Paris Was the Place (40 page)

She rings a small bell on the table and a young man from somewhere in the library brings us tea. But I can’t drink it. I’m too excited. The first thing I do is get out my notebook and pen. Then I stand and move as quickly as I can through the materials to see what I have. The handwritten drafts are in the flowery cursive of a young girl. There are badly typed revisions on parchment paper that look like work Sarojini did herself. Then, finally, poems in three different roughly bound books:
The Golden Threshold
,
The Bird of Time
, and
The Broken Wing
. These also have many handwritten notes on them in the same cursive.

I pick up the handwritten drafts first, because they’re what excite me most. I haven’t dared wish for many marginal notes, but there are several to a page and cross-outs and arrows and parentheses along the
sides of the poems and notes she wrote to herself. Macon grins and holds up his cup of tea. “Is it all that you expected?”

I can’t speak. It’s been such a week. Month. Year. “She is gone from us now,” Padmaja says. “We must leave her to it. She has the poems for one day to herself. You must tell me about France, Macon, and if I will like it there. I am planning to come for a long visit. I want you to take me to the top of the Eiffel Tower. My husband did not believe in travel. Why I married him I still don’t know. Be careful who you marry, Macon. They can appear to be one thing on the outside and end up being a different animal underneath.”

“I married the wrong woman once already, Padmaja.” Macon sips his tea. I hope he doesn’t delve into past lives or tell her about his divorce and other small failures. I’m trying to gain the old woman’s trust.

“This woman,” Padmaja says. “Will you marry her, Macon? We shall see what she is made of.”

“She is a good writer, Padmaja. She will make you a book that you will want to read.”

“Ah. But you did not answer my question.”

“I know you are discerning enough to realize that I can’t possibly address that question in the presence of the woman about whom you are speaking.”

“Oh, Macon,” Padmaja says. “You are old-fashioned in the end, aren’t you? This may be your downfall, being too tied to the past.”

“I have a son, Padmaja. I am tied to my past and to my mistakes, and I am indebted to the future.”

“Children make you honest,” she says. “They leave you and they don’t return your phone calls and they make you see yourself in the most unfavorable lights. Your envy. Your greed. Your malice. And also the size of your heart. I think your heart is big for your son.”

She looks up at me while I stand furiously making notes with my pen. “When you write the book, I want you to call yourself Willow. Not Willie. I want everyone to know that the book was written by a woman, not a man.”

I stop reading at noon. Padmaja has the librarian bring in tomato
sandwiches and more tea. He’s an older man with white hair and bifocals, and he shakes my hand and says his name is Gobal. I’ve taken pages of notes by now, but there’s so much to read and decipher that I’m only through the first half of the first book and I’m panicking. The acrid sweat from my armpits drips down the inside of my T-shirt.

After lunch Padmaja dozes in her chair and Macon goes outside for a walk. When it’s four o’clock, I can see the librarian turning off the lights in the main room, and I try to wake her. “Padmaja.” She opens her eyes and stares blankly at me for a moment.

“Willow. How is your work?” She sits up and runs her hand over her hair to smooth it.

“I need to ask you for more time. There is no way for me to finish in one day. Three books. Hundreds of notes. Because it is your mother’s notes that will turn my book into something that allows the reader inside her life. The notes tell us what your mother was thinking and why she used certain words and crossed out others and omitted whole poems from the final manuscripts. I know our agreement called for one day of reading. But I didn’t think there would be so much here, Padmaja. It could take weeks.” I’ve left everything else behind in these short hours. Luke. My mother. My father. Baby Lily and Sara. Even Macon. It’s just me and the poems. I’m high off of it. I only want more time.

“Yes. My mother had a strong mind. A trained mind. She was strict, and she insisted I marry my husband. He came from a wealthy family. I never met him until our wedding day. It was bad luck that brought us together. Are you sure you do not want to bring me to America? I could give lectures with you. I could help.”

“Padmaja, it is a very good idea, but I teach in Paris now and I won’t be going back to the United States soon. I have to ask you a favor.” If I’m overstepping, she’ll refuse me. I could write some version of my book now. At least I’ve seen the manuscripts and can explain their veracity, but there’s so much more I could do with the original material.

