Adam's Peak (28 page)

To ease the tidal wave of nausea that swept over him, Rudy lowered his head to the hot pavement. He talked to himself out loud, though at first he was still deaf.

“You're alive. Keep breathing. Still alive. Breathe ...”

Dull and distant, the sounds of his own voice began to reach him. He talked on, louder, coaxing meaning from the buzz between his ears.

“You were walking downtown. You looked at the clock. It was ...”

An army truck pulled up nearby, its tires pulverizing the shards of glass on the road. A pair of soldiers in khaki uniforms stepped down from the truck then stood, not moving, for several seconds. Rudy talked on.

“What were you doing there? Why are you—? That woman ... Kristina.”

He remembered the Danish physiotherapist. He'd been with her. He remembered the guest house room and the bottle of Fanta they'd shared. Desperately he gathered together the facts of their encounter, but the more focused that one event became in his mind, the more
chaotic was everything else. He needed order. As the uniformed men ran off, he began to recite—“Our Father, who art in Heaven ... hallowed be ... Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done, on Earth. Give us ... forgive us our trespasses ... Hail Mary, mother of ... full of grace”—but his garbled prayers were comfortless. He closed his eyes and imagined a quiet suburban street, a young girl standing under a sprinkler, her long, wet hair plastered to her shoulders, her skirted swimsuit a balmy aquamarine. He fixed the image of the nymph-like girl in his mind and managed, for a time, to detach himself from the chaos around him, to retrieve a moment of peace and painlessness under the girl's calm stare.

When he opened his eyes again he saw two soldiers gently depositing a young man on the road in the shade of the army truck. The young man wore a white shirt and grey trousers. Rudy lifted his head and squinted at the motionless figure, then he remembered what he had been doing in the city. He braced his forearms and lifted his shoulders.

“Oh Christ, machan. Is that you?”

He strained against the weight of the three-wheeler, but the vehicle gripped him tighter.

One of the soldiers was standing by the truck, shouting orders that reached Rudy like muted percussion. Rudy called to the man in English, then in Sinhala, panicking, in his confusion, when his shouts seemed to him nothing more than whispers. The soldier, however, darted a look in his direction and sprinted over. His polished boots stopped inches from Rudy's face. With a whistle, he signalled to someone Rudy couldn't see, and soon after, the weight of the three-wheeler began to shift. As the vehicle was righted, new fires coursed down his legs. Clenching his fists, he focused again on the figure by the truck.

“Can you help me get to that boy over there?” he shouted at the legs around him. “I need to see if he's okay. He's my—I need to see him.”

One soldier ran off. The other crouched next to the wounded taxi driver, pressing two fingers to the man's jowl. “The ambulance will come soon,” he said, then he stood and jogged away.

Rudy lifted his torso, supporting its weight on his forearms. His pelvis screamed, though the intensity of the pain served to dull the throbbing of his shoulder and head and the sting along his gashed arm. He fixed his eyes on the young man in the shade of the truck. Then,
with agonizing slowness, he began to haul his lower half across the pavement, his arms awkwardly doing the work of legs, every inch of progress a marathon of exertion. He stopped often and brushed the glass out of his path so he could rest his cheek on the ground. People moved around him, some of them running into the maelstrom to help, others hobbling away from it, bloody and stunned. More soldiers had arrived, their tidy uniforms an incongruous sight. They carried the limp forms of those too injured to walk and deposited them in the shade of the army truck. Rudy was grateful he could scarcely hear, and began to wish he couldn't see. But he needed to get to the boy.

When at last he neared the truck, he shifted his course to move around the strangers who lay in his way: a pair of businessmen; a woman in a bloodstained pink blouse; another woman, with grey-streaked hair falling out of its bun. He'd begun to sense, with a creeping, prickling flush of horror, that the six or seven people lying in the shade were dead, or close to it. There was no pain in their battered faces, no trace of feeling at all. They could have passed for synthetic dummies, fashioned from some realistic, but not quite perfect, material. It might have been possible to dismiss them altogether—he desperately wanted to—if it weren't for Kanda. If Kanda were to be alive when he reached him, then these grim bodies on the pavement had to be real. On some level, he had to be responsible for them as well.

A foot or so away from the boy, he stopped, closed his eyes, and lowered his cheek to the ground. He imagined looking down at his student's face and seeing the same expressionless, rubbery features that signalled the strangers' fates. In his mind he saw the confident, intelligent young man lying senseless on the pavement, and the image filled him with a panicky dread that reached far beyond the pandemonium of Janadhipathi Mawatha.

He lifted his head and struggled forward with his arms. The street began to spin. Though he was virtually prone on the ground, he felt he would fall. He groped a few more inches and forced his eyes to focus. It wasn't Kanda. The fellow looked nothing at all like Kanda, and for an instant Rudy wondered who it was he'd been following through the city. His head throbbed. With what felt like the last of his
strength, he pushed away from the line of bodies and flattened himself on the spinning ground.

Sometime later—he'd lost all track of time—he felt a hand rest gently on his shoulder, and he opened his eyes.

“You are Mr. Van Twest, no?”

Rudy lifted his head and looked up at the man crouching next to him—a doctor, or a paramedic of some kind, with a bald head and round spectacles.

“My son is a pupil at your school.” The man smiled briefly. “He loves everything American, and he says you're from America.” His expression became serious. “I think you need a doctor, sir. I saw you trying to get away. Leg is broken, maybe?”

Rudy noticed that his hearing had improved. When the man's hand slipped away from his shoulder, he raised himself onto his forearms.

“What happened here?”

