Desolation Road

38

Now that the trees were full-grown and provided a lovely shade, Grandfather Haran spent more and more time in the garden he had made. He loved to spend time in the contemplation of things past. He thought of his boyhood in Thompson’s Falls, he thought of his first wife, Evgeny, he thought of his son’s boyhood and his son’s son’s boyhood. He thought of his adoptive daughter, turned into a wild, animal child, he thought of his granddaughter, turned into a deity against her own will, and his grandson, the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known. He wondered if he would ever see him again. He thought the thoughts a man of forty-five thinks. When he thought these thoughts he liked to have his meals brought to him so that he could eat in the tranquility of his garden in undisturbed reminiscence and once or twice the Babooshka had had to come out at dusk to fetch him home.

“You should open it up to the public,” said Rael Mandella, mindful of the stuffed pockets of the pilgrims flocking to see his daughter. “The Grey Lady’s Garden of Serenity. Twenty centavos in.” Of late the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption had taken to calling her the Grey Lady.

“I will do no such thing,” said Grandfather Haran. “It is my garden, for the private personal use of my wife, myself and those guests I choose to invite.” To maintain that privacy he hired a handful of desperately impoverished Poor Children from the shantytown called Faith City that surrounded the great grey basilica and paid them to build a wall around his garden. Pleased with their industry, he erected a gate which he locked with a stout padlock and put one key into his pocket and the other on a long golden chain around his wife’s neck.

When the bustle and rush of the new Desolation Road with its entrepreneurs and vendors of religious gewgaws and rentracking hoteliers grew too much, they would lock themselves in the garden and listen to the singing of the birds and the leaping of the fish in the little stream. They would plant flowers and shrubs, for a garden is never completed while its gardener lives, and as they worked their soily-fingered way along paths and flower beds they seemed to discover parts to it they could not remember having planted: secret dells, tiny waterfalls, groves of cool trees, a maze, a sand garden, a grassy lawn with a sundial at its centre.

“Dearest wife, does it sometimes seem to you that our garden reaches out beyond the walls I have built around it?” asked Grandfather Haran. After walking for almost an hour along an intriguing flagstone path, they had come to a stone bench beneath a willow tree and here they were resting. The Babooshka looked at the sky, which seemed to her strangely soft, not like the harsh blue-black of Desolation Road at all, and full of pillowy clouds.

“Husband Haran, I think that as we have grown this garden, so this garden has grown us, and the unexpected things we are finding in it are the seeds it has sown in our imaginations.”

They sat quietly for a long time on the stone bench beneath the willow, watching the clouds, quiet with the quietness of old people who do not need to speak to communicate. As the world began to turn its face away from the sun they left the stone seat and returned by ways more wild and beautiful than they had ever trodden before to the gate in the wall. There pastry vendors and whey-faced tourists pushed rudely past them in the laneway as they locked the gate behind them.

“I am thinking that if what you say is true, then our garden may be of infinite extent and variety,” said Grandfather Haran. The Babooshka clapped her hands in delight.

“Why, husband Haran, then we must explore! Tomorrow we shall begin, yes?”

Early the next morning, before the lanes and alleys filled with strangers, the Babooshka and Grandfather Haran embarked upon their exploration of the garden. The Babooshka fastened one end of a large ball of twine to the gate and played it out. In her satchel she carried eighteen such balls, her drawing books and pencils, so that she might map the unexplored hinterland of the imagination, and two packed lunches. Grandfather Haran led the way, equipped with opticon, sextant, watch and compass. Within ten minutes of leaving the gate, husband and wife were in unfamiliar territory.

There should be a stand of accelerated-growth beech trees here,” said Grandfather Haran. “I planted them myself, I remember clearly.” Before him was a small wooded valley. Banks of rhododendrons gladdened the slopes and a small stream splashed over stones. “There are no rhododendrons here. They are over by the left of the gate… the garden, I think, must be constantly reshaping itself. Fascinating.”

“Hush,” said the Babooshka, “do you hear a voice?” Grandfather Haran strained his less-acute ears.

“Is it Rael?”

“Yes. Hush, listen. Did you hear what he said?”

“I thought I heard my son shout something about Limaal coming home.”

“He did. So, huband, shall we go back?”

Grandfather Haran let the twine run through his fingers. Behind him he could just discern the iron gate. Before him he saw the new valley and it seemed to him that beyond it a huge, virgin landscape, a land of wooded hillsides and rushing rivers, bright meadows and leaping deer.

“Forward,” he said, and together they went down into the valley, he sighting on the sun and marking compass bearings, she reeling out the twine behind her. They crossed the stream and hand in hand climbed up into the wooded hillsides and flower filled meadows and never came back.

When Rael Mandella came to look for them he found only the twine the Babooshka had played out behind her. He followed its devious course around trees and flower beds, fountains and shubberies in a great spiral inward from the walls toward the heart of the garden. He burst through the final screen of privet into a small, neat lawn and came to the end of the twine. It was tied around the trunk of a great elm tree, one of a pair that stood so close together that their branches and roots were intertwined beyond the power of any man to separate.