The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar (57 page)

‘That's very clever, doc.'

‘But you aren't convinced.'

‘You mean I went to all the trouble to write all this, just because I feel guilty about something I can't remember doing? Even if that were so, how would writing these accounts help me deal with guilt?'

‘Writing can be an act of expiation. I believe that you see the Shadowman as a figure who absolves you of responsibility, because he directs your lives. I believe that Ophelia was a real person, who exists – or existed – in this time.'

‘Then why didn't I just start my lives two hundred years ago? It would sure have been a lot less work. Or why bring her into my story so late, if she's the central issue?'

‘I don't know, Adam.'

He became agitated.

‘I'll tell you why. It's because I've written these accounts exactly as they happened, in the way they happened, at the time that they happened! I'm not trying to avoid responsibility. I mean, taking responsibility was my central concern in my first two lives, and my last one.'

‘I have a suggestion.'

‘What?'

‘Let me hypnotize you. I will ask you some questions about Ophelia. I'm sure she's the key. Perhaps if you hear your own voice on the tape giving a different account to what you've written, it might make a difference.'

‘It certainly would. That's a good idea, doc.'

This session was our longest. I hypnotized him and, for over three hours, I asked him questions based on all eight accounts. His answers always matched what he had written. I asked about his present life as well, but his answers there also matched all he had told me. He had good relationships with mother and stepfather. He had not had any physical relationship with a man since he was twenty-six, and his romantic relationships with women were apparently satisfactory. He had not, as I had begun to strongly suspect, killed anyone.

Adam's delusion was far more deep-rooted than I had thought possible. In that session, however, I discovered why. His grandmother and mother, it turned out, also shared it. Schizophrenia is to some extent genetic, but Adam's explanation as to why his mother and grandmother also believed him to be immortal, as I found out when I read his ninth and last account, was quite ingenious.

No matter how long a person lives, they only feel truly alive at specific periods of their life. It is the rare individual who can truthfully claim to have lived at the peak of their energies throughout – or even for the greater part – of their life. There is nothing to be regretted in this fact, for it is also a fact that we are living most fully when we do not notice it.

The letters on the table before me are very old, but they do not seem so. Time, after all, is relative. When you have lived for five hundred years, a few decades seem like yesterday. And the modern appearance of the creased sheets pulls the past even closer to the present. The paper is lined. The black- and blue-ink handwritings are from fountain pens. Most of the letters are in a neat, angular, almost prissy handwriting. The others are written in a flowing, bolder script. The first hand is my own; the second is Emily's, the love of my lives.

These sheets may seem a thin document to sum up the complex life of my ninth incarnation. But everything of importance is contained therein. All the letters are love letters, and it was love that provided a way for me to stop the Shadowman from killing me, though not to defeat him. So, although I remember well, I do not need to remember. For it is written.

September 4, 1940

Dear Krishna,

I know your family will not pass on this letter, so I am sending it to the Colonial Office instead. I understand that segregation functions even in war, and that you are with a coloured battalion. Hopefully, this will make it easier, not harder, for this letter to reach you. When you did not reply, I thought that you were either angry with me, or had decided to respect my wishes, or both. Then I met Nazir Khan, the lawyer, in Port of Spain last week and he told me you had gone to fight for Britain.

With that preface out of the way, I have to ask – WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING!!? I cannot believe, just because I got married, you decided to do something so foolish! Why get involved in these white people's fight? Why risk your life for them? WHY are men so stupid? I cannot imagine your state of mind. I pray that this letter reaches you in good health. I hope you are not taking any foolish risks. I hope and pray you return home safely after this foolishness is over. My heart is with you.

Yours,

Emily

January 4, 1941

Dear Emily,

It was wonderful to receive your letter, vituperative though it was. I will not deny that the knowledge that I had lost you played some part in my decision to fight the Germans. But it was not the only factor and, now that I am here, I know it was not even the main factor. You will not believe me, of course, but the truth is that once I heard what Hitler and his Nazis were doing to the Jews, I HAD to do my part. You may ask why, since the Jews are no concern of mine. But the Nazis do not merely want to subjugate the Jews – they actually want to exterminate every last one! Such insanity fills me with horror – and I do not mean the horror that any humane person must feel at the stories of the death camps, but an actual nausea and misery, as though it were my own people who were being slaughtered. At night I dream not of Jews being shovelled into mass graves, but of Amerindians dying by the hundreds, whipped and kicked and stabbed by white men in steel breastplates, while I look on helplessly. This dream, though, has a vividness I have experienced only once before: when, as a boy, I died for some minutes. I never told you about that; I will when I have more paper.

You may think I am suffering from delusions brought on by the war, but I truly feel that what I have dreamt is no dream, nor even a vision, but a memory. Remember what I once told you about the Hindu belief in reincarnation? Well, I think I may actually have been an Amerindian many centuries ago. I want to prevent what happened to my people happening again to another race. And yet, though that is the real reason I am here, it is not the reason for this war. The leaders of the Allied nations could not care less for the Jews. (Strange people, whites, who hate a people because they crucified their god two thousand years ago, yet their avatar was also a Jew.) This war, which should be a moral way, is only a war for territory. The white people do not care about battling bigotry, even when the bigotry is resulting in genocide.

I have to stop now. Be assured that every page I have I shall use to write to you. And of course delivery is never certain. But know that I think about you all the time.

Yours truly,

Krishna

p.s. How is Adaku?

August 26, 1941

Dear Krishna,

Your letter only just arrived. I can only assume that your other letters have been lost. I hope this one reaches you – I, too, have written several times, but obviously those letters never arrived – perhaps they will eventually. But I will repeat myself just in case.

