by Heather Burt
He owed his sister a letter. “Write to Susie when you get the chance,” Adam had instructed, generously implying that the only thing interfering with the writing of such a letter was busyness. Adam himself used to call Susie every few days, just to check in. Used to. Staring at the ceiling, Rudy fought off images of the frightening hospital paraphernalia that was keeping his brother alive and composed feeble apologies in his head. Then Bernadette returned.
“Wake up, sleepyhead,” she called from the bedroom doorway. “You have company.”
Rudy roused himself and squinted. Nisal had arrived. It was time to be Van Twest, the English teacher.
Smiling awkwardly, Nisal ducked past Bernadette and approached the bed, almost on tiptoe. “Apologies for being early,” he said. “How are you?”
“Not bad. Getting there.” Rudy gestured toward the chair next to his bed. “Have a seat.”
While Nisal got himself settled, Bernadette brought in two glasses of iced tea then announced again that she was leaving. Rudy said, “Be careful,” and she shooed him with a flap of her hand, smiling her broad smile.
Nisal loosened his tie. “I wanted to come sooner, but my son and daughter have had school holidays, and ...”
“Don’t worry. I wasn’t very good company before anyway.”
The math teacher winced slightly. “Terrible business this is, Van Twest. We were so shocked.”
“Yeah, I was pretty shocked too, I tell you.” Rudy laughed, trying to ease the fellow’s nervousness. “Not the sort of thing you expect to happen on a walk in the city. Or I guess I should say it’s not the sort of thing I expect.”
“Muller said you were going to the bank. Is that right?”
“Sort of. I was kind of wandering.”
“You saw the whole thing?”
“Not really. I was walking the other way. Then I heard the guns.”
Nisal shook his head and made a whistling sound. “And then ...? What happened? Big Bang sort of thing?”
Rudy met his colleague’s eyes. “It was big.”
Squeamishly, he ventured back to the fateful scene, aware that the time had come to ask about Kanda. The urgency of his nightmares was suddenly with him, and his conscious mind prepared for an end to the chase. He gave himself the news: Listen, Van Twest. I hate to break this to you, but you weren’t the only one from school out in the city that day. Muller didn’t want to upset you when he visited the hospital. He glanced at the painting of Adam’s Peak and cleared his throat.
“So, anyway ... how did the term finish off ?”
“Oh, very good.” Nisal relaxed in his chair and sipped his drink. “The heat was getting pretty bad by the end, but we soldiered through.”
“Did that genius kid in grade nine get any more hundreds?”
“Pradeep? Oh, yes. That chap gets nothing but perfect scores! Keeps me on my toes.”
“Amazing.” Rudy shook his head. “Hey, you teach the Selvarajah boy, don’t you? Kanda?” Behind the casual demeanour, his heart was pounding.
“Oh yes,” Nisal replied. “Also a bright boy.”
There was no sign in the math teacher’s face that anything was wrong, but Rudy had to be sure.
“He missed his last English class before I went out of commission. It was really unusual. I was just wondering if he was around for the end of term.”
Nisal’s forehead pinched briefly. “Yes—I’m certain he was there. Hasn’t missed any math classes.”
Rudy slumped back against the pillows and closed his eyes.
“Everything all right?” his colleague said.
He struggled to focus. “Yes. Fine. It’s just the heat.”
Nisal nudged the fan cage toward him. “You know, I just now remembered. The Selvarajah boy was asking about you. Yes, I think he was worried about you, Van Twest.”
Rudy forced a smile. “Worried about having Muller assign his term grade probably.”
“No, no. He was very concerned. I’m sure of it.”
Again Rudy smiled, a smile of gratitude that wasn’t altogether deceitful, but his thoughts were unruly. Now that he had it, this information about Kanda wanted mulling over. But Nisal had travelled more than an hour by train to see him. Shoving aside the brood of questions clamouring for his attention, he sat up straight.
“So ... you still need to tell me about that math theory.”
“Fermat’s theorem?”
