Anil's Ghost

by Michael Ondaatje

  ‘Yes, sir. I had a tumbler too.’

  ‘Good.’

  He remembered Gunesena drinking the remnant of cordial, Anil holding the bottle, the night they had picked him up on the Kandy road.

  They continued a while longer with the trolley. Pushed the double swing doors and broke out into daylight.

  The noise and sun almost made him step back. They had come out into the officers’ parking lot. A few drivers stood in the shade of the one tree. Others remained within their cars, the air-conditioning purring. Sarath looked towards the main entrance but couldn’t see her. He was no longer sure she would make it out. The van that was to carry the skeleton they were going to give Anil pulled up beside them and Sarath supervised the loading. The young soldiers wanted to know everything that was going on. It had nothing to do with suspicion, they were just curious. Sarath desired some pause or quiet but he knew he would not get it. The questions were personal not official. Where was he from? How long had he been . . . ? The only way he could escape them was to answer. When they began asking about the figure on the trolley, he waved his hands in front of his face and left Gunesena with them.

  She hadn’t come out of the building. He knew, whatever had happened, he couldn’t go in looking for her. She would have to go through the hurdles of insult and humiliation and embarrassments on her own. It was almost an hour since he had last seen her.

  He needed to keep busy. Beyond the fence a man was selling sliced pineapple so Sarath bought some through the barbed wire and sprinkled the salt-and-pepper mixture on it. A rupee for two slices. He could go into the lobby, out of the sunlight, but he didn’t know whether he could trust her not to lose her temper and endanger herself more.

  An hour and a half now. When he turned and looked back for the fourth time he saw her at the doors. Just standing there, not moving, not knowing where she was or what she was supposed to do.

  He came towards her, his fist clenched, his mind swirling.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She looked down, away from him.

  ‘Anil.’

  She pulled her arm from him. He noticed she was carrying no briefcase. No papers. No forensic equipment. He put his hand on her chest to feel for the small test tubes in the inner pocket of her coat but they were not there. She didn’t react to that. Even in her state she did at least understand what he was doing.

  ‘I told you I would return to the walawwa.’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘Everyone pays attention. My brother told you that. People knew you were in Colombo the moment you got here.’

  ‘Damn you.’

  ‘You have to leave now.’

  ‘No, thanks. No more help from you.’

  ‘Take the skeleton I’ve given you and get in the van. Go back to the ship with Gunesena.’

  ‘All my papers are in that building. I have to get them back.’

  ‘You’ll never get them back. Do you understand? Forget them. You will have to re-create them. You can buy new equipment in Europe. You can replace nearly everything. It’s just you who has to be safe.’

  ‘Thanks for your help. Keep your fucking skeleton.’

  ‘Gunesena, get the van.’

  ‘Listen . . .’ She swung her look towards him. ‘Tell him to take me home. I don’t think I can walk there. I really don’t want your fucking help. But I can’t walk. I was . . . in there . . .’

  ‘Go to the lab.’

  ‘Jesus, keep your—’

  He slapped her hard. He was aware of people on the periphery, her gasp, her face as if it contained fever.

  ‘Go with the skeleton and work on it. You don’t have long. Don’t call me. Get it done overnight. They want a report in two days. But get it done tonight.’

  She was so stunned by his behaviour she climbed slowly into the van, which had drawn up beside her. Sarath watched her. He handed Gunesena the pass through the window. He saw her lowered burning face as the van curled out of his sight.

  There was no vehicle for him. He went past the guards at the gate, out onto the street, waved down a bajaj and gave the driver the address of his office. You could never settle back and relax in a bajaj; if you lost concentration you were in danger of falling out. But sitting forward, his head in his hands, he tried to lose touch with the world around him as the three-wheeler struggled through the traffic.

  Anil climbed the gangplank, then walked along the upper deck. A harbour in the afternoon. She could hear whistles and horns in the far reaches of the port. She wanted openness and air, didn’t want to face the darkness in the hold. Farther down the quay she saw a man with a camera. Anil stepped back so he would be out of sight.

  She knew she wouldn’t be staying here much longer, there was no wish in her to be here anymore. There was blood everywhere. A casual sense of massacre. She remembered what a woman at the Nadesan Centre had said to her. ‘I got out of the Civil Rights Movement partly because I couldn’t remember which massacre took place when and where. . . .’

  It was about five now. Anil found the arrack bottle and poured herself a glass, and walked the narrow steps down into the hold.

  ‘Everything all right, miss?’

  ‘Thank you, Gunesena. You can go.’

  ‘Yes, miss.’ Yet she knew he would stay with her, somewhere on the ship.

  She turned on a lamp. There was the other set of tools, which belonged to Sarath. She heard the door close behind her.

  She drank more arrack and spoke out loud, just to hear the echo in the dim light so she would not feel alone with the ancient skeleton she had been given. She cut the plastic wrapping with an X-acto knife and rolled it down. She recognized it immediately. But to be certain moved her right hand down to the heel and felt the notch in the bone that she had cut weeks earlier.

