The Twenty-Seventh City : A Novel

19

“There’s a man.”

“No.”

“I can hear it in your voice, Essie. A mother can tell.”

“You’ve been getting the money, haven’t you?”

“It’s Singh again. Isn’t it.”

“I hardly see Singh.”

“Well. It’s your life.”

“I said I hardly see him. I don’t know what your problem is.”

“You can tell me. I’ve reconciled myself.”

“I asked if you’d been getting the money.”

“Some money, yes.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? You’ve been clearing a hundred twenty percent and the rate is climbing. He sends you photocopies of every—”

“Photocopies, yes.”

“Send Karam back here if you don’t believe me.”

“I will. You can be sure I will. And I do hope you’re more civil to him this time.”

“Ho. I wasn’t civil.”

“Karam isn’t one to complain, but I had the impression. His feelings were hurt. He’s a sensitive man, Essie. Very tender where you’re concerned. Like a father. I understand that Singh was violent. I’m not surprised. But you’re thirty-five years old now. There comes a time.”

“It’s over between Singh and me, Maman. He’s leaving in a month and I doubt I’ll ever see him again.”

“All the more reason to watch him. I was given to understand a hundred percent was a minimum figure. I was sure you’d do better.”

“Singh isn’t stealing your money. No one cares about your money. No one’s as greedy as you are.”

“Nor as naïve as you. Think about that.”

“You make two-twenty on every dollar you spent in September. The exchange rates are good. As for the taxes, well, I warned you. Don’t think you’re the only one getting taxed. I’m having enough trouble with—”

“Karam will be with you next week. If you warn Singh he’s coming I’ll be very unhappy with you. But not surprised. A mother can tell.”

“I will remind you I’ve known Singh for nineteen years.”

“A mother can tell.”

Who’s Singh? Norris asked.

Dunno. Dozen Thinghth on our litht and fifty aliathes.

What’s the money?

Thupposedly Asha’s, actually the mother’s.

Anything we can nail her for?

Not yet.

Jammu left the lights on in her office, ducked into the bathroom, and changed into long pants and a leather patrolman’s jacket. She pinned her hair and put on a cap, pulling down the bill. Operatives of Pokorny had been following her movements — General Norris had enough wealth to fund an army of spies — and she had to be more careful now. She crossed the walkbridge to the Police Academy, exited onto Spruce, and got in the unmarked Plymouth that Rollie Smith had left at the curb for her. It was a good thing she didn’t need to make surprise inspections often. She drove for twenty minutes before she was sure she wasn’t being tailed. Then she crossed the Mississippi on the MLK Bridge and entered East St. Louis, Illinois.

East St. Louis was a small-scale version of the South Bronx, of Watts, of North Philly. These cratered streets three miles east of the Arch would have been a menace or a social issue for people in St. Louis if they weren’t protected by a wide river and a state line. Singh had done well to imprison Barbara Probst in his loft here. The town was a black hole in the local cosmos, a place so poor and vicious that even organized crime stayed away. No one would expect a finicky psychopath like John Nissing to take his pretty hostage to an area where stepping out of one’s car — where even letting up on the gas pedal — invited death. Jammu parked by the rear loading dock of the warehouse and walked quickly to the door. Asha had given her a set of keys. On the top floor she unlocked a steel door and, to make sure Singh didn’t shoot her by mistake, whistled a fragment of an old drinking song:

Then she went in.

Singh did not look up from the papers spread around him on the floor. He was punching with a single finger, rustically, on the keyboard of a calculator. “What a pleasant surprise,” he said.

“My mother thinks you’re skimming some of her profits.”

“How is the dear old woman?”

“Bhandari’s coming to do another audit next week.”

“Interesting that you warn me.”

She sighed. “I appreciate your doing all this for me.”

“Not at all, not at all.” He drew a red line through a column of figures and stood. “You came to view the merchandise?”

“Yes.”

