The Middleman and Other Stories

by Bharati Mukherjee

  In August his sister’s suitor got himself stupidly involved in a prison break. The sister came to Mr. Venkatesan weeping. She had stuffed clothes and her sewing basket into a camouflage satchel. She was going into the northern hills, she said. The Tigers could count on the tea pickers.

  “No way,” Mr. Venkatesan exploded. When he was safely in America’s heartland, with his own wife and car and all accoutrements of New World hearth and home, he wanted to think of his Trinco family (to whom he meant to remit generous monthly sums) as being happy under one roof, too. “You are not going to live with hooligan types in jungles.”

  “If you lock me in my room, I’ll call the police. I’ll tell them who threw the axe at the rally.”

  “Is that what they teach you in guerrilla camps? To turn on your family?” he demanded.

  The sister wept loudly into her sari. It was a pretty lilac sari, and he remembered having bought it for her seventeenth birthday. On her feet were fragile lilac slippers. He couldn’t picture her scrambling up terraced slopes of tea estates in that pretty get-up. “Nobody has to teach me,” she retorted.

  In her lilac sari, and with the white fragrant flower wreath in her hair, she didn’t look like a blackmailer. It was the times. She, her boyfriend, he himself, were all fate’s victims.

  He gave in. He made her promise, though, that in the hills she would marry her suitor. She touched his feet with her forehead in the traditional farewell. He heard a scooter start up below. So the guerrilla had been waiting. She’d meant to leave home, with or without his permission. She’d freed herself of family duties and bonds.

  Above the motor scooter’s sputter, the grateful boyfriend shouted, “Sir, I will put you in touch with a man. Listen to him and he will deliver you.” Then the dust cloud of destiny swallowed up the guerrilla bride-to-be and groom.

  The go-between turned out to be a clubfooted and cauliflower-eared middle-aged man. The combination of deformities, no doubt congenital, had nevertheless earned him a reputation for ferocity and an indifference to inflicted suffering. He appeared on the front porch early one Saturday afternoon. He didn’t come straight to the point. For the first half-hour he said very little and concentrated instead on the sweet almond-stuffed turnovers that the Venkatesan family had shaped and fried all day for a religious festival they’d be attending later that afternoon.

  “You have, perhaps, some news for me?” Mr. Venkatesan asked shyly as he watched the man help himself to a chilled glass of mango fool. “Some important information, no?”

  “Excuse me, sir,” the man protested. “I know that you are a teacher and that therefore you are in the business of improving the mind of man. But forthrightness is not always a virtue. Especially in these troubled times.”

  The man’s furtiveness was infectious, and Mr. Venkatesan, without thinking, thinned his voice to a hiss. “You are going over my options with me, no?”

  “Options!” the man sneered. Then he took out a foreign-looking newspaper from a shopping bag. On a back page of the paper was a picture of three dour sahibs fishing for lobster. “You get my meaning, sir? They have beautiful coves in Nova Scotia. They have beautiful people in the Canadian Maritimes.”

  On cushiony skates and with clean, cool winds buoying him from behind, Mr. Venkatesan glided all the way into Halifax, dodging posses of border police. He married a girl with red, dimpled cheeks, and all winter she made love to him under a goose-down quilt. Summers he set lobster traps. Editors of quarterlies begged to see his poetry.

  “Beautiful people, Canadians,” he agreed.

  “Not like the damn Americans!” The go-between masticated sternly. “They are sending over soldiers of fortune and suchlike to crush us.”

  Mr. Venkatesan, wise in ways of middlemen, asked, “This means you’re not having a pipeline to America?”

  The agent dipped into a bowl of stale fried banana chips.

  “No matter. The time has come for me to leave.”

  The next day, Sunday, the man came back to find out how much Mr. Venkatesan might be willing to pay for a fake passport / airline tickets / safe houses en route package deal. Mr. Venkatesan named a figure.

  “So you are not really anxious to exit?” the man said.

  Mr. Venkatesan revised his figure. He revised the figure three more times before the go-between would do anything more human than sigh at him.

  He was being taken by a mean, mocking man who preyed on others’ dreams. He was allowing himself to be cheated. But sometime that spring the wish to get away—to flee abroad and seize the good life as had his San Jose cousin—had deepened into sickness. So he was blowing his life’s savings on this malady. So what?