  He had found Sailor. Slowly she directed another lamp onto him. The ribs like struts on a boat. She slid her hand between the arched bones and touched the tape recorder that was there, not believing this now, not yet, until she pressed the button and voices began filling the room around her. She had the information on tape. Their questions. And she had Sailor. She put her hand between the ribs again to press the button to stop it, but as she was about to, his voice came on, very clear and focused. He must have held the recorder close to his mouth as he whispered.

  ‘I’m in the tunnel of the Armoury building. I have just a moment. As you can tell, this is not any skeleton but Sailor. It’s your twentieth-century evidence, five years old in death. Erase this tape. Erase my words here. Complete the report and be ready to leave at five tomorrow morning. There’s a seven-o’clock plane. Someone will drive you to the airport. I would like it to be me but it will probably be Gunesena. Do not leave the lab or call me.’

  Anil made the tape roll back on the rewind. She walked away from the skeleton and paced up and down the hold listening to his voice again.

  Listening to everything again.

  On Galle Face Green the brothers had talked comfortably only because of her presence. So it had seemed to her. It was a long time later that she realized they were in fact speaking only to each other, and that they were pleased to be doing so. There was a want in each of them to align themselves, she was the beard, the excuse. It was their conversation about the war in their country and what each of them had done during it and what each would not do. They were, in retrospect, closer than they imagined.

  If she were to step into another life now, back to the adopted country of her choice, how much would Gamini and the memory of Sarath be a part of her life? Would she talk to intimates about them, the two Colombo brothers? And she in some way like a sister between them, keeping them from mauling each other’s worlds? Wherever she might be, would she think of them? Consider the strange middle-class pair who were born into one world and in mid-life stepped waist-deep into another?

  At one point that night, she remembered, they spoke of how much they loved their country. In spite of everything. No Westerner would understand the love the
y had for the place. ‘But I could never leave here,’ Gamini had whispered.

  ‘American movies, English books—remember how they all end?’ Gamini asked that night. ‘The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He’s going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That’s enough reality for the West. It’s probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.’

  The worker from the civil rights organization came in with the Friday reports of victims—the fresh, almost-damp black-and-white photographs, seven of them this week. Faces covered. The reports were left for Gamini on the table by his window. By the time he got to them the shifts were changing. He turned on the tape recorder and began describing the wounds and how they were probably caused. When he got to the third picture he recognized the wounds, the innocent ones. He left the reports where they were, went down one flight of stairs and ran along the corridor to the ward. It was unlocked. He began pulling the sheets off the bodies until he saw what he knew he would see. Ever since he had picked up the third photograph, all he could hear was his heart, its banging.

  Gamini didn’t know how long he stood there. There were seven bodies in the room. There were things he could do. He didn’t know. There were things he could do perhaps. He could see the acid burns, the twisted leg. He unlocked the cupboard that held bandages, splints, disinfectant. He began washing the body’s dark-brown markings with scrub lotion. He could heal his brother, set the left leg, deal with every wound as if he were alive, as if treating the hundred small traumas would eventually bring him back into his life.

  The gash of scar on the side of your elbow you got crashing a bike on the Kandy Hill. This scar I gave you hitting you with a cricket stump. As brothers we ended up never turning our backs on each other. You were always too much of an older brother, Sarath. Still, if I had been a doctor then, I could have sewn the stitches up more carefully than Dr. Piachaud. It’s thirty years later, Sarath. It’s late afternoon—with everyone gone home except me, your least favourite relative. The one you can never relax with or feel secure with. Your unhappy shadow.

  He was leaning over the body, beginning to dress its wounds, and the horizontal afternoon light held the two of them in a wide spoke.

  There are pietàs of every kind. He recalls the sexual pietà he saw once. A man and a woman, the man having come and the woman stroking his back, her face with the acceptance of his transformed physical state. It was Sarath and Sarath’s wife he had witnessed, and then her eyes had looked up at him, in his madness, her hand not pausing in its stroke of the body within her arms.

  There were other pietàs. The story of Savitra, who wrestled her husband away from Death so that in the startling paintings of the myth you saw her hold him—joy filling her face, while his face looked capsized, in the midst of his fearful metamorphosis, this reversal back into love and life.

  But this was a pietà between brothers. And all Gamini knew in his slowed, scrambled state was that this would be the end or it could be the beginning of a permanent conversation with Sarath. If he did not talk to him in this moment, admit himself, his brother would disappear from his life. So he was too, at this moment, within the contract of a pietà.

  He opened his brother’s shirt so the chest was revealed. A gentle chest. Not hard and feral like his own. It was the generous chest of a Ganesh. An Asian belly. The chest of someone who in his sarong would stroll into the garden or onto the verandah with his tea and newspaper. Sarath had always sidestepped violence because of his character, as if there had never been a war within him. He drove people around him mad. If Gamini had been the Mouse, his brother was the Bear.

