Shantaram (115 page)

When he puffed at the beedie I saw his face clearly for the first time. It was grotesque. Maurizio had sliced and slashed so much suffering into the soft skin that it was almost frightening simply to look at it. In the faint orange light, I saw the sneering smile that gleamed in Modena's eyes as he recognised the horror in my own.

How many times, I wondered, had he seen that horror in the eyes of others-that wide, white dread as they imagined his scars on their own faces and his torment in their souls? How many times had he seen others flinch, as I'd flinched, and shrink away from his wounds as if from the open sores of a disease? How many times had he seen men ask themselves: What did he do? What did he do to deserve this?

Maurizio's knife had opened both cheeks beneath the dark brown eyes. The cuts had healed into long Y-shaped scars that dragged down the lower lids of his eyes and ran like the trails of hideous, mocking tears. The lower lids, permanently red and raw, gaped open in little trenches of agony that revealed the whole globe of each eye. The wings and septum of his nose had been cut through to the bone. The skin, when it closed together, had fused in jagged whorls at the sides but not at all in the centre, where the laceration was too deep. The wide hole where his nostrils had been resembled the snout of a pig, and flared with every inward breath. There were many more cuts beside the eyes, around the jaw, and along the full width of his brow below the hairline.

It looked as though Maurizio had tried to peel off the whole layer of Modena's face, and the hundred scars that encircled his features were puckered, here and there, into little mounds of flesh that might've matched the outstretched fingers of a man's hands. I knew that there had to be other scars and injuries beneath his clothes: the movements of his arm and leg on the left side of his body were awkward, as if the hinges at elbow, shoulder, and knee had stiffened around wounds that had never really healed.

It was a monstrous mutilation; a disfigurement so calculated in its cruelty that I felt numbed by it and unable to respond. I noticed that there were no marks on or near his mouth. I wondered at the fortune that had left his sensuous and finely sculpted lips so perfect, so flawlessly unscarred. Then I remembered that Maurizio had gagged him when he'd tied him to the bed, only lifting the twisted cloth from time to time as he'd commanded him to speak. And it seemed to me, as I watched Modena puff at the cigarette, that his smooth, unblemished mouth was the worst and most terrible wound of them all. We smoked the beedies down to stubs in silence, and my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I became aware, gradually, of how small he was; how much smaller he'd become with the shrivelling effect of the wounds on his left side. I felt that I was towering over him. I stepped back a pace into the light, picked up my bag, and wagged my head encouragingly.

"Garam chai pio?" I asked. Shall we drink hot tea?

"Thik hain," he replied. Okay.

I led the way back through the converted lane and into a chai shop where workers from a local flourmill and bakery were resting between shifts. The men, several of them, shuffled along the wooden bench to make room for us. They were powdered with white flour in their hair and over the whole of their bodies. They looked like phantoms or so many stone statues come to life. Their eyes, no doubt irritated by the dusty flour, were as red as coals from the fiery pit beneath their ovens. Their wet lips, where they sipped the tea, were black leeches against the ghostly white of their skin. They stared at us with the usual frank, Indian curiosity, but looked away quickly when Modena raised his gaping eyes to them.

"I'm sorry for running away," he said quietly, his eyes fixed on his hands as they fidgeted in his lap.

I waited for him to say something more, but he locked his mouth in a tight little grimace and breathed loudly, evenly, through his wide, flaring nose.

"Are you... are you okay?" I asked, when the tea arrived.

"Jarur," he answered, with a little smile. Certainly. "Are you okay?"

I thought he was being facetious, and I didn't hide the irritation in my frown.

"I do not mean to offend you," he said, smiling again. It was a strange smile, so perfect in the curve of the mouth, and so deformed in the stiffened cheeks that dragged the lower lids of his eyes down into little wells of misery. "I am only offering my help, if you need it. I have money. I always carry ten thousand rupees with me."

"What?"

"I always carry-"

"Yes, yes, I heard you." He was speaking softly, but still I glanced up at the bakery men to see if they'd heard him as well.

"Why were you watching me today in the market?" "I watch you very often. Almost every day. I watch you and Karla and Lisa and Vikram."

"Why?"

"I must watch you. It is one of the ways I will know how to find her."

"To find who?"

"Ulla. When she returns. She won't know where I am. I don't go ... I don't go to Leopold's any more or any of the other places we used to be together. When she looks for me, she will come to you or to one of the others. And I will see her. And we will be together."