  The man made many more trips. And on each trip, as Mr. Venkatesan sat the man down on the best rattan chair on the balcony, through the half-open door that led into the hallway he saw the women in his family gather in jittery knots. They knew he was about to forsake them.

  Every brave beginning, in these cramped little islands, masked a secret betrayal. To himself, Mr. Venkatesan would always be a sinner.

  Mr. Venkatesan threw himself into the planning. He didn’t trust the man with the cauliflower ears. Routes, circuitous enough to fool border guards, had to be figured out. He could fly to Frankfurt via Malta, for instance, then hole up in a ship’s cargo hold for the long, bouncy passage on Canadian seas. Or he could take the more predictable (and therefore, cheaper but with more surveillance) detours through the Gulf Emirates.

  The go-between or travel agent took his time. Fake travel documents and work permits had to be printed up. Costs, commissions, bribes had to be calculated. On each visit, the man helped himself to a double peg of Mr. Venkatesan’s whiskey.

  In early September, three weeks after Mr. Venkatesan had paid in full for a roundabout one-way ticket to Hamburg and for a passport impressive with fake visas, the travel agent stowed him in the damp, smelly bottom of a fisherman’s dinghy and had him ferried across the Palk Strait to Tuticorin in the palm-green tip of mainland India.

  Tuticorin was the town Mr. Venkatesan’s ancestors had left to find their fortunes in Ceylon’s tea-covered northern hills. The irony struck him with such force that he rocked and tipped the dinghy, and had to be fished out of the sea.

  The Friends of the Tigers were waiting in a palm grove for him. He saw their flashlights and smelled their coffee. They gave him a dry change of clothes, and though both the shirt and the jacket were frayed, they were stylishly cut. His reputation as an intellectual and killer (he hoped it wasn’t true) of a Buddhist policeman had preceded him. He let them talk; it was not Venkatesan the schoolmaster they were praising, but some mad invention. Where he was silent from confusion and fatigue, they read cunning and intensity. He was happy to put himself in their hands; he thought of them as fate’s helpers, dispatched to see him through his malady. That night one of them made up a sleeping mat for him in the the back room of his shuttered grocery store. After that they passed him from back room to back room. He spent pleasant afternoons with them drinking sweet, frothy coffee and listening to them plan to derail trains or blow up bus depots. They read his frown as skepticism and redoubled their vehemence. He himself had no interest in destruction, but he listened to them politely.

  When it was safe to move on, the Friends wrote out useful addresses in Frankfurt, London, Toronto, Miami. “Stay out of refugee centers,” they advised. But an old man with broken dentures who had been deported out of Hamburg the year before filled him in on which refugee centers in which cities had the cleanest beds, just in case he was caught by the wily German police. “I shan’t forget any of you,” Mr. Venkatesan said as two Friends saw him off at the train station. The train took him to Madras; in Madras he changed trains for Delhi where he boarded an Aeroflot flight for Tashkent. From Tashkent he flew to Moscow. He would like to have told the story of his life to his two seat mates—already the break from family and from St. Joe’s seemed the stuff of adventure novels—but they were two huge and grim Uzb
eks with bushels of apricots and pears wedged on the floor, under the seat, and on their laps. The cabin was noisier than the Jaffna local bus with squawking chickens and drunken farmers. He communed instead with Arnold and Keats. In Moscow the airport officials didn’t bother to look too closely at his visa stamps, and he made it to Berlin feeling cocky.

  At Schönefeld Airport, three rough-looking Tamil men he’d not have given the time of day to back home in Trinco grappled his bags away from him as soon as he’d cleared customs. “This is only a piss stop for you, you lucky bastard,” one of them said. “You get to go on to real places while hard-working fuckers like us get stuck in this hellhole.”

  He had never heard such language. Up until a week ago, he would have denied the Tamil language even possessed such words. The man’s coarseness shocked Mr. Venkatesan, but this was not the moment to walk away from accomplices.

  The expatriate Tamils took him, by bus, to a tenement building—he saw only Asians and Africans in the lobby—and locked him from the outside in a one-room flat on the top floor. An Algerian they did business with, they said, would truck him over the border into Hamburg. He was not to look out the window. He was not to open the door, not even if someone yelled, “Fire!” They’d be back at night, and they’d bring him beer and rolls.