The old woman puts her hand in the air. “I know. I know. You are going to ask me if you can take the poems.”

“Copies of the poems. Only copies. I saw a machine in the office
here. A copy machine.” I hold my breath. The woman makes me feel about twelve years old. Maybe thirteen. Does she trust me?

“I have been thinking on it. I knew you would ask. They told me here that you would ask, and that I would have to decide. Where is Macon? Where has he gone?”

“You fell asleep and he wanted to see more of your village on foot. He has gone for a walk.”

I sit down in my chair. My face is flushed. There’s no ventilation in the room, and I’ve been working intently all day. Padmaja sucks air in between her teeth and makes a whistling sound. Then she points to the door and says, “Go. Go now. Give Gobal all the papers. Tell him I have ordered you. Tell him to begin the copying now. He has been waiting for me to decide. I will follow in a moment. I am an old woman. I am too slow. You must write a good book and bring me to America. So you go.”

“Really? Oh, Padmaja. This is great news. This is going to be fantastic! Thank you. Thank you. It will take at least another full day to make the copies!” I gather up the papers in my arms and carry them into the library’s office. I want to shout I’m so happy.

Macon finds us a half hour later in the library office, where I’m watching a young Tibetan clerk painstakingly copy each page of notes. I bet he won’t get to the actual books until sometime tomorrow. Gobal is here too, instructing the clerk on how to position the pages on the glass of the copy machine, then stepping back to watch.

“You have moved,” Macon says. I try not to grin too much.

“She has prevailed.” Padmaja waves at me. “Get me a chair, Macon. I am too old to stand. Some water, too. You will come back here with Willow tomorrow and watch the work be completed.”

“This is wonderful news.” Macon steps into the reading room and brings a wooden chair back for her. Then he finds an empty glass on the librarian’s desk near the front door and fills it with water from the faucet in the bathroom.

She drinks the water slowly. “There will be no rain today. Why does anyone spend the summer in India? I am too old to be hot like this. We must go now. Our work is done for the day.”

It’s hard for me to leave the photocopying. The manuscripts give me a focus. All my worry for Luke and guilt and fear for Gita have been replaced by questions about the poems. We follow Padmaja to the car. Her driver jumps out of the front seat and opens the back door of the Oldsmobile. His tin lunch canister sits on the dashboard, with a newspaper in the passenger seat next to a red pillow. Padmaja slowly climbs in the back and hands him her cane. He closes the door, and she puts her hand up to the window for a moment in a wave.

“Follow me,” Macon says when she’s gone. “You’ll like where I’m taking you.” He grabs my hand.

“You cannot believe it, Macon!” I scream when I’m sure she’s out of earshot. “There are so many notes. There’s so much work!”

“It’s good. I knew it would be good for you to get here.”

“It’s almost as if I’m there in the room with Sarojini! She chose her words so carefully. Then this amazing thing happened—her poems were read by hundreds of thousands of Indians. They were a call for education. A call to marry out of caste. A call for women to leave the fields.”

He walks me back down the road, toward our little house. Then we leave the road and take a dirt path into the woods. “I followed two students in here,” he says. “I mean, they knew I was behind them, but I don’t think they understood I had no idea where we were going.” We get to a group of buildings in the woods down behind the library. “It’s an ashram. I think they like visitors. I think they depend on visitors in some ways.”

The compound looks like a series of rectangular boxes; each one is one story high and connected by stone paths. The buildings blend in with the trees. We’re standing outside an open dining room where dozens of people sit at benches, eating. I try not to stare. “Is it okay that we’re here?”

There’s an Indian girl on the bench nearest to us who pours herself a cup of water. Her hair’s in a braid. Is it Gita? She turns and takes us in. She doesn’t smile, but she doesn’t frown, either. “Are you sure we’re not intruding?” I ask Macon. “I don’t think we’re supposed to be here.”

A cowbell rings, and a man in a white tunic and white pants steps out of the dining hall. He says, “The morning session has begun. Have you come to work?” He points to the nearest fields. “Here we have beans and paddy rice. We plant and harvest as much as we can now to make it through the winter snows when the pass closes and no buses can get to the mountains.”

“We’re just visiting,” Macon says. “We hope that’s okay.”

“Many people who visit us end up staying for years.”

