The Splendor Of Silence (45 page)

And then there is silence. And a sound of crying. There is only one person here. Someone left behind. The acrid smoke of their bullets hangs in the air, bites into Sam's nostrils. Still holding his gun, Sam moves around the sofa. The Japanese soldier lies along the back of the sofa, hands clutching his knees, tears plunging down his attenuated cheeks.

"Tanomuyo," he says, waving emaciated fingers in the air. "Tekidato omottanda. Ore wa kowakattanda."

Please. I thought you were the enemy. I was afraid.

Sam looks at him, and looks down at the ankles he has shattered. Why, he thinks, he is just a boy. He cannot be more than fifteen years old. Tears gush wetly down his face, an old, decomposed bandage grasps his thin ribs, the coverings mottled with blood and pus, his hair is sweaty and sticks to his head. Sam grabs him by the collar and drags him to the center of the room, kicking his rifle away to the side so that the boy cannot reach it. He tears a white tablecloth into strips, binds the boy's wrists behind his back, and leaves him propped up against a sofa. The soldier's blood pools at his feet and his face pales. Sam surveys him for a few minutes before tearing more strips from the tablecloth and using these as a bandage to bind the boy's ankles. He will never walk again, but he will at least still be alive.

Marianne and Sam bring an immobile Ken into the bungalow after Sam is sure that there is no one else here. There are many rooms, and all of them except for the front drawing room where the Japanese soldier lies in his own blood are trashed beyond recognition--furniture splintered into sticks, sofas and armchairs slashed, brass vases flattened, mattresses and bedding burned and moldering damply. There are big gashes in the red-tiled roof of the bungalow and rain has taken up occupancy in most of the rooms, bringing with it spiders, mosquitoes, innumerable leeches crawling along the stone floors in search of living flesh to feed on. The drawing room is the only safe and dry place in the house. Sam knocks out the door on one end and clears a path from the room to the back of the bungalow so that they now have three exits if they need them--the doorway, th
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oncrete arch leading to the front porch, and the windows along the front from where the soldier shot at them.

Ken's wound is only superficial, and they find this out after Marianne undresses him in one corner of the drawing room as the Japanese soldier watches them, fear blanching his face. The bullet has only singed the skin on the side of Ken's neck. It still takes him a very long time to come around though, and all through this Marianne sits by his side, rubbing her fingers along his temples. She does not look at the Japanese boy, but when her gaze does fall upon him inadvertently, she shudders.

"Will Ken live?" Sam asks.

"Yes," she replies, "there is really nothing wrong with him. I'm not sure why he does not wake up."

At that moment Ken stirs, his eyelids flutter, and when he opens his eyes his gaze is direct and focused, as though he has been awake for a while. Marianne fusses around him and he smiles weakly at her.

"It takes more than a bullet from a bloody Jap to kill me," he says, but he has not yet looked around or seen that the Japanese soldier is in the room with them; he could not have known, Sam thinks, who shot at him. "Why is he still alive?" he asks.

Sam shrugs. "No point in killing him in cold blood, and when I had a chance he only presented me with his legs, so I crippled him."

Ken seems satisfied with that explanation and closes his eyes again. In a few minutes, his breathing evens and he is asleep. Sam meets Marianne's eyes and the same worry is reflected in them both--Ken is injured on his neck, there is no telling how it will affect him; and they are now guardians of a Japanese soldier who has no capacity to walk. What will they do with him? Leave him here by himself, so that he can point his army toward their direction? Kill him before they leave, to keep themselves safe? Carry him out with them? How will they manage two wounded men? For all the resilience and courage she has shown so far, Marianne Westwood is still an old woman. Sam, who is so much younger, is exhausted already, he only sleeps in fits and wakens drenched in sweat and nightmares; he cannot begin to imagine how long Marianne's strength will last.

Sam digs through his haversack for another pistol, and when he pulls it out, the barrel is rusted through. Three short days ago, it fell into a river they were forced to ford on the trail.

