Diamond Dust Page 9

  I found myself skimming the pages, regardless of what news was printed there, searching for a particular item that would bear my name. When I found none, I repeated the whole procedure in case I had missed it the first time. I repeated the act more and more frenziedly, as if I had to confirm what I had seen. I sent away the maid who came to clean the room. I did not answer the telephone which rang and rang at regular intervals. I stayed in my room all day, too afraid to leave it. I could not say what it was I feared, but I found myself trembling. When I was exhausted, I slept, but never deeply—I kept waking, each time in a panic.

  I am not sure how long I stayed in the hotel in this state, whether it was two days or three. It certainly was not longer before the newspaper that was brought to me, and that I went through in such a state of panic that I nearly choked, finally revealed the news I had all along expected—and feared—to find: there was my name printed half-way down the column on page 7 in the local news. Of course my name is not so singular that I imagine no one else could possess it—there must be many men who have both the very common first name and the last. But it went on to give my exact particulars—the firm for which I worked, my designation, the reason why I was in this city—and ended by saying I had been found in the river at midnight, drowned. That I 'left behind' a wife and two children in the city of X. That no foul play was suspected.

  No foul play? Then what was this that was happening? I had been declared dead. I was here in the hotel room, washed, shaved, ready for work, and I was informed that I did not exist, that I had drowned in the river.

  For some reason, at that instant I found this comic, grotesquely comic. I think I laughed—I felt the ripping sound erupt from my throat, I assume it was laughter. How does a man react to such news—the news that he is no more?

  Again I was in such "a state of agitation that I' could not proceed. I was to attend a meeting that morning: that was my reason for being in the city. But if I was dead, if my death was reported, how then could I proceed with my life and keep appointments and attend meetings and continue as though nothing had happened? My colleagues and associates would be thunderstruck to see me, even horrified. How could I submit them to such an experience? Or myself submit to it?

  While I pondered over the best course of action to take, I kept to the hotel room. The telephone did not ring. Then it struck me that someone might very well come down from the office to collect my belongings, perhaps to go through them in search of some telling evidence such as a suicide note (if 'no foul play' is suspected then suicide usually is), and this threw me into such agitation that I decided to flee the room. For a while I considered packing and taking my suitcase with me, but then I thought the matter over and decided it would make my disappearance even more suspicious. If I left my belongings where they were, at least the death by drowning would remain plausible. So I hurried away without a single piece of luggage.

  I have always been a conscientious person and it was very hard for me to slip out of the hotel without paying the bill, but when I went down the stairs to the hall, I was afraid the receptionist might have read the paper and seen my name in it. If so, he would be terribly shocked at seeing me. On the other hand, since he had not come up to examine my room or clear it, it would seem he had not. However, if I were to stop and pay the bill, he would inform my business associates of the fact when they came, as inevitably they would. The only course open was for me to leave, and leave the bill unpaid. This caused me a considerable amount of disquiet which I had to suppress as I hurried out of the lobby and into the driveway. There was a taxi idling there and I could have stepped into it and so hastened my disappearance but I stopped myself with the thought: 'Where would I go?'

  Now I was truly perplexed. My previous life had ended, but did that mean I now had to construct a new one?

  This is a hope, a fantasy many of us entertain in the course of our lives. What happiness, we think, to end the dull, wretched, routine-ridden, unfulfilling life we lead, and to begin on another—filled with all that our heart desires. Yes, but try to do that and you will find you are suddenly faced with hundreds of questions, no answers, doubts and no certainties. There is really no experience so perplexing. A new life—but what is it to be? And how to begin it?

  I confess that I blundered around for the next few days—I no longer know how many—trying first one route, then another. Of course I considered escape; I knew it would be best to flee to another city, some part of the country where I knew no one, and no one would have heard of me or of my 'death'. But I found I simply could not embark on flight. A part of me was consumed by the desire to see what would happen now that I had 'died'. I even entertained the idea of going to my own funeral. It fascinated me to think I could stand beside a funeral pyre and watch my own body, my closest, most intimately known and familiar body, reduced to ash. In fact, it was the image that hovered before my eyes both in sleep and in waking. The only reason I did not follow this compulsion was the thought that I would be forced to see my family, who would naturally also be present, that my young son would come towards me with a torch to light the pyre, that I would have to witness his pain and my wife's sorrow ... I knew I would not be able to control myself and remain 'dead' to them. Once when I was driving home, and had just turned in at the gate, I saw my son, then a small child, falling out of a swing that hung from a great tree, tumbling down into the dust. I leapt out of the car before it had even stopped moving—I simply sprang from it, abandoning it, in my rush to go to him and lift him in my arms and make sure he was not harmed. He was, slightly, and he was also to have several injuries later when he started playing cricket at school and bicycling and swimming, but that moment when he was so small and I saw him hurtling through the air into the dust like a bird was the moment that I felt our bond most intensely. Now that I was 'dead', were those bonds broken? Or would I become aware of them as soon as I was in another situation where they were tried?

