Three Continents (20 page)

But I didn't at all want to talk to Anna, and went and hid where I couldn't be found. There used to be many places to hide, but now every corner of the house from the attic to the cellar had something going on in it, and the followers were also digging, clearing, and planting all over the grounds. But there was one place I still knew to go to: You followed alongside the brook that ultimately fell into the waterfall, but just before it did, there was a tiny path so overgrown it was invisible, and this ended in a sort of cavelike dell where Michael and I had once buried a dead raccoon. It was damp in here, for the sun couldn't reach inside and the dead leaves of many falls had been rained into the earth where they moldered and crumbled. The only other person who knew about this place was Michael, so when I heard the crunch of footsteps, I was sure it was he and was glad he had come. But it was Crishi, and the way my heart turned over was very different from the glow of being glad. He stood looking down at me, and then sat next to me very close and put his arm around me. I stayed hunched up, with my face hidden. Suddenly it
began to rain—we could hear it falling on the leaves above us, but it took longer to get to us because we were so sheltered; and when it did, it was filtered through all that green and was damper and colder than only rain. The two of us seemed to be sitting inside a grave, where no sun and also no noise and no pain could ever get to us. When Crishi said “How long do we have to stay here?” I said “Forever,” and I put my head against his chest, breathing him in together with the earth and rain. “Great,” he said; “really cozy,” but he stroked my hair and made no move to go away.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

“Michael told me.”

I had a twinge of disappointment. I had imagined that it was his own sure instinct—his lover's instinct—that had brought him to me. And I had not expected that Michael would tell anyone, anyone at all, even Crishi, of any secret place we had between us; any more than I had expected him to tell our use of the word
neti
.

“He wanted me to find you,” Crishi said. “He wants you to talk to Anna. . . . No listen, you've got to. There's no two ways about it.”

I began to explain to him why I couldn't talk to her. It was the way we were, Michael and I: solitary, and needing to guard ourselves, something within ourselves, which we felt it irreverent to share with anyone; that the way I sat here in this place, shielded even from the sun and no one knowing where I was except Michael, was what I liked best. And the fact that he, Crishi, was here with me and so close to me, the two of us buried and being rained on—this showed how deeply he had entered into me as I had never thought anyone could. It wasn't easy for me to get all this out, and the effort made me concentrate on myself without looking at him; and when I did, I saw he was frowning impatiently. He didn't try to hide it either, and before I had finished talking, he said “Don't be stupid. We need the publicity and anyone who can get it for us, Anna or whoever. I don't know what all the fuss is about. You and Michael both—sometimes I think you are what she says you are.” Before I could get to ask what this was, he said “And do we have to go on sitting here in the rain much longer?” We went back in single file, along the
brook with the rain falling into it and on us too. He was walking in front of me, and he never looked around to see if I was following, not expecting me to fall back; and I didn't—part of me may have preferred to stay buried inside that dell, but even more I wanted to go with him.

Although I submitted to being interviewed by Anna, I didn't tell her that I was going to marry Crishi. I felt I didn't want to, and also I couldn't, since no one else thought it worth mentioning. When the article appeared, the Rawul was pleased, and although this wasn't till later, when we were in England, I might as well talk about it here, just to show how someone from outside saw us at that time. She described Propinquity very well—she described everything very well; she wasn't a writer for nothing—but from her account it sounded as if it had been an organizational headquarters forever; no one would have guessed that only a short time ago Lindsay and Jean had lived here on their own, mostly in the kitchen. She called it a very ugly house, which I guess it was, seen objectively. And seen objectively, probably Michael and I were as she described us—that is, these nineteen-year-old twins who hadn't managed to finish their education or ever had to work or make contact with other people. She described us as self-centered, self-conscious, uptight, and definitely weird, typical last-of-the-line scions of a once-prominent and moneymaking American family. Even physically it seemed we were typical, pale and slight, and with a faraway self-absorbed look in our strange eyes. But she didn't waste much space on us, who were only these peripheral figures around the true center of the house and movement—that is, the Rawul, Rani, and Crishi. Although she gave an outline of the movement itself, she presented it mainly as an emanation from these three vital, life-giving personalities, who had erupted in and transformed our eroded lives.

