Anil's Ghost

by Michael Ondaatje

  You’ve gone for something,

  And I know you won’t be back.

  Otherwise the whole marriage and divorce, the hello and good-bye, she treated as something illicit that deeply embarrassed her. She left him as soon as their term at Guy’s Hospital was over, so he could not locate her. She had plotted her departure for the end of term to avoid the harassment he was fully capable of; he was one of those men with time on his hands. Cease and desist! she had scrawled formally on his last little whining billet-doux before mailing it back to him.

  She emerged with no partner. Cloudless at last. She was unable to bear the free months before she could begin classes again, before she could draw her studies close to her, more intimately and seriously than she had imagined possible. When she did return she fell in love with working at night, and sometimes she couldn’t bear to leave the lab, just rested her happily tired dark head on the table. There was no curfew or compromise with a lover anymore. She got home at midnight, was up at eight, every casebook and experiment and investigation alive in her head and reachable.

  Eventually she heard he’d returned to Colombo. And with his departure there was no longer any need to remember favourite barbers and restaurants along the Galle Road. Her last conversation in Sinhala was the distressed chat she’d had with Lalitha that ended with her crying about missing egg rulang and curd with jaggery. She no longer spoke Sinhala to anyone. She turned fully to the place she found herself in, focussing on anatomical pathology and other branches of forensics, practically memorizing Spitz and Fisher. Later she won a scholarship to study in the United States, and in Oklahoma became caught up in the application of the forensic sciences to human rights. Two years later, in Arizona, she was studying the physical and chemical changes that occurred in bones not only during life but also after death and burial.

  She was now alongside the language of science. The femur was the bone of choice.

  Anil stood in the Archaeological Offices in Colombo. She moved down the hall from map to map. Each one depicted an aspect of the island: climate, soil, plantation, humidity, historical ruins, birds, insect life. Traits of the country like those of a complex friend. Sarath was late. When he arrived they would load up the jeep.

  ‘. . . Don’t know much en-tomology,’ she sang, looking at the map of mines—a black scattering of them like filaments. She glanced at herself reflected vaguely in the map’s glass. She was in jeans, sandals and a loose silk shirt.

  If she were working in America she would probably be listening to a Walkman while sawing off slim rings of bone with the microtone. This was an old tradition among the people she’d worked with in Oklahoma. Toxicologists and histologists always insisted on rock and roll. You stepped in through the airtight door and some heavy metal would be bumping and thrashing through the speakers, while Vernon Jenkins, who was thirty-six years old and weighed ninety pounds, studied lung tissue mounted on a slide. Around him it could have been civil war at the Fillmore. Next door was the Guard Shack, where people entered to identify dead relatives and friends, unaware of the music because of the airtight room, unaware of the shorthand descriptions circulating over the transistor headset intercoms: ‘Bring up the Lady in the Lake.’ ‘Bring up the by-herselfer.’

  She loved their rituals. The people in the lab would traipse into the greenroom at lunchtime with their thermoses and sandwiches and watch The Price Is Right, all of them in awe at this other civilization, as if only they—working in a building where the dead outnumbered the living—were in a normal world.

  It was in Oklahoma, within a month of her arrival, that they established the Fuck Yorick School of Forensics. This was not just a principle of necessary levity but the name of their bowling team. Wherever she worked, first in Oklahoma, then in Arizona, her cohorts ended the evenings with beer in one hand, a cheese taco in the other, cheering or insulting teams and scuffing along the edges of the bowling alleys in their shoes from the planet Andromeda. She had loved the Southwest, missed being one of the boys, and was now light-years beyond the character she had been in London. They would go through a heavy day’s work load, then drive to the wild suburban bars and clubs on the outskirts of Tulsa or Norman, with Sam Cooke in their hearts. In the greenroom a list was tacked up of every bowling alley in Oklahoma with a liquor license. They ignored job offers that came from dry counties. They snuffed out death with music and craziness. The warnings of carpe diem were on gurneys in the hall. They heard the rhetoric of death over the intercom; ‘vaporization’ or ‘microfragmentation’ meant the customer in question had been blown to bits. They couldn’t miss death, it was in every texture and cell around them. No one changed the radio dial in a morgue without a glove on.

