Running in the Family

by Michael Ondaatje

  “I remember when Daddy lost his job. He had just been sacked and he was drinking. Mummy was in the front seat with him, you and I were in the back. And for the whole trip he kept saying ‘I’m ruined. I’ve ruined all of you. All of you.’ And he would weep. It was a terrible trip. And Mum kept comforting him and saying she would never leave him, she would never leave him. Do you remember that …?”

  (iii)

  “When I left for England, god that was a terrible day for Mum. We were all at Kuttapitiya and she drove me down to Colombo. Left early in the morning. She had to move fast. He was drinking such a lot then and she couldn’t leave him for too long. So when we boarded the ship, The Queen of Bermuda, that was about the time he was waking up and she had to get back before he got into trouble. She knew he had already begun his drinking as she said goodbye to me.”

  (iv)

  “Remember all the pillows he had to sleep with? Remember how he used to make us massage his legs? Each of us had to do it for ten minutes.…”

  (v)

  “To us he was an utterly charming man, always gracious. When you spoke to him you knew you were speaking to the real Mervyn. He was always so open and loved those he visited. But none of us knew what he was like when he was drunk. So when your mother spoke of the reasons for the break-up it was a complete surprise. Oh I did see him drunk once and he was a bloody nuisance, but only once.

  Anyway she told us things were rough. Their servant, Gopal, would not obey her and would continue to buy your father bottles. So we suggested the two of them go up to ‘Ferncliff’ in Nuwara Eliya. They stayed there a week but that didn’t work out and they returned to Kegalle. He had lost his job by then, so they were at home most of the time. Then your mother got typhoid. Para-typhoid, not the most serious kind, but she had it—and he wouldn’t believe her. She said he hit her to make her get out of bed. Somehow she convinced Gopal how serious it was, and while he always obeyed your father he went into town and phoned us. We drove her down to Colombo and put her in Spittel’s Nursing Home.

  She never went back to him. When she was released she went and lived with Noel and Zillah at Horton Place.

  Anyway, a few years later we decided to work on the lawn at ‘Ferncliff’ which was turning brown. So we arranged to have some turf delivered from the Golf Club. And when we started digging we found about thirty bottles of Rocklands Gin buried in that front lawn by your father.…”

  (vi)

  “I don’t know when this happened or how old I was. I was lying on a bed. It was night. The room was being thrown around and they were shouting. Like giants.”

  (vii)

  “After leaving him she worked at the Mount Lavinia Hotel and then the Grand Oriental Hotel, that’s called the Taprobane now. Then in the fifties she moved to England. She had a rough time during those early years in England, working at that boarding house in Lancaster Gate. She had one small room with just a gas ring. Noel’s daughter, Wendy, was boarded at a private school at the time and she was wonderful. Every weekend she’d tell all her Cheltenham friends “Now we must go and visit Aunt Doris,” and she’d drag these posh English school girls, about 6 or 7 of them, and they’d crowd into that small bed-sitter and cook crumpets over the gas ring.”

  (viii)

  “I had some friends who played tennis. My best friends in London. And they were invited to Ceylon for a tournament. They were there for two weeks. When they came back to England I didn’t contact them. Never answered their calls. You see I thought they would have found out what a disgraceful family I had come from. Mummy had drummed this story into us about what we had all been through there. I had this image that the Ondaatjes were absolute pariahs. I was twenty-five years old then. When I went back five years later to Ceylon to see Gillian I was still nervous and was totally surprised that everyone remembered him and all of us with such delight and love.…”

  (ix)

  “In the end he used to come to Colombo every two weeks to bring me eggs and fertilizer for my garden. He was subdued then, no longer the irrepressible Mervyn we used to know, very kind and quiet. He was happy just to sit here and listen to me gab away.… I never met his second wife, Maureen, until the day of his funeral.”

