Beggar's Feast Read online

  Sam said nothing. He stared at the round eyes staring back at his, daggers daring him to disagree.

  “But can you guess his secret?” Astrobe asked.

  “I cannot say,” said Sam, which he thought the greater justice.

  “But do you want to know?” asked Astrobe.

  “No.”

  “Not even why the men in my family have always worn yellow hats?”

  “No.”

  “Well then, there’s nothing left but for you to meet the rest of us,” said Astrobe, a little defeated.

  They descended, this time Sam first, the windowpanes warbling behind them. He had wanted to say there was no need to meet anyone. He had already decided he would not stay here a second night, sleeping beneath that portrait’s secret gaze, sleeping above what particular secrets of sadness and rage and wrongs were this family’s. Which weren’t his, weren’t anything he wanted to be touched by. For more than symmetry’s sake, Sam Kandy would take a man as he asked the world to take him.

  He heard the piano before he entered. And when he went in, something tore open he did not know had been there, something that had been waiting all these years to be torn open. She was turned away from him, concentrating on the playing, as seemed everyone else in the room, which had windows taller than any man he’d ever known and drapes that looked finer than even the finest finery he had watched from Galle Face Parade on Sunday mornings, when it had been English wives walking into Christ Church, their laced throats arching in wonder at the long shadow of the new bell tower. He had to do something else with his eyes and so he inventoried the rest of the room. Heavy chairs, heavy lamps, a large patterned carpet, the cluster of flowers at its centre made yellow beneath a light that looked like a giant drop of perfect water. There was a big black dog sleeping in a corner, on its own carpet, a carpet that was thicker than his father’s sleeping mat. A fire was burning at the back of a deep stone square, above it a mantel made of the same grey stone, another promenade for their shiny silver things.

  “Everyone, please,” said Astrobe. He had talked over her playing! Sam wanted to hate him for it, wanted nothing from the world but to remain in the moment that had just passed, to wither away witnessing the sound and shape of her and her music. But she stopped playing and everyone turned at Astrobe’s words—an older woman, a very old woman, a round man about his age, and she did too. She did too.

  “Everyone, this is Sam, who’s been working for me at the harbour this past year. I may have mentioned him previously. I’ve decided to let him sleep in the observatory.”

  “And why?” one of the women asked.

  “Because that’s what I’ve decided.”

  “Yes, I see,” she said. Mrs. Astrobe.

  “And where is— Sam, is it? Where is Sam from?” asked Astrobe’s daughter. Her voice like honey and music.

  “Ceylon,” answered Astrobe. “And he understands much of what we’re saying.”

  “Oh really, Ceylon?” said Mrs. Astrobe and looked at him, smiled, then turned back to the piano, turning the very old woman at the same time. She never so much as breathed his way again. The very old woman, Astrobe’s mother-in-law, spoke to Sam once, a few weeks later, after stopping him in a hallway. “They dance with kangaroos in the bush. And when I was a girl, I watched them shave a bear.” And then she walked on.

  “Those aren’t— Are those Jim’s?” asked the round young man, pointing at Sam’s shoes but looking at her.

  She slammed down on the piano and rushed from the room and the young man followed like some heavy pet, a sloth bear, and also the two women left, and finally Astrobe took a step toward their exit, stopped, then walked away, through yet another doorway, without saying anything to him either. And so Sam was left by himself, the crashing bowel sounds of the piano ringing in his ears, which were burning, wanting more. Everything was. All of it.

  “Ha! You thought I meant you, yes? That I’m going to box you up and send you home?” Astrobe laughed until it sounded like he was coughing up metal. He dabbed his monogrammed hanky to his eyes. How vengeful was a man’s memory, how conspiring his tongue! He hadn’t thought of his Jim in days. They were in his harbour office. It was almost time to walk home. He’d only told Sam that he knew of a freighter going to Ceylon with free space in the hold. That something small could be sent along. Not someone.

  “What I am proposing,” he continued, his voice now milder, chastened, “is that you might want to put together some effects to send to your family back home. Am I presuming too much? Just it’s that I thought, and I know it’s not for you, and it’s months off from December, but people are already getting their parcels ready to send to London for Happy Christmas. There’s not much left for ourselves in England, thanks to old Martin Astrobe, but I thought it was something you might want to do. Send something home. We could be of assistance.”