Your letter has me very worried. Do you REALLY believe you were an Amerindian in a past life? I know war puts men under great stress, but please please try to maintain your sanity and reason. It is the only thing that will help you survive. I pray for you daily, knowing that each day may be your last. You and I follow different religions, but surely one God looks over us all.

I want to explain to you why I did what I did. I know I owe you that and I am sorry I didn't tell you before. I know it was a cowardly, callous thing to do, running off as I did. But, if I'm a coward, it is because I know that if I had told you face to face what I intended to do, you would have talked me round with that silver tongue of yours in no time at all. So the callousness was necessary, but not deliberate. I hope you understand, though I will not be so foolish as to ask you to forgive. It was high time, though, that I stopped being foolish about many things.

In September last year, I was offered a job as book-keeper at a trading company here in Trinidad. Do you remember that very nice old Jew we met at the de Queres's place in Jamaica last year? Mr. Edelman? My husband, Cedric, works for him. Cedric's father and my father are old friends. Anyway, Mr. Edelman and I had many long talks when he visited Guiana. He told me all about how his family had been driven out of Spain hundreds of years ago and one had come to Barbados and started a family and now he had relatives in Jamaica and Trinidad and Brazil and Britain.

He knew Cedric wanted to marry me and he offered me a position in the company. Believe me when I say I had not at that point decided if I wanted to marry Cedric or not, but I had decided that I wanted to get away from you (and it was a very good offer, especially for a woman, let alone an African woman). I had turned 27 and I needed to move on. For you, everything seemed fine. But I was tired of having to always meet in secret, of never being able to go out like a normal couple except on the few occasions you found an excuse to go to the other islands, and of you always having to leave at eight o' clock to go home to your loving wife. Every time I tried to talk about these matters to you, you would change the subject or joke it off or start making love to me.

So I never told you about the offer because, again, I knew you'd have found all sorts of reasons for me not to go. Not that you could have found any GOOD reasons, but we would have ended up having an argument. And, over the past year or so, we had been having too many of those. If you want to argue (!) that most of those quarrels were my fault, I won't disagree. I had to go. But I never expected you would go off to war because I was no longer in your life. Men!

Adaku is fine. She was upset by the move at first, but she has made new friends and is doing well in school. You will be amused to hear that more people here think I'm a ‘dogla', rather than a mulatto, though I suppose that is partly because Adaku, with her thick long hair, is so obviously one. We are living on a shoestring here because of the war – things like butter and sugar and flour are in short supply. (Enough rice, though!) But we make do – I have planted my own garden and have a cow as well. By the time you return, I may well be a full-fledged Indian woman! And Trinidad is nice, more urban than Guiana. There are many cars, and Port of Spain has trams. I don't see many Indians, but most of them live in the central and southern part of the island anyway.

Sincerely,

Emily

October 30, 1941

Dear Em,

Yes, it WAS a cowardly thing to do; also callous. You could at least have left a note! I went to your house only to find that it had been put up for sale. I had to go to your mother's, pretending I had some urgent figures for you to check, to be told that you had left Guiana. (Nor do I think your mother was fooled by my pathetic excuse for a second!) Yes, I would have tried to persuade you to stay – that is only natural. Especially if I knew you were running off to Trinidad to get married. It's not the marriage that upsets me, but the fact that you would actually marry someone named ‘Cedric'. My God, woman, you could at least have considered your daughter's feelings. The child must be so embarrassed! Anyway, do not talk rubbish about my ‘silver tongue'. When have I ever been able to persuade you to do anything you didn't really want to do? The only times my tongue has had the slightest effect on you, I was not using it to talk! Contrary to your view, I thought we did have a relationship and, moreover, a very good one. On that at least you are perfectly right. Apparently, though, I was perfectly wrong in believing it was fine. Let me assure you that you are mistaken in your assertion that I ‘knew it had to end'. In this end – which you alone prophesied – it seems that I am the one who ends up being the fool. Which, no doubt, was what you intended.

Sincerely,

Krishna

November 30, 1941

Dear Krishna,

See what I mean about your habit of making silly jokes. I did not run off to Trinidad to get married. I came here for exactly the reasons I told you.

I am one of only three Africans in responsible positions in the company, and the only woman. The head office is in the middle of Port of Spain, and I have my own desk. It is a bit difficult dealing with the men who are in lesser positions, but it's actually the women who give me the most trouble. Nothing I cannot handle, though. It's a wonderful opportunity for me.

Perhaps the fact that you think me so dishonest highlights the true reason our relationship had to end. And maybe your readiness to accuse me of lying says more about you than about me. You KNOW you have always been able to do what you want, whether you used your tongue for talking or otherwise.

I have also never liked that attitude of yours, where you cannot believe that I'd leave Guiana since I had a good job, land etc there. Not everyone, Krishna, acts from purely material motives. The main reasons I left had more to do with my emotional state than anything else. But you never did want to hear about my emotional state, did you? Well, you had better tear up this letter now, because I am about to write about just that very thing.

Staying in at night hoping you'd pass. Having to hide from the neighbours. Watching other couples and getting bitter at not being able to do even a simple thing like hold hands in public. Ignoring the gossip about us. Turning away eligible men because I had eyes only for you. Having to drop my daughter at my mother's on the spur of the moment because you had some precious hours free. Lying in bed at night thinking of you with your loving wife, whom you always led me to believe you would leave one day. And, ALWAYS, feeling like a damned fool.

I won't say we should never have had our relationship, for I have enjoyed knowing you and being with you. If I had to do it again, there might be some things I would do differently, but I suppose I would still do it. It was good while it lasted, but we both knew it had to come to an end.