Kitabı oku: «The Karma Booth», sayfa 2

CHAPTER TWO

India. But not India. Not quite. It was what changed everything for him, and it was likely why the government needed him now. Let’s talk about India, that government man had asked him. What was his name? Schlosser. But he didn’t talk about India with anybody.

Timothy Cale had been at his mid-level posting in Delhi for a year when the American embassy got a strange request to mediate in a violent ethnic clash. Of course, the details were so few as to be practically useless for any preparation. He was told that a remote village on the border between Nepal and the Indian state of Bihar had been invaded by a group of rebels, their exact affiliation vague and obscure.

It wasn’t clear to him even why a US representative should get involved in what seemed like an internal dispute, especially when there were no obvious American interests. It didn’t matter. He would go. Sure, the assignment was at his discretion, and as one of the principal secretaries of the embassy, he could have easily turned it down. In looking back on it later, he cursed his own ambition and an almost juvenile urge for thrill-seeking. His Paris and London appointments had been junior postings, but it was the locales that held the glamour, not the office work itself: pushing papers, handling tourist complaints and making sure the colleges for overseas students were behaving themselves. This might be something substantial.

As he boarded an ancient-looking Bombardier turboprop commercial plane, he secretly hoped for adventure, with the equally childish wish that, of course, he’d come out on top and his resolution of the affair would help his career.

All he knew of Bihar he had picked up from the backgrounders written up in neat Times Roman 12 point type from the policy office and from his dog-eared Lonely Planet India guide. He stepped off a plane into Patna, gasping over the pollution and the rampant poverty, which was clear from the minute a US Consulate limo picked him up in the Bankipur district. It would take him to where he would rendezvous with an armed Indian escort for the next leg of his journey.

He got a fleeting glimpse of the Ganges, and then the city became another Third World blur with naked, dirty children, a clamor of street noise and sizzling grills for kiosk food, all contrasting sharply with the opulence of the modern glass castles for the city’s rich businessmen. There were pungent spices. There was the almost crippling stench of decaying shit in the alleys and backed up sewers, and the coppery smell of stale blood—whether from accident or violent robbery, you could never tell and didn’t want to know. Auto-rickshaws buzzed like dragonflies near the Ashok Rajpath, the main market.

Bihar was practically marinated in religion—the Buddha had walked this countryside, and there were lavish Hindu festivals to last you for ages. The last, tenth Guru of Sikhism was born right in Patna. A cynic would have enjoyed pointing out the fact that, amid all this faith, the province had an appalling rate of illiteracy, poverty, inter-caste warfare. The Bihari people faced a revolting degree of bigotry and ridicule in the rest of India.

And here he was, the fair-haired American boy from Illinois, thinking himself sophisticated after his years in Paris and London and a brief stint in Bangkok. Fool. He knew nothing. But that didn’t stop him. And where he was going was a dot on the map with the name of a Bihari–Nepalese subgroup of a people, a similar but unique culture with a name he couldn’t even pronounce, on the knife edge of a border. A no man’s land that would make even the Himalayas—so many miles away but still familiar from photos and news reports—a touchstone of reassuring normalcy.

He was briefed in minutes that “the situation hasn’t changed,” and he didn’t even get the chance to ask what the hell the situation was before the Indian soldiers in their neatly pressed khaki uniforms insisted he climb into the SUV. It was monsoon season, but they would have good luck with the roads—little report of flooding. Just potholes.

He couldn’t detect the passage of time. Bumped and rocked for hours, with only brief rest stops, he tried unsuccessfully to doze and ignore a pounding headache as the rain hit the vehicle’s roof in torrents. There were streaks of glistening drops across the windows, while bullets of moisture dug into the brown soil and made the road into a slippery obstacle course. It was late at night when the engine stopped, and the five Indian soldiers reached for their rifles, the interpreter telling him, “This is it.”

“It” was a village of ramshackle houses and a few lights, with a single two-story Victorian building up on a hill and a ring of dark silhouettes, waiting.

His escort had rifles. He could see none carried by the “rebels.”

But there were bodies at their feet. Men and women in what looked like traditional clothing, woolen caps and coats associated more with the Nepalese than the northern Bihari. They lay on their backs or with their faces in the mud, and they were all paler than corpses. Tim had seen dead, and this looked worse than dead. Those whose faces weren’t obscured by the brown clay of the soil held an expression of demented shock, mouths slack and open. Frozen.