  I did not trust myself to have the nerves or the self-control required for such a bizarre experience, and so I stayed away, but all the time in a kind of anguish that made me clench and unclench my fists and often wipe the tears that streamed down my face. I could not even tell the exact cause of my anguish—was it for myself, the old self that had died, or was it for those I had been parted from and could not go to comfort?

  I began to see that all of life was divided in two or into an infinite number of fragments, that nothing was whole, not even the strongest or purest feeling. As for the way before me, it multiplied before my eyes, the simplest question leading to a hundred possible answers.

  This led me to blunder around in a state of still greater indecision. When the time came to an end that my body may have lain in a morgue, or possibly in my home in preparation for the funeral, and I knew—I cannot explain how, but I did with a certainty feel it within me—that I had been cremated and was no more, I was relieved. At least I ceased to see the scene of the cremation before my eyes in all its horrific detail—the smoke, the oils, the odours, the cries, the heat—and was able to put it behind me.

  Yet I found I could not take the next step. I still felt caught, wrapped up in my life, my 'former' life as I needed now to think of it. It did not leave me free to think of what the next step might be. I was so absorbed in it that I can hardly provide any details of my existence at that time. I slept wherever I ended up—on a bench in the park, on a doorstep or a piece of sacking, or upon a sheet of newspaper. I ate whatever I could find; sometimes hunger made me see black and reel, sometimes I ate and was promptly sick. I know children followed me, laughing, down one street; on another, dogs barked and snapped their teeth at me ferociously and had watchmen come running out to chase me away. Somehow I escaped from them all, and mostly was left alone. Of course I must quickly have begun to look like a beggar, in just the one set of clothes in which I had walked away, and with next to nothing in my pockets.

  It was in this state that I finally climbed onto a train—without a ticket for I could no
longer afford one—and returned to the city where I had once had my home. By then I was reduced to a sorry state by being out in the sun and the rain, unwashed, mostly unfed. I felt, and possibly even looked, much as a lost dog does when it finally finds its way home, whipped, injured, frightened and hungry. Like that lost dog, I thought I would creep in at the gate of my house—I was still capable of such possessive thoughts—and go up the drive to the veranda, and I was certain, or at least ardently hoped, that my family would come out and find me, and treat me as they might a recovered pet, lavishing their attention and care upon me.

  Somehow I did creep back to that gate, I did stand there by the hedge. I did look over it and see that the house was still standing, its verandas and doors and windows and roof, just as in the days when I had lived there myself. Even the tree by the portico—strange that I had never thought to learn its name—though it no longer had a swing dangling from its branches, was still large-leafed and shady, even if its fruit had never been edible except to the birds whose droppings spattered the driveway with white splashes and undigested seed.

  So welcoming, so sheltering, yet I stayed out in the road, not even daring to touch the gate and unlatch it. The reason was that I saw many cars and people and much activity in that driveway and that portico. People were coming out of the house, carrying boxes, trunks, crates and cartons, and heaving them into a truck that stood waiting. After what must have been many hours, the truck rolled down the drive towards the gate. I made myself small against the hedge and watched as it drove away with the furniture and belongings with which I had filled my house. There was a moment when I thought of leaping onto the truck and going with my belongings to wherever they were being taken, but my body was much too weak for such acrobatic feats. Instead I huddled by the gate and watched as my wife—my wife! I called her that to myself, and yet the words already sounded strange now that I was no longer certain I possessed her and wondered how I could ever have imagined I did—came out of the house, dressed in white as a widow, with her parents on either side of her. They were all dressed in the colour of mourning. This distressed me greatly. I wished to run out and plead with them to change to bright colours once more. Had they forgotten how much I liked bright colours, had bought my wife clothes in every colour of the rainbow, and insisted my daughter wear reds and yellows and oranges? But here came the children behind them, carrying small boxes and baskets that contained, I felt sure, their most precious belongings. All of them came down the stairs to the portico where a grey car waited that I recognised as my father-in-law's. I watched them climb into it, and then there was a pause. Were they looking back at the house, saying goodbye to it? Or did they stop to think of me, whom they had last seen here? Then the car started up, quickly, with decorum, and smoothly rolled down the drive and came towards the gate.

  Once again I pressed myself instinctively into the hedge. The last days that J had been through in the city had taught me to shrink, to make myself invisible, and so I did instead of springing out and standing there before them, in the middle of the road, and crying, 'Look, I am here! I have returned!' Neither the words nor the gestures came to me; it was as if they had been strangled inside me. How could I say them when they no longer rang true?

  So the car passed by me, I crouched in the hedge, and none of those seated in the vehicle so much as turned their heads to glance at me. If only they had, surely those words, those gestures would have been wrung from me? Surely I would have cried out, at least to say, 'Please! Oh, please?'

  As it happened, they did not. Not one of them turned to look back at the house they were leaving after so many years of occupation. Did they not feel any pang on departing? Their faces were all fixed, staring ahead as if into the future. Was that what concerned them—the future? Were they, perhaps, looking forward to it, eager for it?

