Garden of Dreams (9 page)

The house looked forgotten, but not violated. Anton had expected broken windows, at least, perhaps the rest of the house ransacked. He knew little of the house’s contents, or of the lives lived here. But he still had a key. As he closed the front door and stepped into the lounge, separated by a wall of glass from the white dunes and the indigo strip of sea beyond, he sensed their presence and absence at the same time. His wife and son both gone, missing.
Margo
, he called, his voice echoing through the shell of the house.
Margo
, as if she’d answer. Little left to go by, in this old cottage sprayed white by the salt of Cape storms. He yearned for signs of them, for the life they had made here together. Apart from him.

He’d lived here once – the year before he’d left, the first year after they’d bought the house, nine years ago. That year, that life, was like a fantasy now, not something that had happened to him. He sank into the khaki sofa that he had often slept on when his marriage started unravelling, and stared at the sea, deep and dark on this winter’s day. The sky was silver, the sun nosing through ragged clouds, and it was raining slightly:
jakkals trou met wolf se vrou.
Weather for rainbows.

There had to be clues, somewhere. He saw the phone on Margo’s desk facing the beach, with sliding glass doors leading on to the sand. He walked over, picked up the receiver and listened to the messages, more than he could count, mostly voices he didn’t recognise. Except his own, at least ten times pleading with Margo to answer, to return his call. She was gone when he’d called the hotel in Delhi the day after flying back to Kathmandu.
Checked out, no forwarding address
, the receptionist had informed him. That was a month ago. No answer on her cell phone; no luck with calls to her friends, or the few extended family members they shared. He’d decided to come back for a few days, search the place, possibly uncover something. In just over seventy-two hours he had to fly back to Nepal.

The place was frustratingly ordered. On Margo’s desk was a pile
of notebooks, neatly stacked. He thumbed through them quickly – all notes for various articles. Nothing more intimate or revealing. Seemingly dated, coffee stains on a few pages. He traced his hand over the desk’s old Oregon surface, recalling when he’d bought this desk for her years ago. When they loved rummaging through antique shops together. When she still dreamed of being a writer, not a journalist, and he supported her dream.

The drawers likewise yielded nothing, just conglomerations of paper, staplers, pens, photographs. He couldn’t bear to look at them.

He walked into the kitchen and nearly tripped over a chrome dog bowl, crusted with old food. The dog. Max. What had become of him? His bed was gone from the corner; there were no other signs of him. The dog missing, too.

Anton plugged in the kettle and searched for mugs. Tea and sugar were where he remembered them, in front of him on the counter, and rusks, brick-hard, in the earthenware jar from Mozambique, a wedding present. In the salt-flecked window he saw himself, a faint reflection but with a definite shape, or shapelessness. All the more rounded by his navy Pringle jersey and brown cords. Heavy, thick, needing a shave, looking grim. He’d lost the colour of Africa.

On the fridge, no recent to-do lists. Only, still, Eli’s first-grade drawing: a baby bird sticking its head jauntily out of the nest, waiting for mom to return and deliver food. Mom
would
return, no doubt in the baby bird’s mind. Anton opened the fridge door, desperate to find fresh milk or lettuce or something indicating recent human habitation. Cleaned out.

As he walked back through the lounge the silence disturbed him. Usually he treasured silence, found refuge in it. Power.
Silence is a weapon with you
, Margo was fond of saying. Now he found it antagonistic, mocking. He rifled through a pile of CDs near the player, mostly rock and blues and long-haired freaks he didn’t recognise, with ominous names like The Darkness, Skid Row and Black Sabbath. Well, he knew that one. Everyone knew Ozzy. What was she doing letting him listen to music like that? He found an old Enya CD and put that on; they used to listen to it years ago, pre-Eli, before a lot of things. The music soothed him as he went upstairs.

When he reached Eli’s room, he settled on his bed, neatly made, staring at the posters of Hendrix, Slash and Stevie Ray Vaughan on the walls, all ‘autographed’. The room smelled like a crypt, airless, damp settling in the walls. Eli’s guitars leaned in a corner in their black cases, mummified. Several framed photos, of him and his surfing pals at eBay,
hung skew. A Louisville Slugger bat tilted against the bookshelf (very few books, Anton noted). The boy had left out his cleats; they were huge, nearly as big as his own shoes. He picked one up and was immediately assaulted by the stink, dulled by disuse but still rancid with teenhood. The last time he’d seen his son he still had some sweetness to him.

