Читать книгу Adam's Peak - Heather Burt - Страница 7

March 26/96. The thermometer says 32°, but I don’t believe it. It must be 37 at least. They’ve taken my portable fan for an assembly in the auditorium, and I have to keep the ceiling fan on low or it scatters the kids’ stuff. The windows are open but it makes no difference. Sigh. If I’d never moved away from here, would I be comfortable in this wretched heat? I know, I know. It got hot where you and I grew up, but this is different. There’s no winter here. I think my body underwent some sort of mutation over all those Canadian winters. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Or am I just a born wimp? Hmm. I can see you smiling, Clare. You know the truth. First-class whiner and complainer, that’s me, no? But my life is here now. Or it will be. I’m not going back. Where I should go is to the staff room (it has air con), but I’m not in the mood to socialize. Anyway, the break’s just about over. English 12 next. More essays coming in today—sigh again. Thank God for Easter holidays.

RUDY CLOSED HIS DIARY and glanced up at the clock. Wistfully he tried to imagine being cold, to conjure up the sensations of stinging cheeks and frozen nostril hairs, but a trickle of sweat meandering from his temple to his ear distracted him. Something had happened to him in his twenty-five-year absence. The heat in which he used to play cricket and hunt for snakes now tortured him. On particularly oppressive days, his hands and feet swelled up and he moved like an old man through the viscous air. The weight he’d put on from his aunt’s cooking slowed him down all the more. And he sweated—unstoppable streams that pooled in any crease or depression, dripped from the hooked tip of his narrow nose, salted his lips and stung his eyes. As students began wandering in, he recalled the day he’d confiscated a crumpled drawing depicting a naked Mr. Vantwest (the maple leaf covering the nether regions gave it away) spraying sweat over the school flower beds. Embarrassed, but also amused—it was a damn good cartoon—he’d slipped the paper into his pocket and carried on with the lesson while wide-eyed glances darted back and forth across the room.

Today, however, he was quite certain his students wouldn’t be taking any notice of him. The object of their attention would still be the new student, Kandasamy Selvarajah, now strolling toward the front desk of the middle row, explaining the correct use of the semicolon to a group of girls. Kanda wasn’t an ordinary student. He was larger somehow, more present. He’d read more English literature than most of Rudy’s colleagues and had no reservations about quoting Shakespeare or Milton to his bewildered classmates. He was the kind of pupil Rudy had fantasized about having back in Canada. But the reality was all wrong. The boy’s presence in class—his confidence, his command of the lessons—had become irritating. Each time he raised his hand, Rudy felt his own hands clench. He expected to be challenged, to be revealed as a fool or an impostor. And yet, there was nothing concrete for him to complain about, even to himself.

The bell rang. Shirt sticking, drips of sweat trickling from his temples, Rudy took his place before the five rows of uniformed boys and girls, looked past Kanda, and said, “Good morning.” As the buzz of conversation quieted, he mopped his face with his handkerchief. “We’re going to start off with some of those exercises on identifying point of view,” he began. “I think we got up to page sixty-five last time.”

Textbooks were opened, pages flipped. When it seemed to Rudy that most of them were ready, he began reading the page sixty-five excerpt from Robinson Crusoe, his voice strangely crisp in the languid air. His students listened politely, not taking in a word of it, he was sure. With the exception of Kanda. By the end of the passage, not five minutes into the class, the boy’s hand was up. Wiping his forehead, Rudy braced himself wearily against the possibilities—a comment on Defoe’s racism, perhaps (though the selected excerpt was innocent enough), a question about the meaning of distemper ... or maybe that challenge he would be unable to answer. He lowered his eyes and met Kanda’s stare.

“Yes?”

The boy hesitated a moment, then cleared his throat. “Are you feeling ill, sir?”

Around the room heads turned and eyes widened. Rudy coughed involuntarily. “What do you mean?”

“I was only wondering, sir, as you seem to be perspiring very heavily. I thought you might be ill.”

