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  The road, on this last journey, was very long. Time spread wonderfully before him. Nothing any longer called him back. Even in retirement, his longing to experience everything of the world’s beauty and strangeness throbbed and agitated. His ex-wife had joked acidly that he never saw a horizon without aching to surmount it. He was still a child, she said. Travel was his vice, his addiction. Or else he was trying to escape something. If he kept moving, that inner demon could not keep pace with him, or have time to breathe.

  But to him it felt different. To stay at home was to escape. To travel was to undergo reality. After his marriage ended, he filled his free time with intense, sometimes spartan journeys. He took early retirement from schoolteaching. Travel became a compulsion, a subtle liberation. Nothing exceeded the intoxication of his solitude and anonymity in a place far away from anything familiar, or the sense that just out of reach, beyond the next frontier, waited something revelatory. The encounter with ways not his own still touched him with the excitement of human exchange. There were the women, too. For a short, unhappy time he consorted with the fierce, laughing prostitutes of Dar es Salaam and Mombasa, whom he abandoned without guilt because they did not care, but with a curious regret too, as from some deeper attachment.

  But then solitude would return. He moved on, and left no trace. The past banked up glittering in his memories, and hung on his walls. It might even be a kind of understanding.

  This time he had meant to visit only Jerusalem and Bethlehem. But the garish delusion of the holy places moved him unexpectedly. He stood in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, at the false Tomb of Christ, and was overcome by bitterness. In this spurious cave of gilt and marble, the long-disowned Christian in him rose in revulsion. He pushed aside the tendered offertory dish, and backed away. Obsessively he hunted in the city for the few slabs of pavement – all but ignored – over which the feet of disciples and future saints must authentically have trod. He bent down to touch them, like a believer. He even gained access to the underground passage of the Hulda Gate, where in the gloom and dust of long neglect he stroked the huge pillars beneath which Jesus must have climbed to the vanished Temple.

  Surprised by his own disquiet, he did not return home. He flew to Istanbul, which he had visited forty years ago with the woman who became his wife. He was afraid of forgetting. Three years ago, according to his doctors, the excision of the brain tumour had left his powers of recollection almost unimpaired. But he was not sure. Cancerous tissue had been removed from vital organs of memory, whose names he had forgotten, and he had been troubled ever since by a fear that whole events, even relationships, had gone from his consciousness.

  Sometimes, wandering the streets and mosques of Istanbul, the images in his old cine films returned to him, but often film had taken the place of memory, and he could not recall walking here. He knew that the city had radically changed, and that nothing was more natural than these forty years’ forgetting. Yet he imagined a physical aching in his head, the dull pain of tissue closing round a void, and the feeling persisted that he was traversing a metropolis of vanished memories.

  Near the ancient ramparts that sealed off the city’s peninsula for three miles, he came upon a leftover church whose sheltering walls, rising in tiers of brick and stone, struck him with the eerie sense of déjà vu that he experienced quite often now. He associated the feeling with tiredness, perhaps with age. He had not seen this church before, he was sure, yet he expected it at any moment to quicken into recognition.

  In the funerary chapel, just short of the apse, an ominous Last Judgement overspread the dome. Beneath the feet of Christ, where Adam and Eve implored forgiveness for the sins of humankind, a river of fire carried the damned into Hell. It flowed down like a sea of blood, and in it he imagined that discolorations in the plaster were the faces of drowning sinners, who would never know the peace of death. He gazed up at them, and at the banked figures of the saved, with an old nausea, and wondered how many millions had died in terror at this morbid fiction, and whether he had seen it before.

  There was nothing to call him home. He applied for visas at a string of foreign embassies. He took trains and buses across the Anatolian plateau beyond Lake Van to the eastern borders of Turkey. The sculptural barrenness of these hills elated him. Once over the frontier into Iran, he entered an embargoed country where tourism had vanished, and even in the cities of Isfahan and Shiraz he was almost a lone foreigner. The concept of home was becoming strange to him. He was feeling an inner lightness. He imagined the country sucking him in, and time softening and expanding before him. He wandered through Persepolis, Pasagardae, and the cliff tombs of the ancient Persian kings. He had never travelled this country before. He stayed in cheap hotels and lived on chicken and rice. He could speak no Farsi, but savoured chance conversations in broken English and French. Because of the way he travelled, people thought him poor. His boots and backpack were fraying. When he glanced in the mirror, he was surprised by a face more gaunt and intense than his own.