On the desk by the window, cleared off but dusty, sat the miniature wooden boat he had carved for Eli when he was three or four. It fit in the palm of Anton’s hand; the olive wood was worn smooth, unpainted. It had never floated; Eli had grabbed it with his little-boy hands and guided it around the bath, vroom-vroom. He had washed his son’s soft, perfect back every night and told him which parts boys had to wash extra.

The room was like a museum. He felt an intolerable grief descending and left, closing the door behind him.

Down the hall Margo had made their bedroom hers. Hers only. He’d always left the decorating to her: her stamp on a place suited him. Classical elegance (a few antiques) mixed with exoticism, artefacts from around the world – masks, sculpture, textiles, ceramics – testifying to her wanderlust. He’d brought to their collection an old biltong kist from a family farm near Philippolis. They’d used it to store spices, jams, and so on, as a sort of pantry – now here it was in the bedroom. Full of
her
things, presumably. He went to investigate; it was locked. Through the wire netting he saw stacks and stacks of papers and books and diaries he wished he could read. To hear her voice.

He lay on the bed, a stinkwood four-poster, firm and high, covered in a quilt a dozen shades of blue. Their first bed. They’d put it in storage, traded it in for a queen-sized, more comfortable and modern; she’d taken it out again, at what point he wasn’t sure. The pillows, though bright white, smelled musty; he found a golden hair on one, hers. He resisted the temptation to search the other pillow for different hairs, telltale. Nothing visible at a glance. The room, white-walled with white muslin curtains, closed, held him like a hermit crab’s shell.

As he rose from the bed, stiff from the damp, he saw there were only three photos in the room, and none of him. On the Greek blue dresser: one of Margo seated on the khaki sofa with Eli, maybe three, tucked between her knees, laughing; in the other frame, two photos of Margo, a larger one of her on the beach at Knysna, on their honeymoon, peaceful and golden; a smaller one of her, six years old, grinning proudly with her first bicycle, wearing a blue-striped dress and pinafore and patent leather shoes, like Alice in Wonderland. On her grandparents’ wide green lawn in New England. Margo had given him the photos and decorated the
frame herself with red paint and gold leaf, on an anniversary.
This is who I was, and am
. Both photos signalling a beginning, something new to learn. Riding a bike. Loving another, unconditionally.

It’s like riding a bicycle
… Was it? Learning to love again if you’ve forgotten how?

When he recalled what had brought them together, what they had shared, it was too much. He had to shut it out. In the beginning, great sex, or at least he’d thought so – he always felt he couldn’t please her enough. The bigger passion was for their work together, fighting the struggle in the media, mainly, shoulder to shoulder with their black comrades who now barely spoke to them. Activists who had made it big in business, hauling in obscene salaries, taking their turn. Stepping on and over the whiteys and most of the people in this country, millions of poor Africans.

There’s no place for me here now
. He’d told this to Margo, before he left to sort out the rest of the world, and guessed he still believed it.

He needed air. He went to the window, pulled the gauzy curtains back and unlocked the sash window, raised it. A chill, kelp-laden breeze rushed in, and the squawk of gulls. The sun was near the horizon, just before dusk.

The music had stopped. He heard footsteps in the lounge and then ‘Hello?’ A girl’s voice.

They met in the kitchen. A slender girl with a long blonde ponytail, hoody, jeans and a pair of riding boots. Twenty-something. Glazed look. He could have sworn she was stoned.

‘Sorry. I thought the house was empty …’

‘Anton de Villiers. And you are?’ Anton tried to recall meeting her.

‘Karin – the house-sitter, the dog-sitter. I left a rucksack in the guest room … I’ll get it?’

Anton followed her to the room at the back of the house, where he had sometimes slept in exile. ‘Where’s the dog?’

‘I’ve got him,’ Karin said, shouldering her bag and walking towards the front door. ‘Do you want him back? When are they coming home?’

They stood facing each other, he and this stranger who had taken the family dog. ‘I don’t know,’ Anton said, wondering how much she knew, reticent to say much. Deciding to lie. ‘Soon, a week or so … can you check on the house? Keep the dog a while longer?’ He reached in his pocket for some bills but she waved them away.

‘No problem, Mr de Villiers. Just let me know what’s happening. Say hi to Eli and Margo for me.’

Nodding, waving half-heartedly from the front steps, he watched her
walk down the path as darkness folded over the house. With the lights on inside it almost looked as if people lived there. He walked around the house, looking in the windows, picturing people where there were none, hearing voices where there was silence. Not silence, really – the waves slapped the shore and he could hear the whoosh of a gull’s wings flapping low.