He opened a door and they passed through an empty room. “The word is mum,” he whispered. He parted a set of curtains to reveal the door. Jammu looked up at the peephole, which was set near the top. Singh went away. He returned with a small stepladder with pads of grooved black rubber. She climbed it and peered into the last room.

It was also empty, or nearly so, its walls and floor and ceiling curving together in the peephole’s optics like the skin of a bubble. The woman and the mattress appeared to cling, suspended, to the floor. She lay on her stomach reading in the light of a dim lamp. Her hair hung loose and overgrown and shaded the rest of her body from the light. Jammu could just barely make out the legs extending to the foot of the bed, the cable connecting her ankle to the wall. But the face was unmistakable. This was Martin’s wife. Jammu had heard her and heard about her as a free person moving through St. Louis. Now she might have been a butterfly tickling Jammu’s palms. Jammu wanted to crush her. Your husband doesn’t love you. Your daughter doesn’t need you. Your Nissing’s an old fairy. She couldn’t remember why she’d objected to the kidnapping. She hated to think of letting Barbara go, of throwing away a thing bought at such a price. She didn’t see how she could survive without moments such as this, without total control. Who are you? This was Martin’s question. When she was with him she forgot the answer, but she remembered now. Barbara glanced up from her book and gazed at the door.

Satisfied, Jammu stepped off the ladder and crossed the room again. Singh followed. “Exactly as advertised,” he said, shutting the second door. “Safe and sound.”

“I know she’s safe. As long as the release goes smoothly.”

“Quite.” He hovered at the outside door, waiting for her to leave.

“It will go smoothly.”

“Should.”

“You’re still a psychopath.”

“Uh huh.”

“I’m not ready to leave, you know.”

“Oh.” He walked to the middle of the room and sat down on the floor. “You make it with Probst yet?”

Jammu entered the kitchenette. “What do you have to drink here?”

“Tap water. Tang.”

“Aren’t we pure these days.” She put one of his clove cigarettes between her lips and leaned over the gas stove. “Do you find him attractive, Singh?” she said in a conciliatory voice, dragging.

“No, ma’am. You ought to know by now.”

“I can’t always tell.”

“As a rule—”

“You’ve been slack with your abstracts lately,” she said. “I don’t want to see any itineraries. I want it all digested.”

“What’s to digest? Use a plate for the ashes, please. It’s become rather Heisenbergian. The more we take away from Probst, the fewer gauges we have of what’s happening. He talks to almost no one. He has no friends. Except you, of course, as I’m sure you are aware and will exploit. But since we’ve yanked most of the bugs, it’s probably just as well. The phone taps help, but the quality has been terrible since I cut the amperage. This Pokorny needs to have another accident arranged. Bombay would have been the ideal place for it. It was a mistake not to have Bhise follow through. Have you considered—”

“Not this close to Billerica. Anyway, Pokorny’s replaceable.”

“Your choice.”

“You still have Barbara calling him.”

“That also doesn’t help much. In fact, she tried to arouse his suspicions, on the fourth, when he’d suggested a divorce. Told him she loved him and then hung up. The only thing that saved us, apart from my fist, was that he treats her so badly that she really does, for the most part, detest him. Thank you, I know. It’s because I developed a situation already nascent. With a tip of the hat to your theories.”

The cigarette was making Jammu’s sense of the vertical swim. She’d have treated Barbara badly too if they were married.

“The tone of his pronouncements has changed,” Singh said. “His attitude in the last six days amounts to a declaration of neutrality. If I were John Holmes I’d be scared.”

“So it looks like I’m getting the message across to him.”

“Not to worry, Chief. He likes you. He thinks you’re cute.”

“Enough.”

“He moons about the house.”

“I said enough.”

“I’m sure you’re wishing we didn’t have to release the little wife. That I could check her as baggage when I fly home.”

She put out the cigarette and licked the sugar from its paper off her lips.

“But you’d like him to go all the way with you,” Singh said.

“To support the merger.”