He stopped at one victim then turned to one of the soldiers and asked to borrow his flashlight. If the shadows up ahead had waited this long for their mediator, they could spare a few more seconds. Tim shone the beam of the flashlight on the dead man at his feet. He was clearly Asiatic, yet his eyes, wide in horror, were a vivid Nordic blue.

He swung the beam of light to a woman sprawled a few feet away. Her eyes were open as well. On the blurry halo edge of the light, he could see all of their eyes were open, each and every one of the victims lying dead on their backs or on their sides staring into nothing.

And each one had vividly blue eyes.

He knew next to nothing about genetics, but his instinct told him that was impossible, even as a hereditary trait in a relatively closed community. He read somewhere that doctors believed that light triggered the production of melanin in the irises of newborn babies—it was why baby eyes change color over time. Disease, injury—they could affect eye color, too. But this…

He had no idea what it meant, or if it meant anything at all.

Set after set of bright blue eyes, staring.

It magnified the rictus of horror on each face. The expressions looked almost canine, animalistic in their dread, and their decomposing skin was beginning to look waxy under the constant monsoon shower.

“Mr. Cale,” called the interpreter. It was a faintly disguised plea. In other words, let’s get the hell away from this place.

Only they couldn’t. They were going to meet those who did this.

Their hosts didn’t raise any weapons at the soldiers. One of them simply lifted a hand in the universal sign that meant: This is as far as you go. Then the man in the center turned a palm up, closing it with a flip-flip-flip for Tim to step forward. As the interpreter followed half a step behind, a flat baritone voice told the man in fluent English, “Your services won’t be needed.”

Tim was grateful to at least be out of the downpour. He was led into a sad-looking structure with stained plywood walls but with a tent roof, the light provided by a Coleman camping lamp. He was waved to a rough-hewn table. His chair was the most beautiful thing in the room, elaborately carved, as if by a traditional master craftsman.

Now he at last had a chance to study who was responsible for the crisis, but these people’s clothing and manners told him little. Men and women stood in religious robes like those worn by monks—except their color scheme was unusual, not like anything Tim had seen on monks in other countries. They weren’t saffron or gold; instead, a mauve and forest green shade that seemed to bleed into the backdrop of the squalid room. And over the robes, they wore traditional woolen vests and jackets and brightly colored scarves of the local people as protection from the weather. Yet somehow they acted as if they barely felt the rain or wind at all.

There were a few young ones, but the older ones stood out to him, their eyes like doll beads and their ruddy golden cheeks lined and cracked with thousands of minute folds and character lines. The man who had beckoned to him took the lead, sitting down in front of Tim, his forehead half in shade, half in light from the lamp. Tim found it difficult to detect an actual personality to the man’s face, it was so tortoise-like, ancient and mummified; yet the smile was guardedly polite and the eyes were alert.

Tim was vaguely perplexed over why the man still wore his set of woolen mittens indoors, his sleeves pulled tight to the wrists, as if he felt a chill specifically reserved for him. The gloved hands rested casually on the scratched, worn table.

“Mr. Cale.”

Curls of incense smoke floated between them from pink joss sticks planted in a wide pan to catch the ashes. The air was thick with the aroma of sandalwood.

“Listen,” Tim started. “I won’t pretend to understand the history of your conflict with these people, but if you’ll outline your grievances, maybe we can find some common ground. My goal here is to avoid any more bloodshed. Now if you’ll tell me who you—”

“That’s not important,” said a woman near the doorway.

“Especially when you don’t know who these people are,” said a boy on the other side, close to a corner. He couldn’t have been older than thirteen, his golden face round and smooth, almost androgynous.

All three fluent in English. With no accent.

“We will tell you who these people are,” said the tortoise-head ancient at the table. “We will tell why they have to die and why some have already died.”

“I came all this way to prevent death,” explained Tim.

“That is not your function here,” said the woman near the door.

Before Tim could ask the obvious follow-up, the man at the table was speaking, his voice vaguely hypnotic with its evenness, and Tim found himself struggling to see him through the veil of incense smoke.

“This village exterminates its girl children. In ages past, it left them to die of exposure in the surrounding hills or took them down to a river to drown them. They spared a few for dowry marriage and breeding and servants. But no love thrived here for daughters, Mr. Cale. When doctors could offer amniocentesis, the villagers used that to prevent girl children. Last year, they sold a group of girls—some as young as four—to a pedophile ring that offers its wares between Sonepur and Kathmandu. Their evils singe and putrefy the air. And there is not one blameless adult, not one that is not stained by this barbarism.”

