Diamond Dust (11 page)

But he had to slow down and halt soon enough because a little further up, where there were broad steps leading down to the water, a group of people had gathered. From their attitudes and gestures, he could see they were agitated—they were crowding around something that one or two of them were dragging out of the water onto the bank. Water gushed from the object they lifted and from the men who raised it, and everyone was drenched. But they crowded around and called out in high, excited voices.

He didn't want to see, or hear. It was evidently a drama, and a moment ago drama was what he had longed for, but now he shrank back, ready to turn—he did not want to be drawn in. A shrinking and dwindling of his former urge overtook him, and he wished miserably that he had stayed back at the hotel, on the veranda, safely drinking beer.

But he had been seen. One of the people, a young man, called out, 'Police? Police? Will you go for the police?' Another, of a practical nature, shouted, 'Do you have a car? Can you take—?'

First he shook his head. Then he said 'No!' very loudly, 'No, no,' and thought of turning around and hurrying away. Just then the men who had lifted the drenched, streaming object from the river pressed past him as they laid it on the bank. He found himself, along with the others, in a circle around it, standing over it and peering down.

The body lying in the mud on the bank was of course sodden, and water ran from it in streams, but it could not have been in the water long, it was intact, and what I saw was a man five feet ten inches tall, with straight black hair that the river had swept off his face, a face that was square and brown, that had a cleft in its chin, a somewhat flat nose, and a mouth that parted slightly to show his teeth. Although it was dark, I could make out that the man wore a short-sleeved white shirt and the pants were of khaki material—that is, not very dark but not white either. He had taken off his shoes for some reason but still wore socks. The socks might have been green or black, I could not tell in the dark and the wet.

I stared at him, taking in every detail. Then I stared again, harder, and more details came into, focus: the Tissot watch with the metal strap, the ball-point pen still attached to the shirt pocket. The face with the hair swept away from it, the flattened cheekbones, the cleft in the chin, the eyebrows black and heavy, the teeth uneven, crowding each other here, parted from each other there, and the glint of a filling. Every detail, in every detail, he was myself: I was looking at myself—after having spent half an hour, or an hour, underwater, sodden with river and mud—but it was I, in every detail, I. It was as though I was lying full-length, suspended in mid-air, and gazing down at my reflection below, soaked and muddy, but myself, I, after an accident in the river.

I do not know for how long I stared. But gradually I became aware that I was alone in standing stock-still, staring, that the others were all talking, hurrying away and hurrying back, bending over the man, touching him, and talking to each other in rough, rapid voices. Police, doctor, telephone, call ... I heard these words, and then I saw them bend down and lift him up, three or four men putting their arms under and around the corpse, and together they hurried down the bank towards the lighted road. I did not follow them but stood on the bank and watched as they carried it away, shouting to each other in the dark.

It was only when they managed to stop a vehicle—or perhaps they had summoned it and it stopped deliberately—and lifted the body into it that I became seized by agitation. Just as I had felt a few moments ago when I contemplated leaping onto the deck of a boat, now one part of me felt impelled to run after them, and plead to be allowed to go with the body—my body—and another part of me. held back, pulled back with violence in fact, and once again I stumbled because I had made a clumsy, lurching movement, although whether forwards or backwards, I really cannot say. I think I may even have fallen on my knees at that moment; later I discovered the knees of my khaki pants were muddy, and that my hands were also dirty. By then I had walked away, in another direction. As I hurried along the lighted highway, I was in great confusion, wondering if I should have followed the body to the morgue and claimed it, or whether I was right to flee from the scene.

I did find my way back to the hotel—I remembered the address clearly—and I did spend the night in the safety of my room and my bed. Next morning I might have dismissed the whole event as a nightmare—a delusion caused by the unfamiliar scene, the darkness, the solitude—but when I was brought my tea in in the morning, and a newspaper, I tried to divert my mind from the horror of the night by reading the news while I drank tea and ate toast.

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.