“That’s what I meant.” He paused. “Dear Miss Singh. I think my boyfriend really digs me but he has cold feet. I’m ready to go all the way. What can I do? Dear Lovelorn. This is the moment for objective correlatives. Contrary to Baxti’s expectations, we haven’t aged him by accelerating the process of loss. His habits and orientation have become youthful and shockingly selfish, which is fortunate because yours — if you’ll pardon my saying it — is a youthful, selfish appeal. I have two ideas and a suggestion.”

“Which I wouldn’t have heard if I’d left just now.”

“The envelope, please.” Singh took a white envelope from the inner pocket of his jacket and tore it open. He scanned the abstract it contained, and read aloud: “One. Urge him to file for the election to fill the county supervisor seat vacated by Billerica.” He looked at Jammu.

“Maybe.”

“Two. He has never served as the Veiled Prophet. Have him selected.”

“Maybe. The VP organization is mainly a city affair, and that means a lot of its members aren’t happy with Probst at the moment.”

“Egon Blanders? You got him that Easton site. He should owe you favors.”

“He does.”

“Well then. Probst is still popular no matter how he stands on the merger question. He should be the Veiled Prophet this year. And the county supervisor. In the fall he ‘mused’ a lot about his ‘semi-retirement,’ which is how he referred to a five-day work week. If you were the one to bring him tidings of a larger role in the public sector…Which brings me to my suggestion. Flatter his vanity. You’ve done well with his physical vanity. But the State, which at this point is little more than a quasi-youthful chaos, needs to be solidified. My suggestion is destiny. He already half believes he’s destined to play a vital role in the history of St. Louis, he’s been told so often. He should believe additionally that he was destined to team up with you — that his family was destined to leave him to achieve this very end. And you don’t care if this turns out to be bunk on the day after the election. Do you. More important yet is the correlative, which is that the city and the county are destined to be rejoined. That the merger isn’t a violence but a necessity. It was destined to happen. The task should be easy for you, because you yourself believe in historical necessity, in your own quaint way. And the symbolism — you the city, he the county — should help reinforce the personal attraction. City of symbols, recall. So ‘go for it.’”

Jammu said nothing. She felt she’d outgrown Singh. Probst wasn’t glib, and he had a position of authority. She admired him for his hesitations, his scrupled observations, for the doors to truth he opened with his careful picking.

“How will you keep the Ripley dynamic active,” Singh said, “if Probst ends up on his side?”

“Ripley can’t back out now.”

“And Devi?”

“I still use her. But she has a bag packed. Pokorny and Norris would like to get me any way they can.”

“You’re very patient with the General.”

“You underestimate his value. His theories have kept him busy. He’s done almost nothing practical to oppose me. And he’s been a walking worst-case scenario. Having kept one step ahead of him, we’ve been two steps ahead of everyone else. The thing is, Singh, it all fits together so neatly. Gopal bagged Hutchinson for us, he publicized the inadequacy of the county police forces, he damaged West County’s popularity, he contributed to the atmosphere of fear, and he did a few things like the stadium trick. Pokorny still has a man trying to figure out where all the equipment came from and what it was for if we weren’t going to use it. It was for him. For the knowledgeable few, for the informational elite. For Norris, who will never figure out that he shouldn’t have wasted time trying to figure it out.”

Singh stood up with a grunt. “What goes on in your head, friend? You must know you always sound like this when you’ve talked to her.”

“Like what?” Jammu wanted to know. What had he heard in what she’d said? Sometimes he just made these things up.

“In ten years the two of you will be indistinguishable.”

She sat with her legs crossed and her arms crossed, in blue serge and black leather; at least she’d never be as formal as her mother. Who as a young woman had changed her name and run off with an American and had a child by him in Los Angeles, very possibly believing the same thing.

Winter came early in Kashmir, late in October when the valley sloshed humidity into the mountains to tumble back as cloud, gothic mist to intrigue in the avenues of Srinagar, in liaison with woodsmoke, in a pre-modern smog. Night began with the unseen dropping of the sun behind unseen peaks, at four o’clock. Balwan Singh entered a bungalow on the city outskirts, threw his coat on a peg, and approached the hunched and red-eyed members of the Marxist Students Reading Group, speaking before he reached them, before they could greet him.