Of the three, she seemed to have had the most difficulty interpreting the Rawul. She wrote an account of his royal ancestry and kingdom, his English education, and his English accent and manners. She described him as physically soft; it was true, he was getting very plump, with Else Schwamm's devoted cooking. She said he gave an impression of compassion—a man who wouldn't hurt a fly; of gentleness, who
wouldn't say boo to a goose; and courtesy, who would never precede a guest out the door, that sort of thing, all true. But she went on to speculate whether these qualities—compassion, gentleness, and courtesy—were those of a potential leader. After some discussion, she decided that there was no reason why they should not be, provided they were held together by one essential quality: She called it first “single-mindedness,” and then slipped in the word “fanaticism.” If that was there, she wrote, the other qualities were absorbed and used by it; she even speculated that the softer qualities were the ones that most easily turned into ruthlessness. She gave some examples, but I didn't feel that she made her point, or that any of this applied to our Rawul, whom I so often watched at breakfast, pouring syrup overgenerously on his pancakes.

I don't know if Anna was aware of the Rani's hostility, or if she returned it, but it certainly made no difference in how she wrote about her. She admired her: for her beauty, her strength of character, her calm exterior, her organizational skill. She compared her with a whole host of outwardly feminine and inwardly virile Oriental women from Cleopatra to the present. However, she pointed out that the Rani was only partly Oriental, and she gave more information about her than anyone had ever told me. The Rani's mother, part-French and part-German, had married an Afghan and gone to live with him on his family's estate outside Kabul. There was quite a little colony there of foreign women married to rich Afghans, and they entertained each other at coffee and card parties and drove around in chauffeured cars. But after a while—this was when Rani (or Renée, to give her real name) was about three—the monotony and strangeness of a semi-purdah life palled on her mother and she returned to Europe, with Rani. Although she took as much jewelry as possible, their circumstances were not as luxurious as they were used to. Rani made up her mind at an early age to improve them. She was fifteen—so Anna speculated: The one fact the Rani had not been outspoken about was her age—when she married her first husband, a German businessman in his forties. Three or four years later, after a nonamicable divorce, she married an Englishman by whom she had had the little boy she had hinted at to me. Everything I had only guessed at
Anna seemed to know for sure, as though the Rani had been entirely candid with her.

The same was true of Crishi. He had never told me what he told her, and it was only after her article came out—that is, after he and I were married—that I learned all this about him. Not that it would have made any difference. Anyway, it was from the article I discovered that his mother was Assamese; that he too had been married—at eighteen in his case—and had not one but two children. Some of the things he had told me—like living on the beach—he hadn't told her; and vice versa, so that it was only after reading the article that I learned the details of his two prison sentences, one in Tehran for a drug offense and the other in New Delhi for fraud. He told her the second was a frame-up by some characters he had got involved with in his youthful ignorance. These two sentences accounted for four years of his life and the rest were spent in traveling in some very distant places and making his living in various businesses, usually connected with precious gems and art objects. For the past eight years he had been with the Rawul, who had legally adopted him, devoting himself entirely to the movement. He told her he was thirty-four years old—which amazed me, in fact I couldn't believe it, and it wasn't what his passport said either. But then his passport gave his name as Christian Ambasta, and his birthplace as Brussels, which wasn't what he had told either her or me; but it did say, correctly, that he had several scars along his shoulder blades, and one from an abdominal operation.