Rudy had no idea, but he nodded. “Yeah, that’s it. I’ve been waiting to hear it.”
For an instant his colleague eyed him suspiciously, then he smiled and slipped into the kind of enthusiasm that succeeded in convincing teenagers math could be worthwhile. “Well, to begin with, Van Twest, it’s the story about the theorem that you’d find most interesting. A real character drama. This Fermat, for instance, was not even a professional mathematician.”
While Nisal talked cheerfully about the seventeenth-century French lawyer setting out the proof of a dull-sounding mathematical idea then running out of space in his notebook, leaving behind a mystery that took generations to solve, Rudy half-listened and, despite his attempts not to, thought about Kanda.
He hadn’t been hurt; he’d returned to school. In a sense, the pursuit was over. Yet the reason for his excursion to the city remained a mystery. Once more Rudy saw the boy standing on the traffic island. Was he on his way to an innocent appointment? Or playing hooky? Or was it something else? And Rudy himself: had he simply been a victim of the same circumstantial flukes that had acted on every other person who’d found himself on President Street that morning? In his distracted state of mind, had he followed a young man who simply looked like Kanda? Or had he been lured away? Despite the heat, he shivered. He thought of Kanda’s letter, its subtly chastising tone. Had the boy intended to teach him a lesson? And if so, just how severe a lesson? The most extreme possibility seemed preposterous, but he had to allow that his Morgan Hill years had perhaps rendered him incapable of seeing certain things.
He was pondering this, tormenting himself with barely imaginable scenarios, when someone knocked at the front door.
“More visitors?” Nisal said, breaking off from his story.
Rudy shrugged. “No idea.” He was inclined to ignore the knock.
They sat in silence for a moment, then Nisal jumped to his feet. “Sorry, machan! I forgot about your injury. I’ll answer it.”
“No, you don’t need—” Rudy began, but his friend was already at the bedroom door. “If it’s one of the neighbours, tell them I’m asleep,” he called out in a raspy whisper, then he sank back against his pillow.
Waiting for Nisal to return, he listened to the faint rustle of vegetation outside his bedroom window and tried to forget his student. He fantasized that the visitor at the door was Clare. Aunty had told him that she’d shown up at his father’s house, once with her mother and once alone. The solitary visit in particular made him jealous, for in his imagination Clare Fraser belonged to him. She received all his rants and uncertainties and pains, and he was unwilling to share her. He’d recoiled from the image of her chatting with his father and his aunt in their Morgan Hill living room, and now, to combat the violation even further, he indulged the fantasy that Clare had come to see him. She’d heard about his injuries and was worried about him. Any moment now she would appear in the doorway, a fairy-like figure (Nisal would have slipped away), and they would acknowledge each other without words. She would cross the room and sit next to him on the bed, their bodies barely touching. He would tell her about his failures, and she would absolve him with a light touch of her hand. Eventually they would be naked. But there’d be no undressing, no coarse grappling with buttons or zips. It would just happen. And then—
He heard Nisal’s voice and was jolted back by the realization that his friend had been gone quite a long time. There was another voice, too—a man’s—and the two were speaking Sinhala. Rudy considered the possibilities. A neighbour? Another colleague? More likely, it was the “special doctor�
�� the woman next door kept threatening to send over. Rudy began rapidly devising excuses not to be examined by the quack when the thought struck him, chillingly, that the visitor was someone associated with Kanda.
His thoughts flew off, worlds away from Morgan Hill Road.
The boy had been involved somehow in the attack. He’d had a role to play—something he needed to do at the clock tower, a signal of some kind. He knew he’d been followed, that Rudy had seen him, and he’d spoken to his superiors.
Rudy’s muscles clenched. His heart thundered. He was back on Janadhipathi Mawatha, in the prickling interval between the gunshots and the bomb. If not for his injuries, he would have bolted for the back door. Instead he sat, frozen, grateful that Bernadette was long gone, insisting to himself that whatever was about to happen to him was only fair. He’d been sheltered too long.
Nisal appeared in the doorway first.