  Weeks later he reached the old Zoroastrian towns of Yazd and Kerman, and walked beneath the Towers of Silence; then he turned north towards the Caspian Sea. It was pilgrimage time in the holy city of Meshed: the greatest concentration of Islamic shrines on earth. His hoteliers warned him against entering its inner sanctuaries. But fancifully he imagined a nest of passageways and curtained rooms, closing on some unique mystery, and felt the fearful impulse to penetrate them.

  At evening, swathed in local shawls, he stooped past the door guardians and into the resplendent courts, until at last, swept up in a slipstream of worshippers, he came along chanting corridors into the tomb chamber of a martyred Shia imam. Trembling, guilty, he stood crushed among a roaring mass of mourners, who clutched and wept at the tomb’s bars in inexplicable grief. Even in his fear he wondered: Who were they really mourning? The imam had been dead twelve hundred years, his character occluded in pious eulogy. No feat of memory could restore him. Yet grief was rising up like some immemorial sorrow, and anger too. It was as if grief, rapture, God Himself were waiting to be ignited in the labyrinth of the shrine or of the brain. Then the crowd swept him out again into the cold dusk.

  Three weeks later, from a hotel in Lahore, he made some dutiful telephone calls. Back in England, nothing had changed. Only in his brother Ricky’s voice – usually so patronising – did he detect an unwonted tension. What was Steven doing? Why had he been away so long? Longer than usual . . . When Steven said he planned to go to Simla, the old British summer capital where their father had once worked, he heard down the crackling line a sharp, aroused interest, as if Ricky were grasping for something – anything, perhaps – that might carry force or meaning. And when at last Ricky said: ‘I’ll fly to Delhi to join you!’ Steven felt a time-worn resentment. Across the pulsing distance the words carried a familiar assumption. Ricky made decisions; his younger brother fell in line. But then Steven heard an undercurrent of pleading, and of a gratitude for Steven that Ricky had never shown before. ‘I don’t want to muck up your plans . . .’ Perversely, the breakdown of that old condescension began to alarm him. He found himself agreeing to meet, just as he would have as a boy, but now from perplexed anxiety.

  For a week longer he journeyed in the shadow of Ricky’s arrival. The solitude he cherished intensified with the imminence of its end. He camped for two nights in the Himalayan foothills, and at dawn watched the snow peaks light up one by one in the night sky, kindled by an invisible hand, and knew why the Hindus sanctified them. When he entered the smog and pollution of Delhi, this magic still clung to him, so that he shrank from the prospect of Ricky. Ricky would bring England along with him, and the horizon would lower and dim.

  At the airport, Steven’s irritation sparked the moment he glimpsed him. In the stream of other travellers, dressed in their dark anoraks, shawls and modest saris, Ricky appeared in a tropical suit and loafers, trailing a big suitcase. He must have imagined India perennially hot. But closer to, Ste
ven softened. His brother looked oddly haggard and alone. His hair was swept back thinner and greying from his temples. When they awkwardly embraced, as they always had, Steven was reminded that he stood taller than Ricky, although the moment they disengaged this would seem an illusion. But now, standing in the wan arrivals hall, he felt his brother’s body narrower than he recalled, and thought he even shook a little. Perversely he recoiled from this. In the end he wanted things to remain as they had always been: even Ricky’s authority.

  Outside, the smog had thickened. They took the metro to the city centre, then an auto-rickshaw through the shock of traffic to Old Delhi station. Steven was used to this now, but he momentarily found himself looking out through Ricky’s tired eyes: at the press of squealing scooters and rickshaws, the dust-clogged pipal and eucalyptus trees, the pavement sewage and shit, and beyond them the ghostly rise of tower blocks in the smog.

  Their train was five hours late. Fog poured through the long vaults of the station, where people slept oblivious under strip lights on the cracked marble floors, their children and baggage around them. Ricky found a lavatory, where he changed into corduroy trousers, sweater and a raincoat. The waiting rooms were overflowing. They walked up and down the cold concourse while Steven wondered at their being here, and what might have happened to Ricky. They had not travelled together since their father took them on holiday as teenagers to Scotland.

