"One Amazing Thing" - читать интересную книгу автора (Divakaruni Chitra Banerjee)15When Cameron first met the holy man, he didn’t recognize him as such. Partly, he didn’t fit Cameron’s concept of holy men: no beads, no robes, no beatific expression on a bearded face. And partly, Cameron was distracted; it was the thirtieth anniversary-or as close to it as he could figure-of his son’s death, and with each passing year, the event weighed more heavily on him. They were traveling on a crowded Muni. Cameron was on his way to the hospice where he volunteered one afternoon each week. So was the holy man, though Cameron did not know this. The man, whose name was Jeff, stood holding on to one of the bus handlebars, swaying as the vehicle made a wide turn. He was white, with pleasant, nondescript features; he wore jeans and a freshly laundered shirt. His head was shaved, but it was currently fashionable for men to shave their heads, so Cameron barely noticed it. Cameron stared out a window, trying to occupy his mind with observation. The passing scenery was painfully familiar, so like the landscape of his childhood, the ugly streets he had labored to escape: storefronts with grills over the doors and windows, piles of garbage, men passed out in doorways. Dealers hung out on street corners, keeping an eye out for customers, or for cops. Even without opening the window, Cameron knew what it would smell like: rotting food, sour armpits, piss, marijuana, and the desperate hilarity of young men who waited for night. But when the doors hissed open, it was to let Cameron-and Jeff-out into sunshine and a happy burst of music and the not-unpleasant odor of Sesame Fried Chicken from Tang’s Carry Out. From across the years he could hear Imani’s voice, so clear that he had to sit down on the bus-stop bench and put his head in his hands: Jeff paused to give him a concerned look. “You okay? Need some water?” Cameron considered telling the stranger to mind his own business, but he held up a hand to indicate he was fine. When Jeff moved on, Cameron went back to thinking about Imani even though he didn’t want to. She was like a scab that he couldn’t help picking at. They had both been in their senior year of high school when he met her at a party. He usually avoided the kind of parties his friends threw, with liquor and loud music and making out in the stairwell and fistfights or worse in the alley behind the apartments. They weren’t even his friends-just guys he happened to know because they went to school together or lived in the neighborhood. But on this day he had just sent off the last of his college applications and was feeling celebratory. And perhaps a bit nostalgic. Soon all this would be behind him. He was certain of getting into a good college. His grades were excellent; his recommendations enthusiastic; he was on the track team, and for the last couple of years, he had taken care to stay out of trouble. Following the advice of his biology teacher, who had become a mentor, he volunteered regularly at the local hospital. His counselor had declared that all these credentials, added to Cameron’s unfortunate background-impoverished, orphaned, first-generation college applicant-would probably snag him a scholarship. At first Cameron had resented the counselor’s patronizing manner. Like some second-rate prestidigitator, the counselor tried to turn the painful truths of Cameron’s existence into advantages. Cameron had wanted to say something cutting, to walk out of the man’s office, slamming the door behind him. But he had held on to his temper. If doing so helped him get where he needed to go, Cameron could put up with a little patronizing. Cameron wanted to be a doctor. He guarded this fragile dream jealously, not confiding it to anyone except his biology teacher. His friends would ridicule it, and even his well-meaning, churchgoing aunt, with whom he had lived since his parents had died, would shake her head in warning and say, “Boy, you aimin’ above your station.” Blindsided by infatuation in the months following the party at which they had met, he had ventured to share his goal with Imani, but that turned out to be an error. At the party, he’d had a couple of beers. When he first saw Imani being pushed into the middle of the room by a couple of other girls, he didn’t recognize her because she went to a different school. She resisted her friends, but when someone turned off the music, she squared her shoulders, stood tall, and began to sing. She was good, definitely, but not so exceptional in this community; almost every family had a member in a church choir. So what was it about this girl that captured his attention and his breath? Her hair was too nappy, her skin too dark. She looked good in the red sweater she wore over a black skirt-but several girls there looked better. Was it the passion with which she sang, eyes closed, leaning into the song? Or the song itself, the haunting, dragged out notes of “My Man He Don’t Love Me”? Cameron had never heard that song