The man ran his palm across his bald head and surveyed the destruction. “Hatred,” he said. “So much hatred.” He looked down at Rudy. “But as I was saying, sir, you must go to the hospital. The orders are to take only the really serious ones now, but I think we can find a place for you.” He reached out and patted Rudy's shoulder. “Special case.”

Rudy hesitated then nodded. “Thank you, Mr. ...?”

“Wettasinghe. My son is Viraj.”

“I remember him,” Rudy lied.

“Ah, good!” Again the man's smile was fleeting. “Tell me, Mr. Van Twest. You didn't have any of the children with you this morning? Was it a school outing?”

He thought of Kanda, still unaccounted for.

“No. I had a spare period, and I came downtown to do some errands.”

Mr. Wettasinghe shook his head. “Terrible luck you had today, sir. But the worst is over. I'll come back with the stretcher.” He assumed an air of authority. “You must stay where you are, Mr. Van Twest. No more crawling around. The hospital will be very busy, so the sooner you're getting there, the better.”

Mr. Wettasinghe jogged off in the direction of an ambulance that had pulled up in front of the clock tower. Rudy turned away from the
bodies on the pavement and rested his head on his uninjured arm. Something crinkled inside his pocket—Kanda's letter. He struggled to remember its content. Something about lions and gazelles and survival of the fittest. He tried to remember more, but what came to him instead was an image of the boy standing on the traffic island in the middle of President Street, looking out at the fragile calm, checking his watch. And a glib voice.

The Tigers employ kids a hell of a lot younger than Kanda
.

The idea was unthinkable. He pushed it away.

In a final attempt to shut out the chaos all around him and the fires in his own body, he imagined himself with Clare Fraser on a slow, swaying train ride through the hill country of his grandfather's tea estate.

T
he back of the tea factory was the area where the men stacked wood and fed the fires for the ovens that dried the fermented tea leaves. As the previous day had been a poya day, no plucking had been done, and the ovens were not yet needed. Alec rounded the corner of the factory, thinking that in the absence of any workers he would snitch some wood and ease his boredom by building something. He stopped short, however, for leaning against the factory wall were his brother and another man, the latter blocked almost entirely by Ernie. The two of them looked as if they were locked in an important conference. Alec retreated behind the side wall and peered around the corner. He stood on tiptoe, craning his neck, and saw that the other man was Amitha. He and Ernie were facing each other, and for a moment Alec strained to hear what they were talking about, until he remembered that Amitha couldn't talk—a source of confusion, for what was the point of loafing about with someone who couldn't talk? Alec wondered briefly if the tea taster might be giving one of his
comic performances, but he was far too still for that. And besides, Ernie wasn't laughing.

Restless, but having nothing better to do, Alec scuffed his shoe in the dirt and watched his brother with his usual mixture of resentment and admiration. For while Ernie's tendency to loaf about with factory workers was a nuisance, even Alec could not deny there was a great deal about him to be admired: the strength of his long limbs; his easy command of words and ideas; his ability to fit in with all manner of people, even the stylish, club-going young men he preferred to avoid. In many ways, barring the painting and the poetry-writing, Ernie was a more suitable man-of-the-house than their father was. For although their father had an important job and commanded respect, he lacked a mysterious but important something that Ernie clearly possessed. The word that seemed best to describe this something—a word that Alec had heard one of his father's friends use in reference to Ernie—was
charisma
. Ernie had charisma. It was something that Alec had attempted occasionally to project, smiling a certain way, entering rooms as if they were his own private domain, but he had no way of knowing if his efforts had been at all successful, or even noticed.

Ernie lit a cigarette and passed it to Amitha, then he lit one for himself. As the two smoked, Alec began to sense in the interaction something of which, he was quite certain, his father would not approve. Yet he couldn't say precisely what it was. Nor did he fully understand why his father would disapprove. Other than the obvious and, for Ernie, ordinary transgressions of loafing about with a factory employee and mucking up his white shirt on the grimy factory wall, the actions that Alec observed were frustratingly innocent. There was something not right, however, something out of the ordinary, and he found himself, as he had during the Tea Maker's recent lecture, willing his brother to do something, anything, that could be construed as an active declaration of the war that had been brewing for quite some time now.

The strength of his own will took Alec by surprise.

With casual defiance, Ernie tossed his unfinished cigarette through the open door of the wood stove—a seemingly trivial thing but nonetheless criminal, Alec was certain, for tea making was a delicate process. Anything could throw it off or contaminate it, even petty
intruders like Ernie's cigarette. It wouldn't be tattling to mention the offence in passing, or, even better, to ask their father whether or not it was permissible to throw rubbish in the wood stove; this was, after all, something a Tea Maker needed to know about. Expecting his brother to be on his way any second, Alec scurried back to the front of the factory then turned and retraced his steps, so that when he and Ernie crossed paths it would look accidental. And he did want to cross paths. For even though he was going to cause trouble for his brother, it occurred to him that Ernie might be in a mood to take him to Nuwara Eliya in the car and entertain him with funny or scandalous stories. But Alec made it all the way back to his starting point without meeting his brother.

He peered around the corner of the building again and saw that Ernie and Amitha had shifted position. Ernie was now slouched back against the factory wall; Amitha's palms were pressed to the wall, on either side of Ernie's head, and his legs were straddling Ernie's. Ernie was making hand signs, like the sort that got made in the tasting room, and Amitha was watching. Alec scowled. He hammered the toe of his shoe into the dirt then took a step forward, intending to break up the bizarre interaction. Instead of carrying on, though, he stopped short, as if a barrier stood between him and the two young men. There was no barrier, however, and his reluctance only frustrated him further. Something told him he should march up to Ernie and insist they drive to Nuwara Eliya. For his brother's own good, this something at the back of his mind said, Alec should pull him away. But he remained where he was, unable to act.