The Marriage Plot (48 page)

There was no good way to describe any of this. Even Thomas Merton could only say things like “I have got into the habit of walking up and down under the trees or along the wall of the cemetery in the presence of God.” The thing was, Mitchell now knew what Merton meant, or thought he did. As he took in the marvelous sights, the dusty Polo Grounds, the holy cows with their painted horns, he had got in the habit of walking around Calcutta in the presence of God. Furthermore, it seemed to Mitchell that this didn’t have to be a difficult thing. It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.

Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing. Calcutta was a city like that. Mitchell walked along Chowringhee Road, gazing up at the buildings, repeating a phrase he remembered from Gaddis,
the accumulation of time in walls
, and thinking to himself that the British had left behind a bureaucracy that the Indians had made only more complex, investing the financial and governmental systems with the myriad hierarchies of the Hindu pantheon, with the levels upon levels of the caste system, so that to cash a traveler’s check was like passing before a series of demigods, one man to check your passport, another to stamp your check, another to make a carbon of your transaction while still another wrote out the amount, before you could receive money from the teller. Everything documented, checked over, scrupulously filed away, and then forgotten forever. Calcutta was a shell, the shell of empire, and from inside this shell nine million Indians spilled out. Beneath the city’s colonial surface lay the real India, the ancient country of the Rajputs, nawabs, and Mughals, and this country erupted too from the baghs and alleyways, and, at some moments, especially in the evening when the music vendors played their instruments in the streets, it was as though the British had never been here at all.

There were graveyards filled with the British dead, forests of eroded obelisks in which Mitchell could make out only a few words.
Lt. James Barton, husband of. 1857–18–. Rosalind Blake, wife of Col. Michael Peters. Asleep in the Lord, 1887
. Tropical vines infiltrated the cemetery, and palm trees grew near family mausoleums. Broken coconut shells lay scattered over the gravel.
Rebecca Winthrop, age eight months. Mary Holmes. Died in childbirth.
The statuary was Victorian and extravagant. Angels kept vigil over graves, their faces worn away. Apollonian temples housed the remains of East India Company officials, the pillars fallen, the pediments askew.
Of malaria
.
Of typhus
. A groundskeeper came out to see what Mitchell was doing. There was no place in Calcutta to be alone. Even a deserted cemetery had its custodian.
Asleep in the Lord. Asleep in. Asleep.

On Sunday, he went into the streets even earlier, and stayed out most of the day, getting back to the Guest House in time for afternoon tea. On the veranda, beside a potted plant, he took a fresh blue aerogram out of his backpack and began writing a letter home. Partly because he used his aerograms as an extension of his own journal, and was therefore writing more to himself than to his family, and partly because of the influence of Merton’s Gethsemani journals, Mitchell’s letters from India were documents of utter strangeness. Mitchell wrote down all kinds of things to see if they might be true. Once written down, he forgot about them. He took the letters to the post office and mailed them without any thought of what impression they would make on his mystified parents back in Detroit. He opened this one with a detailed description of the man with the staph infection that was eating away his cheek. This led to an anecdote about a leper Mitchell had seen begging in the street the day before. From there Mitchell moved into a discussion of misunderstandings people had about leprosy, and how it wasn’t really “that contagious.” Next, he scribbled a postcard to Larry, in Athens, giving the return address of the Salvation Army. He took Madeleine’s letter out of his backpack, thought about what to reply, and put it back again.

While Mitchell was finishing up, Rüdiger appeared on the veranda. He sat down and ordered a pot of tea for himself.

After it arrived, he said, “So tell me something. Why do you come to India?”

“I wanted to go somewhere different from America,” Mitchell answered. “And I wanted to volunteer for Mother Teresa.”

“So you come here to do good works.”

“To try, at least.”

“It’s interesting about good works. I am German so of course I know all about Martin Luther. The problem is, no matter how much we try to be good, we cannot be good enough. So Luther says you must be justified by faith. But, hey, read some Nietzsche if you want to know about this idea. Nietzsche thought Martin Luther was just making it easy on everybody. Don’t worry if you can’t do good works, people. Just believe. Have faith. Faith will justify you! Right? Maybe, maybe not. Nietzsche wasn’t against Christianity, as everybody thinks. Nietzsche just thought there was only one Christian and that was Christ. After him, it was finished.”