before; it would go deep into him, lodging like a guinea worm, emerging whenever it wanted to. It pulled him across the room to introduce himself to Imani, to offer to get her a drink, to listen with fascination to her chatter, though later he couldn’t remember what she had said. By the end of the party, he had-most uncharacteristically-exchanged phone numbers and set up a movie date for the next evening. Maybe that’s why the relationship was doomed from the first: the person Imani fell for wasn’t the real Cameron. Their romance sped through winter into the beginnings of spring. He rushed to get his homework done before he went to his job at the grocery, where he was a stocker, so he could pick her up after her shift at Burger King. Sometimes on Friday nights they went to the movies or to a club. Mostly they spent hours in his beat-up Chevy, parked on a quiet street where they wouldn’t be disturbed by gangs or cops, talking or listening to music or singing along with the radio-or groping. Evenings when she knew her mother wouldn’t be home, they went to her apartment. He fixed her grilled cheese sandwiches and listened to her sing; she initiated him into the mysteries of the female body. Tangled together in bed afterward, he felt an easefulness that was foreign to him. Usually, he had to be constantly doing something, pushing himself. But at these times he felt he could lie there forever. Then, as the oleanders began to bloom and the orioles started flying back north and universities began sending acceptance letters, Cameron and Imani’s relationship grew strained. After graduation, Imani was going to increase her hours at Burger King (her mother said it was time she helped with the rent) while she took classes part-time at the local community college. She couldn’t understand why Cameron couldn’t do something similar. The manager at the grocery liked him. Her friend Latisha, who worked one of the cash registers there, had informed her that he’d offered Cameron a position as assistant manager-with benefits. “In a couple years,” Imani told Cameron, “we be saving up some. Get our own place. Get married.” She offered him a shy smile. When Cameron said that he would find that kind of life stifling, she flinched as though he’d slapped her in the face. On the increasingly rare occasions when she sang, the blues tunes he had loved earlier seemed loaded with reproach: “Crazy He Calls Me,” “Lonely Grief.” They argued almost every time they met. Imani would cry and invoke sayings from her grandmother, a Jamaican obeah woman; Cameron would feel guilty and attempt to console her. If they were at her apartment, they would end up in bed. On the day he learned that a prestigious private college had offered him admission and a sports scholarship, she came into the grocery to say hello. Exhilarated into garrulity, he told her his news. She called him an Oreo, speaking loud enough for his coworkers to hear and snigger. It was the last straw for him-that she would want to ruin the moment of his greatest achievement. When he took her out to the parking lot to tell her this was the end, she informed him that she was pregnant. He could see she was scared, but beneath the fear was a kind of triumph: now he would have to stay with her and take responsibility for the baby. Cameron was furious-and terrified. The ghetto seemed to be closing in on him. He told her that he refused to be manipulated. He was going to college. If she thought she could stand in his way, she was mistaken. He recommended an abortion. He would scrape together the money to pay for it. He couldn’t do any more than that. At the mention of abortion, she stopped crying and grew very quiet. “You want to kill our baby?” she asked. “It so important for you to get away from your people?” He started saying that the mess he saw every day around him was not his people, and he wasn’t alone in wanting to get away. All around him young men were enlisting in the army, being shipped to the jungles of Vietnam. But she was wringing her hands. No, she was making some kind of a complicated design in the air with her fingers. Was Imani putting some kind of voodoo on him? He shook off the ridiculous idea. “It do you no good,” she said. “No matter where you run, you be ending with ashes in your mouth.” She walked across the parking lot. He considered hurrying after her, grabbing her by the hand, saying he was sorry. But that would reopen the coffin of their relationship, and he didn’t have the energy to go through the ups and downs of the last months again. She would probably come running to him soon enough-for the money, if nothing else. Over the next weeks he waited-at first with trepidation, then with concern, then with a strange disappointment-for her to make contact. She didn’t. One day Latisha cornered him in the canned foods aisle and told him Imani had had an abortion the week before. He couldn’t bring himself to ask Latisha-whom he didn’t like-if Imani was okay. Instead he inquired if Imani needed money-could Latisha