Anil's Ghost

by Michael Ondaatje

  They turned off the road and stopped at a rest house, ordered lunch and sat outside above a deep valley.

  ‘Look at that bird, Sarath.’

  ‘A bulbul.’

  She put herself into the position of the bird as it took off, and was suddenly vertiginous, realizing how high they were above the valley, the landscape like a green fjord beneath them. In the distance the open plain was bleached white, resembling the sea.

  ‘You know birds, do you?’

  ‘Yes. My wife knew them well.’

  Anil said nothing, waiting for him to say more or to formally digress from the subject. But he stayed in his silence.

  ‘Where is your wife?’ she asked finally.

  ‘I lost her a few years ago, she did—She killed herself.’

  ‘Jesus. I’m so sorry, Sarath. I’m so . . .’

  His face had become vague. ‘She had left me a few months before.’

  ‘I’m sorry I asked. I always ask, I’m too curious. I drive people mad.’

  Later, in the van, to break the longer silence. ‘Did you know my father? You’re how old?’

  ‘Forty-nine,’ Sarath said.

  ‘I’m thirty-three. Did you know him?’

  ‘I’ve heard of him. He was quite a bit older.’

  ‘I kept hearing my dad was a ladies’ man.’

  ‘I heard that too. If someone’s charming they say that.’

  ‘I think it was true. I just wish I had been older—to learn things from him. I wish I’d had that.’

  ‘There was a monk,’ Sarath said. ‘He and his brother were the best teachers in my life—and it was because they taught me when I was an adult. We need parents when we’re old too. I would meet him once or twice a year when he came to Colombo, and he’d somehow help me become simpler, clearer to myself. Nārada was a great laugher. He would laugh at your foibles. An ascetic. He stayed in a little room in a temple when he was in town. I’d visit him for a coffee, he sat on the bed, I sat on the one chair he’d bring in from the hall. Talking archaeology. He’d written a few pamphlets in Sinhala, but his brother, Palipana, was the famous one in that field, though there never seemed to be any jealousy between them. Nārada and Palipana. Two brilliant brothers. Both of them were my teachers.

  ‘Most of the time Nārada lived near Hambantota. My wife and I would go down to visit. You walked over hot dunes and came upon the commune for unemployed youth he’d set up by the sea.

  ‘We were all shaken by his murder. He was shot in his room while sleeping. I’ve had friends die who were my age, but I miss that old man more. I suppose I was expecting him to teach me how to be old. Anyway, once a year, on the anniversary of his death, my wife and I would cook the food he was especially fond of and drive south to the village he’d lived in. We were always closest on that day. And it made him eternal—“persistent” might be a better word—you felt he was there with the boys in the commune who loved the mallung and the condensed-milk desserts he was partial to.’

  ‘My parents died in a car crash after I left Sri Lanka. I never got a chance to see them again.’

  ‘I know. I heard your father was a good doctor.’

  ‘I should have been a doctor, but I swerved off into forensics. Didn’t want to be him at that time in my life, I guess. Then I didn’t want to come back here after my parents died.’

  She was asleep when he touched her arm.

  ‘I see a river down there. Shall we have a swim?’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Just down that hill.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’d love to. Yes.’ They pulled towels out of their bags and clambered down.

  ‘I’ve not done this for years.’

  ‘It will be cold. You’re in the mountains, two thousand feet up.’

  He was leading the way, more sprightly than she expected. Well, he’s an archaeologist, she thought. He got to the river and disappeared behind a rock to change. She yelled, ‘Just taking my dress off!’ to be sure he wouldn’t come back. ‘I’ll wear my underclothes.’ Anil was conscious of how dark it was around her on this slope of the forest, then saw they would be able to swim farther down to a pool full of sunlight.

  When she reached the water, he was already swimming, looking up at the trees. She took two steps forward on the sharp stones and dove in with a belly flop. ‘Ah, a professional,’ she heard him drawl.

  The brightness on her skin caused by the river’s coldness stayed with her during the last leg of the drive—small bumps of flesh on her forearm, the subliminal hairs upright. They had walked up the slope into the heat and light and she stood by the van drying her hair, beating it gently with her hands. She rolled her wet underclothes into the towel and wore just her dress as they travelled into the mountains.

  ‘At this altitude you get headaches,’ Sarath said. ‘There’s one good hotel in Bandarawela but we’ll stop and set up a work space at a rest house instead, what do you say? That way we can keep our equipment and findings with us.’

  ‘That monk you told me about. Who killed him?’

  Sarath went on as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘And we’ll want to be near the site. . . . There was a rumour that Nārada’s murder was organized by his own novice, that it was not a political killing as most thought at first. Those days you didn’t know who was killing who.’

  Anil said, ‘But you do now, don’t you?’

  ‘Now we all have blood on our clothes.’

  They walked with the owner through the rest house and Sarath selected three rooms.

  ‘The third room is full of mildew, but we’ll take the bed out and get the walls painted tonight. Turn it into an office and lab. This okay?’ She nodded and he turned back to the manager with instructions.