There are stone cisterns for water and chicken coops outside the dining hall, and vegetable gardens right up to the edge of the thick woods. “We won’t be able to stay,” I say. “We have families we need to get back to. But thank you so much.”

“If you are leaving,” the man says, “you should have a swim first. It’s hot in India in the summer months.” He points to the woods past the vegetable gardens. “Take that path on your way up to town and you will find a small lake.” A lake? There? Macon can’t get there fast enough.

The water is pale green and flat. Macon takes off his shorts and T-shirt and makes a shallow dive. “God, it feels good! Come in!”

“I can’t,” I call out. “Doctor’s orders. It’s too soon.”

He swims back to shore and stands in the muck. His body looks thinner now. I try to imprint the shape of his shoulders in my mind while he stands there dripping. “Oh, Christ, this is me not thinking. I’m sorry, Willie. I forgot you couldn’t swim yet.”

“It’s okay. Really. I’m just glad to be in the woods.” I sit on a rock and take my shoes off and put my toes in the water.

The lake loosens my mind until I separate myself from Sarojini and India. When Luke and I camped with our father in the desert, we always talked about water: Did we have enough? Would we find more? Should we go back to the truck before we ran out? The first time we found a lake in one of the valleys, I dove in and could hear a humming sound. My father treaded water near me, and I asked him what the sound was. He smiled and said, “That’s water pressure on your eardrums.”

Luke floated on his back with his arms over his head next to me.
“I hear it, too. It’s music.” Then he kicked and glided away. “When I swim,” he yelled, “I have a movie camera in my head. And the humming sound of the water is the background music.”

That night we heard wolves, and Luke and I put our sleeping bags together inside the tent. I hardly slept. In the morning I checked my canteen and took a small sip. I didn’t have much water left. Luke was the best at hoarding it. He gave me a swig of his. Said he didn’t want me dying of thirst. He always had the most water left at the end of our trips and he always shared it with me. We’ve got to find a phone in Dharmsala so I can call and hear his voice.

Macon dries off by standing in a patch of sun next to the lake. Then he gets dressed and we walk to a place called the Hotel Tibet near the end of the main street. We find a table outside and order beer and lamb and potatoes. There’s a plumbing shop on one side and a seamstress on the other. Metal pipes are stacked in piles outside in the dirt. Two monks in sleeveless robes carry a thick, ten-foot-long pipe. “Maybe the monastery is getting water,” Macon says. “We should tell Luke that his next project should be here. Water’s coming. Electricity will be next.”

The potatoes are sliced and fried with onions, and the lamb is on skewers again. We eat everything. Then we follow a series of square cardboard signs with drawings of black telephones on them. The last sign is nailed to the door of an incense shop in an alley. It’s been ten days since I talked to Luke. Inside, the smoke makes my eyes water. There’s incense in jars on wooden shelves and in piles on a table and in baskets on the floor. Boxes of it are stacked on a desk, where a small, hunched-over man sits.

He asks for rupees and the country code for France and the city code for Paris. Then I recite Luke’s phone number at Avenue Victor Hugo. The man walks inside the black booth behind him with a red nylon curtain pulled to the side. He dials Luke’s number. When it rings, he motions me over with his arm.

“Luke!” I yell into the phone. “Luke, it’s me. I’m here in Dharmsala. How are you feeling? Tell me. Tell me everything!”

“Where to start.” He laughs. His voice is warbly and echoes. “For
one thing, sister, it has taken you a serious-ass amount of time to call me. I was beginning to worry. I hate to worry. Sara is livid. She phones me every day and is getting more and more stewed because you don’t call.”

“There are no phones in India,” I yell into the receiver and look back at Macon. He sits in the chair next to the desk, counting rupees.

“You have to know where to look.”

“No, really—it’s impossible to find phone lines. How do you feel, Luke?”

“I am walking the city taking Polaroids. I have so many by the time I get to the set. When are you coming home?”

“Three days. I miss you.” I start to cry for no reason, and I try to wipe the tears with my shoulder. I’m not going to tell him about the miscarriage. That would be selfish. He doesn’t need any more bad news. “I found the manuscripts!” I scream into the phone and laugh. “They are stupendously, amazingly wonderful!”