Sugar and Other Stories (12 page)

“You could acquire other skills.”

“Oh yes. To do what. What skills? Young men might learn to operate them computers, but us as are set in our ways, we’re dead men, and you know it, you’ve written us off, a whole generation, you can’t wait for us to be tidied away. Come on, admit it.”

“I’m not here for that reason.”

“No. O’course you aren’t. But you’re not here to help men like me, are you? Th’young, maybe. Th’bright ones. I’d give up investigating us and let us die wi decency as fast as we can, Miss. Honest I would.”

Later, in her hotel room again, Joanna felt despondent after this conversation with a self-styled dead man. The mass of men, she thought, are disappointed and angry. Why should the dead be any different, why should we suppose that it isn’t our absolute
nature to want more than we can have and yet to cling like limpets to what we know and have made of ourselves? Why not bungalows with peonies, why not a department of the afterlife full of fine steel tubing? Why should not the worst and most tenacious aspects of our characters persist longest? Why should I suppose that I have any right to hope either to change the world or to be quietly annihilated: those hopes are just part of what I am, which goes on and on within certain clearly defined and very narrow limits. As if in answer to her thoughts on disappointment and anger the voices started up, muttering behind the bathroom door, indistinguishable but furious, furious, purely enraged. Joanna’s second hypothesis had been that it is indeed our ancestors who form our eternity, the time before and the time after our short time on earth, like the Japanese grandfather who presided at breakfast, like Bonnie Roote’s happy family gathering. For an individual man or woman was an object not unlike the Christmas cactus, “Joanna Hope”, bearing its eternal genes which dictate its form and future forever and forever. The voices were attached, not to the vacated garden, but to her own blood and presence. She could go to the Academy of the Return and enquire what quality in her it was that enabled her to hear them, or she could close her mind to them, confront and ignore them. She went to the bathroom door. She imagined the alternatives behind it: shower curtain, non-slip rubber bathmat, glistening red porcelain, or the dusty garret the voices inhabited. There was a susurration: shifting plastic, dripping tap, monotonous plaint.

“Please be quiet,” she said. “I can hear you. I can’t help you, and I don’t want to hear you. You must make things better yourselves … Please, I beg of you, leave me alone. Now.”

Silence. More silence. Courage, Joanna thought, turning back towards the delightful anonymous bed, with its strip of discreet lighting, with its warm gold sheets.

As she raised her knee to get into it, the voice said, “Of course, if you’d treated her a bit better, she wouldn’t be so spiteful, she’d show more understanding, more consideration, she was often
lacking in feeling but I put some of it down to your mismanagement …”

“She’ll learn, in the fullness of time.”

In the fullness of time, the fine barrier would indeed be opened, Joanna concluded, and she would in her turn pass, none too quietly, into that next room.

She was dry. It was the dry season, but this was her own dryness. Her inside-mouth felt like cloth dried into creased folds in the sun; her tongue scrubbed the silky-dry palate with its sand-ripples of flesh. The wet film was gone from her eyes; the rims and the lash-roots pricked. Between the legs was dry too. She washed out her mouth with a scoop of water but this wetness vanished like water spilled on a stone in the sun. She moved round her house, sweeping dust from the clay floor that sweated more dust. She scrubbed spots of grease from the little cooking-stove and wiped traces of white scum from the necks of large jars of salted vegetables. She picked at loose ends on woven sacks of millet and baskets of lentils. She refolded the quilts on her upper floor, and brushed the stone steps in the shuttered shadow. She took up her bright brass pot and set out for the tank.

The village had two streets, crossing. The houses were yellow stone, cemented, with wooden windows, painted pigeon-blue, and golden-brown doors. Half the houses backed onto the high crawling mountains; some had cave-cellars. Others faced the narrow plain in the valley and the mountain-ridge beyond, laced ice-blue on simmering air, river-blue shot with copper. The tank was fed by a small spring that came out of the mountain and went back into it, a little lower, making an angry, sucking sound. Women cleaned their pots, or beat their long skirts, on the stone edge of the trough.

A-Oa needed to see her eyes. She looked into the unruffled tank, deep and dark, greenish at its lower edges and on its floor. Her face looked back at her, an oval shadow on the glitter, and then, as she came nearer, provided with features, an empty fall of black hair, a black mouth, the dark holes of the eyes. The water
turned everything into dark purple and greenish-brown shadows: unsmiling and uniformly olive her dark mask peered back at her, wrinkling its eyes, which, it was true, were very dark.

