The Man Who Loved Birds (29 page)

Flavian read this twice. After the second reading he knelt, lifted his mattress, reached to the far corner and pulled out the manila envelope stuffed with money that Johnny Faye had given him on that night not so long ago—not so very long ago at all. He pulled out some cash, held it to his nose and sniffed. Not that he had given much time over to smelling money but it smelled pretty much like—well, like he expected money to smell, kind of papery
and green, though underneath this smell was a scent at the same time completely familiar and
unusual
 . . . he put the money down, put his nose to the window screen, took a couple of deep breaths of fresh air, then smelled the money again—yes, there was that smell . . . he looked around his cluttered cell, at the basket he kept in the corner for his dirty underwear and—socks, yes. What he was smelling was the warm, human scent of his feet, parked every night near the envelope of money.

The summer nights were still short but at this latitude, even at their shortest, they were long enough for a body to seek out the bottom of the pit of despair and for the second time that strange summer Flavian felt himself falling. The mattress on his narrow bed managed to be at the same time thin and lumpy but before that night at the pool hall and that envelope of greenbacks Flavian had slept like a child, or so it now seemed. He had stored the envelope under the far corner of his bed, there was no logical way he could feel it, and yet he might as well be trying to sleep in a rocky field surrounded by wolves.

And it
was
a boulder-strewn field, the rocky pastures of desire. What, or whom, did he want? “Chosen by God.” Why had he taken that left fork, ordered that beer, played those games of pool, the memory of which—the thought of his near victory—even now brought him to bask in the bright sun of vanity? Suppose he could turn the calendar back, erase that night and this stupid envelope and all that had led from it—would he take the right fork and head straight back to the abbey? He knew that he would not change a thing, which only went to prove that he was a common sinner, handmaiden of the devil, who like every son and daughter of Adam and Eve had freely made his choices and chosen sin over virtue. “What is fixed by fate must come to pass,” the words from the doctor’s story came to mind. Ridiculous. Left to its fate, the field produced only weeds and thistles. Anything more than that required the shaping hands of men and women.

But perhaps thistles were what we were meant to eat. After all, the first person to clear a patch of forest and dig a hole and plant a seed was the first to thumb her or his nose at the Almighty, and the history of the race since then was one long tale of woe.

And yet there was some great honor in choosing rebellion over submission, in refusing to bow to the inexorable laws.

Flavian found himself on his knees before the crucifix that hung on the wall of every cell—how had he come there? He had no memory of kneeling, but all these years and habit would have its way. Maybe that was all that we were, and are, and could be—creatures of habit. He considered the gory Christ in agony, the incarnation of God learning in a particularly brutal way the lessons of the flesh. He climbed stiffly to his feet—from whence that stiffness? How long had he been on his knees? He was thirty-eight—he was beginning to stiffen and harden until the only part of him that wasn’t stiff was the part that he wanted to become so. Yes, he knew what awaited—the old monks talked about it. “Oh, God,” Brother Cyprian joked, “when will this horniness cease?” And God gave an answer: “About fifteen minutes after you’re dead.” The desire never left—only the capacity to bring it to fruition. And here he was, ripe as Augustine’s pear, dangling. Was that to be his fate? Unrepentant, unfulfilled? A creature of the flesh, a creature of habit, whose habits happened to be a white alb with a black scapular cinched at the waist with a broad leather belt; whose habit happened to be reading and writing?

He lay down and pulled up the sheet and studied the bloody Christ.
The Word made Flesh
. In that last liminal second before sleep the dull ache in his knees told him what he must do, the approach he must take to teach Johnny Faye how to write.

Doctor Chatterjee had trained herself in the discipline of skeptical inquiry, or so she told herself when she scrutinized a patient’s records or test results. And now her skepticism was unrelenting. What was she doing, taking up with this
character?
What future could he hold for her? She had accepted assignment to this town with every intention of completing her required service and then obtaining her green card and establishing a practice in a prosperous suburb. There was no imaginable circumstance under which Johnny Faye would accompany her. What had she been thinking? Sex with a
harijan
, he might as well be untouchable, no matter the continent. A lifetime of infertility and she did not fear pregnancy, the odds were in her favor but she knew they were only odds, what had she been thinking? She was a doctor,
his
doctor.

Each time she drove to the statues she promised herself that this time she would speak to Johnny Faye about the impossibility of what they were doing. From her conviction of the rightness of this path and to keep firm in her resolve she wore her drab dark suit and squat black pumps, all business she was, what had she been thinking? In the evening light she walked down the graveled path practicing speeches that she would deliver, making clear that she accepted her responsibility in setting this nonsense in motion but that she was breaking it off, this time was the last time, no, not even that, this time was good-bye.

And then he arrived, summer rain, the recovery of something lost, dawn after night. She said little and he said less. He took her hand and led her to the blind and his eyes were a sweet devouring as much as if she were dressed in the raiment of a goddess.

After that first night he brought blankets so that they made love now without the prick and grate of sticks and stones. His hands were on her and then his fingers inside her, this penetration, this fact of him inside her. He was the plow, she was the earth, it was so simple, how could she not have understood? Until now she had thought of sex as a process, a function like peristalsis or breathing, one of those things the body did to perpetrate itself into the world of
samsara
, the world of suffering, a means to an end of the endless world of life devouring life with no purpose other than to make more life. An instant’s pleasure—no, not even that, how could she think of this wild loss of herself as pleasure, it was what it was, nothing else, all-consuming, no identity, no Meena, no Johnny Faye, but something new that was of the two of them but more than the two of them. His fingers were inside her, one then another, opening her up until some part of her yielded and she was open to him, every part of her was open to him. He entered, not fast, he had known too much suffering to enter fast, he supported himself with his arms while she wrapped her legs around his back and he entered one thread at a time, a tender thrust each barely deeper than the one before until she clutched his buttocks and pulled him into her in one swift thrust that brought him against her
entrails
, the word came to her from some delicate British medical journal because exactly so, precisely right. Now he was thrusting harder and she was rocking in time and they were one, one and one much greater than two.
And so this
, her last thought before losing thought,
is what we call love
.

