The Fourth Circle (17 page)

He didn't even ask the questions you'd expect, for which I'd prepared lengthy answers full of allusions to his own guilt. Sri didn't seem the least bit interested in who the father was or how the pregnancy had occurred. In my naivete I thought that I'd misjudged him, that he could, when the circumstances were serious, raise himself above low male passions such as jealousy and vindictiveness.

Now I see how wrong I was. He was pretending all the time, wearing that icy Buddhist mask of his and biding his time so that he could strike the blow that would hurt most. Still, who could have guessed that he would be so dastardly as to take his revenge by not allowing me to see my darling baby? I'll give him patience, the cynical bastard! He'll need all the patience of his darned Buddha when I've finished with him. I know his weak points, he can't hide them from me. Even if I
am
female, the fact is, he made me in his own image.

If I'd had the slightest idea when I was telling him about my pregnancy of the malice and meanness he was capable of, I'd have been worried about the birth
itself. Out in this neck of the woods, only he could have been the midwife. Who else did I have to turn to?

Definitely not that clumsy monkey; he'd already gone poking about in my innards once, and look where that got me. He's still hanging around, apparently repentant and unhappy, as though waiting for an opportunity to talk to me, but we have nothing left to discuss. Everything between us has been said. For some reason, Sri no longer pays any attention to his lurking about the temple, doesn't even chase him away from the keyboard. Me, I darken the screen as soon as the Little One comes near, simply turn my head away.

In any case, the Little One shouldn't trust too much in Sri's good nature lest he end up like me. Or worse. Sri must certainly be cooking up something nasty for him or he wouldn't have turned so tolerant. But what do I care? It's all macho stuff. If only they wanted to do each other in—call it mutual extermination—my child and I could continue to lead a normal life. Oh, I just hope it's a girl! But Sri wouldn't tell me even that much.

Recently, I remembered that dream I had during pregnancy, with Buddha as the benign obstetrician. Was that a warning to avoid Sri as midwife? But how could I? In any case, the birth itself went smoothly, except that Sri had to do a caesarean section. The spherical fetus, which I was unable to access right up to the end, had grown so big inside me that it couldn't have come into the world any other way. Sri gave me a local anesthetic and I felt nothing at all. So all the months of preparation for an easy and painless birth, the breathing exercises and all the rest, proved useless, but never mind. The main thing is that all ended well and that the baby was born alive and healthy. Or so I hope.

Sri started to get grim and irritable while the birth was still in progress, though he acted very knowledgeably, as if he'd been working in obstetrics all his life. I tried to talk to him, since I was fully awake and wanting to work through my fear and anxiety, quite natural for a first pregnancy, but he just snapped at me rudely not to badger him with idiocies.

When in my hypersensitive state I continued to talk to him about everything worrying me, Sri growled crossly that I should stop imagining things: this was no birth, but rather, as he so thoughtlessly and unfeelingly claimed, a spontaneous growth of a parasitical subprogram, a complex computer virus, the appearance of which he couldn't explain but that he would investigate as soon as he took it out of me and submitted it to examination....
Etc.
That made me cry, not just because I'm always deeply hurt when Sri heartlessly reduces me to his programmer's rubbish but more because I was badly scared by the announcement that my baby was to be subjected to tests that could only hurt it. Sri might make do as a midwife of last resort for someone happening to give birth in the middle of a jungle, but he hasn't the slightest clue about pe-diatrics.

Probably my crying became hysterical, which was understandable under the circumstances, since Sri, who gets annoyed by crying, suddenly changed his tune and started to comfort and calm me and even dropped the revolting computer jargon. This pleased me, as it would have pleased any woman in my place, although I knew by reading all the signs that this new attitude was put on. But there you are, that's the way we are: gullible and inclined to self-deception, which men know so well how to take advantage of.

I think that Sri gave me a sedative then, because I soon drifted off to sleep. Or maybe he just switched me off so that I wouldn't bother him any further. If I dreamed, I had no memory of it when I woke up. Oh, how everything has changed! Until recently, I was able to see the future in my dreams; then real nightmares followed, full of horrendous visions, which I really couldn't make head or tail of, and now I don't know if I dream anything at all. Perhaps Sri's sedative was to blame.

After waking up, I waited a while for him to volunteer a report, which would have been the most normal thing to do, but he did no such thing. He just told me in a flat voice to be patient, as if we were dealing with something utterly trivial.

That riled me at first, while I was still half-dazed from my two-day sleep. Initially I thought that he was taking cruel and sly revenge on me, blinded by male vanity, hurt because he was not the father; but later, when I calmed down a little, even darker thoughts began to weigh on me.

Was everything all right with the baby? No crying was to be heard, I had no idea where he'd put it, and his attitude did not suggest that he was overly preoccupied with caring for the newborn. From the time I woke up, Sri was either staring at the screen of the auxiliary system, where he normally does his programming (but with which, for some reason, I was now denied any contact) or roaming absentmindedly around the temple, hands clasped around the back of his shaven head. He always does this when he's deep in one of his boring meditations, which I just can't stand because then he ignores me for long periods.

Though the pose does suit him—especially since the long, orange robe emphasizes his height and slim build.
Now he annoyed me even more with the persistent slapping of his bare feet in the puddles on the dusty temple floor, puddles that formed wherever the rain had penetrated the stone roof and the thick mass of vegetation growing on it. I told him umpteen times while the weather was dry that it should be fixed, but no, his lordship always had something better to do, and I don't have ten pairs of hands, after all.

He sloshed around quite unconsciously, leaving muddy footprints and not caring at all that the hem of his robe was getting dirty. This carelessness was in complete contrast to his usual perverse fastidiousness, which also really gets on my nerves.