If it was a joke, or an insult, the kid certainly had balls. Rudy mopped his face and studied his student. Kanda himself was tidy to a fault—navy tie knotted snugly around his white collar, black hair trimmed and gelled, spine straight, skin dry. I’m not the impostor here, his appearance insisted. Yet his expression was sympathetic. Not a hint of ridicule or sarcasm.

“I’m not sick, Kanda. I just don’t handle the heat very well. Anymore. But thank you for your concern.” He glanced at James Fernando, the caricaturist, and snickered in spite of himself. “You see, when I first came here, I applied for a job as a garden sprinkler,” he said, folding his handkerchief into a neat square. “But I wasn’t quite sweaty enough, so they made me a teacher instead.”

While James shrank behind his desk, the others laughed. Rudy risked a wink. Then Kanda raised his hand again.

“I have an idea, sir. If we put the desks in a semicircle and you stood under the fan, you might be more comfortable.”

Around the room there were murmurs of approval. Rudy dragged the folded handkerchief along his jaw. Finding no good reason not to take Kanda’s suggestion, he nodded, and the boy stood up. It seemed that he intended to organize the desk-moving himself, and indeed he got right to it, directing his classmates, even reminding them not to scrape the furniture across the floor. “Lift it up, or it leaves marks,” he said, his manner neither condescending nor bossy. When the brief chaos had subsided and the students were again seated, their desks forming a horseshoe that opened toward the front of the room, Rudy took his place under the ceiling fan. Chamika Heenatigala, seated closest to the regulator dial, got up and adjusted the speed to full. In the rush of cool air, Rudy’s shirt pulled away from his skin, and his pores tightened in tiny, euphoric contractions. He pocketed his handkerchief, cleared his throat, and returned to the lesson with an awkward smile in Kanda’s direction.

At the end of class, he called for the essays he’d assigned. There was a brief stampede at his desk, and when this had subsided, Kanda came up, paper in hand. “I hope this is acceptable, sir.”

Rudy straightened the stack of essays on the desk. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. Would you like me to consider it a practice run? I mean, I’ll mark it, but we don’t have to count it. You weren’t here when I explained the assignment.”

“I’d like you to count it, please.”

Rudy nodded and took the essay. It occurred to him suddenly that he should thank his student for the new seating arrangement. In his head he fumbled with the words, but the longer he hesitated, the more lodged in his throat the message became, until it seemed that to cough it out would sound ridiculous. Just as Kanda was about to disappear out the classroom door, he called to him to enjoy his holiday, but the boy didn’t seem to hear.

Rudy stared blankly at the door, then he lowered his eyes to the essay in his hand. The title, “A Defence of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and Their Fight for a Tamil Homeland,” made him frown. He’d asked his students to write argument essays, and predictably most of their chosen topics were banal. Kanda’s topic challenged even more than his classroom manner did. At the same time, Rudy felt his ambiguous antipathy toward the boy taking root in the unequivocal words. He checked the clock then added the paper to the pile.

THE BUS HOME WAS CROWDED AND HOT. Arms and legs, shopping bundles and briefcases nibbled at the boundaries of the tiny space Rudy managed to secure on a padded vinyl seat behind the rear doorway. He eyed a bent woman hoisting herself through the door, clutching the skirt of her sari, and held his breath until another man offered his seat. Then he shut out the faces around him, leaned his head against the metal window frame, and began his hunt for the saints.

They were all along his route through the teeming city, painted plaster statues gazing at the hubbub from behind glass casings: brown-robed Anthonys, arrow-impaled Sebastians, anorexic Marys. Like the faith that had brought them to the island centuries before, these statues had acquired a local character as unremarkable as that of the fruit vendor tidying his mound of yellow coconuts on the sidewalk. Two saints shared a corner with a cross-legged Buddha; the Virgin herself greeted customers on their way to Ganesh Bookshop. One of the Anthonys, without the protection of a glass case, served as a perch for birds and was splattered with droppings. As a private game, a sort of meditation, Rudy counted them. His most recent tally had boosted the total from fourteen saints to seventeen. He was sure there were more, eluding him in obscure nooks and alcoves, but on this particular ride he lost track at the bookshop. Eyes fixed on the blue Virgin stationed a few metres from the shop’s door, he thought of Clare Fraser, his sanctuary. He saw her solemn face watching over him, and he drifted. Unlike other visitants from his Morgan Hill past, she came to him unencumbered, provoking neither remorse nor irritation, though sometimes there was a vague pang of longing, like the echo of a desire he’d ceased to experience first-hand. He didn’t mind forsaking his saint-hunt to be with her—her presence had the same calming effect—but when the bus jerked to an unexpected halt, he lost her as well.

