The Cult of Loving Kindness (21 page)

In the final scene, seven young women represented the seven liberal arts, and they danced provocatively with an equal number of young men, whose hats suggested different industrial procedures. The men were prominent sports figures, the women the seven runners-up of a pageant that had been held the previous day. Yet even so, some energy was lacking, some vital spark. And in this it contrasted with other, smaller, private celebrations which were taking place all over Charn that same night. Illegal, punishable in some cases by long prison sentences, they persisted especially in the slums, where in hot broken rotten houses, not yet reconditioned into workers’ flats, fervent gatherings of the faithful squatted around single candles in the dark. They were rubbing worn crude homemade fetishes, and chanting stories from the life of Abu Starbridge, stories from the life of Angkhdt. In those days the two mythologies had come together, to form a potent new religion of the disenfranchised and the miserable.

It was a religion made of stories. This is a story that they told in those days: Abu Starbridge was carried in a cage through the streets of Charn, on the way to his place of execution. And he was stinking drunk. And they had loaded him with chains, and covered up his face with the dog-headed mask. In the back of an old truck, he was driving through the streets of Charn, while the people yelled curses and threw stones. When he was passing up the avenue of Seven Sins, a laundress from the lowest caste jumped up onto the tailgate. She asked him for his blessing and bent down to touch his feet. But then he reached out through the bars of his cage. He raised her up. He said, “Do not fear. Among a hundred thousand I will know you. And when I see you in the land of Paradise, I will kiss you on the lips.”

Or this—Beloved Angkhdt went traveling, marked with the tattoos of a gardener. It was the starving time, the dark part of the year. Wherever he passed, grass grew under his feet. It poked up through the snow along his footprints.

When he got to a town, the men and women brought their children, for he had the healer’s touch. He would touch them in the secret places of their bodies. Sometimes the women came out while their husbands slept. They lay with him inside the cowsheds, among the cows.

He came to the city. The primate heard that he had come, and then the primate gave him money. But Angkhdt had seen the primate’s daughter. He said he would plant a garden in her stomach, and then he went away. But she lost flesh, and she was almost dead, and she was the only fruit upon her father’s tree. Then the primate took his bow, and hunted Angkhdt through all the hills and the high pastures. He saw him on the hill, a black shadow standing up, and he shot him with an arrow through the thigh. He chased him through the wood. Beloved Angkhdt, he left a trail. And his blood was falling on the snow. There was a flower which sprang up, and a scarlet berry. Then the primate found his clothes discarded in the snow. He was following the track—human footprints, then they changed.

 

On the morning of the sixty-third of September, Cassia waited in the pine grove for Rael to return. A cold mist was hanging in the trees, beading in her hair. At the end of an hour she was too cold to keep on sitting as she had been, wrapped in Rael’s blanket with her bare feet dug into the pine needles. So she got up and walked back to the clearing.

 

There the bonfire was still smoking, and she stepped among the rows of sleeping pilgrims to reach it. She pushed her toes down into the warm ashes, and bent to rub the stiffness out of her legs. Near her the branding tree had fallen to its side. The book, the lantern, and the pail were gone.

The pilgrims had lain down to sleep where they had sat the night before, and most still lay inert, crushed in together for warmth, their arms around each other. Many snored. The ground was scattered with discarded bottles.

But the children were awake, huddled up among their parents. Some had gotten up, and were laughing and playing among the trees, throwing pinecones at a marmot in a tree.

Servant of God was still asleep. So was Mama Jobe, her hand still clasped around her bottle. But Efe was awake—she was returning from the edge of the clearing with a burden of firewood. Her face was puffy and streaked with charcoal, and she was grunting to herself. Her baby was tied to her back in a red strip of fabric, which only left its feet and head uncovered. And behind her, also with his bundle of sticks, trudged her little boy in his old man’s cap.

Mama Efe squatted down near Cassia, poking with a stick into the ashes, searching for embers from the bonfire. In the cold morning she was wearing a black cotton jacket, which nevertheless she had not buttoned; it did not close over her breasts. She laid her cooking fire with efficient movements, while in the meantime her little boy filled up a bucket from a standing tap near the latrine. It weighed almost as much as he did himself, and he was spilling most of it as he dragged it toward the fire.

