Читать книгу Something Barely Remembered - Susan Visvanathan - Страница 6

river and sea

Leelamma had come with me to the station to meet Job. He was a short thin man, dark, with black large eyes. I recognised him at once from the photographs he had sent me. He dropped his suitcases and with no sign of diffidence he held my hands and said, ‘It’s you. At last.’ I was faintly embarrassed, and tried to pull out of his entrance. Suppressing laughter, Leelamma turned away.

Job was Father’s brother. He had been studying architecture in Italy as a young man, when he had met Marcella and married her. Grandfather and Grandmother were upset; there followed the usual tirades and threats of disinheritance, but Job would neither return nor leave the ‘Englishkarti’ as his mother called Marcella. There were no children, another reason for Grandmother’s continuous diatribes.

I was born to Father and Mother when they were very young. Mother had been sixteen and Father barely twenty years old. She was a lovely woman, my mother. I still remember her the day before she died. I was seven years old. Her name was Rahael. We used to live in a large old house. There were wooden walls and ceilings, courtyards, old trees and older furniture. Grandfather, whom we called Appacha, spent most of his time poring over palm-leaf manuscripts with hieroglyphics which he said explained our family genealogy for eighteen generations. His friend Thoma used to laugh at him – ‘Why do you need a genealogy? Can’t you see your nose?’

Mother tied her hair in a knot and always went barefoot. Her feet were long and once I walked into the room where Father kept his account books. She was sitting on his chair. I couldn’t believe it. I was shocked. I had never seen them together alone, Grandmother was always with them. The idea that they slept side by side would have stunned me at that age. I always slept close to Mother. Father slept alone. I had never before seen them together like this. I stared at them, feeling waves of anger and jealousy. They laughed and called out to me, but I ran away to the river. I sat on the steps and I cried till Yohan, my father’s elder brother’s son, found me and took me to my grandmother. ‘Why are you crying?’ she asked, holding me against her soft large bosom, where I could see the speck of gold which was her marriage locket.

‘Father and Mother are alone together without me.’ Grandmother laughed and said, ‘I will just call your mother. She has to grate coconuts for dinner.’

The next day my parents went for a wedding in the next village. It was called Mannar, and I’d always loved going there. The school had a heavy bronze bell, and the steps to the church were whitewashed. The river was green, covered with lilac water-hyacinths, and the boats had to fight their way through the root tresses of these water weeds. There was a storm that evening, and my parents never returned. I never saw them again, though they were brought home. I sat on the back steps of the old house and looked deep into the centres of the yellow canna flowers that my father had grown – wanton yellow with red fire lines. I looked inside the flowers for hours till I was dizzy and thought I would fall into their centres and drown.

So I grew up with Grandmother and all my cousins. After my father died, his father put away the lineage story into a shoe box and then took to visiting the river. He would stare at the water, at the strange and shifting reflections. Then he would come home and say nothing. Yohan’s father was always having to look after the family business: pepper. I grew up with the raw green beads of pepper, and the rain which fell on the twine and leaves. Yohan’s mother was a very gentle woman, but she never had time for me, having seven of her own. Leelamma and Yohan were older than me by five and three years each, but even so, they were my companions. Then when I was eighteen they got married and went to live in their own houses. Leelamma still came to visit us, but these visits were getting more and more infrequent. Her mother-in-law fell ill, there was too much work.

‘Leela, you’ve forgotten me.’

‘Anna, how can you say that?’

‘Why don’t you come home, then?’

‘How can I? I’m married now. People will think I’m unhappy if I keep coming home.’

‘Are you happy?’

‘You’ve seen Issac. What else could I be?’

‘Yohan never comes to see me, now that he’s built a house.’

‘Why don’t you go over, then?’

‘Mariam doesn’t like me. She leaves me in the outside rooms and goes away.’

‘That is right. You hang around Yohan too much. You’ve both grown up now.’

‘But I love him. We’ve always been friends.’

‘He’s married now. And he’s not your brother. You’re his father’s brother’s daughter. People talk.’

‘Won’t it ever be the same again?’

‘No.’

It was on that day that I wrote to Job, Father’s second brother. I sent him an old photograph of Father and Mother and a new one of myself. Twenty-one days later I got a reply. It was on a postcard, and it came from somewhere in Switzerland. He was there on business. Marcella was in Rome where they had a flat. His writing was small and cramped and he closed his letter with the words, ‘We have space. Stay with us.’

In my community, those who are far away always return. My grandmother’s grief lay in that Job, having married a foreigner, would never come back to her. ‘Even if it’s only to lie in the mud next to us, it would be enough, but now he’ll never come.’

I was surprised by Job’s invitation and showed it to Ammachi. She made me explain it to her. Then wiping her eyes with the edge of her gold-embossed shawl, she said, ‘Let him come here and take you.’

She seemed to have lost her rancour against Job’s attachment to the ‘Englishkarti.’ She was eighty-five years old now, her eyes blue grey with age. She had never recovered from the loss of my parents, and now that death came close, she wanted me to be settled. For her it seemed perfectly reasonable that Job should come, and that I should be in his care.

‘He is busy, and besides he’s only asked me for a holiday,’ I said, hesitatingly.

‘No. Job wants you to live with them.’

It was impossible arguing with Ammachi, so I let it rest. Soon after Job came home.

