“It’s me,” I said, “Claire Breslinsky.”
I don’t know what she thought about that.
“I was wondering,” I knocked on the cave wall politely, “if you would be so kind as to speak with me.”
In German, she asked how many of us were there.
In English I answered, “Just me.”
She asked if I would please wait until the other people went away.
Feeling a little foolish, my legs still quivering with the trauma of the climb, I went and hid behind a nearby boulder to wait out the exit of the Indians. Twenty minutes later, I peeked out from my hiding place and there was the hermit passing out orange slices to the pilgrims. She was swathed in a deer-skin pelt draped modestly over a sculpted silver metal brassiere. Her pants could only have been riding breeches. She was barefoot and completely dusted in ash. Her hair must have been knee-length. It was matted, tied up in a wooly brown bun and held securely by a string of dried bodhi tree seeds.
Her eyes were all-encompassing, alert, the whites very blue, the brown had more depth than color. Not a ravishing beauty, she was nonetheless ravishingly beautiful. She was obviously European by birth, but she was so otherworldly now, it was hard to tell where from. I tiptoed over and sat down, cross-legged, beside the four Indians, with whom she continued to speak Hindi. Her attention was carefully held by her hands spinning wool.
Presently she smiled at me. Her manner was pleasant and down-to-earth. She spoke to me in English, introducing herself as Lumar Racknesh and her “dog” as Bobby, who was actually half wolf. He came docilely forward for a pat on the head. The garish collar, she explained, was his protection as the hills were populated by panthers. One had jumped on Bobby the year before, nearly killing him with lacerations to the throat.
I thought uneasily of my still-to-come journey down the mountain.
The pilgrims, one by one, came forward and prostrated themselves at her feet. One of them tried to kiss them, at which point she became upset and threatened him with a scythe blade if he didn’t stop. The man bowed away. As the pilgrims wove their way down the path, leaving different offerings of sugar and pennies behind, Lumar explained that they thought the cave had miraculous powers.
She seemed eager to talk and so I sat down and listened. She spoke of swamis and gurus, how necessary a guru was and how glad she was she didn’t need one anymore. “Now,” she said, “it’s just myself and God. My guru has been dead for twelve years. He was a true master.” Lumar smiled. “I don’t know any other alive today. The great masters nowadays go abroad, and if they are here, they don’t have time for you.”
A baby goat stumbled up to her and began sucking happily away on her earlobe. “He thinks I’m his mother,” she explained. “He’s one of twins and his mother didn’t have enough milk.”
I was anxious to get a look at the inside of the cave and kept peeking over her shoulder toward the inside. Finally, she invited me in to explore the interior. At first I was blinded by darkness. My first impression was of cool deep stone surrounding me. Lumar lit three candles and gradually my eyes adjusted to the shadow. It was magnificent! About eight by five meters, the floor was solid stone covered by mats she’d woven herself, she said. The walls were not so much walls as time-molded black globs, frozen in place by the seasons. From stone and cement, Lumar had sculpted giant images of Hindu gods and goddesses. Even poor statues would have been interesting in such an atmosphere. These were breathtaking. Her scrupulous attention to hands and feet made me think that these bizarre figures actually had lived. Her goddess Fortuna had so much pride. I thought right away of Tupelo. Oh, Tupelo. I held myself up against the wall.
“Not that way,” she said and led me from the spot to a form of Ganesh, the elephant god, god against obstacles, god of wealth. All her animals were spine-tingling in their realism. One lifesized panther stalked a corner of the cave, his eyes of ancient greenstone. They sparkled and flashed in the eerie light. Shiva Linga, the formless form, was an egg-shaped mass that was kind to the touch. Each of them invited caressing. Shiva, one of the three main Hindu gods, rode atop a mighty bull, his six graceful arms poised and ready to perform the dance of destruction. A god to be appeased and catered to, he dominated the cave with his presence. “I never understood the appeal of a god of destruction,” I admitted.
“Why that? You can pray to Shiva when you want to destroy pain, destroy jealousy, desire. Things you’ve had enough of. Makes sense now?”