He made the little speech so calmly, and then sipped at his tea with such contented abstraction, that it exaggerated the weirdness of his delusion. How could he think that Ulla, who'd left him on the bloody bed to die, would return from Germany to be with him? And even if she were to return, how could she react to his face, deformed into that mourner's mask, with anything but horror?

"Ulla... went to Germany, Modena."

"I know," he smiled. "I am glad for her."

"She won't be coming back."

"Oh, yes," he said flatly. "She'll come back. She loves me.

She'll come back for me."

"Why-" I began, and then abandoned the thought. "How do you live?"

"I have a job. A good job. It pays good money. I work with a friend, Ramesh. I met him when... after I was hurt. He looked after me. At the houses of the rich, when a son is born, we go there, and I put on my special clothes. I put on my costume."

The dire emphasis he'd put on the last word, and the fractured little smile that accompanied it, sent a creeping unease along the skin of my arms. Some of that disquiet croaked into my voice as I repeated the word.

"Costume?"

"Yes. It has a long tail and sharp ears, and a chain of little skulls around the neck. I make it that I am a demon, an evil spirit. And Ramesh, he makes that he is a holy sadhu, looking like a holy man, and he beats me away from the house. And I come back, and I make it that I am trying to steal the baby. And the women scream when I come near the baby. And Ramesh, he beats me away again. Again I come back, and again he beats me until, at the very last, he beats me so badly that I make like I am dying, and I run away. The people pay us good money for the show." "I never heard of it before."

"No. It is our own idea, Ramesh and me. But after the first rich family paid us, all the others wanted to be sure to beat the evil spirit away from their new baby son. And they pay us good money, all of them. I have an apartment. I don't own it, of course, but I have paid more than a year of rent in advance already. It is small, but it is comfortable. It will be a good place for Ulla and me to live together. You can see the waves of the sea from the main window. My Ulla, she loves the sea. She always wanted a house near to the sea..."

I stared at him, fascinated no less by the fact of his speech than its meaning. Modena had been one of the most taciturn men I'd ever known. When we'd both been regulars at Leopold's he'd gone for weeks at a time, and sometimes as long as a month, without uttering a word in my presence. But the new Modena, the scarred survivor, was a talker. I'd been forced to run him down in a blind alley to get him to talk at all, it was true; but once he started, he became disconcertingly chatty. As I listened to him, as I reoriented myself to the disfigured, voluble version of the man, I became aware of the melodies that his Spanish accent made as it moved fluently between Hindi and English, mixing the two seamlessly, and incorporating words from each into a hybrid language that was his own. Adrift on the softness in his voice, I asked myself if that was the key to the mysterious bond that had existed between them, Ulla and Modena: if they'd talked to one another, for hours, when they were alone, and if that tender euphony, that voice music, had held them together.

And then, with a suddenness that caught me off-guard, the meeting with Modena was over. He stood to pay the bill and walked out into the lane, waiting for me just beyond the doorway.

"I must go," he said, looking nervously to his left and right before raising his wounded eyes to mine. "Ramesh is there by now, outside the President Hotel. When she comes back, Ulla will be there, she will stay there. She loves that hotel. It is her favourite. She loves the Back Bay area. And there was a plane this morning from Germany. A Lufthansa plane. She might be there."

"You check... after every flight?"

"Yes. I do not go in," he murmured, lifting his hand as if to touch his face, but running it through his short, greying hair instead. "Ramesh goes in the hotel for me. He checks her name- Ulla Volkenberg-to see if she is there. One day she will be there. She will be there."

He began to walk away from me, but I stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

"Listen, Modena, don't run away from me next time, okay? If you need anything, if there's anything I can do, just ask me. Is it a deal?"

"I will not run away again," he said solemnly. "It is just my habit to run. And it was just my habit that was running away from you. It was not me running, just my habit. I am not afraid of you. You are my friend."

He turned to leave, but I stopped him again, drawing him closer to me so that I could whisper into his ear.

"Modena, don't tell anyone else that you keep so much money on you. Promise me."

"Nobody else knows that, Lin," he assured me, smiling that deep eyed grimace at me. "Only you. I would not say that to anyone.

Not even Ramesh knows that I have money with me. He does not know that I save my money. He does not even know about my apartment.