She took up a scouring stone and a handful of white sand and rubbed the vessel, which did not need it. She looked at herself in its convex surfaces, and finally in its curved bottom, spun with fine scratches, glinting white lights, brief coloured lights. Her potface, unlike her water-face, was round and beaming, a sunny shape in hot metal. Her hair scattered light, her features melted and shifted shape with the contour of the bowl. Here there were colours if they could be read, in the brassy refractions, brass-brown cheek-hollows, brass-russet closed lips, burning. Her eyes, under their arched brows, appeared to be ruddy.

The house of a jinx is spotlessly clean and her eyes are red. There was an age when a woman might become a jinx, and she had perhaps arrived there. There were few men in the village. Many of the young ones had been taken by the army, which had taken A-Oa’s husband, to fight many months’ march away, on the frontier. Others had joined the bandits in their mountain-fortress. Those who were left no longer looked at A-Oa in the street in the way she had once feared and needed. Her breasts were small and soft and dry inside her shirt; the cloth was slack over slackness. A woman could not see herself in a man’s eye, that was simply what the old poems said, but she could read the firmness of her body in his attention, the spring of her step. When she combed her hair she caught up now long silver hairs, not many, among the dark ones. These hairs were thicker and livelier in texture than the dark ones, brighter. Were her eyes red?

There was life in the village street, even in the dry afternoon heat. Cha-An’s two daughters and Bo-Me’s frog-agile son squatted and chattered in the dust. When they saw A-Oa they scattered, calling shrilly, the old woman, the old woman, not meeting her eye. A-Oa tightened dry lips: an old woman was
what she was, or was about to be, but it was also a sweet way, a roundabout way, of saying something else, the other thing. She was not friendly to children. Before her husband went she had buried four, eggshell-skulls under fine hairless skin, stick arms strapped to blown bellies, dead trailing feet with their beautiful useless bones, parcels wrapped in banana leaves tucked gently into pits scooped in the dust and hard clay. One, a boy, had seen two summers, had had a few piping words, her name, a complaint of pain, a contented chuckle when he recognized the fat hen. His head had been huge, a wise head, a fool’s head, on a body that never swelled or wriggled. It was always known that he too would not last. He was the third: after the fourth, the army had taken his father.

Kun was outside his shop. He was always to be seen, smiling his own smile, which was not happy, which crumpled his fat face into a shape as though it might be gently about to weep for its own hopelessness and helplessness. Kun had a cellar in the mountain, in which were stored pickled pork and pickled vegetables, linen and cotton thread, oil and quilting, baskets and jars: Kun was a necessary man, a man aware of others’ needs, a good, sharp dealer, respected for it. Kun knew everything that happened in the village before anyone else: he knew when births and deaths would be, and was ready with gifts and offerings, he knew that Bo-Me’s eldest son had run away to the bandits when she was still searching the fields for him, he knew when Ma-Tun’s young wife was alone with a visiting cousin and was able to tell Ma-Tun what had been spoken between them, not much, but enough; he knew, A-Oa was convinced, what had happened to her own young brother-in-law, Da-Shi, who had gone away one night, leaving no message, a year or so after his brother, A-Oa’s husband, had been taken by the army. Kun divulged such knowledge reluctantly and with many cautions. He advised against haste when there were crimes to be judged, or failings to be punished. Like A-Oa he had now no close family in the village: his mother, with whom he had lived, had died at a great age, lovingly tended by her son,
mourned with howls and streams of tears. Kun had never been wanted by the army or coerced by the bandits. He was a fat man, with soft triangular breasts like a woman, resting on his smooth pale belly like overlapping mountain ledges. He wore the usual cotton loincloth, and over it a long cotton robe or coat in dark blue, embroidered at the neck and cuffs in red and yellow. He had soft pointed slippers, over which his fat ankles hung, and could come up behind you silently, if he chose, or if he chose, make an important flapping sound, that announced him for some distance. A-Oa felt that they were in some ways the same, she and Kun, singletons on the edge of the circle, not woven in by kin or obligation. But Kun had known how to make himself necessary and a little feared. A jinx was feared. A jinx could dry up a child, or cause crops to fail, or pigs to be barren. A jinx could cause a tree to burst into flames. A-Oa had never seen this happen, but it was known to be so, to be within the power of those who cast their minds, who made charms. The person who could most certainly have told her whether she had red eyes, whether a change had been effected in her, was Kun. But she did not want to hear it from him. She knew that Kun did not like her, that he wished her ill. She did not know why. It was even possible that Kun wished everybody ill, indiscriminately. She had no one with whom to discuss this.