“Yes.” I looked around. “Say. What do you eat up here?”
“Anything I can get my hands on.” Her eyes glittered and we both had a good laugh.
Then, more serious, she said, “I eat rice, mostly. My goat provides me with milk and cheese.”
“So you don’t eat meat.”
She gave me a startled look. “There’s nothing wrong with a good wurst. If I had one I’d gobble it up. I eat what is offered to me. People come. They leave their offerings.”
A circle of stones and ash provided warmth for Lumar’s evenings. She had a vina, the slender, female-looking instrument similar to the sitar. It lay aside a fur cushion. I asked her to play for me but she refused. Still, she showed me around the cave with a candle, leading my eyes to the most delightful spots. Her eyes blazed when she stopped before an especially vivid part. She seemed to want me to enjoy her work as much as she did. She looked at it as if she were discovering it for the first time.
“I don’t suppose you’d let me take your picture?” I said.
“Why not?” she said, and let me photograph the whole shebang. After that we spoke for a while until the insistent braying of the baby goat brought us again into the sunshine.
I’d noticed that every piece was signed. It was so sad, though, that they’d never leave the cave. They were cemented to it or were part of the unusual natural formations. I must alert Vladimir, I thought excitedly, bring him here. He could see to it that someone brought them to light. Then I looked at Lumar laughing happily with her four-legged white kid and I changed my mind. Here they should stay, I decided, the way she’d dreamed them, in the home that would best suit them. Let them stay a kind reward for searching pilgrims and Lumar’s waking moments, not chiseled out and transported to some chic studio. This was their destiny. Destiny. Was there such a thing? And if there was, what, then, was mine? Why did I always attach myself to someone else’s?
I sat on a patch of grass. Tupelo was dead. How could this be so? How could all these things have happened? I let my head fall back and looked up at the sky. Here I was in Tupelo’s dream, in her intent. She’d never experienced this before she died. She’d tried. She’d never made it. I’d done it for her, though. I stood to go.
At that moment a little Indian lady approached Lumar. She bent down and plucked one of the many wildflowers that bloomed along the path, then laid it at Lumar’s feet as an offering but Lumar started shouting at her angrily, “Stop! You had no right to kill that flower! No right! You can never put it back, never!”
The dainty woman ran away in fear.
“I’d better go,” I said. But Lumar held me back. She put something cold into my hand. It was a miniature figure of Ganesha, the elephant god. “It’s very old,” she said. “It will bring you luck.” Then she turned and retreated into her cave. That was the end of her. I remembered what she’d said about people leaving offerings. I took out Tupelo’s book of poems from my knapsack and left it carefully by the entrance to the cave. I made my way down the steep, darkening path. My knees, like vivid electrical hinges, seemed to move along without me. Down, down the mountainside I went, holding on with my hands at times, almost running at others when the path became level. It was dusk and now I knew there were panthers. But I had done something courageous—at least to me—something I would never have done before. And if the only thing I could change in this life would be me, then at least I had that.
I veered into the wind. To the west I could see as far as the Punjab. Purple stars glittered in the green twili
ght. I heard the evening sounds of the forest and wished again I’d stalked off with something more than my knapsack and the clothes on my back.
After what seemed like a very long time the clouds beneath me dispersed and I could see the faraway lights of the Dalai Lama’s palace. That was a pretty sight, let me tell you. The path forked into three at one point and I could finally see through to where I was headed. I hastened my downward trot. The darkness hurried, too, and I was grateful for the flickering kerosene lights below that guided me.
I staggered into Hula’s. They were playing Parcheesi, all of them, and the steam from the noodle pots made the room look misty and dreamlike. They all looked up, startled. I grabbed a cup of hot tea and drank it down in one draught.
“Well, there you are!” Blacky said. “Done sulking?”
“We were just getting worried,” Isolde said.