  Mr. Venkatesan made a slow show of getting money out of his trouser pocket—he didn’t have any East German money, only rupees and the Canadian dollars he’d bought on the black market from the travel agent in Trinco—but the Tamils stopped him. “Our treat,” they said. “You can return the hospitality when we make it to Canada.”

  Late in the evening the three men, stumbling drunk and jolly, let themselves back into the room that smelled of stale, male smells. The Algerian had come through. They were celebrating. They had forgotten the bread but remembered the beer.

  That night, which was his only night in East Germany, Mr. Venkatesan got giggly drunk. And so it was that he entered the free world with a hangover. In a narrow, green mountain pass, trying not to throw up, he said goodbye to his Algerian chauffeur and how-do-you-do to a Ghanaian-born Berliner who didn’t cut the engine of his BMW during the furtive transfer.

  He was in Europe. Finally. The hangover made him sentimental. Back in Trinco the day must have deepened into dusk. In the skid of tires, he heard the weeping of parents, aunts, sisters. He had looked after them as long as he could. He had done for himself what he should have ten years before. Now he wanted to walk where Shelley had walked. He wanted to lie down where consumptive Keats had lain and listened to his nightingale sing of truth and beauty. He stretched out in the back seat. When Mr. Venkatesan next opened his eyes, the BMW was parked in front of a refugee center in Hamburg.

  “End of trip,” the black Berliner announced in jerky English. “Auf Wiederseben.”

  Mr. Venkatesan protested that he was not a refugee. “I am paid up in full to Canada. You are supposed to put me in touch with a ship’s captain.”

  The black man snickered, then heaved Mr. Venkatesan’s two shiny new bags out on the street. “Goodbye. Danke.”

  Mr. Venkatesan got out of the private taxi.

  “Need a cheap hotel? Need a lawyer to stay deportation orders?”

  A very dark, pudgy man flashed a calling card in his face. The man looked Tamil, but not anxious like a refugee. His suit was too expensive. Even his shirt was made of some white-on-white fancy material, though his cuffs and collar were somewhat soiled.

  Mr. Venkatesan felt exhilarated. Here was another of fate’s angels come to minister him out of his malady.

  “The name is Rammi. G. Rammi, Esquire. One-time meanest goddamn solicitor in Paramaribo, Suriname. I am putting myself at your service.”

  He allowed the angel to guide him into a rijstafel place and feed him for free.

  Mr. Venkatesan ate greedily while the angel, in a voice as uplifting as harp music, instructed him on the most prudent conduct for undocumented transients. By the end of the meal, he’d agreed to pay Rammi’s cousin, a widow, a flat fee for boarding him for as long as it took Rammi to locate a ship’s captain whose business was ferrying furtive cargoes.

  Rammi’s cousin, Queenie, lived in a row house by the docks. Rammi had the cabdriver let them off a block and a half from Queenie’s. He seemed to think cabdrivers were undercover immigration cops, and he didn’t want a poor young widow bringing up a kid on dole getting in trouble for her charity.

  Though Queenie had been telephoned ahead from a pay phone, she was dressed in nothing more formal than a kimono when she opened her slightly warped front door and let the men in. The kimono was the color of parrots in sunlight and reminded Mr. Venkatesan of his last carefree years, creeping up on and capturing parrots with his bare hands. In that glossy green kimono, Queenie the landlady shocked him with her beauty. Her sash was missing, and she clenched the garment together at the waist with a slender, nervous fist. Her smooth gold limbs, her high-bouncing bosom, even the stockingless arch of her instep had about them so tempting a careless sensuality that it made his head swim.

  “I put your friend in Room 3A,” Queenie said. “3B is less crowded but I had to put the sick Turk in it.” She yelled something in German which Mr. Venkatesan didn’t understand, and a girl of eight or nine came teetering out of the kitchen in adult-sized high heels. She asked the girl some urgent questions. The girl said no to all of them with shakes of her braided head.

  “We don’t want the fellow dying on us,” Rammi said. Then they said something more in a Caribbean patois that Mr. Venkatesan didn’t catch. “God knows we don’t want complications.” He picked up the two bags and started up the stairs.

  3A was a smallish attic room blue with unventilated smoke, fitted with two sets of three-tier bunks. There were no closets, no cupboards, and on the bunk that Rammi pointed out as his, no bed linen. Four young men of indistinguishable nationality—Asia and Africa were their continents—were playing cards and drinking beer.