Cassia went to help him. But he would not relinquish the bucket; he glared at her with dull hostility, his fingers tugging at the handle when she tried to lift it. Water splashed onto the neck of an old man who was stretched out nearby snoring. He slapped at his neck as if trying to kill a bug, then woke and cursed. Mama Efe cursed too, and whispered something Cassia didn’t understand. She let go of the bucket’s handle and stepped back.

Brother Longo was there, standing by Cassia’s elbow. “You’re up early,” he said. But she was startled to see him, and disgusted by her memories of the previous night. As she turned, her face must have betrayed it, for Brother Longo’s expression also changed.

She moved away from him, away also from the cursing old man, and stepped instead into a more open place, leaving Efe’s son to drag away the bucket by himself. Brother Longo followed her, and hearing his step, she felt a sadness and a panic in her that she couldn’t identify. But part of it came out of a new feeling of aloneness—Rael had not returned, and she was guessing for the first time how alone she was in the big world. This feeling had been ebbing and flowing since she woke, but at that moment it was at its height. She turned again.

Brother Longo was holding out his hand to her, a smile upon his face. In the light of day there was nothing impressive about him. His skin was covered with red spots, red hair, and she could smell the odor of his armpits. Her mind was full of regret, full of Mr. Sarnath, full of Rael, and she had no patience for it.

She could see the mark of the brand upon his palm, upon his fingers. In the misty morning light, the effect of the phosphorescent paint could not be seen—his hands looked dirty, that was all. And his smile, which was widening, included a broken canine. Next to it, one of his incisors appeared to have been filed down.

His voice seemed thin and vicious, now that he was no longer speaking for the crowd: “You didn’t enjoy our demonstration,” he said, still holding out his hand. “I saw you leave just at the moment of surrender.”

She interrupted him. “There were priests in Charn—my father told us stories about the old days there. Starbridge priests—they worshiped idols. They blinded themselves upon their altars, cut off their own fingers. My father told me once when I refused to eat. Out of a sense of privilege, he said. Of privilege through pain. He said that we must guard against these marks of privilege.”

Brother Longo shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “But look at your own hand.”

She opened up her palm. The birthmark, which she had noticed for the first time the day before, seemed to have gown larger, and to have acquired an alarming color—purple, yellow, blue—as if she had been bleeding underneath the skin. But her palm was not sore or swollen.

 

Later that morning they continued on—Cassia, Servant of God, Mama Jobe, together with the mass of pilgrims. The track continued uphill. Past the outbuildings of Brother Longo’s mission, past a crumbling concrete ramp which rose up to the level of the treetops and then ended, past a field where nothing grew, in which stood the rusted hulks of boilers, engines, generators, turbines, and where the soil was still slimy from some grease or oil or tar that bubbled up out of the polluted earth—four miles from the clearing the track widened and there were remnants of tarmac for a while, remnants of stone gutters. Other smaller ways came snaking through the trees. By eight o’clock, when the sun rose, the track was many yards across.

 

Always they progressed uphill. Servant of God swung himself over the sharp volcanic rocks, his enormous hands wrapped in strips of cotton. Often he would move aside to rest, and then Cassia would look back to see the line of pilgrims coming through the trees, visible a long way, many thousands now, all with their knapsacks and bundles and children and bright ragged clothes. Weather-beaten, grimy, battered, happy, they jabbered to each other up and down the line, and they sang hymns and songs. Now, after weeks of weary traveling, they were close to their goal; it was the last day of the Paradise Festival, and the weather was beautiful once the sun had burned away the mist. The sky was a hard, sweet, cold metallic blue, visible now through the thinning trees, and occasionally the sun shone in their faces.

Servant of God was sweating, panting, and his knees and hands were bleeding. Yet even he was smiling as they climbed up slowly toward the open sun. At times now through a bare place in the foliage they could see the jungle far below them, its black canopy punctured here and there by giant tulip trees, each with its yellow crown, each with its surrounding cloud of birds. And in those same bare places Cassia now caught glimpses of the slope in front of her, rising out of sight, a shoulder of Mt. Nyangongo, whose enormous bulk appeared so gradually. As they climbed, sulphur fumes pinched at their nostrils, and sometimes a hot sulphur mist would rise up around them through a crack in the rock, turning the grass yellow, brittle, dry.