But I'm jumping ahead and I must mention other things first, principally how we got married. I hadn't thought about our wedding too much, hoping that when Crishi was ready to talk about it, he would. The subject was precipitated at the time of Anna's departure, which, like everything connected with her, went off with the maximum fuss. Although she had stayed with us barely a month, she had come with several suitcases, each one containing something very important that needed special care by the followers carrying them. She agitated and gave contradictory instructions, and when at last everything was stowed away and she was sitting in the car, she found she had forgotten her vitamin pills and someone
had to run back for them. “It's too awful,” she said, holding her pale forehead with a frail hand. “All this rushing around, it's killing me.” And truly one felt it was too much for her and wondered how she survived her continual flying around the world. “Anyway, I'll see you in London,” she said to Crishi, who stood with his hand on her open car window; she laid hers on top of it. “Absolutely,” he said. “In two weeks.” I had such a shock that, before we had even gone back in the house, I said to him “I didn't know you were going to London.”

“Well of course, what else?” he said, frowning a bit the way he always did when anyone questioned any plan of his.

I burst out “What about me?”

“You?”

I must have looked pretty stupid—I felt that way—for he started to laugh. “Oh yes,” he said. “I forgot about you.”

I knew he was teasing me; he liked doing it—that way he was more of a brother than Michael. But I felt confused, and shy, feeling it wasn't up to me to pursue this subject though I wanted to. That night, however, when he came to be with me he did take it up and he did talk more or less seriously, for him. I ought to explain that usually we hardly talked, which was fine because we made so much love together. Only sometimes he was in a chatty mood, on subjects like night spots, rock concerts, cars, LPs—he took an interest in all these things.

But that night, when we were resting, he said “Do you really want to?”

I said “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

“Funny,” he said; meaning either me, or the fact that should be so eager to marry him. He drew his finger along my hip bone, which I admit was bony: “Might as well marry Michael,” he mused. “How old are you anyway? Are you sure I'm not going to be had up for doing it with a minor? Oh really? I thought it was thirteen.” He laughed at my protests. “You'll have to eat and get fat. Don't you know I like voluptuous women? The bigger the better. And this
room
, Harriet.”

“What's wrong with it?”

“It's got nothing in it. It's like a cell. Who wants to fuck in a cell? I don't.”

I tried to prove to him that he did, but he was in a strange
mood. He held me away from him to say: “You sure you want to go through with this? Marrying and all? I'm serious, Harriet. I'm warning you seriously.”

And he really was—his face was grave, and he continued to hold me away from him. But what a time and way to warn me: lying naked by me on my bed, at the height of my passion for him, or what I thought was the height, not knowing at the time one could get higher. He must have known how useless it was to say anything to try to hold me back.

No one could, although there were others who tried. There was Jean, who was very forthright, but what she said was ridiculous: If Crishi was the fortune hunter she said he was, he wasn't a very active one, since, far from pressing marriage on me, he never even mentioned it again. His present plans were only for England, where he was to precede the rest of the Rawul's party to make arrangements for the scheduled program. It was I who again had to bring up the subject, and he said, as if it had slipped his mind, “Yes we'd better do something about it before I go.” “But that's in two weeks!” “It only takes five minutes,” he said in a reasonable voice.

“He's right,” Michael said, which was as much interest as he could be expected to take.

As for Lindsay, although she had at first been thrilled, her native caution had reasserted itself, backed up by Jean, and she said “Hadn't we better wait, darling?”

I was frantic! I who had never thought of getting married, who was bored listening to others talk about it, who felt sorry and even a bit contemptuous of Barbara when she carried on about Manton not marrying her—I had become worse than anyone. I appealed to the Rani, who, after all, had brought the proposal but appeared to be in no hurry to have it carried out. “What an anxious bride,” she mocked me; I couldn't take offense, for it was true. I called Manton in Europe: “Daddy, I'm getting married!” “Darling daughter! God bless you!” When I said who to, there was a pause before he asked in a much smaller voice, “When?” “Soon. Next week.” He began, like Lindsay, “Hadn't you better—” but I didn't let him finish; I hung up. What shall I do, I thought; what
shall
I do. In later years I sometimes remembered my despair at that time and found it almost amusing.