It was a military checkpoint, or police. Rudy was never sure which was which. The men, dressed in khakis and carrying guns, represented a danger he couldn’t quite manage to fear. Not from courage, certainly, or even indifference. Rather, it seemed to him that his years on Morgan Hill Road had left him with a thick, invisible shell that kept him separate, both from the danger and the fear. Mechanically he shouldered his knapsack and stepped out to the side of the road with everyone else. There was no shelter from the sun, but the ID check was carried out with reasonable efficiency, and the passengers soon filed back into the bus to reclaim their spots. Rudy searched his bag for Kanda’s essay. If he couldn’t fear the country’s troubles as he should, he would at least acknowledge them in the abstract. He mopped his face and began to read.

I have been studying in English medium schools because my parents believe that knowing English is the only way to have a good profession. I would prefer to study and work in my own language, but unfortunately, my language and my culture have a second-rate status in Sri Lanka. My people have been treated unfairly and abused. Therefore my thesis is that Tamil people must fight a war for their own Tamil homeland where they can make their own decisions.

The words were eerily familiar, challenging, but he read on.

The Sri Lankan government has discriminated against Tamil people since the early days of independence. Tamils were denied the rights of citizenship; their language was denied an official status and their religions take second place to the favoured Buddhism. Early as 1957 Tamil people are suffering and dying at the hands of Sinhalese extremists. In 1983 in an unjustified reaction against a minor LTTE ambush, thousands of Tamil people had their homes, their businesses, and even their lives, destroyed.

Today the government says that their soldiers are liberators of the Tamil people, but the people don’t think of the army as their liberators. Mr. Prabhakaran and the LTTE are the liberators. The army arrests and kills innocent people out in the countryside where their government can’t watch over them. My uncle who is living in Trincomalee knows a girl who was attacked by army soldiers. She was walking early in the morning to see her brother to give him money from their father for his journey to Colombo. The girl was fourteen years old and she started to be a woman that month only. She passed a vegetated area and two soldiers pulled her off the road and put a cloth in her mouth so she would not scream. The soldiers did not take the money but they violated the girl. Now my uncle says this girl has no hope for the future. I have a sister who also is fourteen, I would do anything to protect her.

For a moment Rudy stopped reading and looked out the window—a flimsy show of respect for the unnamed girl, who, like the dangers of her country, remained stubbornly foreign to him. He thought uneasily of his own sister—how far would he go to protect her?—then he read the rest of Kanda’s argument: his reasonable claims about the plight of Tamil refugees and the need for cultural and linguistic equality, his more dubious ones about the intentions of the LTTE and their leader, his predictions that the government’s recent military offensive in Jaffna would fall on its face. There was plenty in the boy’s essay that made sense, but when Rudy reached the end he sank into a silent, brooding rebuttal: Do you really think the kind of violence the Tigers use can be justified, Kanda? Is the idea of a homogenous Tamil homeland even realistic? Would you want to live in such a place? And so on. When he next looked out the bus window, the essay was rolled up tightly in his hand, and he’d missed his stop.

He got off at the junction of the rail line and Vaththe Mawatha—Garden Street, as some of the old Burgher residents persisted in calling it. There was still a winding half-kilometre to backtrack, but he went first to the shady front doorway of his aunt’s church, across from the train station, to mop his face and breathe in the cool emptiness of the massive white sanctuary. In a few days the place would be chock full for Easter Mass, but for now it was starkly, marvellously vacant. He considered resting awhile under one of the whirling ceiling fans, clearing his head of Kanda and everything else, but he was already late. He pulled off his tie, undid several buttons, and crossed the street.