“You have a surprise visitor,” he announced, his manner strangely formal. “I should be leaving anyway. There’s a train at two o’clock.”
The surprise visitor had changed the atmosphere of the house. Though Rudy couldn’t yet see the man, he was conscious of the commanding presence, the foreignness and fearsomeness of Kanda’s world. The air prickled with uncertainty.
“Thanks for coming, Nisal,” he said.
“My pleasure. Thank you for the drink.” He waved. “Get well soon.”
Nisal turned and took his leave of the visitor standing behind him. The man stepped forward into the doorway. He was silver-haired, slender, and had fairer skin than Rudy had anticipated. He wore a white shirt, with a bulge in the breast pocket, and grey trousers.
“Rudyard. May I come in?” he said, and instantly Kanda’s world evaporated.
Rudy nodded. “Yes. Of course.”
“I don’t imagine you recognize me.” The visitor approached the bed. His face, though old, was unmistakable. Glaringly recognizable. They shook hands, and Rudy’s heart continued to race. “I’m Ernest Van Twest,” the man said. “Your father’s brother.”
Rudy nodded. “Uncle.”
Uncle Ernie lowered himself slowly into the chair by the bed, his green-brown eyes surveying the room, resting only briefly on his own painting. Rudy stared, conscious that his near-reverential silence could go on only so long, and that he would have only trivial questions with which to break it. How are you? How was the trip from Kandy? When did you arrive? But Ernie spoke first.
“I apologize for showing up unannounced. Mary has been ringing me from Canada, trying to get me over here.” He said this matter-of-factly, and it was impossible to tell how he felt about his sister’s requests. “I had some business in the city, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone, if you’ll pardon the expression.” He glanced over his shoulder, toward the bedroom door. “I hope I wasn’t interrupting anything private ... with your friend.”
The obvious implications of Uncle Ernie’s remark took Rudy by surprise. Yet they made sense. To Ernie, he was a blank slate.
“No, no,” he said. “Nisal’s a colleague. He just came by to see how I was doing.” He was about to add He had to get back to his wife, but he stopped himself.
“Very nice chap,” Ernie said, and Rudy nodded. “Yeah. He’s a lovely guy.”
Uncle Ernie crossed one leg over the other and smiled tentatively. “Yes, well, your aunt is terrified you’re on death’s doorstep, you know. Said you tried to pretty matters up for her.”
Rudy shrugged. “I didn’t want to worry her. She’s had a lot to deal with.”
He wondered how much Ernie knew of the family’s troubles, how much he cared, if at all. He should have been asking about Adam, it seemed. Adam, more than anyone, he should have cared about.
“Hmm. Not a bad idea,” Ernie said. He reached into his bulging shirt pocket and took out a pipe, a box of matches, and a small pouch of tobacco. “At any rate,” he added, “it doesn’t seem you fared too badly.”
He added a pinch of tobacco to the bowl of his pipe, tamped it, and struck a match. Each time his lips parted around the stem, they made a faint “p” and wisps of smoke escaped from his mouth. Watching the familiar ritual, Rudy sank into the dry, heavy, old-man smell that used to hang in his grandfather’s study. He glanced at the stack of books on his bedside table, among them his grandfather’s diary, and recalled his plan to visit Uncle Ernie—the fleeting eagerness to know his lost relative. There were curiosities he’d been impatient to satisfy, gaps he’d wanted to fill, but now he could hardly think of one.
When the pipe was lit to his satisfaction, Uncle Ernie shook the match and tossed it through the open louvres of the bedroom window. Then he rested his right elbow in his left palm and pointed the pipe stem in Rudy’s direction.
“So, you’ve come back. Is this permanent?”
Rudy shrugged again. “I think so. That’s the plan anyway.” He anchored himself with his hands and raised his right buttock off the mattress to relieve the dull throb in his pelvis. Returning gingerly to his former position, he added, “I’ll be moving from here, though. As soon as I’m mobile again, I’ll start looking for my own place.”
