The Splendor Of Silence (15 page)

A mocking smile lifted the edges of Sims's mouth. "This from an army officer? Sedition, I tell you. Have you no pride in your work? No allegiance to the king?"

Blakely sat up to fling off his shirt and then winced when the wicker of the chair seared into his sweating back. "I'm glad the king pays my salary every month." His expression became moody. "And Susan spends it just as fast as I can deposit it in the Mussoorie bank account. There she is, cool in the hills, away from all this bloody heat, and I cannot even go to visit her now because of that damn cook. Why did you have to beat him nearly to death? We all agree that he deserved a whipping, but you should have done it discreetly, left no or little scars, not damn near killed him."

"Sorry," Sims said curtly. He put a cigarette into his mouth and shouted around it. "Boy, lighter lao!"

"He's gone to get your nonmelting shandy," Blakely said.

The old bearer came back with a fresh tray and a new glass of lime juice choked with ice. His hands trembled as he poured the beer into the glass and then proffered it to Sims. "Sahib, you drink. You put it down. I wipe." He gestured at the tea cloth on his shoulder. "No ice melting, Sahib."

Sims muttered to himself, took a deep mouthful of the shandy, and then handed the glass back to the bearer, who assiduously wiped the bottom and the sides of all condensation. When Sims indicated the table and the lighter, the bearer picked the lighter up and started a flame that he held carefully under Sims's cigarette.

"Go now," Sims said irritably. "Enough. Go."

The bearer bowed, placed the tea cloth on the table, and went back into the barracks. For the next few minutes, the two men were quiet, drinking and smoking, and occasionally wiping their chests and foreheads with the towel.

"When does Susan come back?" Sims asked.

"I don't know," Blakely said. "When she wants to, when the money runs out, I suppose. I stop depositing money when I want her to come back. She spends too much time at parties and balls and gymkhanas at Mussoorie, spends too much damn money too, with all the new frocks she needs, not just wants, but needs. And this year, I cannot be there; thanks to you, none of us is allowed to go to the hills for our leave. So here we are, bachelors again, roasting in the plains."

"You complain too much."

Blakely sat up in indignation. "And what would you know, Sims? No woman has chosen to marry you yet."

Sims grinned. "I have it all, my friend. No wife, but plenty who want to be one for a night, or for a few nights. All the pleasure and no pain."

Blakely moaned. "Yes, and so you keep reminding me." He shook the cigarette tin and spilled the cigarettes onto the table. Picking one up, he lit it and filled his lungs with smoke. "What was her name the girl you knew, the one who was so accommodating ... Rose?"

"Rosalie." Sims ran the edge of his palm over his bare legs, sweeping the sweat onto the verandah's floor. "Rosalie," he said again, his gaze thoughtful upon the heat haze beyond the barracks. "The boys had a ditty for her."

"Do tell."

Sims slurped up the rest of his shandy and set the glass down on the table. When the bearer stepped through the door to refill his drink, he waved him away. "I want a clear head tonight. And there's more drinking to do at the club."

"Sahib," the bearer said, not understanding all of that, but movin
g a
way beyond the door's frame and out of their sight to sit against the wall in case they needed him again, or changed their minds, as they were wont to do.

"I once knew . ," Sims began, and then cleared his throat. "I need to stand for this." He stood up to face Blakely, and Sam saw that the wicker chair had posted tiny, circular patterns of red on the skin of his back and the backs of his thighs.

'I once knew a girl called Rosalie
,
Who said 'how do you do' so very prettily. On the floor she held sway

Swaths leaping into love night and day. Proposals though she awaited eagerly, Most men were content to skip over fleetly."

Blakely roared with laughter. "But why?"

Sims held out his hand. "Wait, you must wait. I'm not finished.

For Rosalie, hide them as she may
,
Her fingernails gave her away.

And in the end, all knew that it was true
,
Rosalie was only four annar in the rupee."

The two men bent over with mirth, laughing at their own cleverness. Blakely was actually crying, wiping his eyes, coughing over his cigarette. "That was priceless, Sims," he said, his voice rasping in his throat. "How long did it take all of you to figure out that she had a touch of the tar brush? Did no one come close to marrying her?"