“So your solution to the stain is ethnic cleansing?” demanded Tim quietly. He was incredulous. “Damn it, it’s clear you’re educated people! And you must know these things happen in the rest of India, in other parts of the world. Why are you talking about wiping out an entire village? And who are you people?” He calmed down, realizing it must be only a threat. He was here, and if he was here, that meant nothing was decided. “What do you want? What are your terms?”

“There are no terms,” said the woman at the door.

“We’ve explained our reasons,” said the boy in the corner.

“At certain times, there can arise a collective evil,” said the man at the table. “The rot grows and eats, feeding like mold off the soul of a land. It is not a question, Mr. Cale, of what needs to be done. The course of action will take place.”

He didn’t understand. They were talking. He could hear them talking, yes, but competing for his attention was the sound of the pattering rain beyond the door of the room, and the incense was making him feel lightheaded. He heard distant screams coming from a street away. The woman didn’t turn to look. The boy didn’t react at all. One of the soldiers of his army escort stormed into the room, but the people in robes stopped him with a glance. The soldier looked to Tim, making a silent appeal.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Tim pleaded. “This isn’t necessary. You can’t slaughter a whole village! There must be someone! At least one innocent here! And even if they’re all complicit, these people must have children who have done nothing—”

He sifted his mind desperately for arguments; tried to summon a bulwark of compassionate rationality to prevent this. Come on, he ordered himself, come on. A handful of men with rifles could prevent nothing here if they started their promised massacre—it was up to him. But the situation was unraveling. He couldn’t accept that it was deteriorating so quickly, his role reduced to that of an audience member for this grotesque play.

“The children have been removed,” said the old man at the table. “They will be cared for at other villages.”

“Wait—wait! Why am I here then? Why was there any need for me to come? I don’t understand. If you didn’t want mediation—”

“You are here because you are still untainted,” said the woman.

“We had to go miles to find one who was,” said the boy.

“Untainted?” snapped Tim. “Do you actually think I could agree with your type of morality? That I’m going to watch you carry out mass murder?”

The eyes of the old man blinked, disappearing briefly into the fleshy pouches of aged skin. The thin mouth pursed its lips, and he said patiently, “That is not what we mean by untainted.”

“The word ‘receptive,’” said the boy, “might be more applicable. We assumed you would be receptive to us.”

Tim knew he wasn’t getting anywhere, and it crossed his mind that perhaps he had blundered into a trap. Maybe they always intended to assassinate an American official as their main goal. His panic rose like acid-burning vomit in his throat, and a gloved hand reached across the table and took his wrist. It took his arm gently, with no threat in the motion at all. But it happened so fast.

“You’ll leave here safe and sound in a few minutes,” said the old man.

“Do you remember your Greek mythology, Mr. Cale?” asked the woman near the doorway. She tugged on the winding folds of her wrap.

“Argus Panoptes,” said the old man. He let go of Tim’s wrist and began pulling off the mitten of his right hand.

“He’s a giant,” said the boy with a triumphant smile of white teeth, sounding for the first time like a child. He tugged off his knit woolen cap with the strings, and a few strands of his black mop were pulled up for an instant. Just like any boy.

“Servant of the goddess Hera,” said the woman. The English and Greek words sounded strange from that wise Asian face. Then her scarf was removed, her neck bare—

“Panoptes, meaning in Greek, ‘all seeing.’”

The old man’s glove was off, and he cast aside his woolen jacket as the classical reference finally clicked in Tim’s mind—

He pushed back his chair and jumped up. The wooden legs scraped the floor, and the chair timbered back with a crash.

Yes, Hera’s giant, his body covered with eyes.

And in front of him the old man stayed calmly in his seat, the dark forest green and mauve garment folds running like a toga over one shoulder, but the shoulder itself, his chest, his arms covered in eyes. There were eyes on the body of the woman. Eyes were blinking from the flat, adolescent chest of the boy. The effect was like seeing skin marked with a pattern of yellowish whiteheads, of boils, but each pupil had a lid and an eyelash, some of them blinking out of sequence with others.

The Indian soldier near the entrance backed away from the woman, one foot out the door.

“What are you people?” Tim whispered.