  Meanwhile, bright tungsten bulbs gave the labs a clear optic light, the music in Toxicology was perfect for sit-ups and stretches when you found your neck and back had become tense from close-focus work. And around her was a quick good-old-boy debate and an explanation of a dead body in a car.

  ‘When’d they report her missing?’

  ‘She’s been gone, lo, these five or six years.’

  ‘She drove into the lake, Clyde. She already had to stop the car once to open a gate. She’d been drinking. Her husband said she just took the dog and left.’

  ‘No dog in the car?’

  ‘No dog in the car. I wouldn’t have missed a Chihuahua, though it was full of mud. Her bones had demineralized. Car lights were on. Skip the photo, Rafael.’

  ‘So—when she opened the gate she let the dog free. She already had a plan. It’s a by-herselfer. When the car started filling up, she lost it and climbed into the back seat. That’s where she was found. Right?’

  ‘She should have knocked off her husband. . . .’

  ‘He could have been a saint.’

  Anil would always love the clatter and verbal fling of pathologists.

  She had arrived in Colombo directly from working in sparse high-tech desert towns of the American Southwest. Although her last location, Borrego Springs, hadn’t seemed, at the start, enough of a real desert to satisfy her. Too many cappuccino bars and clothing shops on the main street. But after a week she was comfortable in what was really a narrow strip of civilization, a few mid-twentieth-century luxuries surrounded by the starkness of the desert. The beauty of the place was subtle. In the southwestern deserts you needed to look twice at emptiness, you needed to take your time, the air like ether, where things grew only with difficulty. On the island of her childhood she could spit on the ground and a bush would leap up.

  The first time Anil had gone into the desert, her guide had a water-mist bottle attached to his belt. He gestured her over, sprayed the thin leaves of a plant and pulled her head down towards it. She inhaled the smell of creosote. The plant spilled this toxic quality when it rained, to keep away anything that tried to grow too near it—and so reserved the small area around it for its own water supply.

  She learned about agave, which had at least seven uses, among them its thorn as a needle, its fibres as thread. She saw cheese bushes, dyeweed, dead-man’s-fingers (a succulent you could eat only during one month of the year), smoke trees with their rare system of roots (an exact underground reflection of their size and shape above ground), and ocotillo, which dropped its leaves to preserve moisture. And plants whose colours seemed washed out and those that doubled their rich colours in twilight. She spent as little time as possible in the small house she shared on H Street. She was usually within the flat-roofed paleontology lab by seven-thirty with a coffee and a croissant. In the evenings she jeeped into the desert with her co-workers. There had been zebras here three million years before. Camels. All the usual browsers and grazers. She walked above the bones of these great defunct creatures, on atolls left from ocean days seven million years earlier. There was a slight flirtation as she brushed the hand of someone passing binoculars to her to search out a sparrow hawk.

  Once again she discovered the passion for bowling among forensic anthropologists. Perhaps too much ca
re during the day picking up fragments with tweezers or using whisper brushes made them want to hurl things around with six-drink abandon. There was no alley in Borrego Springs, so each night they’d clamber into a museum van and drive out of the valley into nearby hill towns. They brought their own ‘hammers’—specially weighted balls for competition bowling. All through these nights, in spite of the active jukebox in the Quonset hut, she kept singing a woeful song: Better days in jail, with your back turned towards the wall. . . . Though there was no sadness in her during this time. It was as if she was expecting the sadness of that song to reach her eventually, almost knowing there would be a conflict with Cullis when he arrived.

  Lovers who read stories or look at paintings about love do so supposedly for clarity. But the more confusing and anarchic the story, the more those caught in love will believe it. There are only a few great and trustworthy love drawings. And in these works is an aspect that continues to remain unordered and private, no matter how famous they become. They bring no sanity, give just a blue tormented light.