  ‘Why now?’ he wondered aloud. ‘Why here?’

  Ricky grimaced. ‘I had to leave England. Even for a few weeks.’ He ignored Steven’s stare. ‘And India is the place I first remember. I thought: so why not go back? Stupid, really.’ Perhaps he was regretting it already. He was hugging his shoulders against the cold. ‘But you, why did you want to go to Simla, Steven? You don’t even remember it.’

  Simla lived in Steven’s mind through his mother’s evocation of it, even through his father’s quiet. He said: ‘I wanted to remember them.’

  Ricky gave a curt laugh. ‘I think Dad wanted to forget. He hardly ever talked about India.’

  Steven remembered his father’s silence too. It was his mother who had eulogised Simla: its mountain wonder, the scent of pine woods. But to his father, India had signified lost opportunity. He had passed the Colonial Service exams, then for five years worked in some administrative office before India’s looming independence brought them all home.

  Ricky said: ‘He had ideas about his future. He dreamed of becoming a district officer in the Punjab, administering justice to the natives. Then it was all over . . .’

  ‘Did he tell you that?’ Steven felt a twinge of bitterness at how little was ever vouchsafed to him. Ricky had always been his father’s favourite. India, to Steven, hovered only on the edge of recall. He said at last: ‘Ricky, do you really remember Simla?’

  As a boy, Ricky used to torment him with tales of monkeys and elephants, whereas Steven could remember almost nothing of India at all. He was only four years old when they returned to England, sailing on the HMT Dilwara. But Ricky was already seven, and his store of exotic tales increased with the years.

  As they walked, Steven fantasised that something around him might sharpen into memory. It was easy to imagine. The loudspeaker announcements – in Hindi and stilted English – resounded in his head like ancient trumpets. Each was punctuated by the notes of an organ, which infused its proclamations with baleful divinity. And at the station’s heart, beneath its display board, a line of sanyassin renunciates slept, stretched out on newspapers in their saffron robes and turbans, their features retracted in thickets of hair. Couldn’t he have remembered such things? But Ricky too stared at them in wonder.

  It was late evening before they boarded their sleeping car. Lying under its stained blankets, in a cubicle shielded by frayed curtains, Steven closed his eyes with relief against the deepening night. The train rumbled northward through the fog, and Ricky receded into a disembodied voice three feet away. The only other sound was the muffled laughter of passengers from a distant cubicle. In the fading orange glow of Delhi beyond their window, Ricky said: ‘Judith has left me.’

  Steven felt no jolt of surprise. Ricky and his wife had lived in mutual infidelity for years, and there seemed nothing left to bind them. Their daughters were married and gone. Steven murmured his condolence into the dark. Then he heard himself say: ‘I never liked her.’

  But Ricky’s voice had turned soft and baffled. ‘I told her it was too late, Steve. Divorce is something people do when they’re young, like you did. But we’re old. I’m sixty-nine, we’ve got used to one another, and forgiven most things. God knows, it’s too late to start again.’ He left a moment’s silence, in case Steven might fill it. ‘And she chose the wrong moment to leave.’

  ‘What moment?’

  Another silence, then: ‘I’ve been fired from my board.’

  ‘Oh hell, Ricky, why?’ Steven expected a saga of takeovers or boardroom treachery, but instead Ricky said: ‘There was a misappropriation of assets.’

  Steven did not understand what followed. Ricky’s words took on a confessional tension in the dark, yet they sounded empty, as if he had spoken them too often. They concerned bank debenture trading and misrepresentation in company records. It seemed his brother had trodden a tightrope between irregular practice and outright fraud. Steven gave up trying to understand his arguments, and listened instead to their tone: by turns guilty, aggrieved, reconciled.

  In the end, they lay in silence. Steven stared up at nothing. The air was thick with smells of cumin, sweat, disinfectant. In the past, Steven might have experienced secret triumph. Ricky, the successful one, the suave career role model: his life exposed as a crude charade. But now he waited to feel anything at all. He said at last: ‘I never understood business, Ricky.’

  ‘Nor did Judith.’

  ‘Did she leave you because of that?’

  ‘She said she would have left anyway. She said unforgivable things.’

  Judith – small, eager, ingratiating – had always irritated Steven. He did not see the point of her. He said: ‘It would help if you were angry.’