ask her? Latisha gave him a hard look and walked off. Cameron felt terrible, but the rush of getting ready for college didn’t allow him time to dwell on the whole complicated mess. REMINISCING ON THE BUS STOP BENCH HAD MADE CAMERON late, and this annoyed him. He jogged the last few blocks (though jogging through this kind of exhaust-laden air sometimes brought on his asthma) and arrived at the hospice sweaty. The sweat wouldn’t matter too much since he worked in the garden. When he had started volunteering, they had tried him with the inmates (that’s how he thought of the patients, prisoners with a life sentence). He sat with them, read to them, adjusted pillows. But watching the seemingly interminable process of dying made him nervous and snappy, and after a couple of incidents the management had asked if he could do something with the barren strip of land behind the building. Now the Pacifica Hospice Care boasted a garden, lush with lavender and daylilies, where patients could be wheeled in to watch the hummingbirds flit around brightly colored hanging feeders. As he hurried down the passage to the back, where gardening supplies were kept, Cameron was surprised to see Jeff emerging from a patient’s room. Jeff tried to engage Cameron in conversation, but Cameron sidestepped him with a curt hello. When, a half hour later, he saw Jeff wander into his garden (that’s how Cameron thought of it), Cameron felt a frisson of annoyance. Was the man following him? Cameron turned his back on the intruder and went on planting sweet alyssum. But Jeff sat on a bench peaceably, ate a sandwich, and watched the clouds. When he finished eating, he sat very still with his eyes closed. After an hour, he left quietly. Cameron, intrigued by the stillness, made some inquiries and learned that Jeff was a lay Buddhist priest. The management had asked him to come in and minister to their Buddhist patients. In the following weeks, Cameron saw Jeff every time he came into the hospice. Jeff ate his lunch in the garden and meditated there. He always gave Cameron a friendly nod but made no further attempts to talk. (Cameron was surprised to feel a twinge of disappointment at this.) One day, Jeff didn’t eat but sat rubbing his eyes tiredly until Cameron couldn’t stand the suspense and asked what was wrong. “Louie died,” Jeff said. Cameron suggested that maybe that was a good thing. Louie, a skeletal young man with AIDS, had been suffering for months. “He was so afraid of death,” Jeff said. He punched the bench in frustration. “Nothing I said could comfort him.” Cameron abandoned his weeding and sat beside Jeff on the bench. That was how their friendship began. TO HIS BITTER ASTONISHMENT, CAMERON DID NOT DO WELL IN college. First, he developed severe allergies that deepened into asthma. It could have been from moving to a different part of the country, but he couldn’t help thinking of it as punishment. The Bricanyl cleared up his breathing at first, but soon he had to increase his dosage for it to work. It felt like he was moving underwater. He couldn’t perform as well as before. Imani’s words echoed in his bones: CAMERON BEGAN TO SPEND A GREAT DEAL OF HIS FREE TIME with Jeff. Jeff had a small apartment in the Mission District and taught Comparative Religion at a local college. He also volunteered at a small Tibetan monastery, helping with everything from paperwork to fixing leaks to chauffeuring the monks, who had fled from Tibet to a small Himalayan village before arriving here. Some days, Jeff cooked, odd dishes with flat noodles and tofu and seaweed, or mushrooms that plumped up when you soaked them in water, dishes that Cameron was distrustful of at first but grew to like. Jeff was no saint; he tended to impatience and took it hard when things didn’t go the way he wanted them to. But Cameron admired the quickness with which he was able to return to cheerfulness. Jeff had a way of listening without interruption or advice that Cameron appreciated. As they sat on the balcony of Jeff’s apartment with steaming mugs of coffee, he found himself telling Jeff things he hadn’t shared with anyone. He went backward, beginning with his current job. He was the head security guard for a large bank building downtown, but each day the gun he carried at his hip seemed heavier. He lived in a tiny one-room place in a too-expensive neighborhood so that from his window he would be able to see the ocean. Every morning he tucked his inhaler into a pocket and went for a run. With the wind whistling in his ears, he could forget the decisions he regretted. He had to take pills at night to sleep. He hated insomnia but feared sleep because of the nightmares. None of his activities since he left the army-helping at the hospice, serving food in soup kitchens, donating money to organizations that rescued abused children-had stopped the nightmares. The worst was that of a tiny child afloat in an oval room. The boy would open his black eyes and look at Cameron without reproach, and that was the hardest