Questions of Travel Read online

  Grief moved by stealth. In the act of putting on a shirt, he might think, “The last time I wore this, they were still alive.” A banyan tree was always close at hand, now expanding, now shrinking. Its branches formed a black square. It encompassed all that was unimaginable: the future, for one thing, or the last minutes of his son’s life.

  A week earlier they had been alive. Ten days. Twelve. The last time he had cleaned his nails, the last time he had sneezed. Run, run, run and bring me…The roots of the banyan were lifting inside Ravi, and dry contractions seized his stomach. He couldn’t remember the magical object that would restore his wife and child.

  It was Malini’s fault that their son was dead. He could have killed her at times.

  Carmel Mendis, weeping into a neighbor’s black Bakelite phone, nevertheless reproached her son for staying alone with an unmarried woman. What would people say?

  Ravi repeated Freda’s argument: he was safest there. The apartment block, white and streamlined as a plane, had a monitored alarm system and was patrolled day and night by a guard. The compound wall was three meters high and bristled along its length with upside-down nails. When Freda pointed out these defenses, Ravi had thought how easily circuits are disabled and men frightened or bribed. But he said nothing. Precautions soothed her and left him unconcerned. Freda mistook his silence for dullness and listed the security arrangements again.

  Ravi relayed them to his mother, and added that he had his own room. “My own bathroom, also.” As he spoke, it struck him as extremely strange that two people should have a bathroom each.

  He was providing all this information in an undertone. Freda had gone into her bedroom and shut the door when his mother called. This had the effect of making Ravi vividly conscious that she was there, on the other side of the wall.

  Curiosity, a resilient emotion, rose up in Carmel. “Son, what is it like there?” Her mind, running through scenes from Dallas, reached for something fabulous and unattainable, but stuck on an older ideal: Valenciennes lace. She also asked, “Can’t you get a chaperone, child?” The peculiar word, fished up from the sunless depths of his mother’s girlhood, went through Ravi like pain.

  Nimal Corea turned up with a laptop, a bottle of Johnnie Walker, and ganja already rolled into a joint. He wanted to show Ravi the website he had set up as a memorial to Malini and Hiran. There was an email address to which people could write if they had information about the murders. It was understood that faith in the police investigation was limited, at best.

  Ravi refused to look at the photograph of his son. In fact he didn’t want to look at the site at all but didn’t know how to say so without giving offence. Nimal scrolled down, and Malini looked out from the screen in a mercilessly exact rendition of her gaze.

  Nimal was wearing a ring set with a garnet on the little finger of his damaged hand. He had grown heavier, and called with corpulent oaths for justice and revenge. He spilled the contents of a manila envelope on the table, and Ravi shuffled printouts of emails. There were messages of sympathy and heartfelt, righteous denunciations, but no one had anything useful to say. Nimal looked on, jiggling his knee. But now and then he would lower his head and turn his ring with a sheepish air.

  Ravi, who had never tasted alcohol, never used ganja, didn’t hesitate to sample these gifts. It was like attending the funeral of his wife and son: not a thing he had expected he would do but suddenly unavoidable. A glassy remoteness encased him whenever anyone spoke of what had happened. It was not that he was unmoved by Nimal’s efforts, but everything—the condolences from strangers, the modular leather furniture, his friend’s declarations—had the overlarge quality of a film. He had noticed, and it was consistent with the fantastic unfolding of events, that one of the emails offering sympathy came from Deepti Pieris, Malini’s old adversary at the NGO.

  When the whisky was two-thirds gone, Nimal broke down. He wanted to offer Ravi a place to stay, he said, but his lodgings consisted of a room above the RealLanka office. With the collapse of dot-coms across the world, the public float of the company had been postponed, and Nimal’s salary was devoured by the cost of living in central Colombo. And, “Work, work, work, all the time,” he wept. There was no time, he said, over and over again, as snot and tears mingled on his plump, childlike face. “Everything is faster, we must work faster, eat faster, shit faster.”

  Ravi paid no attention. He had just caught sight of his hand—a surprise! What was it doing there at the end of his arm?

  Time passed, and although he continued to swallow pills, Ravi stopped sleeping—so he would have claimed. But there were mornings when he could remember having spent hours on a beach looking out at black waves.