  Turning over the sudden idea, a year after he’d come to live in Astrobe’s house, Sam felt like he’d been walking through a forest watching for songbirds and fallen in a gem pit. “There is family in Ceylon,” he began carefully, oh vengeful memory, oh conspiring tongue, “but they do not live near Colombo harbour, in fact they live far from there and I am not sure how something from here would reach them. But I am grateful, yes.” Each word was a testing step. There could be a hole within the hole.

  “Have you a name for where they do live?”

  “Yes. Yes, there is a village name, yes.”

  “That, and your father’s good name, should be enough.”

  “Yes, I see.” He would not tell Astrobe what he had told B. in the greedy gloom of his Pettah stall: that his father wasn’t a good enough man for a good name. The week before, one noontime at the office, Astrobe had received a visitor—the bookkeeper from a rival shipping agent, who said he wanted to work for Astrobe because his boss was no good and he knew the company was about to fold. Astrobe had Sam show him to the door and then told Sam to avoid boomerang dealers like that. “You don’t tell a man you’ve burned down the house you lived in and then ask if you can come live in his.”

  And so Sam wouldn’t say a word against his father to Mary’s. But he was also, in fact, tempted by the justice and glory of Astrobe’s suggestion that he send something to his family, to the village. By the vision of his father opening a crate full of things from a son and a world so far beyond him; things not even the grand walauwa people themselves could have even in the best of paddy and pepper years; things that in an overgrown green emptiness like Sudugama would be worthy of veneration, of shrines, of caparisoned elephants in drummed procession and named first-born sons and declarations of war between houses. Things that, Sam now knew, were to be understood as but trinkets in the great world itself. But as much as Sam wanted this victory, he did not want its cost. Contact. Taint. But he wanted his father, his family, all of Sudugama to know where and what he was now, and he did not. He did not!

  “It was just a thought, no matter. Mrs. Astrobe always orders Mary new dresses for Christmas and I’m sure Mary wouldn’t mind some of her old ones going to Ceylon this year instead of the mission up at La Perouse. You must have sisters. Maybe a sweetheart? Sam?”

  But he wasn’t listening anymore. And he wasn’t worrying either, about his family, about cost or triumph, contact or taint. He should have been listening. He should have been worrying. But Sam was only waiting for Astrobe to stop talking so they could close the office for the day and go to Mary.

  An hour later, her face flashed, then drained of all colour, then flushed red when her father knocked and walked into her bedroom in a single motion, his monkey close behind him. As usual, Cousin Malcolm was in the room already, his face Mary’s mirror. He was standing beside her chest of drawers. His elbow looked nailed down.

  “Father, why even have doors?”

  “Shall we just remove yours then?” Father and daughter smiled at each other, sourly. Sam was smiling too, a wild idiot grin. Shown a mirror, he might have shattered it for shame.

  �
��I see you have company with you, Uncle James.” Malcolm nodded at Sam.

  “What I was about to say to Mary!” said Astrobe, louder than was necessary, still smiling sour, but now staring at his nephew, who looked down and said nothing else.

  “Hello,” Mary said to Sam.

  “Yes,” said Sam to Mary.

  “Yes?” asked Mary.

  “Yes. Hello,” said Sam.

  After Astrobe explained that this year’s mission crate would be going to Ceylon, she shrugged and disappeared behind the fine-worked door of a large wardrobe. Sam waited and watched. He watched so hard he could have counted the brass flower petals that encircled its knob, unravelled the cardamom-like braid of darker wood running in a square at its centre. Malcolm pried his elbow free from the dresser and went to stand beside her while she sorted her clothes. Sam heard them laugh. She emerged with an armload of frill. She carried it to him. He extended his arms. She gave him a dozen emptied embraces, not even looking at him but already calling back to Malcolm about something else. Astrobe turned to leave and so he had to turn too but then Mary called out “Wait a moment” and Sam Kandy became Lord Buddha’s bo tree. She came back to him, bunching up in her hands a long piece of thin fabric, many-coloured. She left it on one of his waiting branches. He held his breath while she placed it there. When she turned he exhaled and it unfurled and Sam tucked his chin to catch it. Standing there in infinite patience, twenty-four sleeves and now this scarf hanging down from his arms, he looked prayer-flagged.

