But she could imagine. “Don’t forget,” she said, “I’ve been there myself.”
“Did you look at people’s faces?”
She nodded. “At my own in the glass. And of course at Dugald’s. Goodness, that last time we took the moksha-medicine together! He started by looking like a hero out of some impossible mythology—of Indians in Iceland, of Vikings in Tibet. And then, without warning, he was Maitreya Buddha. Obviously, self-evidently Maitreya Buddha. Such a radiance! I can still see…”
She broke off, and suddenly Will found himself looking at Incarnate Bereavement with seven swords in her heart.
Reading the signs of pain in the dark eyes, about the corners of the full-lipped mouth, he knew that the wound had been very nearly mortal and, with a pang in his own heart, that it was still open, still bleeding. He pressed her hands. There was nothing, of course, that one could say, no words, no consolations of philosophy—only this shared mystery of touch, only this communication from skin to skin of a flowing infinity.
“One slips back so easily,” she said at last. “Much too easily. And much too often.” She drew a deep breath and squared her shoulders.
Before his eyes the face, the whole body, underwent another change. There was strength enough, he could see, in that small frame to make head against any suffering; a will that would be more than a match for all the swords that fate might stab her with. Almost menacing in her determined serenity, a dark Circean goddess had taken the place of the Mater Dolorosa. Memories of that quiet voice talking so irresistibly about the swans and the cathedral, about the clouds and the smooth water, came rushing up. And as he remembered, the face before him seemed to glow with the consciousness of triumph. Power, intrinsic power—he saw the expression of it, he sensed its formidable presence and shrank away from it.
“Who are you?” he whispered.
She looked at him for a moment without speaking; then, gaily smiling, “Don’t be so scared,” she said. “I’m not the female mantis.”
He smiled back at her—smiled back at a laughing girl with a weakness for kisses and the frankness to invite them.
“Thank the Lord!” he said, and the love which had shrunk away in fear came flowing back in a tide of happiness.
“Thank Him for what?”
“For having given you the grace of sensuality.”
She smiled again. “So that cat’s out of the bag.”
“All that power,” he said, “all that admirable, terrible will! You might have been Lucifer. But fortunately, providentially…” He disengaged his right hand and with the tip of its stretched forefinger touched her lips. “The blessed gift of sensuality—it’s been your salvation. Half your salvation,” he qualified, remembering the gruesomely loveless frenzies in the pink alcove, “one of your salvations. Because, of course, there’s this other thing, this knowing who in fact you are.” He was silent for a moment. “Mary with swords in her heart,” he went on, “and Circe, and Ninon de Lenclos and now—who? Somebody like Juliana of Norwich or Catherine of Genoa. Are you really all these people?”
“Plus an idiot,” she assured him. “Plus a rather worried and not very efficient mother. Plus a bit of the little prig and day-dreamer I was as a child. Plus, potentially, the old dying woman who looked out at me from the mirror the last time we took the moksha-medicine together. And then Dugald looked and saw what he would be like in another forty years. Less than a month later,” she added, “he was dead.”
One slips back too easily, one slips back too often…Half in mysterious darkness, half mysteriously glowing with golden light, her face had turned once again into a mask of suffering. Within their shadowy orbits the eyes, he could see, were closed. She had retreated into another time and was alone, somewhere else, with the swords and her open wound. Outside, the cocks were crowing again, and a second mynah bird had begun to call, half a tone higher than the first, for compassion.
“Karuna.”
“Attention. Attention.”
“Karuna.”
Will raised his hand once more and touched her lips.
“Do you hear what they’re saying?”
It was a long time before she answered. Then, raising her hand, she took hold of his extended finger and pressed it hard against her lower lip. “Thank you,” she said, and opened her eyes again.
“Why thank me? You taught me what to do.”
“And now it’s you who have to teach your teacher.”
Like a pair of rival gurus each touting his own brand of spirituality, “Karuna, attention,” shouted the mynah birds; then, as they drowned out one another’s wisdom in overlapping competition, “Runattenshkarattunshon.” Proclaiming that he was the never-impotent owner of all females, the invincible challenger of every spurious pretender to maleness, a cockerel in the next garden shrilly announced his divinity.
A smile broke through the mask of suffering; from her private world of swords and memory, Susila had returned to the present. “Cock-a-doodle-doo,” she said. “How I love him! Just like Tom Krishna when he goes around asking people to feel his muscles. And those preposterous mynah birds, so faithfully repeating the good advice they can’t understand. They’re just as adorable as my little bantam.”