He walked to the top of the small dune in front of the house, just a crest of sand feathered with blowing grasses. He was alone; the distant neighbours were all inside, lights on but blinds drawn. Far to the right, to the north, rose the massive silhouette of the mountain, Chapman’s Peak, menacing at night. To the left, the south, blinked the lighthouse at Slangkop, its beam disappearing as it rotated but then flashing again, penetrating the darkness.

For decades guiding the lost home.

They looked like a flock of cockatoos in their white saris, fussing over Eli and his friends – the ‘sisters’ of Ojal and the other hijras on G.B. Road, who’d given them the money to come here, to Agra, to this miserable tea-coloured kotha behind the train station. The train had spilled them out, five lost souls, with hundreds of tourists here to see the Taj; they’d trooped into the kotha totally exhausted. The hijras hadn’t been surprised to see them but had looked gloomy, weighted by silence.
They’re in mourning
, Ravi had whispered as they entered.

They found her,
said the smallest hijra, wispy and high-voiced, barely male.
In an alley, her throat
… she drew her finger across her neck and grimaced.
Who could have done this to our beloved?
moaned another, wringing her hands and collapsing to her knees.
We’ve put the word out
, advised the guru, hefty and formidable, fond of rubbing the stubble on her chin.
We’ll bring the buggers to justice.

For four days now, the hijras had obsessively bathed, fed and coddled them. Cried in front of them. Sat up all night watching them. Warned them. As a precaution, they’d dyed Eli’s hair black and, amid loud protestations, chopped off a few inches. When he looked in the mirror now he got a fright. Felt butchered.

People had been asking after them at Ojal’s kotha – goondas, the hijras said.
No worries,
guru-ji said,
we can take care of goondas
. The other children seemed to believe her. But by the fifth day, Eli had had enough.

‘We can’t stay here forever,’ he said, throwing his hand of cards down on the lounge floor, where all five kids were playing blackjack. He’d been teaching them.

‘I change the music?’ the smallest hijra asked in her feeble voice, rising from her torn armchair to go to the boom box. ‘Maybe you sick of Bollywood, yes?’

I am sick of that fucking whiny music and of you birdmen-women with no balls and of this stinking place, this kotha, this city, this country
, Eli thought.

‘No, it’s fine,’ he said.

‘You bored?’ Ravi asked, leaning towards him and staring at him subserviently.

‘He not bored,’ Sanjana said, her voice reaching out to him. ‘He fed up.’

‘Fed up?’ asked Shanti, puzzled. She knew little English, Deevyah even less, but Shanti seemed perpetually curious.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I am. We have to make a plan. Get out of here. Get home.’ Ravi looked wounded. ‘Don’t worry, you’re coming with me, Ravi.’

Yet none of them seemed in a hurry to go. He wanted to get them out of there before they settled completely into a life of being pampered by men who thought they were women and treated them like babies. How could they ignore the danger? How could they accept fate with open arms, no matter how terrible it was?

‘So what are we doing?’ Ravi asked, reluctant to stop the game.

They needed money; they couldn’t keep getting it from hijras. They needed food, and a place to sleep each night. They all needed shoes. More than anything, they needed to be on the move again, before anyone caught up with them.

‘We’re going to do what everyone else does in Agra,’ Eli said, stacking his cards and walking out the door.

None of the other children had ever been to the Taj Mahal, the pride of India. As he led them through the back alleys, asking for directions on the way, Eli didn’t say how cold it had left him, this monument to love, how it made him shudder, particularly the thought of old Mumtaz, the Shah’s beloved wife, buried under all that marble.

As they drew nearer, the rickshaws multiplied, both bicycle and auto, hundreds scrambling and aiming for the same target, Indian and Anglo tourists racing each other to get there first. Eli led the group down the side of the road, threading through the crowds, tout after tout selling postcards and other trinkets. Then the rows of ashoka and neem trees ended, opening up to the esplanade, the pools, fountains and sculpted hedges, where sat the Taj, a pearly mirage at the far end.

He’d seen this same view before, but with his mother in the foreground, as he’d snapped her photograph. Now, the other children underscored her absence. The three girls stood still in wonder, and Ravi jumped up and down, clapping his hands. ‘It’s there, really truly, isn’t it!’

They had enough money for tickets, left over from what the Delhi
hijras had given them and supplemented by some pocket change from the ones in Agra, so they waited in the ticket line with everyone else. Eli could have gone to any of these people and asked for help. But out of pride and distrust, he didn’t – he wouldn’t. He would do this alone, if he had to. He’d get them all to Kathmandu, to his father, to safety, himself. If he could.