"One officer did; he wouldn't believe us when we told him of her ancestry. You should have seen her, Blakely. Skin as white as cow's milk, as creamy as whey, eyes as green as slime in a water tank. Auburn hair, and not from a bottle. She wouldn't take that poor chap to see her parents or her brothers and one day he followed her home and saw them for himself. Two days later, we heard that some thugs set upon her and cut up her face with a shaving blade. That was the end of Rosalie; she never came to the dance hall again. A good thing too." Sims's face hardened. "She had tried to pass herself off as one of us, but was nothing but a half-caste."

Around the verandah and alongside the wall of the barracks, Sam leaned on his spade. Talk such as this he had heard many times before, perhaps too many times before, and it caused a ruffling anger to grow within him. He had understood the mean and cheap rhyme about the poor girl called Rosalie. Her fingernails gave her away. This was the myth among soldiers, that Indians who looked British because they had some white blood could never hide the darkening skin around their fingernails, or the ridge of browner color in the half-moons of skin. It was prejudice of the shallowest and most petty kind, practiced on both sides. As much as the British had brought their color consciousness into this society, the Indians Sam had met in Calcutta or Assam, sometimes in the Grand Hotel, sometimes in clubs, had also been surreptitiously proud of their color, especially when it seemed as though they would bleed white if pricked, without the aid of a British ancestry. The color bar was everywhere, and this Rosalie, if she really existed, had paid for it, perhaps more so because she was Anglo-Indian.

Sam moved so that his eyes were level with the verandah's floor. Sims and Blakely were still laughing, without a sound now; the heat had robbed them of even their laughter. And if this joke was funny, it was funny no longer, because it was so oft repeated. The two men had talked about the cook's beating; why, Sims was the very man who had beaten the cook. Had Mike mentioned his name? Or any connection with him at all? Had he known him?

He peered at the two men to commit their faces to his memory. The sun had begun to cast longer shadows on the ground and Sam knew that it was time to return to Raman's house and slip back into his room before the servants began to stir from their afternoon sleep. He hefted the spade back on his right shoulder, and at that moment, the pain returned in a full, blossoming anger, sending fire through his muscles. Sam cried out and dropped the spade. It Chunked onto the ground, lifting a fine sheen of dust around his feet. The two men in the verandah moved with an astonishing speed down the slick concrete floor; Sam heard them before he saw them leaning over the parapet.

"What are you doing here?" Sims shouted.

Sam raised his head to look at them, and then ducked, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "Sorry, Sahib," he mumbled, his voice hoarse, falling into a singsong intonation. He moved slowly, tiredly, his back hunched, to pick up the spade and turn his back on them.

"Who is it?" Blakely asked.

"Some mall, listening to us. What are you doing here?" Sims shouted again.

"Sorry, Sahib," Sam said again as he moved toward the bushes and the N COs' quarters.

A pebble sang through the air and nicked Sam on his leg, but he kept going. An argument he could not have with these men, and he hoped they hadn't looked into his face too closely. Still maintaining his slouch and scramble walk, Sam shuffled away. More stones littered the dirt around him.

"Damn," he heard Blakely say. "I must have had too many shandies; I can't even get a clear shot at the bugger."

As he walked away, more swiftly now, Sam sneaked a look back at the men, and found them leaning over the parapet in a wet, sweating exhaustion. All the way back on the dirt path, he thought about what he had heard, the men he had seen, tried to remember if their names sounded familiar. But no, it was not their names that caused some forcibly buried memory to stir within him.

It was the name of the girl. Rosalie.

April 1942, a Month Earlier

Somewhere in Burma

They smell the village first. Before they see it, before they even know it is there. Sam's map shows a green, jungly void here in the

Kachin hills, just forests unbroken from the eye of a mapping plan
e a
bove. But they smell the village and know it has to be an entire village
,
not just the remains of a single human, but many. Men, women, children.