  (x)

  “You know what I remember best is how sad his face was. I would be doing something and suddenly look up and catch his face naked. And full of sorrow. I don’t know. Long after the divorce I wrote to him. I’d just been to my first dance and I complained about all the soppy songs the boys sang to us, especially one they played constantly, which went “Kiss me once and kiss me twice and kiss me once again … it’s been a long long time,” and he wrote back saying he just wished he could kiss us all once again.

  … The sections you sent me made me very sad, remembering him and all those times. Of course I was always the serious one among us, with no sense of humour. I showed what you had written to someone and they laughed and said what a wonderful childhood we must have had, and I said it was a nightmare.”

  (xi)

  “When I used to meet him years later he was always a fund of wonderful stories, never dirty, never mocked a woman. Anyway, one day I ran into him in the Fort and that night your mother, who was visiting Ceylon at the time, came to dinner. So, playing the devil’s advocate, I told her who I had seen that morning and I said, you should see him. I remember she was very silent and looked down at her empty plate and around the room, somewhat surprised, and said, ‘Why should I have to see him?’ And I don’t know why but I kept pushing it and then gradually she began to be interested. I think she almost gave in. I said I could easily reach him by phone, he could come over and join us. They were both in their sixties then, hadn’t seen each other even once since the divorce. For old time’s sake, Doris, I said, just to see each other. Then my wife thought I was being too cocky and made me change the subject and suggested we eat, that dinner was ready. But I know she was nearly persuaded to, I could tell that more than anything else. It was so close.…”

  BLIND FAITH

  During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed. So our job becomes to keep peace with enemy camps, eliminate the chaos at the end of Jacobean tragedies, and with “the mercy of distance” write the histories.

  Fortinbras. Edgar. Christopher, my sisters, Wendy, myself. I think all of our lives have been terribly shaped by what went on before us. And why of Shakespeare’s cast of characters do I remain most curious about Edgar? Who if I look deeper into the metaphor, torments his father over an imaginary cliff.

  Words such as love, passion, duty, are so continually used they grow to have no meaning—except as coins or weapons. Hard language softens. I never knew what my father felt of these “things.” My loss was that I never spoke to him as an adult. Was he locked in the ceremony of being “a father”? He died before I even thought of such things.

  I long for the moment in the play where Edgar reveals himself to Gloucester and it never happens. Look I am the son who has grown up. I am the son you have made hazardous, who still loves you. I am now part of an adult’s ceremony, but I want to say I am writing this book about you at a time when I am least sure about such words.… Give me your arm. Let go my hand. Give me your arm. Give the word. “Sweet Marjoram” … a tender herb.

  THE BONE

  There is a story about my father I cannot come to terms with. It is one of the versions of his train escapade. In this one he had escaped from the train and run off naked into the jungle. (“Your father had a runaway complex,” someone has already told me.) His friend Arthur was called to find him and persuade him back. When Arthur eventually tracked him down this is what he saw.

  My father is walking towards him, huge and naked. In one hand he holds five ropes, and dangling on the end of each of them is a black dog. None of the five are touching the ground. He is holding his arm outstretched, holding them with one arm as if he has supernatural strength. Terrible noises are coming f
rom him and from the dogs as if there is a conversation between them that is subterranean, volcanic. All their tongues hanging out.

  They were probably stray dogs which my father had stumbled on in jungle villages, he had perhaps picked them up as he walked along. He was a man who loved dogs. But this scene had no humour or gentleness in it. The dogs were too powerful to be in danger of being strangled. The danger was to the naked man who held them at arm’s length, towards whom they swung like large dark magnets. He did not recognize Arthur, he would not let go of the ropes. He had captured all the evil in the regions he had passed through and was holding it.

  Arthur cut the ropes and the animals splashed to the ground, writhing free and escaping. He guided my father back to the road and the car that his sister Stephy waited in. They put him in the back seat, his arm still held away from him, now out of the open car window. All the way to Colombo the lengths of rope dangled from his fist in the hot passing air.