The next day she went up the valley to the Temple. She packed a little meal to offer to the carved Wise Ones: a small dish of chick peas, an oboe-fruit, ridged brownish green, pointed at both ends, which when pierced with a knife produced a flow of clear, thin red juice. Women desiring children offered these fruits at certain times of the year, carving them open, lavishly displaying their dimpled and pimpled concavity, the rows of fat white seeds on their thread-stalks in the moon-shaped cradle. She took too a few pods of the white beans that grew in her garden-strip, almost all of which were now gathered and heaped in the sun to dry. The beans were pale and waxy, flecked with crimson; their papery pods were whitish, splashed with purple-red.

The valley mounted steeply amid rustling yellow bamboos, harbouring insects with scraping monotonous songs and the occasional rush of sooty wings. The Temple was at the head of the valley and higher still, up four hundred steps, carved in the rock, in whose natural and carved niches sat perhaps four hundred carved sages and petty gods, staring with blind intelligence. It was built on a plateau, within a high wall, painted blood colour, on which charms were written in soot black characters against evil ones, sorcerers and demons. Round the foot of this wall crouched and wandered a collection of the rootless and the lost, the homeless and the holy, black-veiled women huddled like clustering bats, naked holy men, still as stone, or rhythmically prostrating themselves and rising. There was a smell of sour cooking, the smell of burning pats of dung, a weaker smell of hot flour on griddles, a tinge of spice. In the past they had crowded to put out their hands to A-Oa, displaying huge sores, or running wasted fingers in the channels of their children’s bowed ribs. Today they wailed a little but did not hurry, as though she appeared to offer no hope. There was a well out here, deep under a conical canopy. A-Oa stopped and hauled up bucket and dipper to assuage the dryness. She sipped, turned the cold water in her dry mouth, feeling it run over, not soak into, the shiny-dry flesh, catch, as it went down, on the sore dryness of her throat.

The courtyards were busy and chattering: worshippers moved between greater and lesser temples, brown-robed monks carried baskets of grain and vegetables, families squatted in the dust and argued. In the greater Temple were the huge figures of the Wise Ones, three and awful, taller and wider than the eye could ever see at once, so that it was as much as you could do to focus on a heavy knee, or monstrous, mountainous hand, or far away the three faces, up in the dark of the roofspace, staring quietly out over the heads of the worshipping ants, wonderfully, characteristically blank, bearing a family resemblance in their perfect stillness. The
brass lamps were all at the level of the altars, which were themselves below the level of the vast feet, which were dusty but not travel-stained. This gave the illusion that the Wise Ones towered away for ever, out of sight, out of apprehension, out of form. A-Oa bought an incense stick from a monk, lit it, and stood it with the others on one of the smaller altars; she bowed repeatedly, and set out her dishes of beans and fruit before kneeling to pray, her black and silver hair in the dust. It seemed to her that she did not know how to pray or what to ask for. In the past she had asked for sons: or to be forgiven for whatever had caused the sons she had to sicken and fail. To one side of her, standing beside the altar, was a small squat brass boy, a fat and polished child, not dusty like everything else in the huge, smoky and rattling place, but gleaming where countless soft dark hands had touched and caressed him. He wore a small scarlet cloth on a string, just large enough to cover whatever he had between his legs. It was known that his touch brought luck, brought boy-children. On every previous visit A-Oa had touched him. When she was young and humorous she had tickled him like a lover, laughing back quietly at her husband; after the loss of the first child she had touched the warm metal with fearful fingertips. Once she had come with Da-Shin and had touched the boy furtively, laying her fingers over his metal ones, asking friendship, complicity. He had a smile that took up his whole face, curling both mouth and eyebrow corners. She tried to tell the Wise Ones that she was afraid, that she was not herself, that there were changes she couldn’t describe. All she was conscious of was the presence of the grinning boy, the sheen of countless handlings, gratified or denied, the dangling red cloth that was never lifted. She thought: when I am dead, this will be over, meaning by “this” the boy and all his works. The Wise Ones vouchsafed no relief, perhaps because she expected so little, was closed to their silent lines of life as her tongue and palate were to water.