Passing the station, he quickened his pace to get away from the mob of taxi drivers hovering around their Bajaj three-wheelers, but one fat-bellied driver stepped into his path immediately.

“Sixty rupees only, sir.”

Rudy deked to the right. “No, thanks. I’ll walk.”

The driver kept pace with him. “Okay, okay. Fifty rupees. Good price.”

“No.”

“Okay, how much you want to pay?”

“Normal price.”

“Fifty rupees is very good price for you, sir, but I’ll give you forty-five. Last price.”

Rudy stopped and sighed. “Look—I’m not a tourist. Give me the same price you’d give my aunt and I’ll go with you. Otherwise forget it.”

The driver held his stare a moment longer then shrugged and ambled back to his three-wheeler, refastening his plaid sarong in a neat fold and tuck. Rudy waved away a few more offers and finally slowed to a stroll. He was glad the taxi ride hadn’t tempted him. There were other people out in the road—people who paid him no particular attention as they went about their business—and in that random, fleeting community, amid the tangled yards and airy bungalows of Vaththe Mawatha, he could believe that he really wasn’t a tourist—that this uncomplicated world, the one he’d shared with his parents and Susie for six years, was still his.

Up the road, he stopped to buy a comb of bananas from the fruit stand. Apart from his own “Ayubowan,” the transaction was conducted in silence, for the old fruit vendor spoke no English, and Rudy’s Sinhala was still awful. He nodded his thanks and carried on to the top of Aunty Mary’s lane, where he lifted a few flyers and envelopes from the mailbox then swung open the wooden gate. As he made his way down the narrow, overgrown path that led to his aunt’s bungalow, he experienced a familiar flash of empathy for those outsiders who ardently insisted that his birthplace was so exotic. The short walk took him past feathery ferns, wide, waxy leaves, and whiffs of jasmine that made his head spin. Overhead, the pawpaw and mango trees were loaded, while underfoot, sticky brown fruit oozed from fallen tamarind pods. It was exotic, he had to admit, though he preferred to believe that his own attraction came from a sense that this tangle of tropical growth was part of him.

Outside the yellow bungalow he peered through the latticed cement wall into the sitting room, where the exoticism of the lane lost its integrity. The rattan and teak settee had cotton throw pillows from Ikea; the painted Sinhalese devil mask with bulging eyes and a hanging tongue looked down on plastic figurines of Jesus and Mary; the old gramophone sat next to the television from Singapore. The floor was polished red cement; the white walls were decorated with school photos and souvenir tea towels.

Faintly Rudy heard his aunt in the kitchen. He let himself in and sorted through the mail. There were two advertisements, a telephone bill, something from the bank, and a single letter, from his brother. He turned it over, looking for Aunty’s name. Adam’s letters were always to the two of them. “To Aunty Mary and Rudy,” the envelopes always said, and inside would be short, chatty updates on his job at the campus bookstore, his swimming, his motorcycle, family goings-on, and other things of that sort. But this letter was addressed simply to “Rudy Vantwest.” Frowning, Rudy folded the envelope in half and stuffed it in his trouser pocket.

In the kitchen, Aunty Mary was dusting Easter cookies with sugar. A kitten with matted orange fur had stationed itself at her feet, while a mob of tiny flies hovered over a jack fruit on the counter. Rudy deposited the bananas next to the jack fruit and kissed his aunt’s cheek. She smoothed her cotton dress and patted the thick twist of silver-black hair at the back of her head.

“You’re home late, son.”

“Yeah. The bus was slow.” He reached above her head for a glass.

“Want tea?”

“No, thanks. Water is fine.”

“Ah, yes. My doctor is telling me I should drink more water. Very good for the health, isn’t it. You’d like chicken for dinner?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll just finish this. It shouldn’t be long.”

“No hurry,” he said distractedly. “I’ll get started on my marking.”