He was only thirty-seven years old, and looked like Yohan. For the ten days that he stayed in the ancestral house he quarrelled with Ammachi. It was terrible.

‘You didn’t bring the Madame?’

‘Marcella,’ Job said softly.

‘What kind of name is that? It’s not in the Bible.’

‘It’s a good name.’

‘She is not good, I know.’

‘You haven’t even met her.’

‘Cigarettes.’

‘She is very gifted. She is well-known in her country. Who cares what you think in this backwater.’

‘And her legs. Everyone in the street sees her legs.’

‘What about your mother? We all saw her breasts.’

‘She had children, she had once provided milk, she was ninety-five. How can there be shame then?’

‘My wife is an artist and a good one.’

‘Does she bring any money?’ Ammachi’s eyes were suddenly alert.

‘Mother, stop it. I’m going.’

‘Take Anna. After I go no one will give her rice.’

‘She has her inheritance.’

‘And what was it that fed her, clothed her and educated her for all these years?’

‘You Nazarenes, you followers of Yeshu Christu, have you never heard of love?’

‘What can I do? Abe controls the business. He says there is nothing for her.’

‘I’ll take her with me.’

Ammachi got up, and held Job’s hands and kissed them.

At the end of the month of June – ceaseless rain – Job and I left for Rome. I was so excited, I had dark shadows under my eyes from not sleeping for almost ten days. The whole village turned out to see us go, and anxious faces peered in at us when the taxi’s wheels churned in the deep sea sand. The river is on the east, the sea is close by, on the other side.

Father George, my teacher, looked in through the glass. He was desperately trying to say something.

‘Don’t forget your prayers, Anna,’ I finally heard, as I lowered the pane.

‘No, I won’t forget.’

‘Don’t forget your Malayalam. Have you taken the Gundert?’

Job asked, turning back to look at me, ‘What on earth is the Gundert? And I must buy you a box. You have a tin trunk? I didn’t even know they still existed.’

‘It’s a dictionary. The Gundert is an English–Malayalam dictionary. Father George is afraid I’ll forget to read and write the mother tongue.’

‘Write every week. Don’t forget the algebra,’ the old man shouted once more.

‘Yes, Father.’

‘Meet Father Agnello. A Catholic, but a good man. Holy.’

It started to rain. I saw Yohan. He was looking at Mariam and smiling. He looked towards me and waved. The taxi began to move, and then through a blur of tears, I saw Yohan open out a large black umbrella and Mariam stood close against him.

Marcella was wonderful. She was older than Job, and the love between them was so tangible I was forever surprised by it. Job stopped speaking Malayalam to me, and I was forced to learn Italian. My English was very good, because Father George had a degree in literature, in philosophy and in theology from Cambridge. He had been our parish priest for twenty years – unusual for our sect where priests were constantly transferred. It was he who had educated me, and by the time I was sixteen I had read almost everything that he had. The Russians were indecipherable to me, and Father said that I would have to wait till I was thirty before I could begin. I sometimes told Yohan what I read and he would look strangely at me. His eyes were narrow and black, and his cheekbones so sharp that they jutted through his skin.

‘You don’t even know how to cook.’

‘Shall I translate Aristotle’s Politics for you?’

‘That’s all very well. You had better marry soon, Anna. You have charm, but no beauty. Your father died too early. You can’t even cook or sew. You’re thin like your mother – she almost died when she gave birth to you.’

‘Yohan, why are you saying all this?’

‘I’m worried about you. And you should stop coming to see me. I’ll talk to Father about finding a match for you.’

How long ago all that seemed here in Rome. I realised as the years passed that love threatened us both. I understood, sitting under another kind of sun, why Yohan no longer acknowledged me.

Marcella never talked to me of marriage. She bought me an expensive camera almost as soon as I arrived.

‘We can’t afford to send you to the University. We want you to have the best, but university – no. We cannot afford. You’re too late to sculpt. The camera is good, you learn and sell. That is how you will live.’

So my future was carved out, and I spent those early months walking miles every day, in the cold breeze and the spring rain, learning to use a camera. My early photographs – now with Father George – were mainly of fountains and plazas, colonnades and arches. Marcella was not pleased.

‘Stupid tourist bitch,’ I heard her screaming to Job.

‘Marcella, she’s a child, from the country. Don’t speak like that.’

‘Let her hear what I think.’

Two years later I did a study of the Colosseum. The earth was deeply stenched with rain, weeds grew. I sent them to a German magazine which printed them at once. Celebration! Marcella was pleased at last. She gave me one of her odd, rare and brilliant smiles.

I wanted to go back home, but Job dissuaded me.

‘Things will not be the same. Ammachi is dead, what is there to go for?’

‘Yohan is there, and Leelamma.’

‘Yohan? That silent boy, Abe’s son? You want to see him?’

‘I want to hear the rain, I want to eat mangoes, sit by the river.’

‘You’re a fool. Nothing is the same ever. Ask Marcella for money if you want to go. I have none now.’

So I never went back. Sometimes in the dark green Roman street, ancient cobbles under my feet. I would think of the old house where I grew up. There were children, frogs, spiders, crows in the backyard, dark recesses, mangoes ripening in hay, and hens laying eggs in a chest of rice. I missed the high pitched Syrian chants from the village church, and the white cotton clothes edged with gold metallic thread that our women wore. One day I would go back to my ancient village where the wind brought to us the sound of the sea, and the hush of river water.