  One day he asked Freda, “Who would want to harm me? Why do I have to stay here?” She had just come home; her keys were still in her hand. She drew in her chin and looked hard at him, but it was plain that his bafflement was sincere.

  Later on, when she was in her room, Ravi stood close to the door. Freda was talking on her mobile: “I mean, yesterday I really thought there were signs of improvement. And then today, I actually had to spell out that he’s at risk because it would be assumed Malini’s passed on information they’d rather he didn’t have. And he still didn’t get it. He said, ‘But I’ve never done anything.’ So I said, ‘Exactly. And they don’t want you to start.’”

  Then Ravi heard, “I’m sure you’re right, I’m sure it’s the medication. He’s just not making connections.” And, “Yes. Super-sad.”

  When Freda was at work, Ravi went into her room. It was his mother’s bedroom, secretive and calm. But Carmel’s room was crowded with heavy, dark furniture: a modest landscape packed with gloomy lakes and cliffs. Here, there were small, entrancing things: necklaces, painted boxes, photographs, the bright spines of books beside the bed. Ravi realized that when his mother had asked him what Freda’s flat was like, what he should have said was that everything in it was new. He had just understood the meaning of money: it was freedom from ugly, inherited tables, from lumpy pillows and chairs that sagged.

  Rings sparkled on a tray. Like all his countrymen, Ravi was a connoisseur of gems. He saw the diamond Freda called The Millstone and left lying around the flat, and the magnificent sapphire—he spied her Jaffna Tamil mother in its blue depths. There was a turquoise lozenge bound with silver, and an opal for bad luck. And there was sheer rubbish, a big red rose molded from plastic, a glass band in which purples and lilacs merged.

  He handled the jewels. They were cold as corpses.

  From their first meeting, Freda had reminded him of someone. This impression, a bird he had to identify from its shadow, hovered fuzzy and persistent in Ravi’s brain. He studied a group of framed photographs on a chest. A fair-haired man was genial in one of them; in another, his padded arms clasped Freda against a backdrop of snow. Ravi went out to the living room and examined the larger photo of him there. He filled the frame, a squared-off man. Ravi thought of good English butter. He thought of all the red roast beef the man contained.

  The balcony where Ravi stood smoking looked into a broad-leafed tree. On the far side of the street, just where a bat had hanged itself in the power lines, a car pulled up and a girl got out. She wore jeans and a UCLA T-shirt, but her hair, lustrous with oil, flowed to her hips. When Hiran was very young, he had delighted in undoing his mother’s plait and staggering around her with her hair in his fist, imprisoning her with its locks. Peering through leaves, Ravi watched the girl, who was now addressing an intercom. The gate before her began to swing open. There might still be time to leap from the balcony, seize her, shear the hair from her head.

  Freda plugged in her PowerBook and answered emails. She was a news junkie, she informed Ravi with pride. “Get this!” she would say. There might follow the Washington Post’s opinion of a summit about Palestine, or The Guardian’s retrospective take on the Y2K bug. A dead man hovered at her shoulder: Ravi saw his father, chin propped on hand beside his shortwave radio, lost in Letter from
America or smiling at Just a Minute on the World Service.

  When Freda invited Ravi to use her laptop, he declined. What he didn’t say was that things had their own size and were not equal—even the primitive technology represented by Father Ignatius’s old map had known that. But the Internet, abolishing distance, undermined relativity; it offered sapphires and plastic with an even hand. When arguing with Malini, it had been usual for Ravi to say things like, “These people who were raped or tortured or killed have no connection to you. Why are you concerned with them?” Why hadn’t she replied, “What connects you to the level of coffee in a Cambridge pot?”

  The living room contained a phone and an answering machine, but it was often Freda’s mobile that rang. Ravi watched her thumbs move over it, agile and dark. He noticed that she didn’t like to be parted from the sleek little phone, carrying it with her from room to room and never leaving the flat without checking that it was in her bag. He thought of the oval St. Christopher medallion that accompanied his mother everywhere, safety-pinned to nightie or bra.

