos on their travelogues to get the Westerners to come to fun-filled China, see?” He looked at me. “Much like the buffalo and feathered Indians you destroyed and use to attract German tourists at the travel bureaus on the Bahnhofstrasse.”
“I destroyed?” I sputtered.
Blacky stood up and tucked his shirt into his blue jeans. “When do you think I can get in to see him?”
“Who?”
“The Dalai Lama.”
“Oh, you won’t be seeing him. He’s off to Sweden.”
“Wie bitte?!!”
“Yeah. Collecting money for his people. Pity. After all that.”
“But he’ll return shortly …”
“Oh, I don’t think so
.”
We looked at one another.
“This can’t be,” Blacky said.
Reiner said, “It certainly has taken away the feeling of urgency with the film.”
Blacky sat down, personally betrayed. Angrily, he slurped his buttered tea.
It had never occurred to any of us—after all we’d gone through to get here—that the Dalai Lama might have gone away somewhere. I didn’t even dare look at Blacky. I knew he was furious and somehow this would be translated to me. Suddenly he stood up in an aggravated fluster. He said, “I’ve got to see Tupelo. Where is she?”
Reiner made a face. “Oh, I wouldn’t go trouble her now. She’s meditating.”
“She’ll want to see me straight away.”
“They won’t let you in.” He yawned raucously. “Blacky, there are other interesting people here, you know. You might be interested in the doctor of the Dalai Lama, for example. Or the hermits living in the caves. There are dozens of those. Veritable Saint Francises. I’ve already got them on film.”
But Blacky would not be consoled with substitutes. Already his thoughts had moved on. He’d taken out his little record book and was recording the outrageous cost of gasoline. “I wonder if it would be simply cheaper to fly at this point,” he said. He consulted his map. “We could hop over to Kashmir.”
“We won’t be going anywhere soon,” Reiner put in. “The lines at the fuel pumps are six hours long.”
We all looked out the window. Yes, there they were, the last threads of local men with their empty canisters.
A Tibetan family sat in a corner trying to sell their last pieces of turquoise to Westerners who must be rich to have come such a long way on a whimsy. They were shy and polite. One of them held out two stones to anyone who would look. Travelers walked past and kept on going. From across the room, one dark red stone glimmered. I went over and admired them.
Pack Up the Moon Page 22