He filled his glass from a pitcher in the fridge, drained it, then went out back to wash at the well. Bathing at the stone well in the pink-gold light of late afternoon was one of those entitlements, like eating rice with his fingers or shitting in the outdoor toilet under a leafy canopy, that Rudy indulged in simply because it was not—could never be—part of his Canadian life. With renewed determination to distance himself from that life, he drew a pail of cool water dotted with dead leaves, emptied it into the plastic washtub, and rolled up his sleeves. A pair of mosquitoes—enormous brutes with long, dangling legs and abdomens—danced threateningly over the tub. He clapped them both dead, pried a bar of soap from the rim of the well, and scrubbed his hands and face. Completing the ritual, he emptied the tub over the dirt and shook his hands.

Adam’s letter weighed heavily in his pocket as he returned to the sitting room and installed himself at his grandfather’s desk. His knapsack was on the floor, Kanda’s essay inside. It was a queer twist of fate, being confronted with both on the same day—though the coincidence didn’t particularly surprise him. He reached down and unzipped his bag. He would start with the essay; the letter could wait.

Skimming Kanda’s introduction, he put a check mark next to the thesis statement. (The boy had a thesis; two-thirds of the class would-n’t.) He made a few more check marks throughout the paper, circled some errors, then, turning to the back page, considered what comments to make. A further response had entered his mind, joining those he’d come up with earlier: What if your sister got in the way of a Tiger attack, Kanda? What then? But he couldn’t write that—or anything else he’d come up with, for that matter.

He leaned back, and his gaze drifted up to the framed oil painting hanging above the desk. The painting, an awkward, immature work, apparently done by Uncle Ernie, had been in Aunty’s house for as long as Rudy could remember. Its subject was Adam’s Peak, the mountain his brother was named after, rendered as a dappled green oblong under a yellow sun. Despite the clumsiness of the brush strokes, the light on the peak showed a certain sensitivity to nature, while the surrounding hills cast convincing shadows on the landscape. At the summit of the oblong was a red pavilion. The lopsided building was too large for the scale of the painting, and it seemed to Rudy that the picture would be more effective without it.

As he sat pondering this, Aunty Mary emerged from the kitchen with a cup of tea.

“I thought you might like this since you are working.”

He turned and sighed. His aunt’s attentions embarrassed him—the cooking, the laundry, the cups of tea. He planned to move out, of course. Buy a house closer to the city, ship his belongings from Canada. But for now, for Aunty Mary, he was still a child. He took the cup and thanked her.

“How are your pupils doing?” she said.

“Oh, most of them are fine.” He paused. “I just finished reading the new kid’s essay. Seems he supports the Tigers.”

“Aiyo.” Aunty shook her head. “These Tigers only care about making trouble. You must explain to him.”

Rudy looked down at the half-page on which his comments would be written. “There’s nothing I can explain to him that he does-n’t already know, Aunty. He believes that violence is the only option left for his cause.”

Aunty frowned. “And why is a young man so worried about a cause like this? He has more important things to think about, no?”

Feeling oddly compelled to defend his student, Rudy shrugged and sipped his tea. “Kanda identifies himself mainly as a Tamil. He thinks his language and culture will be best served in an independent country.”

“He is full of strange ideas then,” Aunty said. “What’s most important is our family, no? We should worry about those people, whether they are healthy and living a good life. Language and culture will look after themselves, isn’t it.”

Rudy opened his mouth then shrugged again. “You may be right.”

“Do you think this Kanda is involved with the Tigers?”

“I doubt it. But who knows? The Tigers employ kids a hell of a lot younger than him.”

“Ah, yes.” Aunty shook her head. “They give machine guns to children. It’s a sin.”

Rudy gulped down most of his tea and stared at the back page of Kanda’s essay. In the brief silence, the ticking of Grandpa’s old clock and the thrum of the electric fan were strangely loud.

Then Aunty sighed. “I think our government is putting itself out on the murunga branch.”

Rudy looked up, surprised. His aunt never discussed politics. “What do you mean?”

“Ah, it’s an old expression. When someone is feeling very proud of himself, we say he is sitting on the murunga branch.” She pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of her dress and shook it out. “As you know, the murunga is a very tall tree. It also has very brittle branches. You can climb high up in this tree, but then the branch breaks ...” Her voice trailed off.

