In twelve days, working at the Directorate of Scientific Research, they came up with the answer. Ignore the fuze entirely. Ignore the first principle, which until then was “defuse the bomb.” It was brilliant. They were all laughing and applauding and hugging each other in the officers’ mess. They didn’t have a clue what the alternative was, but they knew in the abstract they were right. The problem would not be solved by embracing it. That was Lieutenant Blackler’s line. “If you are in a room with a problem don’t talk to it.” An offhand remark. Singh came towards him and held the statement from another angle. “Then we don’t touch the fuze at all.”
Once they came up with that, someone worked out the solution in a week. A steam sterilizer. One could cut a hole into the main case of a bomb, and then the main explosive could be emulsified by an injection of steam and drained away. That solved that for the time being. But by then he was on a ship to Italy.
He keeps remembering one thing. He is in the white horse. He feels hot on the chalk hill, the white dust of it swirling up all around him. He works on the contraption, which is quite straightforward, but for the first time he is working alone. Miss Morden sits twenty yards above him, higher up the slope, taking notes on what he is doing. He knows that down and across the valley Lord Suffolk is watching through the glasses.
He works slowly. The chalk dust lifts, then settles on everything, his hands, the contraption, so he has to blow it off the fuze caps and wires continually to see the details. It is hot in the tunic. He keeps putting his sweating wrists behind himself to wipe them on the back of his shirt. All the loose and removed parts fill the various pockets across his chest. He is tired, checking things repetitively. He hears Miss Morden’s voice. “Kip?” “Yes.” “Stop what you’re doing for a while, I’m coming down.” “You’d better not, Miss Morden.” “Of course I can.” He does up the buttons on his various vest pockets and lays a cloth over the bomb; she clambers down into the white horse awkwardly and then sits next to him and opens up her satchel. She douses a lace handkerchief with the contents of a small bottle of eau de cologne and passes it to him. “Wipe your face with this. Lord Suffolk uses it to refresh himself.” He takes it tentatively and at her suggestion dabs his forehead and neck and wrists. She unscrews the Thermos and pours each of them some tea. She unwraps oil paper and brings out strips of Kipling cake.
She seems to be in no hurry to go back up the slope, back to safety. And it would seem rude to remind her that she should return. She simply talks about the wretched heat and the fact that at least they have booked rooms in town with baths attached, which they can all look forward to. She begins a rambling story about how she met Lord Suffolk. Not a word about the bomb beside them. He had been slowing down, the way one, half asleep, continually rereads the same paragraph, trying to find a connection between sentences. She had pulled him out of the vortex of the problem. She packs up her satchel carefully, lays a hand on his right shoulder and returns to her position on the blanket above the Westbury horse. She leaves him some sunglasses, but he cannot see clearly enough through them so he lays them aside. Then he goes back to work. The scent of eau de cologne. He remembers he had smelled it once as a child. He had a fever and someone had brushed it onto his body.
THE GREAT TREE
“Zou Fulei died like a dragon breaking down a wall . . .
this line composed and ribboned
in cursive script
by his friend the poet Yang Weizhen
whose father built a library
surrounded by hundreds of plum trees
It was Zou Fulei, almost unknown,
who made the best plum flower painting
of any period
One branch lifted into the wind
and his friend’s vertical line of character
their tones of ink
—wet to opaque
dark to pale
each sweep and gesture
trained and various
echoing the other’s art
In the high plum-surrounded library
where Yang Weizhen studied as a boy
a moveable staircase was pulled away
to ensure his solitary concentration
His great work
“untrammelled” “eccentric” “unorthodox”
“no taint of the superficial”
“no flamboyant movement”
using at times the lifted tails
of archaic script,
sharing with Zou Fulei
his leaps and darknesses
“So I have always held you in my heart . . .
The great 14th-century poet calligrapher
mourns the death of his friend
Language attacks the paper from the air
There is only a path of blossoms
no flamboyant movement
A night of smoky ink in 1361
a night without a staircase
TO A SAD DAUGHTER
All night long the hockey pictures
gaze down at you
sleeping in your tracksuit.
Belligerent goalies are your ideal.
Threats of being traded
cuts and wounds
—all this pleases you.