  In 1911, prehistoric remains were discovered in the Bandarawela region and hundreds of caves and rock shelters began to be explored. Remains of cranial and dental fragments were found, as old as any in India.

  It was here, within a government-protected archaeological preserve, that skeletons had once again been found, outside one of the Bandarawela caves.

  During their first few days there, Sarath and Anil recorded and removed ancient debris—freshwater and arboreal gastropods, bone fragments of birds and mammals, even fish bones from distant eras of the sea. The region felt timeless. They found charred epicarps of wild breadfruit that still grew in the region, even now, twenty thousand years later.

  Three almost complete skeletons had been found. But a few days later, while excavating in the far reaches of a cave, Anil discovered a fourth skeleton, whose bones were still held together by dried ligaments, partially burned. Something not prehistoric.

  ‘Listen,’ she said (they were in the rest house looking at the body), ‘there are trace elements you can find in bones—mercury, lead, arsenic, even gold—that don’t belong to them, they seep in from the surrounding soil. Or they can move from the bones into the adjacent soil. These elements are always passing into and out of bones, whether they are in coffins or not. Well, in this skeleton, there are traces of lead all over him. But there is no lead in this cave where we found him, the soil samples show none. Do you see? He must have been buried somewhere else before. Someone took precautions to make sure the skeleton was not discovered. This is no ordinary murder or burial. They buried him, then later moved him to an older gravesite.’

  ‘Burying a body and then moving it is not necessarily a crime.’

  ‘It’s a probable crime, no?’

  ‘Not if we find a reason.’

  ‘All right. Look. Use that pen and move it along the bone. That way you can see the twist in the bone clearly. It’s not as straight as it should be. There’s also transverse cracking, but we’ll leave that for now, just more proof.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Twisting happens to bones that get burned when they are “green,” that is, flesh-covered. An old body whose flesh withered away with time and then was burned later on—that’s the pattern with most of the Bandarawela skeletons. This one was ba
rely dead, Sarath, when they tried to burn him. Or worse, they tried to burn him alive.’

  She had to wait a long time for him to say something. In the freshly painted room at the rest house, the four cafeteria tables each held a skeleton. They had labelled the bodies TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SAILOR. The one she was talking about was Sailor. They faced each other across the table.

  ‘Can you imagine how many bodies must be buried all over the island?’ he finally asked. He was not denying anything she had said.

  ‘This is a murder victim, Sarath.’

  ‘A murder . . . Do you mean any murder . . . or do you mean a political murder?’

  ‘It was found within a sacred historical site. A site constantly under government or police supervision.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And this is a recent skeleton,’ she said firmly. ‘It was buried no more than four to six years ago. What’s it doing here?’

  ‘There are thousands of twentieth-century bodies, Anil. Can you imagine how many murders—’

  ‘But we can prove this, don’t you see? This is an opportunity, it’s traceable. We found him in a place that only a government official could get into.’

  He was tapping his pen on the wooden arm of the chair as she talked.

  ‘We can do palynology tests to identify the type of pollen that fused to the bone, on those parts of him that were not burned. Only the arms and some ribs were burned. Do you have a copy of Wodehouse’s Pollen Grains?’

  ‘In my office,’ he said quietly. ‘We need to test for soil extracts.’

  ‘Can you find a forensic geologist?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No one else.’

  They had been whispering in the dark for almost half an hour since she had walked from the skeleton at the fourth table and given Sarath’s shoulder a little tug, saying, ‘I have to show you something.’ ‘What?’ ‘This thing. Listen. . . .’

  They covered Sailor and taped the plastic. ‘Let’s lock up,’ he said. ‘I promised to take you to that temple. In an hour it’s the best time to see it. We’ll catch the dusk drummer.’

  Anil didn’t like the abrupt switch to something aesthetic. ‘You think it’s safe?’

  ‘What do you want to do? Take it wherever you go? Don’t worry about anything. These will be fine here.’

  ‘It’s . . .’

  ‘Leave it.’

  She thought she’d say it right out. At once. ‘I don’t really know, you see, which side you are on—if I can trust you.’

  He began to speak, stopped, then spoke slowly. ‘What would I do?’

  ‘You could make him disappear.’

  He moved out of his stillness and walked to the wall and turned on three lights. ‘Why, Anil?’

  ‘You have a relative in the government, don’t you?’

  ‘I do have one, yes. I hardly ever see him. Perhaps he can help us.’

  ‘Perhaps. Why did you turn on the light?’

  ‘I need to find my pen. What—did you think it was a signal to someone?’

  ‘I don’t know where you stand. I know . . . I know you feel the purpose of truth is more complicated, that it’s sometimes more dangerous here if you tell the truth.’

  ‘Everyone’s scared, Anil. It’s a national disease.’

  ‘There are so many bodies in the ground now, that’s what you said . . . murdered, anonymous. I mean, people don’t even know if they are two hundred years old or two weeks old, they’ve all been through fire. Some people let their ghosts die, some don’t. Sarath, we can do something. . . .’

  ‘You’re six hours away from Colombo and you’re whispering—think about that.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to the temple now.’