  Freda played her messages. Hello, this is Luis. Just me, darling. Hi, it’s Djamilla/Nick/Fran. She would tell Ravi, “Imogen and I were in college together. She’s in Ho Chi Minh City now.” Or: “Joel’s such a sweetie. Nothing like one’s idea of a New Yorker, actually.” The fair man had acquired a name, Martin, a job description, head of client relations in an Anglo-American mining consortium, and a vocation, helping Africans see why they needed Anglo-American mines.

  A postcard came of the Valley of the Kings. Freda propped it on a shelf, beside a card from Seville. One of the magazines by the couch contained a map of the world on which swooping lines traced an airline’s routes. Global, connected: that was how Ravi pictured Freda Hobson’s life.

  She was at work when the doorbell rang. Ravi knew he was going to be killed. Without hesitation, he slithered under his bed.

  That evening, Freda asked why he hadn’t opened the door to her cleaner. “Were you out?” Out was discouraged if not exactly forbidden. Ravi usually bought cigarettes from the guard but had been known to walk to the shop on the main road. It was one of the tensions that thickened around his smoking. He hadn’t realized that Freda employed a cleaner; had not, in fact, given any thought whatsoever to the cleaning of the flat, such labor having always been accomplished by this or that woman in his orbit. He might have pointed out that Freda had neglected to warn him the cleaner was due, but found he had forgotten the words. He couldn’t remember how to say “I didn’t know.” Silently, he watched a scribble of irritation pass over her face.

  Wherever Freda Hobson went, she made herself indispensable to a woman she had selected. Men admired her, at first. Very young, she had abstracted the pattern of her parents’ marriage—the blade and the block—and rolled it into a tube through which to view the world. She had collected twenty or thirty close female friends, whose birthdays were noted in a book. Freda neither quarreled nor abandoned, but with each new friend something would happen to make her feel tremendously let down. She asked herself again what a stranger could have said to Malini to lure her into his car. Her friend was prone to girlishness in the presence of fluently spoken men, a weakness explained, Freda supposed, by an early attachment to the unspeakable père. But how to account for Ravi? There was the obvious explanation, but Freda, having been careful to fall in love with a plain man, was unmoved by the other kind. Goldfish, too, are decorative. This business with the cleaner was the limit! The cleaner was erratic, and might not turn up for weeks; the day guard, a relative, offered far-fetched excuses that Freda neither rejected nor believed. As for Ravi, he hadn’t so much as washed a plate until she made it clear that he was to do so, and then he hadn’t known how to stack the machine. Freda had decorated the flat with pictures and carvings from home; she liked to keep a few of the beautiful, familiar things close. But a velvet rectangle stamped with the head of Nefertiti had blighted a wall, bestowed on Freda, like the cleaner, by her landlord. She had shut it away at once in a cupboard. Looking in from the threshold of Ravi’s room one day—it was observation rather than intrusion, since the boundary was respected—she saw that he had propped the velvety abomination beside his bed. What was really unfathomable, however, was his inability to act in his own interest. What he had seen had left him blank-eyed, but he refused counseling. He had the soul of a—but Freda was unable to think of anything at once passive, exasperating and in need of rescue. Some kind of endangered slug that secreted a mild irritant, perhaps?

  After the incident with the cleaner, Ravi turned jumpy. Night noises unsettled him, but silence swelled. He had believed that he was indifferent to dying; that he might even welcome the ending of his life. Others had feared the same. He guessed that he had been watched at first, never left alone. The faces of strangers, dark ones and pale, had hung over him in the room with a window at either end. But when the cleaner rang the doorbell, it was protest that sent Ravi to hold his breath in the dust under his bed. Stubborn life had asserted itself. He remembered a childhood experiment, a flower placed in colored water that traveled up to stain white petals. He felt the red force that insisted in his veins.

  The immediate media coverage of the killings had been extensive and sympathetic. There were brave editors, and those who remembered Malini’s father from the old days. The child was photogenic, and where human feeling might have slumped, it was propped up by the piquancy of the way the woman’s corpse had been displayed. But there were no developments, and the murder of obscure civilians was not exactly rare. As drama, the story was ill equipped to withstand the latest turn taken by the war. Talk of a cease-fire and international mediation had naturally led to an increase in slaughter. The Tigers were enjoying a string of military successes. Coverage of Malini and Hiran’s case, like hope of a swift resolution to the conflict, flickered and went out.