“And what about the other kind of biped?” he asked. “The less adorable variety.”
For all answer she leaned forward, caught him by the forelock and, pulling his head down, kissed him on the tip of his nose. “And now it’s time you moved your legs,” she said. Climbing to her feet, she held out her hand to him. He took it and she pulled him up from his chair.
“Negative crowing and parroted antiwisdom,” she said. “That’s what some of the other kind of bipeds go in for.”
“What’s to guarantee that I shan’t return to my vomit?” he asked.
“You probably will,” she cheerfully assured him. “But you’ll also probably come back again to this.”
There was a spurt of movement at their feet.
Will laughed. “There goes my poor little scrabbling incarnation of evil.”
She took his arm, and together they walked over to the open window. Announcing the near approach of dawn, a little wind fitfully rattled the palm fronds. Below them, rooted invisibly in the moist, acrid-smelling earth, was a hibiscus bush—a wild profusion of bright glossy leaves and vermilion trumpets, evoked from the double darkness of night and overarching trees by a shaft of lamplight from within the room.
“It isn’t possible,” he said incredulously. He was back again with God-the-Fourteenth-of-July.
“It isn’t possible,” she agreed. “But like everything else in the universe, it happens to be a fact. And now that you’ve finally recognized my existence, I’ll give you leave to look to your heart’s content.”
He stood there motionless, gazing, gazing through a timeless succession of mounting intensities and ever-profounder significances. Tears filled his eyes and overflowed at last onto his cheeks. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped them away.
“I can’t help it,” he apologized.
He couldn’t help it because there was no other way in which he could express his thankfulness. Thankfulness for the privilege of being alive and a witness to this miracle, of being, indeed, more than a witness—a partner in it, an aspect of it. Thankfulness for these gifts of luminous bliss and knowledgeless understanding. Thankfulness for being at once this union with the divine unity and yet this finite creature among other finite creatures.
“Why should one cry when one’s grateful?” he said as he put his handkerchief away. “Goodness knows. But one does.” A memory bubble popped up from the sludge of past reading. “‘Gratitude is heaven itself,’” he quoted. “Pure gibberish! But now I see that Blake was just recording a simple fact. It is heaven itself.”
“And all the more heavenly,” she said, “for being heaven on earth and not heaven in heaven.”
Startlingly, through the crowing and the croaking, through the insect noises and the duet of the rival gurus, came the sound of distant musketry.
“What on earth is that?” she wondered.
“Just the boys playing with fireworks,” he answered gaily.
Susila shook her head. “We don’t encourage those kinds of fireworks. We don’t even possess them.”
From the highway beyond the walls of the compound a roar of heavy vehicles climbing in low gear swelled up louder and louder. Over the noise, a voice at once stentorian and squeaky bellowed incomprehensibly through a loudspeaker.
In their setting of velvet shadow the leaves were like thin shavings of jade and emerald, and from the heart of their gem-bright chaos fantastically sculptured rubies flared out into five-pointed stars. Gratitude, gratitude. His eyes filled again with tears.
Snatches of the shrill bellowing resolved themselves into recognizable words. Against his will, he found himself listening.
“People of Pala,” he heard; then the voice blasted into amplified inarticulateness. Squeak, roar, squeak, and then, “Your Raja speaking…remain calm…welcome your friends from across the Strait…”
Recognition dawned. “It’s Murugan.”
“And he’s with Dipa’s soldiers.”
“Progress,” the uncertain excited voice was saying. “Modern life…” And then, moving on from Sears, Roebuck to the Rani and Koot Hoomi, “Truth,” it squeaked, “values…genuine spirituality…oil.”
“Look,” said Susila, “look! They’re turning into the compound.”
Visible in a gap between two clumps of bamboos, the beams of a procession of headlamps shone for a moment on the left cheek of the great stone Buddha by the lotus pool and passed by, hinted again at the blessed possibility of liberation and again passed by.
“The throne of my father,” bawled the gigantically amplified squeak, “joined to the throne of my mother’s ancestors…Two sister nations marching forward, hand in hand, into the future…To be known henceforth as the United Kingdom of Rendang and Pala…The United Kingdom’s first prime minister, that great political and spiritual leader, Colonel Dipa…”
The procession of headlamps