“Classically,” he said, “the revolution proceeds at the most general level along dialectical lines between theory and praxis, praxis and theory. Lenin’s perception of his historicity became Lenin’s stewardship of the Bolshevik actions, which actions, their practical successes and failures, led to a refinement of his theory, specifically in the concepts of imperialism and the Communist state. As long as Lenin lived, this dialectic closely matched its counterpart, that of man as participant and man as percipient, as subject and as object. But the death of Lenin, the emerging imperfections of the early state, and above all the rise of Stalin created a crisis in the dialectic: praxis dictated that theory, in the short run, be its apologist.”

His comrades squatted on the floor, leaned against walls, chewing paan or smoking, like a congregation of ruminant boatmen a generation older. Most of them were sons of well-heeled Hindus, their eyes Brahmanically mournful, and they’d adhered to the Indian pattern by which youths become men early. Textbook materialism had exalted them. They filibustered in classrooms. They got themselves expelled. They laughed at jokes that were correct.

Singh, whose jokes were always correct, never laughed. He paced back and forth before them, standing at the center of an asterisk of shadows cast from his legs by the lanterns, his strut as always part professorial, part firebrand, and mainly Heinrich Heine — and he began to sense that he was not being heard. His comrades’ shoulders bucked and dipped as if they felt a draft. They did. It was a newcomer, behind them, a girl, a very young girl with a boyish body and a boy’s short hair, sitting cross-legged in slacks on the floor near the wood stove. Singh interrupted himself to ask for her name.

“Jammu,” she said.

He welcomed her stiffly and, by example, led the group to ignore her for the duration of his lecture. When the meeting broke up she slipped out of the bungalow like a shrug embodied, like a self containable in one small word. He followed her, with a glance over his shoulder to make sure no comrades saw.

She said she came from Bombay. She said she was sixteen. She was studying in Srinagar against her will. She told Singh it wasn’t a good university. Her mother wanted her to marry a certain forty-three-year-old Kashmiri landowner because she was a bastard and the landowner had asked. She was studying electrical science. She spoke no Kashmiri. Her mother wanted to manufacture transistor radios in Ahmadabad and wanted her to run the company. She wanted to go to London or Paris and be a writer and not marry. She’d seen one of the Reading Group’s handbills. Her mother had told her her religion was neosocialism. In the cellar of their house, in Bombay, she had watched a cat in a window well push five wet babies out of its body. The cat became angry and tried to escape but was too weak to climb out of the window well. The kittens were squirming like living excrement on the dead leaves. The cat lay down again and ate the sac. She asked Singh who Trotsky was.

She would have fallen to the first man unscrupulous enough to claim her, would have become, at someone’s arbitrary urging, a fascist or an industrialist or a criminal, would have put out for the most tertiary member of the Reading Group. (And then would have included him in a biting roman à clef and left it unfinished in a footlocker.) She was preternaturally innocent, like the simple brain of a time bomb. She was incapable of love but acted wed, directing Singh’s life (“You can’t afford those boots”) and viewing other men with airtight indifference. She went where no women had gone, did what few girls were doing, and so it didn’t matter what she said. If you were Jammu, it didn’t matter. The Reading Group, soon recast as the Kashmiri Alternative Socialist Front and thence as the People’s Reading Group, believed her to be doctrinaire. So did Singh. He promoted her to a position of command. He forsook all others in bed. He and she dressed identically.