Exhausted, I sat down on a chair. They looked at one another and I saw they’d been discussing me. What good would it do to tell them? They would minimize it somehow. I reached instead for one of their trusty peanut butter sandwiches. Fragments of ore on the wood-burning stove struggled loose and a cascade of cinders went up.
chapter twenty-two
The rains were on their way. Weeping egrets turned the ridge and circled overhead. You never heard anything like it. We filed outside to watch. After a while we stood around kicking the grass, watching the prayer sayers, the wheel turners. We found ourselves at loose ends, having sold all the vans to a cortege of wealthy but exhausted French trekkers who were delighted to get them. Chartreuse had come across one of them in prison. They hadn’t committed any serious crimes, he’d explained, just a little hashish, but their vans had been confiscated. (I’d seen those trekkers, though. They looked like junkies to me.) Chartreuse lay on the grass now, smoking. All he wanted to do was to lie outdoors and look at the sky. You couldn’t blame him. He pulled himself up when he saw me. He was wearing a backpack.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
He shrugged and took a death-defying pull on his cigarette. “I thought I’d join the trekkers. They need a cook. I don’t know. I’m fed up.” His yellow eyes looked through me. “I’m sure Wolfgang can manage on his own, eh?”
I tried to hide my disappointment. “Yes. Yes, I guess he can.”
He chewed his lip with savage intent. “It was Wolfgang who put the police on to me, you know.”
“Chartreuse, it could have been anyone.”
“No, but it wasn’t. They told me at the station.”
“Chartreuse, let’s be fair. Everyone suspected you.” I hung my head. “Even me.”
His eyes narrowed. “He will get his. What goes around comes around, n’est-ce pas?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned …”
We looked together, up the hill and past the waterfall, at our profound memories. I’d been so fond of Wolfgang at the beginning. But now, when things had gotten to the crunch, well, it just seemed to me that he’d shown himself a really small and bitter person. And Reiner, who I’d found despicable, had turned out to be a decent human being, with values.
Harry came bounding up the path. “Want to take a walk over to the little orphanage?” He looked at us over his armload of short-legged jeans. “I thought I’d give these to the children in the orphanage.”
“Good idea.” I loved Harry. I just did.
“I’ll help you carry them.” Chartreuse lifted them from him.
“Want to come, Claire?”
“No. No, thanks,” I said. I wanted to get a couple of things straight with Blacky, this time without an audience. “Later.”
“Later.” Chartreuse winked and he gave me a special look, filled with charm and meaning. He feels good about himself, I remember thinking.
Blacky, however, thought the orphanage might need him to do some checkups. “I’ll just run over there with Harry and Chartreuse,” he told me happily. But he said it like he was asking my permission. I held my nuggets of turquoise and garnet and rolled them around in my hands. I was sorry that he felt that way. But I had always wanted to own him. That was my dynamic with him. I smiled. I could wait. He continued to stand there. Perhaps he felt he’d gone too far. Isolde came up. She regarded the wedge of silence between Blacky and me. “Look, you two,” she swung her long black hair around and pulled it into a knot, giving an exasperated sigh, “we’re stuck here for a week, probably, anyway. You might as well make up.”
Reiner marched up the road with his clipboard and a bounce to his step. “Plenty of rooms at the Kailesh Hotel. Daisy, I reserved first pick for you.”
“Lovely!” Her abundance of Tupelo’s jewelry dangled, Cleopatra-like, between her breasts. She would have to wear all of it at once.
“Looks like we’ll be here for a while.” Reiner leered at her, thinking of later. “Once the rains start, the roads turn to fudge,” he reminded us. He looked skeptically up at the dirty sky. “Pity about the light.”
“Doesn’t matter now.” Wolfgang sucked a tooth. “It will be a superb ending with Tupelo’s death. We couldn’t have made up a better one. I can hardly wait to get back and start cutting the film. Isn’t there any other way out?”
Reiner lifted his new Tibetan bonnet and wiped away some pearls of sweat. “No chance. There’s just Hula’s husband and his coal truck. We’d all hardly fit. They’re letting it make its delivery and once it heads back to Delhi, they’ll be shutting the road.”