  Gamini placed the warmth of his hand against the still face. He had never worried about the fate of his one brother, had always thought he himself would be the fatal one. Perhaps they had each assumed they would crash alone in the darkness they had invented around themselves. Their marriages, their careers on this borderland of civil war among governments and terrorists and insurgents. There had never been a tunnel of light between them. Instead they had searched out and found their own dominions. Sarath in sun-drenched fields looking for astrological stones, Gamini in his medieval world of Emergency Services. Each of them most at ease, most free, when not conscious of the other. They were too similar in essence and therefore incapable of ever giving in to the other. Each refused to show hesitation and fear, it was only strength and anger they revealed when in the other’s company. The woman Anil had said, that night on Galle Face Green, ‘I can never understand someone by his strengths. Nothing is revealed there. I can only understand people by their weaknesses.’

  Sarath’s chest said everything. It was what Gamini had fought against. But now this body lay on the bed undefended. It was what it was. No longer a counter of argument, no longer an opinion that Gamini refused to accept. Oh, there seemed to be a mark like that made with a spear. A small wound, not deep in his chest, and Gamini bathed it and taped it up.

  He had seen cases where every tooth had been removed, the nose cut apart, the eyes humiliated with liquids, the ears entered. He had been, as he ran down that hospital hallway, most frightened of seeing his brother’s face. It was the face they went for in some cases. They could in their hideous skills sniff out vanity. But they had not touched Sarath’s face.

  The shirt they had dressed Sarath in had giant sleeves. Gamini knew why. He ripped the sleeves down to the cuffs. Below the elbows the hands had been broken in several places.

  It was dark now. It looked as if the room were full of grey water. He walked to the entrance and touched the switch, and seven central lights came on. He came back and sat with his brother.

  He was still there an hour later when the bodies started coming in from a bombing somewhere in the city.

  President Katugala was in a white cotton outfit, looking old, not at all like the giant posters of him throughout the city that had celebrated and idealized him for years. When you looked at the real image of the man, the lean face below the thinning white hair, there was a compassion for him, no matter what he had done. He looked weary and scared. He had been tense during the previous days, as if there was some kind of foreshadowing in his mind, as if some mechanism he had no control of had been put in motion. But it was now National Heroes Day. And the one thing the Silver President did every National Heroes Day was to go out and meet the people. He could never give up a political rally.

  The week before, there had been warnings from the special forces of the police and army for him not to go among the crowds. He had in fact promised he would not do so. But around three-thirty in the afternoon, it was discovered the President was out meeting the people. The head of Katugala’s special unit, with a few other officials, leapt into a jeep and went looking for him. They located him reasonably quickly in the crowded Colombo streets and had just reached him and were standing behind him at the moment the bomb went off.

  Katugala was wearing a loose white long-sleeved jacket and sarong. He was wearing sandals. He had a watch on his left wrist. He stopped by Lipton Circus and made a short speech from his bulletproof vehicle.

  R—— wore denim shorts and a loose shirt. Underneath these was a layer of explosives and two Duracell batteries and two blue switches. One for the left hand, one for the right, linked by wires to the explosives. The first switch armed the bomb. It would stay on as long as the bomber wished. When the other switch was turned on, the bomb detonated. Both needed to be activated for the explosion to occur. You could wait as long as you wanted before turning on the second switch. Or you could turn the first switch off. R—— had more clothing on above the denim shorts. Four Velcro straps held the explosives pack to his body, and along with the dynamite there was the great weight of thousands of small ball bearings.

&
nbsp; After Katugala finished speaking at Lipton Circus, he travelled in the bulletproof Range Rover towards the large rally on Galle Face Green. A year earlier a fortune-teller had said, ‘He will be destroyed like a plate falling to the ground.’ Now he made his way along the dual carriageway. But he kept climbing out from his vehicle and greeting the crowd. R—— threaded his way on a bicycle through the chaos of people, or maybe he was walking, wheeling it. In any case, Katugala was now among the people; he had stopped again because he saw a procession of slogan-waving supporters coming onto the street from a side road. He tried to help supervise it. And R——, who would kill him, who had infiltrated the outer circle of Katugala’s residential staff so that he was well known by them, R—— came slowly towards him, riding or walking his bicycle.

  There are a few photographs of Katugala taken during the last half-hour of his life that exist only in a file belonging to the army. A couple of pictures were taken by the police from a high building, some by journalists, which were later confiscated and never returned, never published in the newspapers. They show him in his white outfit, looking frail, beginning to appear concerned. Mostly he looks old. Over the years no unflattering pictures of him were published in the newspapers. But in these photographs what you notice first is his age—emphasized by the fact that behind him is his platonic form on a giant cardboard cut-out, where he looks vibrant, with thick white hair. And behind him you can also see the armoured vehicle that he has left for the last time.

  Katugala’s plan, in his last minutes, was to get the procession of supporters from his constituency to join the crowd on Galle Face Green. He had begun walking back to his vehicle, changed his mind and returned to choreograph the procession once more; this was how he came to be caught with his bodyguards between two very different processions—his supporters and the general populace celebrating National Heroes Day. If someone had said the President was in their midst, most of those in the crowd would have been surprised. Where is the President? At street level, in the crowd, the only presidential presence was a giant cardboard cut-out of him carried like a film prop, bobbing up and down.