When she went to Chicago (under a false impression of that city’s political climate; it was 1968 and she thought it was a hotbed; hers was, Singh came to see, a peculiarly Indian blunder) he departed for Moscow to study mechanical engineering. He had a room in the largest freestanding structure in all of Eurasia, the MGU on the Lenin Hills, a monument to Stalin’s conviction that More Is More. One day he went to the thirty-fifth floor and found a neglected rock collection and a door to a tiny elevator, an elevator with space for only two people squeezed tightly together, so that when he’d ridden it up as far as it went and the door had opened, his face was a matter of inches from a steel fence and a sign which commanded in Russian DO NOT TOUCH and which was marked with a skull and crossbones and a bolt of lightning piercing the skull’s eyesockets. He took the elevator back down to the rock collection. He had a fling with a young engineering student named Grigor who worked part-time in the Soviet patent office and who claimed, when drunk on vodka, to have the task of copying patents from Western nations into Russian and dating them to appear to have been issued in Moscow several years before the originals. Then he would weep and claim he was lying. From Chicago Jammu sent Singh a postcard that read in its entirety, “Miss you.” Back in Bombay he found that, out of his sight, she had entered the Indian Police Service. He didn’t mind. She was still his favorite, his first and only woman to date, and in reminding him that he could go both ways she made him feel universal and powerful. He performed his historical function religiously — if religion implies the submission of the autonomous mind to ritual. As the most erudite Catholic theologians take communion and are confessed, in Bombay Singh never stopped recruiting, inciting, discussing. For several years he lived in Mahul, in the shadow of the Burmah Shell refinery. Every morning he would leave his rooms to ply the streets or wait tables at the Lady Naik Hotel or burn time in a tea room with his leftist pals, and on the steps of his building he would stop in front of a deformed little cigarette seller and drop coins on his outspread scarf and take a package of genuine Pall Malls. For arms the man had two ebony hemispheres protruding from his shoulders, arrested in utero thirty years earlier, shining in the red morning light as though varnished. The deformity wanted to shame the concept of arms, or perhaps reproduced in Singh the man’s longing to have them. The man was an avatar of Jammu.

Frequently in those early years Singh visited her mother’s house on Mount Pleasant Road. Shanti Jammu hosted nightly showings of the creations of her Pathan chef and of her own conversational effulgence. Shanti fancied herself a marxist of the gradualist school. “Ours is a country of caste divisions, Balwan,” she would twinkle, as if this were news to him. “Not class divisions. The Petits against the Patels. The tinkers and the tailors. Sikhs and Hindus, and vice versa of course. How can this be changed? Who’s to break the traditions? Who’s to build the slums and run them on the Western model? A very wise man I once knew spoke of dehumanizing this generation in order to humanize the next one. So I’m a capitalist roader. A ruling-class dog. Just fulfilling…my historical telos!”

“Your dharma.”

“Come, come, let’s be modern.”

“That’s my point. You aren’t transcending the superstructure. You’re still a Brahman squeezing Harijans in the name of wisdom and racial privilege.”

“And you’re still a superior Sikh. That’s my point. You and your Russians! They were nothing but Frenchmen in sable. Germans with samovars. We’re still Indians. We won’t shed our Oriental souls overnight. If we look west, it’s to England. Dignified, class-conscious sentimental old England.”

“Home of Marx and still the only Labour government in postwar Western Europe.”

“Do have some beef, Essie. You too, Balwan. You’re looking peaked. Where is the working class in ‘socialist’ India? Where is the Industrial Revolution? It’s a generation down the line.”

“Not in Bombay, Poona, Delhi, Bhopal. And it’s the urban centers that matter, because that’s where the organs of repression are concentrated. Russia itself was a feudalistic agrarian state in 1917.”

“Well goodness gracious, then be my guest. Foment! Ignite the slums! Only drop me a line on the eve of your revolution.” She touched his arm, and winked at her daughter. “I’ll want to pack. I’m sure the canaille won’t grasp that I’ve been working in their best interest. Will they?”

“Does a chicken have lips?”

“But it will all be in the family. Essie keeps you out of jail. You’ll keep us off the guillotine.”