O my god! you say at breakfast
reading the sports page over the Alpen
as another player breaks his ankle
or assaults the coach.
When I thought of daughters
I wasn’t expecting this
but I like this more.
I like all your faults
even your purple moods
when you retreat from everyone
to sit in bed under a quilt.
And when I say “like”
I mean of course “love”
but that embarrasses you.
You who feel superior to black and white movies
(coaxed for hours to see Casablanca)
though you were moved
by Creature from the Black Lagoon.
One day I’ll come swimming
beside your ship or someone will
and if you hear the siren
listen to it. For if you close your ears
only nothing happens. You will never change.
I don’t care if you risk
your life to angry goalies
creatures with webbed feet.
You can enter their caves and castles
their glass laboratories. Just
don’t be fooled by anyone but yourself.
This is the first lecture I’ve given you.
You’re “sweet sixteen” you said.
I’d rather be your closest friend
than your father. I’m not good at advice
you know that, but ride
the ceremonies
until they grow dark.
Sometimes you are so busy
discovering your friends
I ache with a loss
—but that is greed.
And sometimes I’ve gone
into my purple world
and lost you.
One afternoon I stepped
into your room. You were sitting
at the desk where I now write this.
Forsythia outside the window
and sun spilled over you
like a thick yellow miracle
as if another planet
was coaxing you out of the house
—all those possible worlds!—
and you, meanwhile, busy with mathematics.
I cannot look at forsythia now
without loss, or joy for you.
You step delicately
into the wild world
and your real prize will be
the frantic search.
Want everything. If you break
break going out not in.
How you live your life I don’t care
but I’ll sell my arms for you,
hold your secrets for ever.
If I spea
k of death
which you fear now, greatly,
it is without answers,
except that each
one we know is
in our blood.
Don’t recall graves.
Memory is permanent.
Remember the afternoon’s
yellow suburban annunciation.
Your goalie
in his frightening mask
dreams perhaps
of gentleness.
THE STORY
for Akash and Kamlesh Mishra
i
For his first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives.
Journeys, winding paths,
a hundred small lessons
and then the past is erased.
Some are born screaming,
some full of introspective wandering
into the past—that bus ride in winter,
the sudden arrival within
a new city in the dark.
And those departures from family bonds
leaving what was lost and needed.
So the child’s face is a lake
of fast moving clouds and emotions.
A last chance for the clear history of the self.
All our mothers and grandparents here,
our dismantled childhoods
in the buildings of the past.
Some great forty-day daydream
before we bury the maps.
ii
There will be a war, the king told his pregnant wife.
In the last phase seven of us will cross
the river to the east and disguise ourselves
through the farmlands.
We will approach the markets
and befriend the rope-makers. Remember this.
She nods and strokes the baby in her belly.
After a month we will enter
the halls of that king.
There is dim light from small high windows.
We have entered with no weapons,
just rope in the baskets.
We have trained for years
to move in silence, invisible,
not one creak of bone,
not one breath,
even in lit rooms,
in order to disappear into this building
where the guards live in half-light.
When a certain night falls
the seven must enter the horizontal door
remember this, face down,
as in birth.
Then (he tells his wife)
there is the corridor of dripping water,
a noisy rain, a sense
of creatures at your feet.
And we enter halls of further darkness,
cold and wet among the enemy warriors.
To overcome them we douse the last light.
After battle we must leave another way
avoiding all doors to the north . . .
(The king looks down
and sees his wife is asleep
in the middle of the adventure.
He bends down and kisses through the skin
the child in the body of his wife.
Both of them in dreams. He lies there,
watches her face as it catches a breath.
He pulls back a wisp across her eye
and bites it off. Braids it
into his own hair, then sleeps beside them.)
iii
With all the swerves of history
I cannot imagine your future.
Would wish to dream it, see you
in your teens, as I saw my son,
your already philosophical air
rubbing against the speed of the city.
I no longer guess a future.
And do not know how we end
nor where.
Though I know a story about maps, for you.
iv
After the death of his father,
the prince leads his warriors
into another country.
Four men and three women.
They disguise themselves and travel
through farms, fields of turnip.