Soon they were herded through the gate and free to approach the imposing monument. ‘It looks like a frozen soft-serve,’ Eli said.

They all looked at him blankly.

‘I think it’s beautiful,’ Sanjana said. ‘Come on.’

As they passed all the tourists snapping away, faces glued to cameras, a young Indian man attached himself to their group, falling into step with Eli. Maybe five, six, years older, with a thin moustache and ‘diamond’ earrings on both ears.

‘You want guide? I give you very good price, no problem,’ he said rubbing his hands together, as though washing them. He had on tight jeans, sandals, and an ‘I Love India’ T-shirt, with a heart. ‘Are these with you?’ He looked disapprovingly at the others.

‘We don’t need a guide,’ Eli said, walking faster. ‘My friends and I have been here before.’ Sanjana, ahead of him, hadn’t turned around and the younger ones, just behind, were within earshot. ‘Haven’t we, Ravi?’ Eli pulled him up next to him, put his arm over his shoulder.

‘This your friend? These girls too?’ asked the guide.

‘Yes, all my friends.’ Eli would slug him, he thought, if he didn’t move away soon.

‘These can’t be your friends. Bad kids, these kids. Watch out for them, I know kids like these …’

Eli stopped abruptly and pulled Ravi close in front of him. ‘Fuck off!’ he said as the crowd flowed around them on two sides, like a river around a rock. ‘Go guide someone else.’

Eli dragged Ravi forward into the crowd, motioning the younger girls to follow, so they could catch up with Sanjana.

‘Who was that?’ she asked. ‘He was bothering you?’

‘Nobody,’ Eli said. ‘And yeah, he was bothering me.’

‘Because you too sexy!’ Ravi said, snickering.

Finally they were at the entrance to the tomb, among clumps of tourists listening to tour guides in a babble of languages.

‘Tell us about Taj, Eli,’ said Shanti.

‘Tell us everything,’ Sanjana said.

He couldn’t remember much, just that it was built in the 1600s by
Shah Jahan, one of the Mogul emperors, as a tomb and memorial for his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal. So he told them that, while leading them closer to the entrance, where dozens of people were seated on benches, removing their shoes or putting them on.

‘Let’s go,’ Eli said, staring down at his bare, grimy feet. ‘At least
we
don’t have to take our shoes off.’

They wandered through the white marble spaces, courtyards and archways, stroking the smooth surfaces embedded with flowers made of crushed gems, rubies, sapphires, emeralds. The young ones were mesmerised, walking faster and faster to cover more ground, touch more of the Taj. Sanjana, though, came back and walked with him.

‘It is something, isn’t it?’ she asked, looking down, not at him. ‘To build all this for someone? What does it say?’ Eli felt too cynical to say otherwise. ‘That the Shah was a rich egomaniac?’

Sanjana looked at him, confused, with no answer.

‘It’s a monument to himself, not to his wife. That’s how I see it anyway.’

‘Then Eli cannot see!’ Sanjana bristled, folded her arms and strode off.

He let them go ahead, get lost in the hordes so he could be alone. Of course not alone in these crowds, but anonymous for a while. It was claustrophobic in there anyway, so he turned and walked outside again, heading towards the balustrade marking the outer edge of the platform where the Taj rested, on a hillside leading down to the river. The Yamuna, he remembered, one of the most polluted in India, a tributary of the holy Ganges fouled by tons of human shit. Everywhere in India, filth and beauty collided, coexisted. He couldn’t figure it out.

As he stared down the steep bank of dirt and dry grasses, down to the muddy swirls of the river below, he wondered what the hell they were going to do, where they were going to go. He’d take them as far as he could, help the girls go back to their villages in Nepal and bring Ravi with him to Kathmandu. From maps his mother had shown him, he knew if they got to Varanasi they could make their way across the Nepalese border from there.

But they needed money.

And if they got it by dubious means, they’d have to stay one step ahead of the police – and whoever else might be after them.

Can’t you phone your father?
Ravi had asked him on the train from Delhi. He couldn’t, actually, that’s how absurd it was – he didn’t have
a phone number for him, and didn’t know the name of the place he worked, only that it was near Durbar Square. Kathmandu. Nepal. It might as well have been the moon. All his friends’ numbers were in his cell phone. As for his mother – he’d tried calling her on the hijras’ phone here, many times, but just got the sound of his own voice on the answering machine. He’d left messages, including the kotha’s number in Agra. His mom hadn’t called back.