Jammu kept him civil. She said she shared his contempt for her mother, saw the egregiousness, knew all about it, so why bring it up? She had no other family in the world. So Singh held off, and by and by Shanti banned him from the house. Both he and she made believe, for Essie’s sake, that their enmity was rooted in politics. It wouldn’t have done to let Jammu know that there was simply bad blood between her only two loved ones, that their antipathy could not be rationalized. It was a measure of her dictatorial potential that people close to her felt compelled to shield her from unpleasant facts.

In Bombay Singh gained a reputation for irresponsibility because he was forever dropping out of sight, abandoning his cohorts. In thirteen years they never even trusted him enough to make him a section leader. The truth was that he was responsible to Jammu, the rising star of the Bombay police. He made sure he stayed available in case she needed a job done. He made sure she believed the nights they spent alone together meant a great deal to him. Perhaps they did. And perhaps her career would mean more to the future of India than any amount of marxist agitation. It was this possibility that kept him in her service. The margin of hope in Bombay ran very thin. Jammu was an anomaly, foreign to the culture, and Singh knew that change had always been forced on India from outside, by the Aryans, the Moguls, the British. Even Gandhi had come from across the ocean. If you were Indian and socially responsible, it was your obligation to leave India, literally, intellectually, or both.

When the call came, he was ready to leave. The destination — St. Louis, Missouri — hardly seemed to meet the requirements of an Archimedean fulcrum. But Jammu said the specifics shouldn’t make any difference. (Especially when it was clear that no matter what she did, stay or leave, the Bombay police would be rioting by mid-autumn.) She said that in every social entity, even a quiet mid-American city, there were inequalities that could be parlayed into subversion. (Subversion! Constantly, in her innocence, she took corruption for subversion.) She said she was impatient with India. She wanted to leave her mark on a place, on a culture, and she knew it wouldn’t be Bombay. It had taken her nearly fifteen years with the Bombay police to reach this conclusion, which Shanti had been drawing for her all along. Of course she maintained she’d planned from the beginning to use her police work merely to launch her to America. That was a lie. She said she was bored and restless. This, Singh believed. He followed her. He was interested in attacking the United States.

But the operation had turned out to be a repeat of her performance in Bombay, where, as a member of the People’s Reading Group, she’d infiltrated the Indian Police Service and penetrated to the depths of its bureaucracy, becoming the police commissioner in India’s largest city and receiving along the way the active financial support of Indira and her party, and then turned her back on the entire country. She’d sold her work, all her chances, for a job in St. Louis. And here again she’d ridden history at a velocity that seemed miraculous to the unthinking. And here again velocity undid her. She loved it for its own sake, obsessively, with a modern desperation that tied her progress to the ghetto, which was also modern and obsessed with speed. The sudden trends, the sudden deaths. And where she’d had perhaps the only opportunity ever to arise in latter-day St. Louis to bring a small revolution to its black residents, she’d subverted subversion instead. She was on the wrong side of the law. Poverty, poor education, discrimination and institutionalized criminality were not modern. They were Indian problems, sustaining an ideology of separateness, of meaningful suffering, of despairing pride. In the ghetto, just as in the Indian ghettos of caste, consciousness would come slowly and painfully. Jammu had no patience. She’d hauled the big industrial guns into the inner city and called it a solution, because ultimately it was far easier to change the thinking of a rich white fifty-year-old or to deflect the course of his eighteen-year-old daughter than it was to give a black child fifteen years of decent education. Jammu had lied to the blacks, swindled them out of their homes, bribed and cajoled their own advocates into betraying them, and all in the name of speed. Of appearing to solve the problem quickly. Of seizing power while it could still be seized.

Still, Singh had no ready-made category for her. She was too self-conscious, too protean, too amateur and peculiar for him to dismiss her. But at least he could see now that she and her methods weren’t what he’d hoped, her methods not the fuse of any revolution anywhere, and she not the entclechy he’d imagined he’d beheld when she was sixteen and wanted to have intercourse on gravel and in boats and to make people obey her laws. He could see now. America was the seat of her atavism. She was just like her mother. All the subtle countertrends that had nagged him from the first days in Srinagar — her lack of direction, her indifference to suffering, the patness of her utterances — had culminated in St. Louis. Senseless St. Louis. She would stick here, permanently associated, her methods sound enough to vanquish the locals but too fancy to take her further. She’d use Probst because she thought she cared for him and then discard him soon enough, for behaving like a human being. Singh was glad to have seen the changes she’d wrought, the spectacle of speed, and to have achieved momentary fulfillment in his handling of the living Probsts. He’d enjoyed the ride, and he’d be glad in a month when he was gone.

