The doctor sighed and looked up at me, and then at K’s father, who was standing next to me. The doctor touched his own eyes and drew his fingers down his face, mimicking the motion of tears. As if he had been waiting for a cue, or for permission, K’s father began to cry. The doctor turned to the crowd and made the same motion, and as though they were a great chorus, they wept in unison, keening and wailing and mourning. It was a peaceful mourning during which no one threw a stone, fired a gun, or lit a match. Despite what we had anticipated, there was no visible anger—only an unquenchable grief that washed the tension away. In the distance, at the far end of the temple grounds, the cadres began to move out. They had been instructed to occupy and protect property that otherwise would be at risk for destruction. Several vans took off from the temple. They would travel through Jaffna town. Voices through distant megaphones, spreading the news and asking for calm. Above the weeping audience, the beautiful crows circled. They, too, had been waiting for days, but now they swooped away from us, higher and higher, their paths looping upward like incense smoke.
Four cadres who had been waiting with K lifted him from the dais and the people’s cries around us grew louder. His sarong fell around his limp legs, and they looked even thinner. Behind his plain checked shirt, the red flag of the Tigers was the biggest and brightest spot in the crowd, which had arrived wearing white in a preemptive strike at lamenting him. I thought that if I touched him now he might turn to powder. We might all ignite. I wanted to step down off the platform and tell them that I had loved K, that he had been the friend of my life. I wanted the people beside the stage to be with me, and I wanted to be with them, but the difference in our grief separated us. They looked like me and spoke my language and had grown up in the same places, but they were mourning for someone else.
The Nallur temple was the most beautiful of all the Hindu temples in Jaffna, and arguably, of all the Hindu temples in Sri Lanka: a good place for K to die, to make his last gesture, not least because it was dedicated to Murugan, the god of war, to whom K had always shown particular devotion. When K’s body was carried away, the doctor and I followed, and even as we moved across the stage and away from the temple, we met the smell of jasmine and incense, and the burnt, clean odor I had associated with holiness from childhood. As though the temple itself also walked behind him.
The cadres bore his body down the steps of the stage to the sandy corridor by the side of the building. Before the passage, which was both wide and long, the crowd parted for us. It felt like the death procession of a king. Behind and above me, the bells of the clock in the main tower sounded. Around the clock, carved figures of temple guardians and gods watched over us. He could not have chosen a grander theater.
At the other end, the priests awaited us. They, too, cried with great ostentation and decorum. One of them came forward to usher us inside the small makeshift building where we had kept what we needed to care for him. And then the cadres left the doctor and me with the body.
The door closed behind them with a quiet click, and I looked down at K’s dead face. It was kinder in death. Although he had been unconscious with his eyes closed when he died, they had fallen open somehow as he was carried in. Even glassed with death, they were beautiful eyes, still full of a scholar’s quiet civilization, as though he were tired from a long night in the university library. Reaching under his glasses, I closed them with a shudder at the desert tenderness of his eyelids and the long, brittle brush of his lashes. The doctor undressed him quickly. When he motioned to me to look away from the naked body, I ignored him. I did not want to be spared anything about this body, the ugliness and horror of each wasted muscle. K’s skin flaked and peeled as the doctor began to prepare the body for the funeral cortege. Little pieces of him drifted to the floor; his scalp littered his bushy black hair. I squatted and watched, completely still. When the doctor asked if I was all right, I nodded. But I could not bear how K looked. I rose and went to ask one of the priests for a bowl of oil. When I returned, without my asking, the doctor stopped his preparations of the body.
The oil smelled familiarly of coconut. They used this same oil to bathe the gods and light the lamps in this temple. It had a good fragrance with which to send K away: clean and spicy. He had liked this smell. I myself associated it with dharshan, the aspect of holiness we all wished to acquire when we entered a temple. Squatting back down, I dipped the edge of my white cotton sari into the oil and began to smooth it over the body. I drew the sari over his head like a veil, and the oil dripped from the corner of fabric onto his head. I let the sari drop from my hand, closed my eyes, and put my hands into his shock of hair like a pair of combs. His hair was dull, filled with windblown dust, tangled and matted from twelve days without brushing. Moisture without life seeped back into him. I looked up at the doctor, who nodded. “It will look a little better,” he said. “They know how he died. They watched it.”
And now he watched me. But I barely noticed. It felt like a ritual, but it was something I had never done before and have never done again for anyone. I put my fingers directly into the bowl of oil and touched K’s eyebrows, which were standing up, wild with bristly hairs. I smoothed them down. Without wiping my hands clean, I took off his glasses, marking them with oily prints. I stroked his eyelids again, and under his eyes where the circles were. I tugged his cheeks and his earlobes and rounded his chin. Behind me, the door clicked. The doctor was gone. At last, after so many years, I was alone again with K.