“And how does that relate to the government?”

Aunty wiped her forehead and cheekbones. “The government is feeling very proud these days. They believe that capturing Jaffna will put an end to all this fighting. But I think these Tigers will make sure the army’s murunga branch comes crashing back to the ground.”

“You and Kanda agree on that much,” he said with a wry smile. “And Dad. What does he say? ‘The Tamil man and the Sinhalese man will never get along. It’s not in their nature.’ Or some rubbish like that?”

His aunt stuffed the handkerchief back in her pocket. “Ah, no. You’re right. We must be positive, isn’t it. It’s Easter.” And on that, she turned and went back to the kitchen.

Rudy picked up his pen and composed his comments.

Kanda: Your essay is quite well organized and the prose is clear and engaging. There are some problems with grammar and punctuation, as marked, but they don’t seriously detract from the success of your paper. The essay has a strong, attention-grabbing thesis, and you offer plenty of good evidence in support of it. The major way in which the paper could be improved would be to give some consideration to the best arguments in support of the other side. The most convincing arguments are often those that show they understand their opponents’ position and can reasonably refute it. You have the potential to be an excellent writer. Keep up the good work.

It was a long way off what he wanted to write, but it would have to do. At the bottom of the page he wrote “B+” then reached for the rest of the essays in his knapsack. As he shifted position, Adam’s letter crinkled in his pocket. He decided to save it till Aunty Mary had gone to bed.

LATE THAT EVENING, after chicken dinner and more marking, Rudy slouched at the desk, tapping his pen against the cover of his diary. Mosquitoes hovered around him, but he was too tired to bother lighting a coil. Too tired to write, really, but it was something of a ritual, his nightly communication with Clare Fraser—begun on a cold Christmas day back home and carried out ever since. He told her about his afternoon, about reading Kanda’s essay and missing his bus stop, then he left his diary in his bedroom and went to the shower shed in the backyard. The green plastic enclosure was dimly lit by a pair of bulbs fixed to the back wall of the house. Overhead the black sky was pierced with stars. Rudy hung his sarong over the door and turned on the water. It fell from the broad metal shower head, straight and heavy and warm, like a monsoon downpour. He backed into it, watching a rupee-sized spider scurry across the concrete floor, reached for the soap, and lathered his hands. Eyes closed, he masturbated with dull frustration, a desire for release of some kind. He thought of his ex-girlfriend Renée’s muscular thighs and prodigious breasts, of the girl in Kanda’s essay, walking by herself early in the morning, of Clare. He came easily. Relieved, if only temporarily, he rinsed off then stood still under the spray in the shower’s green light. At the faint sound of the dining room clock striking eleven, he turned off the water and hurried to dry himself before the mosquitoes moved in.

In the bedroom he put on a T-shirt, an ancient souvenir from the Toronto Jazz Festival, with gaudy splashes of turquoise and pink. His sarong was covered in red and gold elephants.

“A real fashion plate you’ve become, machan,” he heckled his reflection in the wardrobe mirror. Turning sideways, he sucked in his belly and straightened his shoulders, ran his fingers through his damp hair and cursed at the amount that came out. He considered doing some sit-ups while the air was cool, then he remembered Adam’s letter.

He imagined what it would say.

I think we need to talk about our relationship, Rudy. I’ve tried to connect with you, but it hasn’t really worked, has it. What have you got against me? I don’t think I’ve deserved your coldness ...

The more Rudy imagined, the more real the words became, until he felt he knew the contents of his brother’s letter precisely. A vague memory came to him. He was twelve or so; Adam was still little. They’d built something together in the backyard. It was a rock sculpture of some kind, but it all fell apart. What he remembered most clearly was picking up one of the rocks and throwing it as hard as he could. But he couldn’t recall what his target had been.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered.

Leaving the letter in his trouser pocket, he unknotted the mosquito net hanging over the bed. He made his way around the mattress, tucking the net underneath, leaving a small gap through which he finally crawled. Safe inside, he reached his hand out to switch off the bedside lamp then tucked in the rest of the net.