In afterglow he asked again that she talk to him in her native language. She told him stories in Bangla, from the Mahabarata, Great India, tales of Krishna and Hanuman the monkey king and Arjuna the reluctant warrior and Sita his faithful wife. Once she told how Sita lived in exile with her king Arjuna and his brothers,
deep in the forest in a hut exactly like the one in which they lay right here, right now. At the story’s end, silence, in which she understood the spoken word, her mother tongue, as the key that had opened her to him, even if he did not understand what she was saying—better, perhaps, that he did not understand.

Then he spoke. “Mouth music.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s like mouth music, hearing you talk on like that and the pretty little way you bob your head with the words when they go up and down, kind of like you’re saying yes and no at the same time. That’s all words are anyway. Mouth music. We’re just like sparrows at sunrise, making all that racket just to say hello to another day and prove to ourselves and anybody that’s listening that we’re alive. It don’t mean a thing excepting it means everything.”

He was echoing her thoughts, she understood, because he was meant to say the right thing at the right moment. “I should break this off. I should stop seeing you.”

“That is what you ought to do. But you aint never much done what you ought to do nor said what you ought to say else you wouldn’t be here, aint that right.”

“I have my whole life in this country at stake. Why am I doing this? I am Brahmin, you cannot know what that means but a Brahmin must marry someone worthy.” A terrible thing to say but she made herself say it, whatever was needed to bring this to an end. “You might as well know. I have had
dates
, Harry Vetch is eager to see me again.”

“Then maybe you should see him again.” He kissed her breast. “Maybe he can help you out with Rosalee’s boy.”

“I have asked him as much.”

Johnny Faye lifted his eyes to hers. “I knew you’d figure out something. You just got to take your time, like a lot of people. What did he say?”

“Precisely what I have already told you but with the authority of the law. I am to guard my tongue and keep my place.”

“So do you listen to the law or do you listen to your heart?”

The little voice
, Rosalee’s words came of their own accord. She broke her gaze from his. “Matthew Mark Smith is my patient. He is no concern of yours.”

His turn to look away. “How about letting me be the judge of that.”

A sinkhole of silence.

“In my childhood I read novels and I thought, ‘The stupid things people do. They must be making this up. How can they not know better? Who can believe this? Nobody could be so reckless.’ And here I am, a Brahmin, creeping through the woods to meet with a
dacoit
.”

“Here we are.” He took each nipple between thumb and forefinger and put his mouth over hers and they did not speak for a long while.

He asked nothing more than her presence. Not once did he ask to meet her, he never came to her office, though after their lovemaking he always saw her to the edge of the woods. Her heart’s deep spring, once desiccate, flowed anew. She loved him because he loved her as she was—a childless and once-married exile.

An evening came when she dressed in a pale blue
choli
and the single sari she had brought from India, a scrap of the evening sky star-bangled and edged with silver, wrapped around her waist and thrown over one shoulder. Though it was not a night on which he might expect her to appear she followed the path to the statues on nothing more than the hope that he would divine her longing and of course he was there waiting because he was her destiny.

In the clearing in front of the sleeping apostles she struck a pose her body remembered from the dancing classes required of all Bengali girls. She moved with the bearing of a woman wearing a garment held in place by presence and grace. Her hands assumed their poses, agile and independent, two actors on the stages of her wrists, Parvati hands that of their own accord know how to sleep, to rest for centuries at the edge of a lap, or else to lie palms up,
invoking the stillness of eternity until in an instant they wake, her fingers forming complicated little temples that dissolve with a circular rotation of the wrist opening outward to reveal a flat palm with a blood red dot at its center, the thumb and forefinger a perfect circle and the remaining three fingers saying
up!
Released from its skewered bun her hair fell almost to her waist, gleaming as if brushed with oil. She wore gold bangles at her wrists and the hot breeze from the west carried their tinkling. In one nostril a chip of glister in the evening’s last light—a diamond. She joined her hands palm to palm, then moved them left-to-right while her head moved right-to-left, even as her eyes followed her hands. Contradiction in union—the parts of her body discrete and independent even as the body was complete and whole—the tension between the movement of her body and the tranquility of her countenance, between time and eternity. She formed a complex knitting of the hands and fingers around a ball of air and in that moment the space her hands enclosed and contained became as real as a stone, a place that she shaped into a house that she inhabited and into which she invited Shiva, her consort. He was his father’s son. She was her father’s daughter. “For me you are this place, a place to call home. My own country.” She took his hand and led him to the blind.

Meena knelt on the floor of Rosalee’s kitchen next to Matthew Mark, who lay with an array of colored pencils in front of a square of poster board. The aged nun teaching summer school had charged her students with illustrating some principle from their catechism, and after much deliberation he had chosen
Three Roads to Heaven
. “Everybody thinks you can only get to heaven by being a priest or a nun or a monk or getting married,” he told Meena. “But the catechism says a single person can get there just like anybody and I thought about you and how you’re not married and how I want to be single when I grow up because I want to be like you. So that’s what I’m going to draw.”

“Surely a very hard thing to draw,” Meena said. “Might you choose an easier subject?”

“I always choose the hardest subject. It’s more fun that way.” He was drawing big puffy clouds with an azure pencil. “Heaven,” he said, by way of explanation. “Where Jesus lives. Jesus was single.”

“I see.”

“Did you learn about Jesus when you were a kid?”

She smiled. “I prayed to Jesus, because he was the most handsome.”