  The writer Martha Gellhorn had said, ‘The best relationship is with someone who lives five blocks away with a great sense of humour and who is preoccupied with his work.’ Well, that was her lover Cullis, though make it five states, make it five thousand miles. Make him married.

  It seemed they loved each other most when they were apart. They were too careful when together, when the extremes of possible joy remained dangerous. She had been content in Borrego Springs with just their phone conversations. Women love distance, he’d said to her once.

  What happened in Borrego Springs took place during their first night together. She needed to be at work early the next day: something unexpected had come up. A beautiful new tusk, but she didn’t tell him that. He had arrived a few hours earlier, having flown a thousand miles. His sullenness and annoyance at the change of weekend plans forced an old fury out of her. They had been singing their fucking arias of romance with limits for too long.

  She rose from the bed in Borrego and took a shower sitting on the edge of the bath, facing the rain of it. Her tight, furious wrists. Steam filled the room. A week before Cullis’s arrival she had booked a room for him, for them, at the Una Palma Motel. He was to come in on the eight-o’clock bus from the airport on a Friday night to coincide with her three-day weekend. Then they had unearthed the tusk.

  Meeting him at the bus depot she gave him a carefully selected sprig of desert lavender, which he broke trying to insert into his buttonhole.

  *

  A good archaeologist can read a bucket of soil as if it were a complex historical novel. If a bone had been grazed by any kind of stone, Sarath, she knew, could follow such grains of evidence to their likely origin. As she had taken the few fragments of the damaged section of Sailor’s skull and reconstructed it with a glue gun. But in Colombo she couldn’t locate half the equipment she and Sarath really needed, equipment they had in excess in America. It would be picks and shovels, strings and stones. She’d gone to Cargill’s department store and picked up a couple of shaving brushes and a whisk.

  When Sarath finally arrived at the Archaeological Offices, he joined her by the wall maps. It was a few days after their evening on Galle Face Green with his brother. She had tried reaching Sarath the next day, but he seemed to have disappeared, gone to ground. In the meantime a package had come for her from Chitra, so during that first afternoon she consumed the entomologist’s badly typed notes, then pulled a road map out of her bag.

  Now, on this Sunday morning, Sarath had called at dawn, apologizing not for the hour but for being away, out of touch. He’d asked her to meet him at the offices, ‘in an hour,’ he said. ‘You know how to get there? You go right from your place and fall into Buller’s Road.’

  She’d hung up, looking at the luxury of the bed, and went off to shower.

  ‘I have samples from the first burial site,’ he said, ‘taken from the cranial cavities. Probably from a swamp. They buried him temporarily in wet earth. It makes sense. Less digging. They could have put him in a paddy field, then taken him later to the restricted area and hidden him there to disguise the fact that he was contemporary. Anyway, I think the original burial was in this general vicinity’—he pointed—‘Ratnapura district. That’s southeast from here. We need to check the water tables.’

  ‘Somewhere where there are fireflies,’ she said. And he looked at her with a blank face.

  ‘We can be more specific, we can make a smaller radius,’ she continued. ‘Fireflies. So not a busy settlement. Somewhere more open. Like a riverbank that people do not go to. Chitra, the entomologist I told you about—those marks that looked like freckles, she came to the boat and studied them and made notes. She has hundreds of charts of insect life on the island. She said it was pupae-encagle glue, from the “shout-and-die” cicadas—you find them in forest areas like Ritigala. Here—she drew a map for us of the possible places—they are all further south, which links with your soil results. Somewhere on the outskirts of Sinharaja Forest, maybe.’

  ‘On the north side of it,’ he said. ‘The soil on the other peripheries wouldn’t fit.’

  ‘Okay, then this stretch here.’

  Sarath drew a rectangle with a red felt pen on the glass that covered the map. Weddagala to the west, Moragoda to the east. Ratnapura and Sinharaja.