He’d worked himself up into a reverie. He was staring up at the ceiling, smiling, his face shining. “It would be nice to be a Christian like that. The first Christian. Before the whole thing went kaput.”

“Is that what you want to be?”

“I am just a traveler. I travel, I carry everything I need with me, and I don’t have problems. I don’t have a job unless I need it. I don’t have a wife. I don’t have children.”

“You don’t have shoes,” Mitchell pointed out.

“I used to have shoes. But then I realize it is much better without them. I go all over without shoes. Even in New York.”

“You went barefoot in New York?”

“It is wonderful barefoot in New York. It is like walking on one big giant tomb!”

The next day was Monday. Mitchell wanted to post his letter first thing, and so he was late getting to Kalighat. A volunteer he’d never seen before already had the medicine cart out. The Irish doctor had returned to Dublin and in her place was a new doctor who spoke only Italian.

Deprived of his usual morning activity, Mitchell spent the next hour floating around the ward, seeing what he could do. In a bed on the top row was a young boy of eight or nine, holding a jack-in-the-box. Mitchell had never seen a child at Kalighat before, and he climbed up to sit with him. The boy, whose head was shaved and who had dark circles under his eyes, handed the jack-in-the-box to Mitchell. Mitchell saw at once that the toy was broken. The lid wouldn’t snap shut, keeping the puppet inside. Holding it down with his finger, Mitchell motioned for the boy to turn the crank, and at the appropriate moment, Mitchell released the lid, letting Jack jump out. The boy loved this. He made Mitchell do it over and over again.

By this time it was after ten o’clock. Too early to serve lunch. Too early to leave. Most of the other volunteers were bathing the patients, or stripping the dirty linens off their beds, or wiping down the rubber mats protecting the mattresses—doing, that is, the dirty, smelly jobs that Mitchell should have been doing also. For a moment, he resolved to start right now,
right this minute.
But then he saw the beekeeper coming his way, his arms full of soiled linens, and with an involuntary reflex Mitchell backed through the arch and climbed the stairs straight to the roof.

He told himself he was just going up to the roof for a minute or two, to get away from the disinfectant smell of the ward. He had come back today for a reason, and that reason was to get over his squeamishness, but before doing that, he needed a little air.

On the roof, two female volunteers were hanging wet laundry on the line. One of them, who sounded American, was saying, “I told Mother I was thinking of taking a vacation. Maybe go to Thailand and lie on the beach for a week or two. I’ve been here almost six months.”

“What did she say?”

“She said the only thing important in life is charity.”

“That’s why she’s a saint,” the other woman said.

“Can’t I become a saint and go to the beach, too?” the American woman said, and they both started laughing.

While they were talking, Mitchell went to the far end of the roof. Peering over the edge, he was surprised to find himself looking down into the inner courtyard of the Kali temple next door. On a stone altar, six goats’ heads, freshly slaughtered, were neatly lined up, their shaggy necks bright with blood. Mitchell tried his best to be ecumenical, but when it came to animal sacrifice he had to draw the line. He stared down at the goats’ heads awhile longer, and then, with sudden resolve, he went back down the stairs and found the beekeeper.

“I’m back,” he said.

“Good man,” the beekeeper said. “Just in time. I need a hand.”

He led Mitchell to a bed in the middle of the room. Lying on it was a man who, even among the other old men at Kalighat, was especially emaciated. Wrapped in his sheet he looked as ancient and brown-skinned as an Egyptian mummy, a resemblance that his sunken cheeks and curving, blade-like nose emphasized. Unlike a mummy, however, the man had his eyes wide open. They were blue and terrified and seemed to be staring up at something only he could see. The incessant quaking of his limbs added to the impression of extreme terror on his face.

“This gentleman needs a bath,” the beekeeper said in his deep voice. “Somebody’s got the stretcher, so we’ll have to carry him.”