When that awful stench rises up the hillside and hums around them, Sam, Marianne, and Ken crash to a halt where they are on the track. That first horrid breath of carrion decaying ambushes them. It punches into their lungs. They cough violently into their hands, bend over from the waist to squeeze out that smell from their bodies. When they straighten, Marianne reaches out a shaking hand for Sam, who is ahead of her in their single-file walking, and the other hand to Ken, who is behind her.

"It cannot be," she whispers. "Say it cannot be, Sam. Not again."

Sam tears his gaze from Marianne's face and down to the glistening brown and green leaves on the forest's floor. He hears Ken hobble closer to Marianne, grasp her arm into his chest, and lay his head on her shoulder. For comfort. Sam can say nothing, his tongue grows thick, glues itself to the top of his mouth, and tears prickle at the back of his eyes. As they stand there, linked together in the slowly dripping forest, the sun comes out somewhere above them, hews through the monsoon clouds, sends glittering spears of slanting light between the leaves and branches.

Marianne begins to cry. Not again. Not again, she says to herself.

Sam straightens his back, swabs at his eyes, and ties his filthy and damp handkerchief around his nose. "We must go see," he says.

Marianne holds him back, not letting go of his hand. "No. Let us go around. There must be a way around. Why do we have to go through the village?"

Sam begins to trudge down the track, his boots gathering leeches from fern fronds. It is only when they cut away a tiny triangle of his flesh that he even knows they are there, feasting on his blood with surgical precision, feeding poison into his body to keep the blood thinned, and flowing. But he does not feel their bite, does not feel them plop onto the ground, fat and satiated, gray with pleasure from the feed.

"There must be something in the village we can salvage, Marianne," Sam says, more to himself than to her. "We have no food left; we have to go through the village."

"I'm not coming," she says, and sits down on the ground, pulling Ken, whose hand she is still clutching, down with her. The leeches drop off from the trees onto their heads, wend their way around their collars and slide inside.

"I'm not coming either," Ken says now. His face is discolored, ash on his cheeks, salt around his mouth and his eyes. His ankle is swollen, the skin straining against the bandages that are drenched in blood again. The leeches on Ken's shirt and his khaki pants move downward, enticed by the scent of fresh blood.

Sam bends to whack at them and knocks them to the ground. He takes out his tin of cigarettes, shoves three in his mouth and lights them all together. That first draft of nicotine gladdens his lungs, and the air around them is so still, so humid that the smoke hangs over his head in a mist. Sam gives Marianne and Ken a cigarette each, then sets his, lit end smoldering, against the leeches on his legs. They shrivel in protest and drop off, one by one.

"Aren't you afraid of the Japanese smelling the smoke, Sam?" Ken asks, his face more drawn in fatigue now that they are at rest, even so briefly.

"It's doubtful that they can smell anything beyond the death of that village."

"I'm not going there," Marianne says again. She too is tired, but there is something else in her eyes, something Sam has not seen before today. Fear. Marianne is afraid of confronting a scene much like the one she left behind in the Kachin village where she lived for so many years. There, every death was of someone dear, someone she had laughed with, taught the scriptures to, kept safe from the menace of the white man. They had been her children, given to Marianne by her god. And in the end, they ha
d t
aken care of her, given her the gift of her life. So Marianne sits stubbornly amongst leeches and dead leaves, her heels dug into the ground, upwind from another, shattered village that has not survived the onslaught of the Imperial Japanese Army.

Sam squats on his haunches, his knees creaking. "Tell me," he says. He cannot order them to move. They are not children; they are not even army. Well, Ken is, and Sam outranks him. But the rules do not seem to apply here anymore. Sam will not leave Marianne and Ken on the hillside to forage through the dead village on his own. He does not know what he will find there, who will still be living, who dead, what terrors await to haunt future dreams for many years. He does not know if the Japanese still linger, if he will come out alive. He does know though that they have to scavenge for food. From their last supply drop all they have left is a can of cherries in heavy syrup, a can of cream to go with it--not enough to keep them alive. Sam also cannot leave them alone here even for a brief while, no matter how stubborn they are, how pigheaded; he is their guardian and he must either stay with them or take them with him. He chooses to take them with him. Since he also cannot order them to lift their behinds from the forest floor and follow him, he will coax them.