  ‘Somewhere in here is a swamp or small lake, a pokuna in the forest,’ he said, clarifying.

  ‘Who else is there, I wonder.’

  Since the Archaeological Offices were deserted, they took their time collecting whatever maps and books they needed. Sarath was walking in and out of the building, packing the jeep he had borrowed. She had no idea how long they would be away from Colombo, or where they would stay. Another of Sarath’s favourite rest houses perhaps. While he looked through various soil charts she grabbed a field manual from the library shelves.

  ‘So we stay where? In Ratnapura?’ She said it loud. She liked the echoes in this large building.

  ‘Beyond that. There is a place we can stay, a walawwa, an old family estate—we can continue working there. With luck it’s still empty. Sailor must have been killed somewhere in that area, perhaps even came from there. We can try to find Palipana’s artist on the way. I suggest you break contact with Chitra.’

  ‘And you’ve told no one.’

  ‘I have to meet officials, give them summaries of what we’re up to, but for them our investigation is nothing. I haven’t spoken about this.’

  ‘How can you bear it.’

  ‘You don’t understand how bad things were. Whatever the government is possibly doing now, it was worse when there was real chaos. You were not here for that—the law abandoned by everyone, save a few good lawyers. Terror everywhere, from all sides. We wouldn’t have survived with your rules of Westminster then. So illegal government forces rose up in retaliation. And we were caught in the middle. It was like being in a room with three suitors, all of whom had blood on their hands. In nearly every house, in nearly every family, there was knowledge of someone’s murder or abduction by one side or another. I’ll tell you a thing I saw. . . .’

  Sarath was speaking in the empty offices, but he looked around.

  ‘I was in the south. . . . It was almost evening, the markets closed. Two men, insurgents I suppose, had caught a man. I don’t know what he had done. Maybe he had betrayed them, maybe he had killed someone, or disobeyed an order, or not agreed quickly enough. In those days the justice of death came in at any level. I don’t know if he was to be executed, or harassed and lectured at, or in the most unlikely scenario, forgiven. He was wearing a sarong, a white shirt, the long sleeves rolled up. His shirt hung outside the sarong. He had no shoes on. And he was blindfolded. They propped him up, made him sit awkwardly on the crossbar of a bicycle. One of the captors sat on the saddle, the one with the rifle stood by his side. When I saw them they were about to leave. The man could see nothing that was going on around him or where he would be going.

>   ‘When they took off, the blindfolded man had to somehow hang on. One hand on the handlebars, but the other he had to put around the neck of his captor. It was this necessary intimacy that was disturbing. They wobbled off, the man with the rifle following on another bike.

  ‘It would have been easier if they had all walked. But this felt in an odd way ceremonial. Perhaps a bike was a form of status for them and they wished to use it. Why transport a blindfolded victim on a bicycle? It made all life seem precarious. It made all of them more equal. Like drunk university students. The blindfolded man had to balance his body in tune with his possible killer. They cycled off and at the far end of the street, beyond the market buildings, they turned and disappeared. Of course the reason they did it that way was so none of us would forget it.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  There are images carved into or painted on rock—a perspective of a village seen from the height of a nearby hill, a single line depicting a woman’s back bent over a child—that have altered Sarath’s perceptions of his world. Years ago he and Palipana entered unknown rock darknesses, lit a match and saw hints of colour. They went outside and cut branches off a rhododendron, and returned and set them on fire to illuminate the cave, smoke from the green wood acrid and filling the burning light.

  These were discoveries made during the worst political times, alongside a thousand dirty little acts of race and politics, gang madness and financial gain. War having come this far like a poison into the bloodstream could not get out.

  Those images in caves through the smoke and firelight. The night interrogations, the vans in daylight picking up citizens at random. That man he had seen taken away on a bicycle. Mass disappearances at Suriyakanda, reports of mass graves at Ankumbura, mass graves at Akmeemana. Half the world, it felt, was being buried, the truth hidden by fear, while the past revealed itself in the light of a burning rhododendron bush.