“So how do we get—”
Not to be interrupted, he gave a small authoritative toot on his whistle. “There’s a state bus that comes through next Sunday. By then the weather should relent. That will take us as far as Delhi. From there we can all fly home to Munich. Make sure you’ve taken all your gear from the vans as I’m giving the keys to that Pierre fellow in an hour. As we are all determined to leave as soon as possible, when the pass becomes clear I shall purchase tickets for everyone.” He took hold of Daisy’s hand. She snuggled up to him. “All right,” she agreed.
I walked over to the half circle that was now our diminished caravan. For a moment I stood outside it, not liking to go in. I opened the door. It reeked of Harry’s spoiled bananas. I had to get the rest of my things. Very quickly, I piled my meager wardrobe and my toothbrush in my largest lightweight bag. I took my best Kuchi dress off the hook, my dwindled box of personal toiletries from the shelf. I went to Blacky’s van. I took Tupelo’s last unopened bar of soap.
I looked around for the last time. There was a refrigerator that had broken down in Greece, a sink that had broken down in Turkey, a bookcase over the bed, and a table, if you wanted it, to raise up and peg on the floor. I touched the knife grooves in the worn red plastic plates, put my cheek against the orange plaid curtains that had let in so much light. I kept my money underneath the false bottom of a crock. It was that harmless-looking yogurt pot I’d picked up in the Khyber Pass. I put it in Frau Zwekl’s soap box with the rosary beads and the false teeth, shut the lid, and took it with me. Several bottles of scotch snuggled comfortably in a pile of Pakistani scarves. The trekkers would be happy to find them, all right. You couldn’t take them past the border. Under a cushion I saw what I was looking for. I’d left my blue notebook in here. I took it. Who knew. Someday when I was old, maybe people would wonder what it was like when I was young; the things that had happened here and on the way, our journey into what would be the evening of Aquarius. I picked the bananas up gingerly. I went outside and felt the beginning of the soft rain on my face. It was just a mist. I walked the bananas to the dump. The eagles swooped down instantly and tore them apart with gusto.
I had an idea. I took out Frau Zwekl’s false teeth and brought them over to Hula’s father. It was a long shot, but … I placed them on the table in front of him. You’d have thought I laid out the crown jewels. Conversation stopped throughout the place. “You’ll have to wash them,” I began but it was too late. He’d picked them up and already stuck them in his mouth. I
waited. I thought, Surely they won’t fit. The old man continued to sit there but he refused to open his mouth again. That was it, the joint was shut. I got up. “Well,” I said, “good luck.” I walked away.
Blacky was coming in the door.
“Claire,” he said. “Sit down.”
“What?” At that moment I knew he was going to ask me to marry him. He looked so earnest.
I turned on him my most bewitching smile.
He seemed a little short of breath. “They. Wolfgang. Someone stole the film canisters.”
I was still smiling. “What?”
“The film,” he choked. “They’ve stolen it! Every can.”
“Who! Who’s stolen it?”
“If we knew that!” he snapped.
I turned and looked out the open window. The waterfall tumbled down. Whatever had happened there’d always been that one thing that had given justification to it all: the film. Whatever had happened. I shook my head. A series of pictures, months, scenes from our journey like a shuffle of cards floated past me. All we’d been through! I looked up at Blacky. He looked away. Someone was shouting out in the street. It was Wolfgang. He seemed to be throwing a fit.
chapter twenty -three
We walked around in circles all day long. Nobody talked. It was as though another one of us had died.
Then Reiner was blowing his whistle in a rage by the waterfall. They’d found the film but it was ruined. Ruined! The canisters were gone. Whoever it was had simply thrown the film into the stream. Parts of it came rushing, useless, into town.
There was no consoling Wolfgang. I went to look for Chartreuse but he was nowhere to be found. He’d gone for good, deeper and deeper into his own borderless journey. That special look he’d given me had been good-bye.
I went to look for Blacky. He was standing just beneath the Tibetan Moon. Two new girls had come to town. Peace Corps girls. Fresh in from Sweden and Jordan. Very pretty. They were climbing the stairs and their new Kuchi skirts fluttered like flags in the rippling wet wind. They were laughing and telling him what a time they were having getting into Kashmir. He gave them no end of advice. I was happy to see Blacky wasn’t sorrow-stricken.
Pack Up the Moon Page 30