  And when I saw that, when I saw that they had a future, one that they looked forward to, or at least moved towards with resolution, I admit that I also felt, mixed with the bitterness of disappointment, a certain relief. It was as though I had at last shed them. My wife, my children, my house, they were all gone from me, and curiously, I did not feel bereft so much as lightened of my load.

  The car disappeared down the road. Someone in a watchman's uniform came and locked the gate. The click of the latch reminded me the house was not mine, had in fact never been mine; it had belonged to the company for which I worked but no longer did. It was apparent they had asked my family to vacate it and move. And they had, to my wife's parents' home in another town. She belonged there, she was returning to it. She had been mine, my wife, for a stretch of time that now was over.

  After a long time of sitting in a state of sorrow and exhaustion, I left my house and, not wanting to walk on the streets where I might meet neighbours or friends, I went by small backstreets that normally only servants and peddlers used, and came to the river that ran around the outskirts of the city. This was no wide, grand river as I had seen in the city where I died, but only a muddy, slimy trickle that ran through a wide sandy bed in which washermen spread out the clothes they washed, and alongside which stood a few straw-roofed shacks housing I had no idea whom. By then it was evening and I stayed on the bank and watched as the washermen folded up the washing, loaded it on the backs of small donkeys and led them away. Small fires were lit in the straw-roofed shacks which began to smoke in a dark, smothering drift. A child with a pot came down to the stones beside the river and filled it, then turned and wandered away.

  By then it was growing dark and I felt it was safe for me to make my way down unobserved. I took off the shoes that somehow I had retained till now and left them in the grasses by the side of the road, then walked down and across the sand, which felt gritty to my feet, and came to the water. It looked more like a drain than a natural stream but I was in such need that I bent with cupped hands and scooped up some water to first wash my face, then splash some on my head and finally even to drink.

  I could not have drowned myself in such a trickle if I had wanted to. That thought led me to wonder, as I stood up on the stones and stared into the murky opaqueness of the water, if that was what I wished: to drown this self that had remained, to drown the double of the self that had already died.

  But that self, my other self, the self that had had a job and a wife and children and a home, that self was already gone. I wondered what it meant, that death of my mysterious double. It seemed to me that I had died with it; I was so convinced of this that I was not able to resume my life. But was that the only possible interpretation? Once again I felt my mind splinter into fragments that whirled wildly in some great vacuum, and one fragment that I seized upon as another possibility was this: could that death have meant that my double had died on my behalf, that his life was finished, freeing me, my new self, my second self, to go on with another life, a new life?

  I searched in myself for an instinct, an urge that would provide the answer. Was it to be death, or life? I remembered how I had once stood on a river bank—in how different a condition, how different a state!—and considered leaping onto a boat and letting it carry me down the river and out to sea, but now I felt no impulse at all, not even one that needed to be confronted and stifled.

  It seemed to me that by dying my double had not gifted me with possibility, only robbed me of all desire for one: by arriving at death, life had been closed to me. At his cremation, that was also reduced to ash.

  Then I was filled with such despair that I sank onto my knees in the mud.

  At daybreak the child with the pot returned to the river for water. What he saw made him stop and stare, first from the slope of the bank, then from closer up, the stones in the shallows. When he made out it was a man's body that lay in that trickle, face down, he dropped the pot on the stones in fright. Its clattering rang out so loud and clear, a flock of crows settling on the sands in curiosity took off in noisy flight.

  The Artist's Life

  WHEN Polly returned from summer camp, there was still
some time to go before school reopened. She took to slamming out of the house after breakfast and wandering barefoot into the backyard, disappearing behind the garage and the bean vines to where the old car tyre still hung on a rope from the maple tree. For years forgotten, its solaces were now to be rediscovered—the twirling herself round and round and then, when she had wound herself up to the point of strangulation, letting go and allowing herself to unwind in an accelarating spin; the dragging of a toe through the scrubby grass as she pushed herself moodily backwards and forwards; the contortions of her limbs into and around and about the reassuringly fissured and pulpy rubber to act out the contortions of the inarticulate mind. Then there was the great canopy of the maple drooping down over her and around her in its protective tent of green, and the sighings, stirrings and scamperings that went on softly and unobtrusively within it, and the shade, almost chill, it threw across the sticky yellow heat of the last August days. She hung, trailed, twirled and rocked within it, her eyes narrowed under a dusty fringe.

  With those narrowed eyes she was gazing back into the remarkable fortnight of the summer camp. It made her push out her lower lip, clench her teeth as she remembered the bliss, so unexpected, so unlooked for, that came her way as if in search of her, Polly, its chosen recipient.

  That summer, in the tedious summer camp beside the dully glittering, reed-edged lake in the north, Polly had been chosen the hand-maiden of Art. A red-haired young woman who wore long, tie-dyed cotton shifts, and smiled cat-like through green eyes and moist lips, had chosen her.