ELIGIBLE NO MORE? Chief Jammu, the world’s most eligible police officer, has been seen of late on the streets of St. Louis in the company of wealthy contractor Martin Probst (glimpsed here climbing into the Chief’s private squad car). The match-up is rumored to have estranged Probst from his wife of twenty years. But, insists Jammu, “we’re only friends.”

When Barbara had studied the picture to Singh’s satisfaction he took the copy of People away from her. “It was idle,” he said, moving his chair close to her mattress. “You were in the check-out line at the tiny A & P and paging through the magazine rack. You just happened to see the picture and the caption. But it sends you reeling, if that’s not too strong a phrase. First his talk of divorce, and now this. He’s anticipating you. You can hardly stand it. He’s chipping away at the trenchancy and originality of what you’ve done. You were never in control and you still aren’t in control.”

She lay back on her pillows. The eye he’d blackened on the fourth had healed. It no longer stared out autonomously. “My husband is weak, John. But he usually manages to redeem himself.”

“You think, with condescension. When hatred ceases to suffice, you can always condescend. Anything to prove you special, to give you purpose, to show yourself the only thing you’ve ever lacked is appreciation. You push open the doors of our building and take the elevator up and for the first time, honey, for the first time, you see our love nest as it really is. You wonder about the furniture. Is it fashionable? And if it is, then whose fashion? Which year’s? Time has never been less on your side. You notice the smell, the smell of all high-rise apartments with low ceilings and climate control, from the odd pockets of organic things that cross-ventilation can’t reach. You see the photograph of my pretty dead wife and you begin to remember how, when you first met me, before I swept you off your feet and taught you the true nature of sexual love, how you pitied me. You see the blank notebook from that afternoon at the Modern. Still just a T in there. Estranged wife. His wife of twenty years. It’s a dark Sunday night. I’ve been away all weekend, since we got back from Paris. You put the few groceries in the refrigerator and sniff. The box of baking soda isn’t really doing its job anymore. The tandoori chicken left over from our night out before our vacation is red and blue like a tropical fish. You throw it away, and roaches dive for cover in the trash can. Cars honk outside. You glance at the Van Gogh weekly desk calendar on our kitchen table. It’s the eighteenth. You’ve been away for two months.”

“Get to the crazy stuff,” she said loudly. “You know that’s what I live for.”

“You mean those nightmares you were having the first few weeks you slept here? That I was a psychopath? The Great Unknown? You’re good at dreams, you know those were just drama, psychic ways around the plain old-fashioned ordinariness of what I am.”

She laughed. “Oh, that’s real good.” She reached for the cigarettes he’d brought her.

“You stand bitterly in the kitchen, smoking. Your husband and that arrogant new bitch of a police chief! And—”

“Why not believe her? Maybe they’re only friends. He certainly thinks highly enough of her.”

“You say that aloud and hear the jealousy. Of course they’re more than friends. Your husband’s weak and Jammu is strong. And no one will guess, because your husband is the man. You picture them together. Laughing. Strolling. Smooching. Holding hands. The darlings of your hometown. While you and I hang on in the eastern provinces, trying only to uphold each other’s sanity. But you love me. You do love me, Barbara, like you never loved him.”

She scraped ash on the hem of her jeans and rubbed it in.