Ernie nodded absently. “Ah, yes. Well, that makes sense.”
“Something closer to the city, I thought.”
Uncle Ernie didn’t answer. He was again surveying the room.
Rudy fidgeted with his watch strap. “Are there any areas of Colombo you’d recommend?”
“Colombo? I hardly know the place.” Ernie’s eyes were now on his painting. “Do you recognize that mountain, Rudyard?”
“Rudy. Everyone calls me Rudy.”
“Yes? Yes, I imagine Kipling has finally gone out of fashion. Good thing.”
“It’s Adam’s Peak. Sri Pada. You painted it in 1946.”
“That long ago?” Ernie rubbed his collarbone through the open neck of his shirt. “Probably the last time I climbed the thing as well. Have you been up?”
“No ... not yet.”
“Ah, well, you must do it. It’s rather spectacular. If you begin the climb at midnight, you reach the top by sunrise.” Uncle Ernie closed one eye and traced an ascent in the air with the stem of his pipe. “It’s a magnificent view up there,” he said, stabbing his imaginary summit. “The season will be done soon for this year, but there’s still time. You could—” He looked down at Rudy and lowered his hand. “Well, I gather climbing is out of the question for you just now, isn’t it.”
Again Rudy eyed his grandfather’s diary. He remembered Grandpa’s words—cavorting, giggling, prattling—and tried to connect them to this newfound uncle. To mention the diary at all was a gamble, he suspected, but in the aftermath of his earlier fears he felt bold.
“I’ve read about one of your climbs, in Grandpa’s diary,” he said. “Aunty Mary passed it on to me.”
Uncle Ernie sucked on his pipe and nodded calmly as he exhaled. “How interesting. I wonder which time that was.”
“My father wanted to go along, but Grandpa thought he was too young.”
“Hmm. Yes. I remember Alec threw a hell of a tantrum every year. It was terribly important to him to be included on that expedition. He wanted to do everything I did. Typical of the younger brother, really. I expect he could have managed the climb. He was an athletic chap.”
This description of his father as a tag-along little brother echoed uncomfortably in Rudy’s head. For a moment he saw Adam, bawling over the remains of a stone sculpture in the backyard. He shifted his position.
“Can I make you a cup of tea, Uncle? I need to get up and move around a little.”
Uncle Ernie waved his free hand in front of his face. “No. I’m afraid I can’t stomach the stuff. Very inconvenient when I was living in Britain, but there you are.”
Very inconvenient when you were living on a tea estate, Rudy thought, but in response he only nodded.
“In any case,” Ernie said, “I should be on my way. I’ll let Mary know you’re perfectly fine.” He stood up slowly,
hesitating midway. “You are fine, I take it? Managing all right?”
“Uh, yeah. Just fine.”
“Very good. I’ll be off then.”
Uncle Ernie emptied his pipe out the window. Rudy shimmied to the edge of the bed, lowered his legs to the floor, and reached for his crutches. Launching himself up, he teetered between opposing urges—on the one hand, to hold the old man back as long as he could, and on the other, to get rid of him as soon as possible. The visit, as it was, seemed either incomplete or a waste of time.
He followed his uncle out of the bedroom. As they neared the front door, and the choice of either planning to see each other again or saying a final farewell became imminent, Rudy silently reproached his aunt for forcing the visit. If he’d had some warning, he could have prepared. For one thing, he wouldn’t have seen Ernie alone; he would have arranged for Bernadette to be with him. She would have welcomed her mother’s cousin with all the warmth she would accord any family member, and at the end of the visit, she would have seen Uncle Ernie off with strict orders to stay in touch and an invitation to an upcoming birthday party or Sunday lunch. But Rudy had nothing to offer.
At the door, Ernie extended his bony hand. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Rudy.”
“You too, Uncle.”
“Take care of that hip.”
“I will.”
Uncle Ernie opened the door and stepped outside, and suddenly the balance of Rudy’s teetering was thrown off. He lacked Bernadette’s resources, but for an instant he discovered her will.