"I will go out and find the hen," he says, "and prepare dinner for us.

And," he says, pausing, "for the boy." Here he glances at the Japanese soldier. "Will you be all right?"

"Yes."

Still Sam lingers, uneasy, not wanting to leave Marianne alone. She waves toward the door. "Go."

The rain has stopped by the time Sam steps out into the darkening light under the moist teak trees. He walks around the perimeter of the bungalow, his boots squelching in the damp grass. What he sees on the inside--a shambles--is mirrored here too, the lawns are blown up with unnecessary throws of grenades, the bushes are hacked down by someone gone mad with his dah, the creamy yellow shrouds on the murdered earth are the annual blooming padauk flowers. Such destruction, Sam thinks, as his nostrils fill with the fragrance of the flowers. There is a sudden movement in the bushes and the scrawny hen comes clucking out and stops at Sam's feet. He puts out a hand to it and it does not move for a second, then turns around and flees, rending the still air with the sound of its frantic clucks. Sam finally pounces upon the hen on one of the walkways surrounding the house and grabs it by the neck. It flutters in his arms, protesting in a flurry of feathers until he wrings the thin neck with one twist and settles its still-warm body in the crook of his elbow. Sam comes upon the pool on the side of the bungalow and looks down into the clear, green water, his whole self rampant with longing. The temperature still hovers somewhere over blazing, though the sun is close to setting and the canopy of trees over him has darkened everything to a blur. Water drips from the leaves of the hibiscus bushes and the pool seems to glow as though lit from inside with a string of lights. Sam sets the dead bird down by the side of the pool and strips off his clothes until he is naked. He dives from the side into the water, barely breaking the surface. When he comes up for air after a blessedly long time in the cool water, his body feels clean and strong, the sweat and dirt of the past few days washes away, he can breathe and feel human again. Sam floats in the water on his back, submerging himself until only his nose is in the air. He drifts weightlessly, his arms out, his fingers dragging under the surface to keep his body in balance.

He thinks he feels the smooth and clammy brush of skin against his, for just a moment, but is too lethargic to open his eyes. The feeling passes, but then there is a distinct rising of the hairs along his back and on hi
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ape. Sam does not open his eyes but listens intently, raising himself out of the water just enough for his ears to be revealed. This is no sound from a human being. An animal? His clothes lie in a pile along the side of the pool, by the dead hen, and right on top is his leather holster with his Colt tucked safely in it.

Sam opens his eyes but makes no sudden movements, just gently propels himself toward the rim of the pool. He senses, rather than sees, at first, the gelid pale white and daffodil yellow skin of the snake rising out of the pool. It runs its muskmelon-size head along the edge of the verandah, its forked tongue slithering out for a taste in the air of the dead hen and finds it. The python has begun to open its jaws and slide its body out of the water when Sam ducks his head into the water and swims toward it, thinking only that he is not going to lose his only delicious dinner to a damn snake.

As his splashing sends waves toward the edge of the pool, the python turns around, falls back into the water and races toward him. It comes upon his body from underneath and coils its mighty length over the part it has most access to, his right arm.

Sam suddenly finds himself in the Burmese python's embrace, within the waters of the pool where they have both been swimming. He opens his mouth to call out to Marianne and at that instant, the mammoth snake squeezes and constricts around Sam's arm. And yanks him under.

Chapter
Twenty-five.

For seven years, while her son was a minor, she practically ruled from behind the purdah; a seclusion so strict that even the doctor must look at her tongue, or the dentist pull out her teeth, through a slit in the curtain that shut off the inner apartments; and her ladies must follow suit she triumphed over all imposed limitations; but she could not easily move about, because of purdah restrictions.