  Laura, 1999–2000

  SHE PERSUADED MEERA BRYDEN to commission a feature on Naples, pitching it as a neglected place. Thousands passed through on their way to Pompeii or the Amalfi Coast, but the city itself had slipped from the tourist beat. It was deemed too dangerous to visit or too dirty; pundits warned perennially of its collapse. Laura used words like reveal, disclose, uncover. Meera agreed at once, as Laura had known she would. Wanderlust, on which the Wayfarer fed, was only lust, after all, lustily excited by penetration and veils.

  The old crowd around Theo was dispersing, allegiances shifting or falling away, careers and children claiming their due. The woman who had written about surfing had moved to Manchester and was marketing herself as a brand strategist, the letterpress printer had died. Bea had been promoted to working sixty-hour weeks. The guerrilla gardener had inherited a title and gone to live in a castle in Spain.

  Theo had invented a new project. Laura had sparked it by telling him about the man who for decades had gone about Sydney chalking the word “Eternity” on its pavements. Now, once a week, Theo went out after dark to blazon the latest entry in his Chalk Anthology in the streets. Laura came out of a Tube station one afternoon and saw he whistles his Jews into line. She walked about Swiss Cottage, spotting fragments of Celan’s “Death Fugue” on walls, pavements, curbs—but she couldn’t find them all.

  He chose his poems at random from those he knew by heart, said Theo, the anthology didn’t mean anything. He was trying to interest Lewis Bryden in it; they could go out together to chalk up the poems at night. The whole thing struck Laura as very artskool: hip, portentous, annoying. In the restaurant where she was having dinner with Bea, “He’s at least ten years too old to be carrying on like that,” she decided. Bea agreed; these two now permitted themselves that kind of acid judgment on Theo. Then Bea Morley set down her fork. It was one of those days when her soft yellow moustache was in evidence. She touched it, crying, “But how awful if he was sensible like us!”

  Laura had come to dread what she had once so looked forward to, evenings alone with Theo. When she arrived, it was usual to find him slow and slurred. His
stories looped, drifted, tripped over themselves, grew labyrinthine. There was an evening when he endlessly circled a momentous yet enigmatic memory of setting off alone on a journey. A whistle had sounded, and his mother, dressed in a short blue jacket with silver buttons, turned rigidly away. Laura’s thoughts wandered. When the fuddled account had trailed off, she asked whether Theo had finished his thesis. Suddenly lucid, focused, he snapped, “When did you start to pry?”

  There was no longer even the fiction that Theo didn’t drink when he was alone; that was another thing that was now permitted. He told Laura that there were occasions when he was drunk for three or four days at a stretch. “Pleasantly drunk. You have no idea. The far side of great drunkenness is just amazingly nice.” But Bea said that on a weekend when Theo had gone with her to Berkshire, she had heard him in the bath. He was moaning softly, “Poor Theo. Poor Theo.” He came out at last, with pink cheeks and an empty bottle of gin.

  The problem was no longer drunkenness—now it was being sober. When Bea invited a few friends to tea for Laura’s birthday, Theo didn’t show. Bea said grimly, “His short-term memory’s shot.” They waited and waited. There was no answer on Theo’s phone. At last, someone switched off the lights, and Bea came out of the dark carrying a cake stuck with candles; the pennant flames flew sideways. Laura picked up a knife.

  One evening in Hampstead, Theo fell asleep halfway through a sentence. The night was cold; Laura didn’t like to leave him downstairs. She pushed and coaxed him up to his room at the top of the house—a journey both hazardous and dreary—where she covered him with a quilt and left him snoring. On the landing, she paused to recover and looked around. Mass-market prints covered the walls. There was the busty peasant from Naples, there was a half-naked female rising from a jungle pool, there was a Chinese girl with an angular blue face. But as Laura made her way down, the display was dominated by kitsch, reiterated weeping. The tearful, cherubic boys she had noticed on her first visit had proliferated. They had crept into the hall, they were creeping up the stairs.