  ‘That’s fine. You don’t have to. I’ll go. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll turn out the lights,’ he said.

  We are often criminals in the eyes of the earth, not only for having committed crimes, but because we know that crimes have been committed.’ Words about a man buried forever in a prison. El Hombre de la Máscara de Hierro. The Man in the Iron Mask. Anil needed to comfort herself with old friends, sentences from books, voices she could trust. ‘This is the dead-room,’ said Enjolras. Who was Enjolras? Someone in Les Misérables. A book so much a favourite, so thick with human nature she wished it to accompany her into the afterlife. She was working with a man who was efficient in his privacy, who would never unknot himself for anyone. A paranoid is someone with all the facts, the joke went. Maybe this was the only truth here. In this rest house near Bandarawela with four skeletons. You’re six hours away from Colombo and you’re whispering—think about that.

  In her years abroad, during her European and North American education, Anil had courted foreignness, was at ease whether on the Bakerloo line or the highways around Santa Fe. She felt completed abroad. (Even now her brain held the area codes of Denver and Portland.) And she had come to expect clearly marked roads to the source of most mysteries. Information could always be clarified and acted upon. But here, on this island, she realized she was moving with only one arm of language among uncertain laws and a fear that was everywhere. There was less to hold on to with that one arm. Truth bounced between gossip and vengeance. Rumour slipped into every car and barbershop. Sarath’s daily path as a professional archaeologist in this world, she guessed, involved commissions and the favours of ministers, involved waiting politely for hours in their office lobbies. Information was made public with diversions and subtexts—as if the truth would not be of interest when given directly, without waltzing backwards.

  She loosened the swaddling plastic that covered Sailor. In her work Anil turned bodies into representatives of race and age and place, though for her the tenderest of all discoveries was the finding, some years earlier, of the tracks at Laetoli—almost-four-million-year-old footsteps of a pig, a hyena, a rhinoceros and a bird, this strange ensemble identified by a twentieth-century tracker. Four unrelated creatures that had walked hurriedly over a wet layer of volcanic ash. To get away from what? Historically more significant were other tracks in the vicinity, of a hominid assumed to be approximately five feet tall (one could tell by the pivoting heel impressions). But it was that quartet of animals walking from Laetoli four million years ago that she liked to think about.

  The most precisely recorded moments of history lay adja-cent to the extreme actions of nature or civilization. She knew that. Pompeii. Laetoli. Hiroshima. Vesuvius (whose fumes had asphyxiated poor Pliny while he recorded its ‘tumultuous behaviour’). Tectonic slips and brutal human violence provided random time-capsules of unhistorical lives. A dog in Pompeii. A gardener’s shadow in Hiroshima. But in the midst of such events, she realized, there could never be any logic to the human violence without the distance of time. For now it would be reported, filed in Geneva, but no one could ever give meaning to it. She used to believe that meaning allowed a person a door to escape grief and fear. But she saw that those who were slammed and stained by violence lost the power of language and logic. It was the way to abandon emotion, a last protection for the self. They held on to just the coloured and patterned sarong a missing relative last slept in, which in normal times would have become a household rag but now was sacred.

  In a fearful nation, public sorrow was stamped down by the climate of uncertainty. If a father protested a son’s death, it was feared another family member would be killed. If people you knew disappeared, there was a chance they might stay alive if you did not cause trouble. This was the scarring psychosis in the country. Death, loss, was ‘unfinished,’ so you could not walk through it. There had been years of night visitations, kidnappings or murders in broad daylight. The only chance was that the creatures who fought would consume themselves. All that was left of law was a belief in an eventual revenge towards those who had power.

  And who was this skeleton? In this room, among these four, she was hiding among the unhistorical dead. To fetch a dead body: what a curious task! To cut
down the corpse of an unknown hanged man and then bear the body of the animal on one’s back . . . something dead, something buried, something already rotting away? Who was he? This representative of all those lost voices. To give him a name would name the rest.

  Anil bolted the door and went looking for the owner of the rest house. She requested a light dinner, then ordered a shandy and walked out onto the front verandah. There were no other guests, and the rest-house owner followed her.

  ‘Mr. Sarath—he always comes here?’ she asked.

  ‘Sometimes, madame, when he comes to Bandarawela. You live in Colombo?’

  ‘In North America, mostly. I used to live here.’

  ‘I have a son in Europe—he wishes to be an actor.’

  ‘I see. That’s good.’

  She stepped off the polished floor of the porch into the garden. It was the politest departure from her host she could make. She didn’t feel like hesitant small-talk this evening. But once she reached the red darkness of the flamboyant tree she turned.

  ‘Did Mr. Sarath ever come here with his wife?’

  ‘Yes, madame.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  ‘She’s very nice, madame.’

  A nod for proof, then a slight tilt of his head, a J stroke, to suggest possible hesitance in his own judgement.

  ‘Is?’

  ‘Yes. Madame?’

  ‘Even though she is dead.’

  ‘No, madame. I asked Mr. Sarath this afternoon and he said she is well. Not dead. He said she said to give me her wishes.’