  But Ricky was not angry. He sounded bereft. Some fearsome void was engulfing him in her absence. ‘You must think I still love her.’

  Steven leant across and touched his brother’s hand, where it covered his face. The upsurge of his own compassion took him by surprise, and was followed at once by a fleeting thrill of closeness, then by an old embarrassment. And when Ricky muttered, ‘Bloody woman’, it was said to close the subject off.

  Steven did not sleep, but the train fell silent with the sleep of others. Sometimes it stopped at wan-lit stations, where nobody got in or out. Restlessly awake, Steven felt glad that his mother would never know of Ricky’s fall. She, whose affections were spread equally, would have been racked by mystified sadness, and would have strained to disbelieve whatever she was told. But she had died two years before, with her illusions intact. Only at the end did the passionate, big-boned woman sink under a massive stroke. Then, for a week, she had sought the clasp of Steven’s hand over the hospital sheet, and his voice correcting her confusions and hopes. Yes, Ricky is on business in Australia. Yes, Ricky is coming home (but he came too late). And her flesh at last had refined to an ethereal delicacy, unrecognisable, and her eyes were flinched shut, and her hand a precious claw in his.

  A century earlier, the imperial British had built a narrow-gauge railway into the Himalayan foothills to Simla. Through more than a hundred tunnels and over eight hundred bridges it annually carried the governing elite up from the threatening swelter of Delhi towards the mountains. Steven’s parents had travelled with it. In fact, he and Ricky might be settling into the same wooden seats as they had. Just before dawn, the toy-like train started to tug its red and yellow carriages out of the mist and began a five-hour ascent. At first it snaked through tropical vegetation, then levered itself upward in hairpin loops among giant cedars and pines. At noon they saw the horizon break open on a shimmering palisade of s
now, and glimpsed the old summer capital spread along precipitous ridges above them.

  Steven had no idea what to expect, and they stepped out into nothing recognisable. They searched for a hotel in the centre, and were engulfed by throbbing crowds. Weekend holidaymakers from the plains, Delhi office workers, Sikhs and mountain tribespeople flowed round them in rivers of different dialects and violent colours. People came to Simla now to shop, trek, relax. Jeans and anoraks and bobble hats jostled among turbans and salwar trousers; and everyone was taking photographs. No Westerner was in sight. Ricky had brought a map, and tried to trace old landmarks, without success. The world they were seeking had been gone for sixty years. Modern India had overswept it: bright, swarming, newly confident.

  Along the main ridge a bronze Mahatma Gandhi walked with his staff and book, his plinth inscribed ‘The Father of the Nation’. Vendors of candyfloss and ice cream were milling around him, and children taking pleasure rides on docile horses. Opposite, a statue of Indira Gandhi, the Iron Lady of her day, stood with her back to the steep suburban slopes, and a troop of rhesus monkeys was bustling round her feet.

  Slowly Steven and Ricky began to notice round them the buildings that their parents must have known. They stood in a quaint mock-Tudor style that was soon to be despised in their motherland, and survived here in faded anachronism. At one end of the esplanade the neo-Gothic Christ Church was closed, its drainpipes wrapped in barbed wire; at the other, the old town hall had withered to a wraith of glass and rotted timber, the shingles slithering from its dormer windows, and pigeons flying in and out of empty rooms.

  That evening, exhausted, they sat on their twin beds as they had as boys, and wondered if they should have come. Ricky had brought with him an old family photo album, and with it a pencil map of Simla’s western ridge. Here, in their father’s meticulous hand, various government offices were inscribed, and just beneath the grounds of Viceregal Lodge a faded green dot marked where their parents’ bungalow had stood. In his youth, Steven had once asked to see this album, and had found himself peering into a time he strained to imagine, until his father had eased the book away again with one of his dismissive quips. But now, while his brother slept, he leafed through its pages with deepening fascination. In its small, faded snapshots, Simla’s shopping mall, its churches and its half-timbered offices looked near-deserted: a sepia stage set dotted with stock figures in topis and rickshaws. But there were pictures too of polo matches and viceregal garden parties, of their mother’s face shadowed under an enormous Florentine hat, and a military band playing in the background, while his father chatted with colleagues in morning coat and the grey top hat that he’d kept until his death.