They are private and shy
in an unknown, uncaught way.
In the hemp markets
they court friends.
They are dancers who tumble
with lightness as they move,
their long hair wild in the air.
Their shyness slips away.
They are charming with desire in them.
It is the dancing they are known for.
One night they leave their beds.
Four men, three women.
They cross open fields where nothing grows
and swim across the cold rivers
into the city.
Silent, invisible among the guards,
they enter the horizontal door
face down so the blades of poison
do not touch them. Then
into the rain of the tunnels.
It is an old story—that one of them
remembers the path in.
They enter the last room of faint light
and douse the lamp. They move
within the darkness like dancers
at the centre of a maze
seeing the enemy before them
with the unlit habit of their journey.
There is no way to behave after victory.
And what should occur now is unremembered.
The seven stand there.
One among them, who was that baby,
cannot recall the rest of the story
—the story his father knew, unfinished
that night, his mother sleeping.
We remember it as a tender story,
though perhaps they perish.
The father’s lean arm across
the child’s shape, the taste
of the wisp of hair in his mouth . . .
The seven embrace in the destroyed room
where they will die without
the dream of exit.
We do not know what happened.
From the high windows the ropes
are not long enough to reach the ground.
They take up the knives of the enemy
and cut their long hair and braid it
onto one rope and they descend
hoping it will be long enough
into the darkness of the night.
STEP
The ceremonial funeral structure for a monk
made up of thambili palms, white cloth
is only a vessel, disintegrates
completely as his life.
The ending disappears,
replacing itself
with something abstract
as air, a view.
All we’ll remember in the last hours
is an afternoon—a lazy lunch
then sleeping together.
Then the disarray of grief.
On the morning of a full moon
in a forest monastery
thirty women in white
meditate on the precepts of the day
until darkness.
They walk those abstract paths
their complete heart
their burning thought focused
on this step, then this step.
In the red brick dusk
of the Sacred Quadrangle,
among holy seven-storey ambitions
where the four Buddhas
of Polonnaruwa
face out to each horizon,
is a lotus pavilion.
Taller than a man
nine lotus stalks of stone
stand solitary in the grass,
pillars that once supported
the floor of another level.
(The sensuous stalk
the sacred flower)
How physical yearning
became permanent.
How desire became devotional
&nbs
p; so it held up your house,
your lover’s house, the house of your god.
And though it is no longer there,
the pillars once let you step
to a higher room
where there was worship, lighter air.
Linus Corea from ANIL’S GHOST
A few years earlier a story had gone around about a Colombo doctor—Linus Corea—a neurosurgeon in the private sector. He came from three generations of doctors, the family name was as established as the most permanent banks in Sri Lanka. Linus Corea was in his late forties when the war broke out. Like most doctors he thought it was madness and unlike most he stayed in private practice; the Prime Minister was one of his clients, as was the leader of the opposition. He had his head massages at Gabriel’s at eight a.m. and saw his patients from nine till two, then golfed with a bodyguard at his side. He dined out, got home before curfew and slept in an air-conditioned room. He had been married for ten years and had two sons. He was a well-liked man; he was polite with everyone because it was the easiest way not to have trouble, to be invisible to those who did not matter to him. This small courtesy created a bubble he rode within. His gestures and politeness disguised an essential lack of interest or, if not that, a lack of time for others on the street. He liked photography. He printed his own pictures in the evening.
In 1987, while he was putting on a golf green, his bodyguard was shot dead and Dr. Linus Corea was kidnapped. They came out of the woods slowly, unconcerned about being seen by him. It meant it did not matter to them and that frightened him more than anything. He had been alone with the bodyguard. He stood beside the prone body and was surrounded by the men who had shot him from a distance of forty yards precisely through the correct point in the head. No thrashing around.
They spoke to him calmly in a made-up language, which again increased his anxiety. They hit him once and broke a rib to warn him to behave, and then they walked back to their car and drove away with him. For months no one knew where he had got to. The police, the Prime Minister, the head of the Communist Party were called in, and all were outraged. There was no communication from kidnappers wanting payment. It was the Colombo mystery of 1987, and offers of rewards were made throughout the press, none of which was answered.