  THE CEYLON CACTUS AND SUCCULENT SOCIETY

  “THANIKAMA”

  After the morning’s drive to Colombo, after the meeting with Doris—tense, speaking in whispers in the hotel lobby—he would force himself to sit on the terrace overlooking the sea. Would sit in the sunlight drinking beers, which he ordered ice-cold, and finishing them before the sweat even evaporated from the surface of the bottle. Poured out the glasses of Nuwara Eliya beer. He sat there all afternoon, hoping she would notice him and come down to speak with him properly, truthfully. He wanted his wife to stop this posing at her work. Had to speak with her. He could hardly remember where the children were now. Two in school in England, one in Kegalle, one in Colombo.…

  Till 5 o’clock, he sat out on the blue terrace with the blaze of sun on him—determined to be somewhere where they could be alone if she changed her mind and came down to him—not with the other guests and drinkers in the cool shadows of the lobby of the Mount Lavinia Hotel. He recalled everyone. Their crowd. Noel, Trevor, Francis who was dead now, Dorothy who ran riot. All burghers and Sinhalese families, separate from the Europeans. The memory of his friends was with him in the sun. He poured them out of the bottles into his glass tankard and drank. He remembered Harold Tooby from his schooldays and his years at Cambridge where the code was “you can always get away with more than you think you can get away with.…” Till Lionel Wendt accidentally told his father of the deception. Lionel always guilty over this, who gave him and Doris a painting by George Keyt for their wedding. He still had that in any case, and the wooden statue of a woman he had picked up at an auction which everyone else hated. Objects had stayed and people disappeared.

  At five he got into the white Ford. She had not come down to him. And he drove to F. X. Pereira in the Ridgeway Building and bought cases of beer and gin to take back to Kegalle. Then he parked near the Galle Face Hotel, old haunt, and crossed the street to the bar where journalists and others from Lake House sat and talked politics, talked rubbish, talked about sport, which he was not at all interested in now. Did not mention Doris. Drank and laughed and listened, till eleven at night at which time they all went home to their wives. He walked down Galle Road and ate a meal at a Muslim restaurant, sitting alone in one of the frail wooden booths, the food so hot it would sear back the drunkenness and sleepiness, and then got into his car. This was 1947.

  He drove along Galle Face Green where the Japanese had eventually attacked, by plane, and disappeared into the Fort whose streets were dark and quiet and empty. He loved the Fort at this hour, these Colombo nights, the windows of his car open and the breeze for the first time almost cool, no longer tepid, hitting his face with all the night smells, the perfume of closed boutiques. An animal crossed the road and he braked to a halt and watched it, strolling at its own speed for it was midnight and if a car would actually stop it could be trusted. This animal paused when it reached the pavement and looked back at the man in the white car—who still had not moved on. They gazed at each other and then the creature ran up the steps of the white building and into the post office which stayed open all night.

  He thought, I could sleep here too. I could leave the car in the centre of Queen’s Road and go in. Other cars would weave around the Ford. It would disturb no one for four or five hours. Nothing would change. He lifted his foot off the clutch, pressed the accelerator and moved on through the Fort towards Mutwal, passed the church of his ancestors—all priests and doctors and translators—which looked down on him through a row of plantain trees, looked down onto the ships in the harbour docked like enormous sinking jewels. He drove out of Colombo.

  An hour later he could have stopped at the Ambepussa resthouse but continued on, the day’s alcohol still in him though he had already stopped twice on the side of the road, urinated into darkness and mysterious foliage. Halted briefly at Warakapola where the dark villages held the future and gave a Tamil a lift, the man striking up a conversation about stars, and he, proud of that mutual ancestry, discussing Orion with him. The man was a cinnamon peeler and the smell filled the car, he did not want to stop, wanted to take him all the way past the spice gardens to Kegalle rather than letting him out a mile up the road. He drove on, the cinnamon blown out already by new smells from the night, drove dangerously, he couldn’t quite remember if he was driving dangerously or not, just aware of the night breezes, the fall-out from spice gardens he skirted as if driving past vast kitchens. One of the lamps of his car was dead so he knew he was approaching stray walkers disguised as a motorcycle. He weaved up the Nelundeniya U-turns, then into the town of Kegalle. Over the bridge into Rock Hill.