It was unclear how they were going to manage this. Mitchell went down to the foot of the bed, waiting while the beekeeper pulled off the old man’s sheet. Thus exposed, the man looked even more skeletal. The beekeeper grabbed him under his arms, Mitchell took hold of his ankles, and in this indelicate fashion, they lifted him off the mattress and into the aisle.

They soon realized they should have waited for the stretcher. The old man was heavier than they’d expected, and unwieldy. He sagged between them like an animal carcass. They tried to be as careful as possible, but once they were moving down the aisle there was nowhere to set the old man down. The best thing seemed to be to get him to the lavatory as soon as possible, and in their haste, they began to treat the old man less like a person they were carrying and more like an object. That he didn’t seem aware of what was happening only encouraged this. Twice, they bumped him against other beds, fairly hard. Mitchell changed his grip on the old man’s ankles, nearly dropping him, and they staggered through the women’s ward and into the bathroom in back.

A yellow stone room, with a slab at one end, on which they set the old man down, the bathroom was lit by misty light filtering through a single stone lattice window. Brass spigots protruded from the walls, and a big, abattoir-like drain was sunk in the middle of the floor.

Neither Mitchell nor the beekeeper acknowledged what a lousy job they’d done carrying the old man. He was lying on his back now, his limbs still shaking violently and his eyes wide open, as if screening an endless horror. Slowly they pulled his hospital gown over his head. Underneath, a soggy bandage covered the old man’s groin.

Mitchell wasn’t frightened anymore. He was ready for whatever he had to do. This was it. This was what he’d come for.

With safety scissors the beekeeper snipped the adhesive tape. The pus-stained swaddling came apart in two pieces, revealing the source of the old man’s agony.

A tumor the size of a grapefruit had invaded his scrotum. At first, the sheer size of the growth made it difficult to identify as a tumor; it looked more like a pink balloon. The tumor was so big that it had stretched the normally wrinkled skin of the scrotum as taut as a drum. At the top of the bulge, like the tied-off neck of the balloon, the man’s shriveled penis hung to one side.

As the bandage fell away, the old man moved his palsied hands to cover himself. It was the first sign that he knew they were there.

The beekeeper turned on the spigot, testing the water’s temperature. He filled a bucket. Holding it aloft, he began pouring it slowly, ceremonially, over the old man.

“This is the body of Christ,” the beekeeper said.

He filled another bucket and repeated the process, intoning:

“This is the body of Christ.”

“This is the body of Christ.”

“This is the body of Christ.”

Mitchell filled a bucket himself and began pouring it over the old man. He wondered if the falling water increased the old man’s pain. There was no way to tell.

They lathered the old man with antiseptic soap, using their bare hands. They washed his feet, his legs, his backside, his chest, his arms, his neck. Not for a moment did Mitchell believe that the cancerous body on the slab was the body of Christ. He bathed the man as gently as possible, scrubbing around the base of the tumor, which was venemously reddened and seeping blood. He was trying to make the man feel less ashamed, to let him know, in his last days, that he wasn’t alone, not entirely, and that the two strange figures bathing him, however clumsy and inexpert, were nevertheless trying to do their best for him.

Once they’d rinsed the man and dried him off, the beekeeper fashioned a new bandage. They dressed him in clean bedclothes and carried him back to the men’s ward. When they deposited him in his bed, the old man was still staring up blindly, shuddering with pain, as though they’d never been there at all.

“O.K., thanks a lot,” the beekeeper said. “Hey, take these towels to the laundry, will you?”

Mitchell took the towels, worrying only a little about what was on them. All in all, he felt proud about what had just happened. As he bent over the laundry basket, his cross swung away from his chest, casting a shadow on the wall.

He was on his way to check on the little boy again when he saw the agronomist. The small, intense man was sitting up in bed, his complexion considerably more jaundiced than on the previous Friday, the yellow leaking even into the whites of his eyes, which were a disturbing orange color.

“Hello,” Mitchell said.

The agronomist looked at him sharply but said nothing.