“Because what have you done with your life? How did you reach forty-three without noticing your delusion in following him? He never appreciated what he had in you for twenty years. What’s worse, he never will. What happened at the side of your cradle or behind the scenes at your Catholic confirmation that doomed you to live in the shadow of a powerful man you respected and admired and found amusing and condescended to but never loved? How were you damaged? That you’ll live your whole life as his victim. His sacrificial victim. That you could appear in the pages of People as the wife from whom his affair with Jammu had estranged him. It’s you you feel sorry for in me. I’m out grubbing up another story, another check to pay another month’s rent. Except I’m not. You hear a noise in the hall and you turn, and it’s me. I say, Surprise! You jump a little, and I kiss you.”

Singh dropped to his knees and kissed her mouth, his eyes on the lengthening ash. Her lips didn’t move beneath his. “Like that,” he said through a frog in his throat, and rose.

“You’re too strange,” she said. She turned her head away from him to bring her lips to the stained filter. “I mean that seriously.”

“So we aren’t in the mood.” He sat down again. “We’re in the mood for soul-baring and stories. We sit down at the table and I tell you one. I tell you I was born in the hills. I grew up in the hills and I went to school in the hills. I was a radical student—”

“In India.”

“Of course. In Kashmir. I was a radical student, and there came a time when it was important to me to establish my credentials. I rode up into the hills—”

“On a horse?”

“On a motor scooter, with a young female radical student also on a motor scooter. We were nearly at the border when we came to a game preserve overlooked in the far distance by a charming little castle. We parked our scooters and walked deep into the preserve. We found a broad meadow surrounded by fir trees and sat down in it. We sat there for four days. We slept, and ate pakoras. Otherwise we mortified the flesh. The owner of the preserve wasn’t a prince or a nobleman, but he owned all sorts of land and his tenants suffered greatly. As you may have heard, non-princes seldom feel a bond with their tenants. At least this one didn’t.

“After four days, we heard horses, as my companion knew we would. I stood behind a tree while she waited in the hot alpine sun. Into the meadow rode the landowner and his bodyguard. He felt the need for a bodyguard, you see. The men dismounted and spoke to her as if they knew her. The bodyguard helped her to her feet, and she stuck a knife in his throat. I stepped out from behind the tree, and with a bayonet — just the simple bayonet, a family heirloom, you understand, a metal symbol — I cut open the landowner’s abdomen. I had to use both hands, but the blade was sharp. He doubled over, and I lost my hold on the blade. I pushed him into the grass, and my companion bent over him and smiled and said, ‘We’re the People’s revenge.’ He was so terrified that I couldn’t look at his face. But she could. She could. He tried to double over again by sitting up, and I pulled the bayonet out and pushed it in again further up his chest, this time towards the heart. There was a fair amount of resistance, about like cutting up a raw chicken. His head fell back, and blood and also clear mucus came out of his mouth and ran into his nostrils. I remember wanting to blow my nose. In fact I sniffled the whole time we were riding our scooters back down to where we lived. I feel strongly about many ethical issues, as you know, but existence and nonexistence aren’t among them. You don’t deserve to live and you don’t deserve to die. This landowner had lived forty-three years — about the average for his tenants, though of course below average for his own family. He didn’t deserve to die. It was merely that a lifetime of his actions had begged a violent response. And on our side of the Danube you see a great many violent responses. You become inured, but that isn’t the right word for it. You become a little less afraid, or a little more jungly, and if you really thought about this you might decide that by your standards, though I now lead a civilized life in Manhattan, I’m insane after all. As I might decide you are passively insane because you’re unable to look down at your body, at your belly, which has swelled to allow Luisa but never been cut open, and at your breasts, which I’d venture to guess you’ve always felt were rather OK as breasts go, and at your legs, which like the Third World you can’t seem to devote much serious consideration to — you can’t look down on this and see it entirely as yourself. Maybe, I don’t know, if people’s heads were where their feet are, they would respect the body more, looking up to it. You’re amazed that you contain hot blood in quantity, organs, flesh, gray brains — you can imagine Luisa after a car accident, imagine her pretty head split in two but not your own, and so you think I’m a little too strange to be loved. A little too — honest? Crude?”

“Tiresome.”

“If you talked more I’d talk less.”