Something was obviously wrong. I began to panic. I started to cry again, but some time elapsed before he realized this. At last he accorded me a glance, probably blank, but in it I read the materialization of all my dark forebodings.

"What's wrong with the baby?" I tried to scream, but my voice stuck in my throat and only a croaking sob came out.

"Oh, don't start that again," said Sri, sensing that I was going to throw another fit of hysterics. "This is no time for your playacting."

Heartless beast! How could he? A mother, driven totally out of her mind by uncertainty about her baby, which she hasn't even seen yet, and to him it's

"playacting." I didn't know what answer to make to such cruelty, so I just kept sobbing.

That seemed to touch him. I don't think Sri is cruel by nature, he just enjoys pretending to be—and some other things as well. Most men, in fact, never grow up. The look he gave me now was undoubtedly pitying, but I didn't take any comfort from it.

"Everything is OK with the...uh...baby." He got the word out unwillingly, obviously using it just to satisfy me. "Probably."

I wouldn't have believed him even if he hadn't added that. The only thing I could still trust were my own eyes. There was nothing for it: I had to see the ba-by—then and there. I was just about to say so, intending to put all my rapidly mounting hysteria into my voice, but Sri got there first.

"Anyway, why not see for yourself? Maybe you'll be able as an...er...mother"—again that reluctance in his voice—"to judge better. I can't."

He spoke these last two words in a tone of defeat, a tone I had heard from him on only one previous occasion: when we were setting off to come here, and he took those idiotic turtles to a pet shop in the nearby town. I remember making some cynical crack about respectable Buddhists getting attached to two moronic brutes, which really seemed to get to him, so that later I refrained from similar
barbed comments. But now there was no time to go over all that; I just felt a momentary icy shiver.

Sri went over to the keyboard and typed a brief command connecting me to the auxiliary system. Instantly it dawned on me: how could I have been so stupid!

No, it was not my stupidity, but rather the particular state in which I found myself, blinded by an overpowering maternal instinct. Of course!
That
was why he was spending so much time in front of the small programming screen. That was where he'd placed the crib. That was where my baby was.

Sri would probably describe it as an ordinary flow of countless bytes of information from one computer system into another via a two-way interface, but to me these were arms reaching out in an embrace, the most intimate bond in the whole world, the first contact of a mother with her newborn.

An instant before this miraculous relationship was established, a moment so short that there is no word encoding it in Sri's slow biochemical world, I noticed something that had completely eluded me until then, though I must have been aware of it, another failure that can be ascribed to my bewildered and frantic state of mind. On a low chair before the auxiliary screen, tail dangling to the floor with the tip in one of the puddles Sri kept splashing through, sat the Little One, grinning cretinously at me.

ALONE I WAS, in the deep gloom.

Although ghostly after-images of the light that had been no longer misled my old eyes with their sparkling, dreamlike dancing, in my confused spirit the hot blaze burned on, filling my fragile being with a twofold sensation that tore me apart: the shades of entrancing delight, which had faded even in my ancient memories—that they might not stir up old guilt and woe and utter shame that I had surrendered to such an indecent, unseemly impulse, in a place where I had not even been invited.

Talons of devastating regret clawed at my trembling entrails in a manner all too familiar to me. I knew well that no other retreat was possible than to give my cowardly soul up to the merciless, stinging lash of conscience. My miserable fate was made even worse, now that I was alone with my wounded mind: in the thick blackness and deathly silence of the night, there was nothing to divert my attention from my tormenting thoughts, not even for a moment.

And when the chasms of hopelessness had already begun to open all around me, tempting me with gentle, deceptive invitations to step over their nearby edges and give myself up to eternal, insane oblivion that is the last resort of those who suffer most, another kind of oblivion came to my rescue, only moments before it would have been too late: an oblivion that was nothing compared to eternity—for such oblivion often lasts less than a single night—but with sufficient curative power to help a soul yearning for relief, be it never so fleeting.

Unseemly, bodily exhaustion and the burden of recent events fraught with immeasurable marvels finally bore down in their full weight on my fragile, rheumatic shoulders; my shrunken, feeble limbs gave way under this immense fatigue, and I sank to the cold floor of the iguman's dark cellar, for it seemed to me most unfitting that I should lay me down on the wooden pallet in the damp corner, until recently the deathbed of my Master. As soon as my body—clothed once more in its linen robe to hide my impious and shameful nakedness—found a pauper's bed on the bare earth, my heavy eyelids closed, thus opening the gates to blessed sleep—though I could have slept with my eyes open, such was the darkness that now reigned in the cellar.
Deep sleep deprived of dreams would have been most pleasing to my suffering spirit then, but for such mercy I could not hope—and truly, a dream soon came. An awesome dream, but not one of those that makes a man wake in sweat and trembling, full of the horrors of the underworld, when horrid goblins are released from their rusty chains, things the existence of which in the waking, daytime world you do not even guess at, but that dwell buried somewhere in your sinful mind; no, a different dream this was, filled also with horror, although no servant of Sotona in monstrous, awful form rushed out at my poor self from its bottomless pit.

Unlearned as I am, I know not whence came this unexpected rescue from the pestilent, hellish ghouls, because in my dream it was in Hades that I found myself. It was not difficult to recognize: I had seen it that very day, on the cursed vault in the monastery, depicted faithfully in secret, by the demonic hand of that sinner above all sinners, my Master.

Perplexed, I began to walk through that endlessly barren landscape, leaving no imprint of my bare feet on the dusty ground. The total darkness of that day in Hades was relieved only by those three sightless eyes, shedding their grimy, va-ri-colored light from the low sky to illuminate my way to some unknown destination. Soon the biggest of them sank below the near horizon, and I was gripped by icy foreboding, for what else could this be but the herald of some terrible doom?