His thoughts were floating off down the river when he heard his name being shouted behind him. He turned and saw Ravi and the girls skipping and running towards him from the Taj, looking for him.

‘Were you going to jump in the river?’ Ravi grinned.

‘Fat chance – it’s disgusting.’

‘Maybe Eli cannot swim!’ Ravi said, coming closer, pinching him and running off.

‘I can’t swim,’ Deevyah said.

‘Not me too,’ said Shanti.

‘I can,’ Sanjana said proudly.

‘Listen.’ Eli tried to sound commanding. ‘We’ve got to get some money. Somehow. Who’s got an idea?’

Ravi rubbed his hands up and down his body, lingering on his butt. The younger girls giggled and cupped their breasts. Sanjana looked very serious.

‘Forget it – not like that. Not ever again like that,’ Eli said.

They walked back towards the entrance to the monument and skirted the armies of shoes being guarded by large old women in voluminous skirts and shawls, set into the ground like tents. Each one kept her little tin bowl nearby for tips. There were all kinds of shoes – dainty sandals of patent leather; stylish heeled pumps; cool Nikes and DCs; functional Adidas; dorky brown clunkers; smart men’s leather slip-ons; Crocs; and lots of rubber slip-slops in all colours. Their owners were all inside touching the walls, oohing and aahing and dreaming of romance on a grand scale.

‘Look!’ Eli said in a loud whisper. ‘Over there, the guard’s asleep. Ravi, Shanti and Deevyah, you talk to the other guards while Sanjana and I get the shoes.’

‘Bad idea!’ Sanjana shook her head.

‘Why? We can sell them.’

The others scanned the spread of shoes and seemed unconvinced.

‘I’m not doing it!’ Ravi pouted.

‘Why not?’

‘I’m not stealing.’ Ravi was a renowned petty thief in the kotha, always snatching girls’ lipsticks and perfume. But there was no time to argue. ‘We need your help, Ravi.’

Sanjana seemed to be coming round to the plan. ‘I’ll take them in my sari …’

‘I’ll get that big bag next to the one who’s asleep and fill it,’ Eli said. ‘You three …’

‘I’m going,’ Ravi said, scampering off sideways and turning towards the river again, towards the back of the Taj this time.

‘Wait!’ Eli half-shouted.

‘He won’t go far,’ Sanjana said.

The younger girls stood there, waiting for instructions.

‘Shanti, Deevyah, sit down and talk to those other two guards, keep them busy. Sanjana, when I nod you must grab as many pairs of shoes as you can carry – and then run like hell back to the river!’

Shanti and Deevyah obeyed, each going to one of the guards, sweeping away some shoes and sitting down gracefully. It seemed they had caught the aunties’ attention. No one was watching him, so he sidled up to the sleeping guard, a grey-haired woman in a huge red sari, snoozing against a big straw basket and snoring faintly. Her fat fingers gripped the edge of her tin cup. Next to her was a large red, white and blue woven plastic bag, folded over. Eli grabbed it.

It took less than two minutes to fill the bag. By then people had noticed and were pointing and shouting. As he started to run, at the edge of his vision he saw the old lady waking up, gesticulating madly. He turned to see Sanjana and the other girls chasing after him like a herd of wild horses, breathless with adrenalin and fright. If they could make it to the end of the monument, another twelve metres maybe, and around the back, they could climb over the balustrade and sneak out down the riverbank.

They rounded the corner, and stopped to catch their breath. Sanjana went back to check; no one was following them, not yet. They were sweaty and thirsty, and pleased with themselves. Eli kept strategising: ‘We need to walk calmly towards the river, and when no one’s looking, escape over the wall there.’

Few people lingered here, just a few amorous young couples seated to the far left on the wall, and a mother and two toddlers playing with a ball straight ahead. Off to the right, near the overhanging branches of a neem tree, stood a doughy silver-haired man in khaki shorts and a
yellow polo shirt, clunky sandals, with his back to them. His legs were split apart and through them Eli saw the spindly brown legs of a boy.

They had to get out of there, but Eli walked towards the man anyway. When they were within three metres of him, he turned, red-faced. His belt was undone. The boy in his shadow stepped forward into the sunlight.

It was Ravi.

‘Piss off!’ said the man, buckling his belt. He was British, with wire-rimmed glasses and a soft belly. ‘Mind your own fucking business.’

‘Get out of there, Ravi,’ Eli said, stepping closer. ‘Now. We’re going.’