“We told you, it doesn’t matter,” said the boy. “Not now, in this moment. It’s sufficient that you are… receptive.”

“There is a cost for the rebalancing,” said the old man. “And so we have adopted an eye for each of these villagers who have lived in destructive blindness. Understand: we are not without a comprehension of degrees of guilt. Those who did less are the ones you found as you arrived. For the others…”

His gnarled hand reached into the drapery of his robes and slowly withdrew a dagger.

Oh, God. He grasped immediately what the man was about to do, and because it was impossible, he could not understand how to prevent it.

He was left to watch as the blade dug like a scalpel into the soft white of a blinking egg imbedded in his flesh, and Tim heard himself scream no no no as the old man hissed and gritted his teeth in genuine pain. Warm blood poured down the arm, hideously blinding more of the blinking eyes and dripping down to the sawdust floor, and Tim heard the corresponding wails from beyond the shelter.

“Stop it! Please stop it! You can’t believe this is right!”

“This is for those who did these unspeakable acts,” said the old man. “And for those who allowed them to happen, seeing is believing.”

The soldier made a guttural sound—not quite a yell but a kind of bark of his revulsion and fear. He ran out, and Tim heard his boots stomp in the moist earth. As the woman and boy brandished their own knives, Timothy Cale rushed past them into the rain. He knew where the soldier was going—the soldier was joining the others who had been guarding the SUV. People ran now into the main thoroughfare of the village as distant screams rose over each other. Shouts grew louder in the native dialect, and there was a string of gurgling cries. The soldiers could do nothing.

Tim couldn’t bring himself to step closer to the silhouettes of villagers, some staggering into the road, others falling to their knees.

All of them were clutching their heads, their fingers on their foreheads or at their temples…

Dazed in his shock, he looked back at the rectangle of spilled light from the doorway, and he saw a curving, trickling stream of blood pouring out. It mingled with the puddles of rain.

He couldn’t stop the impulse to be sick.

His eyes felt the salt-burn of tears, his forehead still soaked with rivulets of rain, while his throat was scorched with bile. He pulled himself up and forced his senses to register again, but this time the people of the village were missing. No, not all of them, they couldn’t be. Could they? The first ones, yes, he could tell that the first ones who had shouted and run into the street were… gone. A mysterious banishment that was the crowning touch of the strangers. But the others? A whole village gone. He heard the ugly metal chunk as one foolish soldier prepared his rifle to fire, but there was no staccato burst. Something stayed his hand, forcing a reappraisal.

You’ve got to do something, thought Tim. You can’t stay just a witness to this.

He started to run through the unpaved narrow streets, his shoes splashing through the puddles of mud and rainwater, looking for… he didn’t know what. Survivors, those who hadn’t been claimed yet. He had pleaded with them: There must be someone! At least one innocent here! He couldn’t find anyone. Bodies, yes. Bodies and more bodies like those they first spotted on arrival, each one with staring blue eyes, but others were missing. Others were taken. He felt a growing hopelessness—then panic, because the soldiers might start up the SUV and leave him behind. Through the sshhhh of the relentless rain, he spotted an old woman, curled up, hugging her knees near packed metal chairs behind a market stall table.

Oh, Christ, he didn’t speak the language. Maybe… Maybe if he just held out his hand, and if his tone was gentle enough, he could persuade her. “You have to come with me! It’s not safe for you here!”

She said something that sounded like a fatalistic complaint. Telling him he was mad, that it was pointless. Her voice was high and sharp and raw, the whine of a gnarled tree branch being snapped off. She was horrified at what was happening around her, but she couldn’t see escape.

“Please,” he called over the rain, still holding out his hand. “Please!”

After a moment, she picked herself up with an effort, her limbs trembling either from fear or the palsy of her age, stepping out from her hiding place. She could walk surprisingly quickly, but he wished she could run. They had to get away from this place. The strangers in the robes had either overlooked her or were busy reaping other souls. He found himself pulling her along by the arm, cursing himself for his fear.

He heard the small boy from a side alley, calling out for someone. Mother, father, it hardly mattered. Scared brown eyes under a mop of black hair, his tiny limbs at his sides, but his neck turning this way and that, looking, hoping… He was small, and given the diet and environment here, it was difficult to tell the his age. He could have been anywhere between four to seven years old. Tim scooped him up, and the boy cried out, but the old woman said something to shush him and comfort him.