  For about ten minutes he sat in front of the house now fully aware that the car was empty but for his body, this corpse. Leaving the car door open like a white broken wing on the lawn, he moved towards the porch, a case of liquor under his arm. Moonless. The absence of even an edge of the moon. Into the bedroom, the bottle top already unscrewed. Tooby, Tooby, you should see your school friend now. The bottle top in my mouth as I sit on the bed like a lost ship on a white sea. And they sat years ago on deck-chairs, young, going to England. In the absurd English clothes they surprised each other with. And then during the heart of the marriage sailed to Australia serene over the dark mountains in the sea, the bed of the ocean like a dragon’s back, ridges and troughs and the darkest eye of the Diamantina crater. This too was part of the universe, a feature of the earth. Kissed in the botanical gardens of Perth, took the Overland train east across the country just so they could say they had seen the Pacific. His Colombo suit fell off him now to the floor, onto its own pool of white and he got into bed. Thinking. What was he thinking about? More and more he watched himself do nothing, with nothing. At moments like this.

  He saw himself with the bottle. Where was his book. He had lost it. What was the book. It was not Shakespeare, not those plays of love he wept over too easily. With dark blue bindings. You creaked them open and stepped into a roomful of sorrow. A midsummer dream. All of them had moved at times with an ass’s head, Titania Dorothy Hilden Lysander de Saram, a mongrel collection part Sinhalese part Dutch part Tamil part ass moving slowly in the forests with foolish and serious obsessions. No, he looked around the bare room, don’t talk to me about Shakespeare, about “green hats.”

  The bottle was half empty beside him. He arose and lit the kerosene lamp. He wanted to look at his face, though the mirror was stained as if brown water and rust hung captive in the glass. He stepped towards the bathroom, the yellow pendulum of lamp beside his knees. With each swing he witnessed the state of the room and corridor. A glimpse of cobwebs quickly aging, undusted glass. No sweeper for weeks. And nature advanced. Tea bush became jungle, branches put their arms into the windows. If you stood still you were invaded. Wealth that was static quickly rotted. The paper money in your pocket, wet from your own sweat, gathered mould.

  In the bathroom ants had attacked the novel thrown on the floor by the commode. A whole battalion was carrying one page away from its source, carrying the intimate print as if rolling a table
t away from him. He knelt down on the red tile, slowly, not wishing to disturb their work. It was page 189. He had not got that far in the book yet but he surrendered it to them. He sat down forgetting the mirror he had been moving towards. Scared of the company of the mirror. He sat down with his back against the wall and waited. The white rectangle moved with the busy arduous ants. Duty, he thought. But that was just a fragment gazed at by the bottom of his eye. He drank. There. He saw the midnight rat.

  MONSOON NOTEBOOK (iii)

  A school exercise book. I write this at the desk of calamander looking out of the windows into dry black night. “Thanikama.” “Aloneness.” Birdless. The sound of an animal passing through the garden. Midnight and noon and dawn and dusk are the hours of danger, susceptibility to the “grahayas”—planetary spirits of malignant character. Avoid eating certain foods in lonely places, the devils will smell you out. Carry some metal. An iron heart. Do not step on bone or hair or human ash.

  Sweat down my back. The fan pauses then begins again. At midnight this hand is the only thing moving. As discreetly and carefully as whatever animals in the garden fold brown leaves into their mouths, visit the drain for water, or scale the broken glass that crowns the walls. Watch the hand move. Waiting for it to say something, to stumble casually on perception, the shape of an unknown thing.

  The garden a few feet away is suddenly under the fist of a downpour. Within half a second an easy dry night is filled with the noise of rain on tin, cement and earth—waking others slowly in the house. But I actually saw it, looking out into the blackness, saw the white downpour (reflected off the room’s light) falling like an object past the window. And now the dust that has been there for months is bounced off the earth and pours, the smell of it, into the room. I get up, walk to the night, and breathe it in—the dust, the tactile smell of wetness, oxygen now being pounded into the ground so it is difficult to breathe.