He thinks that I spend my share of the money that we earn together on drugs. And I do not take any drugs, Lin. You know that. I never did any drugs. I just let him think that I do. But you are different, Lin. You are my friend. I can tell you the truth. I can trust you. Why should I not trust the man who killed the devil himself?"

"What do you mean?"

"I'm talking about Maurizio, the enemy of my blood."

"I didn't kill Maurizio," I said, frowning down into the red walled caves of his eyes.

His perfect mouth widened into an accomplice's leer. The expression dragged harder on the Y-shaped scars that once were the lower lids of his eyes. The gape of those eyes was so unnerving in the flame-lit lane that I had to steel myself not to flinch or draw back when he reached out to put his palm on my chest.

"Do not worry, Lin. The secret is safe with me. I am glad that you killed him. Not just for me. I knew him. I was his best friend-his only friend. If he lived, after he did this to me, there was no limit to his evil. That is how a man destroys his own soul-he loses the last limit to his evil. And I watched him, when he cut me with his knife, and when he walked away the last time, and I knew that he lost his soul. It cost him his soul, what he did... the things he did to me." "You don't have to talk about it."

"No, it is okay, now, to talk about him. Maurizio was afraid. He was always afraid. He lived all his life in fear of... everything. And he was cruel. That is what gave him his power. I have known a lot of powerful men in my life, and this much I know - all the powerful men I knew were afraid, and cruel. That is the ... mix... that gave them power over other men. I was not afraid. I was not cruel. I had no power. I was... you know, it was like the feeling for my Ulla-I was in love with Maurizio's power. And then, after he left me there, on the bed, and Ulla came into the room, I saw the fear in her eyes. He put his fear into her. He made her so afraid, when she saw what he did to me, that she ran away and left me there. And when I watched her leave, and shut the door..."

He hesitated, swallowing hard, the full, unmarked lips trembling on the words. I wanted to stop him, to spare him the memory of it and maybe save myself from it as well. But as I began to speak he put a little more pressure in the palm that he held against my chest, silencing me, and looking up into my eyes once more.

"I hated Maurizio for the first time, then. My people, the people of my blood, we do not want to hate, because when we do hate, it is with the whole of the soul, and it can never forgive the hated one. But I hated Maurizio, and I wished him dead, and I cursed him with that wish. Not for what he did to _me, but for what he did to my Ulla, and for what he would do in the future as a man without a soul. So, do not worry, Lin. I do not speak of it to anyone, what you did. And I am glad, I am truly grateful that you killed him."

A clear voice within me said that I should tell him what had really happened. He had a right to know the truth. And I wanted to tell him. An emotion that I couldn't fully understand-the last vestige of anger at Ulla, perhaps, or a jealous contempt for his faith in her-made me want to shake him, and shout the truth at him, and hurt him with it. But I couldn't speak. I couldn't move. And as his eyes reddened and simmered into tears that ran, exactly, in the channelling scars that pierced his cheeks I held the stare, and nodded my head, and said nothing at all. He nodded his head, slowly, in reply. He misread me, I think, or I misread him. I'll never know.

Silences can wound as surely as the twisting lash, the poet Sadiq Khan once wrote. But sometimes, being silent is the only way to tell the truth. I watched Modena turn and limp away, and I knew that the wordless minute we'd shared, with his hand on my chest and his breached and weeping eyes close to mine, would always be more precious and even more honest for both of us, no matter how errable or misunderstood, than the cold, unloving truth of his world alone, or of mine.

And maybe he's right, I thought. Maybe his way of remembering Maurizio and Ulla was right. Certainly, he'd dealt with the pain they'd caused him a lot better than I'd dealt with that kind of pain when it had happened to me. When my marriage fell apart in betrayal and bitterness, I became a junkie. I couldn't bear it that love was broken, and that happiness had cindered so suddenly into sorrow. So I ruined my life, and hurt a lot of people on the long way down. Modena, instead, had worked and saved and waited for love to return. And thinking about that-how he'd lived with what had been done to him-and wondering at it on the long walk back to Abdullah and the others, I discovered something that I should've known, as Modena did, right from the start. It was something simple: so simple that it took a pain as great as Modena's to shake me into seeing it. He'd been able to deal with that pain because he'd accepted his own part in causing it. I'd never accepted my share of responsibility-right up to that moment-for the way my marriage had failed or for the heartache that had followed it. That was why I'd never dealt with it.