Sometimes they would cross a lava flow. Here especially Servant of God would grunt in pain as he labored over fields of pumice and obsidian. Even Mama Jobe, whose thin shoulders were bent that day under the burden of a crushing hangover, protested when they reached a place among the thinning laurels where the path disappeared among dunes of powdered glass. “Stupid,” she said, “you’ll hurt yourself,” and she grabbed him by the hair to yank him back out of the press of pilgrims. In fact many had turned aside to tie bandannas round their mouths and to lift their children up onto their shoulders, and to drink a few swigs of water before they continued on. From up ahead there came a squeak, squeak, squeak—the shuffle of their plastic boots upon the glass.

Servant of God had hurt himself. The cuts upon his knees and hands were coated with black powder, and his tongue also was black with it. But still he struggled grimly forward: “No,” he said, “I’m almost there.” They had to pull him back out of the dust; then he relented and let them care for him and wash him clean while he lay gasping on his back. They wasted water from Mama Jobe’s canteen, and he was sputtering and complaining. But whenever he relaxed his face, it returned to the smile that was now his natural expression.

Cassia had been walking in a daze of self-absorption. Intent on the confusion in her heart, entranced by the power of her own senses, she had barely noticed the cripple’s pain until they stopped. Now she chided herself, and with acute and careful fingers she picked the glass out of his wounds.

“No,” he said. “This is nothing; let me go.” But his struggles were halfhearted and in a little while he lay still. While Cassia washed him from the water bottle, Mama Jobe unwrapped from a rag six stiff narrow leaves. She crushed them on her palm and then she retched up from her throat a glob of phlegm, discolored from tobacco juice, and mixed it all into a paste. Then she was rubbing it into the torn flesh along the cripple’s shins and knees. Cassia put her finger out to touch some of the goo. She took some on the end, and soon the sensitivity of her skin was less, her hand felt alien, apart.

“What’s the matter now?” grumbled Mama Jobe, for there were tears in Cassia’s eyes.

“What are we doing here?” she asked.

Once Mr. Sarnath had come upon her in the woods, where she was sitting by a pool. So intent was she upon a water spider that she had not heard his footsteps. “Do not be misled by your sensations,” he had said. “Intensity is not the same as understanding. Surely I am part of this as well as you.”

She was sitting on a dusty tuft of grass, over a soil of sharp stones. Stunted, spindly trees hung over them. The sun was hot. Ten yards away, the stream of pilgrims passed unchecked, raising a mist of powdered glass out over the lava flow. Thin men, pregnant women, children, and none of them was Rael.

“What am I doing here?” she asked.

Mama Jobe rolled her eyes. She had ripped part of the hem of her dress to make a fresh bandage for the cripple’s hands, and she was smearing it with her anesthetizing paste. She was in no mood for foolish questions; her particolored face was full of wry disgust. Servant of God was lying on his back, quiescent now, his body daubed with grit, dappled with sunlight. His arm was over his face and he was smiling.

“Go and find someone,” said Mama Jobe. “He’s right—it’s not far now.”

Cassia wiped her hand across her cheek, and where her finger passed it made a long cold line. She turned her face aside. Now the woods were full of an ominous banging, a scattered roll of drumbeats. Perhaps a hundred men were marching in step along the path, fat men in crimson robes, with shaved heads and puffy faces that were covered with white greasepaint. Their eyes were lined with black and violet, and they had huge, grotesque false eyelashes, and they banged on heavy wooden drums with sticks wrapped in cotton batting. They were carrying flags too, awkwardly because of the overhanging branches. Cassia recognized the golden sun, the fat face of Abu Starbridge, the great dog’s head of Angkhdt.

Once more the tears rose to her eyes. She turned back to Mama Jobe, whose expression was kinder now, more humorous. “What’s wrong with you, girl?” she asked. “Is it your friend?