I pushed a finger between his teeth and pulled it out again, still dry from his sandpaper tongue. I was not K’s wife, or his sister, or his mother, but I poured oil from the bowl so that it formed a pool on the crater of his shallow chest. I pushed it up, into his neck and onto his withered arms, so far from the guns they had carried and the grenades they had thrown. I was not K’s doctor, and I was not his lover, but I put my thumbs into his elbows and cupped my hands around their edges, which were sharper than his bones as I had previously known them. I undid the knot of my long hair. Kneeling, I laid my temple next to his shoulder and found that as I had always suspected, my head fit into a perfect place his joints made for me. I stretched myself out next to him. Beneath me, the concrete floor of the temple was cool. I moved onto him, matching each of my living parts against his dead ones so that my whole self was pressed against him, living cells against dead cells. He was still warm. Tall as I was, there was almost no difference between us. My hair fell forward and across his body, dead cells on dead cells. I let my nails cut into his back. I felt rather than saw the quiet fold of his once-skinny stomach, now bloated with hunger. I held onto him with all my might, as though I could bury myself in him, or as though between us, the earth and I could still hurt him.
It was not erotic, not even a little. It was not romantic, not even a little. It was desperate. For the first time in my life, I wanted to die. I dipped my finger into the oil and put it on my own dry lips. It tasted sour. I wanted to soak into him, to fill up each crevice and hollow bone, so I kissed him with that flammable mouth, but even with the oil, it was a chaste, paper-lipped kiss that came too late. Pushing myself up, I found that my sari was drenched in the oil I had placed on his body to give it the appearance of life. The scars on his stomach, which had been barely visible before, shone brightly, pushed into sharp relief by the edema of his fast. They were the scars of a battle he had fought in May, in Vadamarachchi, where he had been badly wounded. My hands mapped the damage, and finally, I touched my friend, no longer my patient. The marks began on his right side and traveled above his navel, ending on the left side of his rib cage. Doctors had removed parts of his liver and intestines. He had nearly died and in defiance of the code of our movement, I had wept then as I could not now. My own stomach scar-less, the broken eggs of two childhoods ago still sliding invisibly across it.
The scars reminded me that no matter what was done to K’s body, the crowd had already seen things as the Tigers wished them to be seen. The scars would be covered up. He woul
d be anointed with more oil and garlanded. He would be marked with sweet ash and saffron paste and kungumum, the red powder. His body would move through the streets and villages of Jaffna like the statue of a god, and no one would dare to say that he had never been a believer in true nonviolence. They would say that he was greater than Gandhi, and he was not.
Only my hands had on them the detritus of his skin.
I rose from K’s body.
When doctor and priests finished their work, I dressedc K in the uniform they gave me, the uniform of a lieutenant colonel. He had received a promotion upon his death, just as though he had died in battle. It made no difference to them how he died, just as it had made no difference to him. But it mattered to me.
I buttoned up his dear body in its brown shirt, latched his belt around his waist, pulled up the zipper of his trousers, and straightened his medals. The doctor let me do all of this. It was not the work of a doctor, but the work of a woman, and although I was not yet a doctor, I was no longer a child. He handed me the Tiger sash, and I draped it around K’s shoulders, my fingers shaking. I took the camera K had given me for my sixteenth birthday out of my black bag and snapped a picture of him for the last time. I did it slowly, adjusting the angle of his uplifted chin, tracing his eyebrows again, moving his hat so that the shadows it cast would not obscure his eyes, even though his closed lids hid their light. I took my time, tucking his hair behind his ears and refolding his collar so that I could touch him again. I resisted—just barely—the urge to shake him.
Finally, the four male cadres came again and took his body away from me. They placed him into an open casket made of wood. Already, despite the doctor’s care, K’s hands were beginning to curl and freeze. His back stiffened, and already he was a stranger. Already he belonged to people who did not know him, and I could not believe I had ever laid my head against those unwelcoming shoulders. The cadres moved to put K’s open coffin into the back of a black Jeep, and the crowd, wailing, followed it on foot. They formed a gruesome trail of white. I lingered at the end of the crowd, along with the doctor. The breeze that blew at my oily sari did not cool the Jaffna heat.
As we passed into the town, we saw house after house already festooned with the plaits of coconut leaves, a symbol of mourning. From other temples and schools we could hear funeral music blasting with obscene volume and pompousness. In front of all the houses, we saw pictures of K, garlanded and lit by oil lamps. At each town, people came out to join the train of mourners. Bare feet kicked up the dust of the road, and from far away, villages could see us coming by the cloud we brought with us. The weeping rang so loud that it carried across farms and across paddy fields, to beaches and lagoons, over the entire peninsula. Tears arrived, knocked on doors, and were met with open and regretful arms. Sorrow took up residence in every street of every borough.
K died as he had done everything in the last years of his life: with a great sense of theater. He could have been an actor, I see now, but even in times of peace, when more Jaffna men chose professions other than death-making or peace-making, they were rarely actors. We were obsessed with respectability, and it was not respectable to admit to acting. Still, in the fast’s last days, when K did not have much strength left, I could tell by the exaggerated and slow way that he was moving that he had more than he was willing to show. He wanted to make the end a climax, and around him the propaganda machine that he had constructed whirred and clicked to help him. Cameramen focused on him. The thrum of music and the shrill voices of women singing rose to a higher pitch as though he had cued it. The priests, whose order was never disturbed, stopped even their slow, measured movements. In the distance, we could smell fires burning, the smell which is constantly in the air in Sri Lanka. It is the fragrance of purification, an ongoing process, and it smells not bad, but painful.