thing. Cameron told Jeff about his deployment to hot, mosquito-infested countries supposedly threatened by Communism, where he had been feared and detested because of his uniform. He described the men he had killed-sometimes apathetically, because their lives hadn’t seemed as real as his own. Jeff grew white around the mouth, but he put a hand on Cameron’s shoulder and left it there. When Cameron had told Jeff everything he could remember, all the way back to his parents’ death in a car crash when he was twelve, he asked about Imani’s curse. Jeff didn’t believe in curses, but he did believe in consequences. He felt that Cameron had done what he could to expiate his wartime acts, but the abortion was unfinished business. Cameron knew he couldn’t go looking for Imani to ask forgiveness. She was probably married; his reappearance would cause more harm than good. He was too old and set in his ways to adopt a child and become a full-time parent. Then Jeff recalled that the monks had spoken of orphanages in the hills of India. What if Cameron contacted one and sponsored a boy? When the time was right, he could visit him. Perhaps when Cameron saw this child in person, when he caught hold of his hand and felt the metta that upholds the universe flowing between them, he would be healed. Buoyed by new hope, Cameron contacted the orphanage. They were slow to respond; he had to stop himself from sending reminders, from taking a plane to the nearest city and hiking up to the gates. To succeed, his offer must appear to be a casual act of philanthropy, not a desperate yearning. (The authorities were cautious; Jeff had told him stories about foreigners and child trafficking that explained why.) Finally the orphanage sent a photograph, along with details. Not a boy, as Cameron had requested, but a scrawny girl left outside their gates a few years back. It did not matter. As soon as he saw the blurry black-and-white picture in which she wore a too-large frock and squinted into sunlight, he knew she was the one. He sent in the necessary money to become her sponsor and requested permission for a visit. But the orphanage informed him that they did not want to rush things. People sometimes tired of their charity, and if the children had had contact with them, they felt additionally rejected. Cameron could write letters to Seva-that was the girl’s name. They would be translated and read to her. In a year or two, when she learned to write, she would send him notes in Hindi. Meanwhile, could he fill out the enclosed forms for a background check and have recommendation letters sent directly to the orphanage? Impatience-and that old anger-had boiled up in Cameron, but he followed the instructions. Each month he wrote to Seva. Each year, the orphanage sent him two photos of her, taken at activities such as lunch or games, which he pored over hungrily. Since last year, he had begun to receive, at random intervals, lined sheets filled with a child’s scrawlings that the owner of his neighborhood Indian grocery deciphered for him. Cameron could tell that Seva had a mind of her own. In addition to the requisite sentences thanking him and wishing him good health, she informed him of various occurrences in her life: the orphanage cat’s newborn babies had been eaten in the night, by a coyote, the cook said; her friend Bijli had ventured into the bushes at the edge of the playing field in spite of being warned and now had a terrible itch; she had done well in most of her exams except math, which was very difficult for her to understand; Anil had pushed her into the mud when they were marching during P.T. class, so she had pushed him down, too, and the P.T. teacher, Mr. Ahuja, had made them stand out in the yard all afternoon as punishment; Mr. Ahuja had a big mole with hairs sticking out of it on his left cheek. Cameron was concerned when he heard of the punishment, but Jeff consulted the monks and assured Cameron that this discipline was fairly mild compared to what was customary at many such schools. Still, Cameron thought it was time he went and saw Seva. Perhaps he would have a little discussion with Mr. Ahuja while he was there. He wrote a stern letter to the orphanage, hinting that he might switch his support to a more forthcoming organization. The orphanage sent a speedy reply: Mr. Grant was of course welcome to visit. When Cameron informed Seva, he was coming, he received an ecstatic note listing all the things she would take him to see once he arrived. He carried it around in his wallet. He applied for an indefinite leave from work and for a one-year visa from the Indian government. He suspected that, as a single male, and an African American at that, he would never be given custody of Seva. But as he scoured Toys “R” Us, filling his suitcase with gifts he thought an eight-year-old would like, he wondered if he might just stay on in the hills. Perhaps he could persuade the orphanage to fire Mr. Ahuja and take him on as the P.T. teacher? Then the earthquake struck and- |
||
|