  “Okay, ’bye,” Rammi said. He was off to scout ship captains.

  When Rammi left, despite the company, Mr. Venkatesan felt depressed, lonely. He didn’t try to get to know where the men were from and where they were headed which was how he’d broken the ice in back room dormitories in Tuticorin. One man spat into a brass spittoon. What did he have in common with these transients except the waiting?

  By using his bags as a stepladder, he was able to clamber up to his allotted top bunk. For a while he sat on the bed. The men angled their heads so they could still stare at him. He lay down on the mattress. The rough ticking material of the pillow chafed him. He sat up again. He took his jacket and pants off and hung them from the foot rail. He slipped his wallet, his passport, his cloth bag stuffed with foreign cash, his new watch—a farewell present from Father van der Haagen—between the pillow and the mattress. He was not about to trust his cell mates. A little after the noon hour all four men got dressed in gaudy clothes and went out in a group. Mr. Venkatesan finally closed his eyes. A parrot flew into his dream. Mr. Venkatesan thrilled to the feathery feel of its bosom. He woke up only when Queenie’s little girl charged into the room and ordered him down for lunch. She didn’t seem upset about his being in underwear. She leaped onto the middle bunk in the tier across the room and told him to hurry so the food wouldn’t have to be rewarmed. He thought he saw the flash of a man’s watch in her hand.

  Queenie had made him a simple lunch of lentil soup and potato croquettes, and by the time he got down to the kitchen it was no longer warm. Still he liked the spiciness of the croquettes and the ketchup was a tasty European brand and not the watery stuff served back home.

  She said she’d already eaten, but she sat down with a lager and watched him eat. With her he had no trouble talking. He told her about St. Joe’s and Father van der Haagen. He told her about his family, leaving out the part about his sister running wild in the hills with hooligans, and got her to talk about her family too.

  Queenie’s grandfather had been born in a Sin
halese village the name of which he hadn’t cared to pass on—he’d referred to it only as “hellhole”—and from which he’d run away at age seventeen to come as an indentured laborer to the Caribbean. He’d worked sugar cane fields in British Guiana until he’d lost a thumb. Then he’d moved to Suriname and worked as an office boy in a coconut oil processing plant, and wooed and won the only daughter of the proprietor, an expatriate Tamil like him who, during the War, had made a fortune off the Americans.

  He tried to find out about her husband, but she’d say nothing other than that he’d been, in her words, “a romantic moron,” and that he’d hated the hot sun, the flat lands, the coconut palms, the bush, her family, her family’s oil factory. He’d dreamed, she said, of living like a European.

  “You make me remember things I thought I’d forgotten.” She flicked her lips with her tongue until they shone.

  “You make me think of doing things I’ve never done.” He gripped the edge of the kitchen table. He had trouble breathing. “Until dinnertime,” he said. Then he panted back up to his prison.

  But Mr. Venkatesan didn’t see Queenie for dinner. She sent word through the girl that she had a guest—a legitimate guest, a tourist from Lübeck, not an illegal transient—that evening. He felt no rage at being dumped. A man without papers accepts last-minute humiliations. He called Rammi from the pay phone in the hall.

  That night Mr. Venkatesan had fun. Hamburg was not at all the staid city of burghers that Father van der Haagen had evoked for him in those last restless days of waiting in the Teachers’ Common Room. Hamburg was a carnival. That night, with Rammi as his initiator into fun, he smoked his first joint and said, after much prodding, “sehr schön” to a skinny girl with a Mohawk haircut.

  The tourist from Lübeck had been given the one nice room. Queenie’s daughter had shown Mr. Venkatesan the room while the man was checking in. It was on the first floor and had a double bed with a duvet so thick you wanted to sink into it. The windows were covered with two sets of curtains. The room even had its own sink. He hadn’t seen the man from Lübeck, only heard him on the stairs and in the hall on his way to and from the lavatory walking with an authoritative, native-born German tread. Queenie hadn’t instructed him to stay out of sight. Secretiveness he’d learned from his bunk mates. They could move with great stealth. Mr. Venkatesan was beginning to feel like a character in Anne Frank’s diary. The men in 3A stopped wearing shoes indoors so as not to be heard pacing by the tourist from Lübeck.