“I go only to return,” he had said to me before closing his eyes: the traditional farewell. “Go and come back,” I answered: the traditional answer. And although I have told you this story in English, you must remember, we were in Tamil. A private language for me now, here, and I remember him saying that as though it were private, as though it were not only to me but only for me, although we were surrounded by so many other people. And even as he said it, I was still wading through the river of my own understanding. He should have died days earlier. He was missing parts of his body. Death by fasting should not have taken him longer than a week. I had a suspicion that they had somehow stretched it out on purpose. For show. He went to sleep, but no one else could. Around the crowd, televisions had been set up. They were broadcasting only one channel, the channel of the Tigers, which was called Nidarshanam. I remember looking up to the screen, where the twin heads of K and Gandhi shone out at me. As I watched, the two heads moved closer together, merged, and blended into one. I could hear a group of women beginning a set of thevaram, devotional songs. Air rose from deep inside me, and I breathed heavily to expel it. I gulped, and swallowed, and started to laugh. I could not help it. K’s mustache on Gandhi’s face did not fit at all. Gandhi’s protruding ears instead of K’s obedient ones made no sense. It was funny—it was funny. I laughed as quietly as I could, which was not very quietly, and wiped my face, which was not wet, with the backs of my hands.
In a time of peace, as a Hindu, K would have been cremated. On a funeral pyre he would have burst and sparked like tinder. He would have risen into the air as smoke. If he had had a son, the boy would have carried the torch to light the flame. Since he had no son, his father would have done the deed. Since he had no wife, only his friends would have borne witness.
Only his friends. I could say that he was only a friend, but that would not be true; that would not be right. Our friendship exceeds and surpasses, expands and embraces. K is more, always; he is with me still. Here in the West, people think women of my country leap into fire with the bodies of men we have loved. But he was only a friend—only—and I let him go. They took his body from me, but it did not matter. Do you see now? Do you understand? In K, I had and lost such a friend that I became the place where his body burned.
COLE BECHER
Charybdis
FROM The Iowa Review
WE’D SPENT EIGHT MONTHS walking up and down berms and around shit-filled yards in Iraq swinging AN/PSS-12 mine detectors—known as “twelves” or “piss-twelves”—on top of eighty to a hundred pounds of gear, including M-4s, M-16s, even M-249 SAWs, and the requisite magazines or belts of 5.56mm ammunition. I was an inch shorter, my spinal cartilage having compressed under the weight.
Even so, I missed swinging the piss-twelve around people’s yards, hitting the likely spots with a cool efficiency, as if searching for bombs were an Easter egg hunt. I missed digging or telling the grunts to dig when I heard the annoying, squealing tone. I missed finding something heavy wrapped in plastic only a foot or two down, saying, “We got you now, motherfucker” or “I found pay dirt,” and watching the offending haji get zip-cuffed. I think we all missed it—I know Conrad did. He used to whistle “Taps” when he was sure he’d found something. At least I think it was “Taps.” It was hard to tell because I’m slightly tone-deaf from shooting shoulder-fired rockets, and Conrad’s whistling sounded like wind coming through an old screen door. If it wasn’t “Taps,” it was a dirge for the damned. Either way, we all loved those moments of discovery. Those little instants of validation made Iraq an okay place for us, so much that there were only two consistent downsides: no women and no booze.
Of course there were plenty of both when we came home that August. The handful who still had girlfriends or wives met them at our Navy/Marine Corps Reserve Drill Center, where the CO released us to the mob of waiting families and friends. It was well past midnight when we arrived and filed off the bus, each of us in our most presentable pair of desert cammies. It was late summer in Virginia, so it was warm when we formed up in the familiar parking lot—probably the same temperature as Iraq at night.
Still, it felt off—wrong. We were standing in
formation in desert camouflage between red-brick buildings surrounded by green trees and grass. I felt exposed, vulnerable, the way you feel after a sniper’s first shot, before you can pinpoint his location.
We could see the lights in the gym through the tall windows that ran along its side. In each, figures crammed against the glass, fighting for a glimpse of us, the way barking dogs jump against screen doors. It tripped my Spidey sense, and I felt like the illusion of safety was poised to pop. But I didn’t say anything. No one did. We just stood there, loosely huddled in the parking lot as if preparing for an imminent attack. I remember looking at Conrad, locking eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath, and thinking, This nice peaceful moment is about to get overrun. He nodded.
Mack, Conrad, and I were three of the last to climb the long ramp into the gym. We lingered at the bottom, looking up at the opening under the industrial roll-up door. All we could see was the bright light and the throngs of elated people swarming and swirling inside.
Mack turned and broke our silence. “It’s like we’re rock stars in some weird paradigm where it’s cool to be swooned over by our lameass families.” He paused for a moment, taking a deep breath. “All right, let’s go meet those groupies.” We grudgingly trudged up the ramp and into the gym, Mack leading and Conrad trailing. I lost track of them when my family descended on and surrounded me, giddily assaulting my tense shoulders with hugs and proclamations of joy.
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 Page 31