--Maud Diver, Royal India, 1942

*

The fenana apartments of Jai's palace were in a separate wing by themselves, accessed through a series of corridors. Mila walke
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ehind the manservant who led her to the ?enana, a petromax lantern held aloft in his hand. Here, there was no electricity and this part of the palace was ancient, perhaps built as early as the sixteenth century by an ancestor of the Rudrakot royal family. The corridors had huge, cusped arches and enormous ceilings painted a deep indigo blue. There were gaps in the jails, screens on top of the arches, from where little bits of twigs and dust came floating down when a roosting pigeon flapped at the intrusion upon its night's sleep. Mila heard the deep gurgles of protest from the pigeons' throats, heard the cry of a peacock somewhere in the gardens beyond the light from the lantern, saw the colors of the walls intensify and fade as they passed until it seemed like they were within the embrace of an ocean. The whole evening had been surreal, the dinner, the flight through the various rooms of Jai's apartments, startling a lazy gecko here, a nestin
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parrow there; their laughter and an overwhelming feeling of love and affection for this man who wanted to give her so much. She had chosen the rooms she wanted for her own when she would be married to Jai, three of them, each opening out onto a marble courtyard with a fountain in the center and a parapet on the far end with a view of the town of Rudrakot and the Panjari Mountains capping the horizon in the distance. There were two trees in the courtyard, one a kinshuk, now in full bloom with its bright vermilion flowers and its dark mahogany-colored bark, and another the prosaic neem tree, which would soon fruit with its yellow, grapelike, inedible fruit. The rooms were large and empty, and Mila had stood in one darkened corner--as Jai moved around at the other end of each room--and listened for the breathing of past occupants, a smell from their presence, an approval of her wanting this space for her own, for her being here.

When it came time for her to marry Jai and move into these apartments, the rooms would be ready--whitewashed anew, the marble polished and washed, the floors slicked clean of the dust and dirt of centuries, the niches wired for electricity, carpets laid on the floor, Louis XIV furniture moved in, complete with a four-poster bed in the bedchamber. As it was, Jai's apartments were on another side of this wing of the palace and part of the renovation would include his removal from the old rooms to new ones close to hers. They would sleep in her bedchamber and awaken to each other every morning. No valets would be allowed to enter the room, instead Jai would have to learn to rise and go out to meet his menservants so that they could attend to his needs.

Mila's footsteps faltered at the thought of their sharing a room. She pulled the pallu of her glittering sari around her shoulders and covered herself from a sudden chill in the heated air. The manservant walking in front of her paused, inclined his head, and waited for her to make the adjustments with her pallu. Then he went on, listening for the sound of her footsteps matching his own.

When they reached the harem apartments, the manservant bowed and stood aside in front of a heavy teak door painted bright red and studded with brass fittings, like the outer doors of forts and palaces. He reached out and thumped on the wood with his fist and the door opened to reveal another servant, also male, but part of the Tenana.

The second servant bowed to Mila and swung his hand inward, indicating that she should join him there. His glance fell upon the raise
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oorstep and then up to her face and Mila nodded as she lifted her foot to step across the threshold into the penana. As she took that first step, she wondered how many times she would have to come in here in the future and what the etiquette would be then, when she would be officially part of Jai's household. For now, she was merely a guest.

Here also there was no electricity, but the wall niches had been put to good use with oil lamps made of clay, the flames standing upright in the torpid air. The lamps only threw little pools of light within their very tight peripheries, and the rest of the corridor was in darkness, but beyond the corridor were the gardens again and here the stars and the rising moon lit the landscape. Mila went through another set of corridors and another set of doors, and as she neared the heart of the ienana, where the most important women in Jai's harem lived, the embellishments on the walls and the doors and the verandahs became more and more ornate. The brass was polished and shiny, the lamps held clean, newly pressed oil with barely the hint of an odor, the floors were clean with wiping, the bushes in the gardens rampant with cloyingly fragrant blooms, the views in the distance, of the town of Rudrakot, like a diamond necklace flung out into the desert night.

And then, from this semidark, glorious world of aromas, Mila stepped into a brightly lit, dazzling room, the main reception hall of the harem. She entered and stopped, her breath taken away by a grandeur she could not ever have imagined.