  From the first, love had been this suffering, this burning and suffering with knowledge that she was near, which made every triumph of living in Astrobe’s dark wood and dog carpet house so much deadwood and ash: the triumph of balancing a cup and saucer on his knee without looking at it, of eating beef, of eating beef with silver, of returning a blue-eyed visitor’s gaze straight away, of shaking his ringed white hand. Astrobe told Sam that once a week, every Sunday when the family went to church and then made their calls about town, he could use the family bath. He was to leave no hairs. Even though the tub’s taps were explained to him, it had looked to Sam like some mad hunter’s trophy, the gutted body of a demon bull, claw-footed and low to the ground, black-hulled and crackled bone-white within. But bathing in heated water late winter afternoons in Sydney, the sunlight streaming through a corner of the facing window and catching the risen steam and making of it a bright angled smoke, was a glory not possible in the world he had known before, a world of bathwater funked and body-warmed by young brother monks, a world of hard and slippery wet stone and furious boring bugs at the bamboo spout in the village, of Colombo seawater that sometimes left you feeling browner, more pungent and pickled than before you’d waded in. But he could not triumph in his Sydney baths as he should have. Each time there was nothing else but to know that she too had been here, Mary’s body, like his, waiting in this warm vapoury blanket bottom of the world, like this, just like this. Only she was not here now. She never was and would she ever be? The sun would always fade, the water long since lukewarm, before he stood up, streaming, shuddering from how cold love could be.

  As usual, Malcolm came to his room that night. The first time Astrobe’s soft heavy nephew had climbed to the observatory, a year before, it had been to explain why his dear cousin Mary had rushed from the music room upon Sam’s introduction to the family. Her beloved brother had survived Gallipoli itself, only to die in the retreat from Suvla Bay, stumped at the shins by a landmine. The chaplain’s letter home did not advise as such and shoes had been bought and remained boxed until, it seemed, Astrobe had given them to Sam.

  Hello, yes, yes, yes, hello—they passed his five Mary words back and forth a thousand different ways, like two dogs running their tongues dry along some common belly sore. And then Sam made his case again and again.

  “Never, I’m sorry to tell you,” answered Malcolm.

  “But look where we are, where I have come!” Sam pleaded, his memory open like a conqueror’s atlas. “Look at how I’ve been living with his family this past year! And now this Christmas crate! Also, he has said he wants to speak to me, about my plans, after Wellington. I think that’s when I shall tell him. Ask his permission.”

  “Oh yes, he is off to Wellington isn’t he. Remind me when.”

  “First of next month. And not just him; I am to go too.”

  Malcolm nodded.

  “Also, you have seen how he takes me with him through the city. Doesn’t this mean, couldn’t it mean that—” he’d never say it outright. In open air, words meant to shape the best possibilities negated them.

  “Yes,” Malcolm allowed. “But you must know he has done that before.”

  “You mean with, with—” Sam would never say Jim because Astrobe never said his dead son’s name, and also out of his own cosmic worrying. Those jurying stars, the broadcast heavens, looked in on the lovelorn shadow he made of his nightly hours in his windowed octagon, high above much of Sydney, just as they’d looked down on his boyhood, those sleepless nights before his birthday runs along the village green.

  “Yes, with—” said Malcolm like he was speaking with a child. But by now Sam had talked enough with Malcolm to know a goad. He stayed quiet.

  “With Chawkees, yes, he went around Sydney with Chawkees just like he does with you, but that was years ago, when Chawkees was young and strong.”

  “Chawkees? He called him Chawkees?” Sam asked, confused. Why did men say they wanted to make fellow men of their boys and then call them Squirrel?

  “Yes, Chawkees. Oh no, sorry, I didn’t mean Jim. Sorry. Is that really what you thought?” Malcolm smiled like he’d been sneaking treacle while the rest of the world was eating sour curd. “Actually, I was referring to that old hunting dog always sleeping in the music room. Chawkees. And sorry to leave you there, but I’m to take tea with Mary and Aunty in the garden.”

  Sam took Malcolm by the throat, his fingers sinking into the fat folds of his face, his warm pink devil jowls. He choked him to the edge of the staircase. The only decision was whether to send him down without another sterile word spilt between them, or let him apologize and vow he’d make up for it, promise he’d speak to both Astrobe and Mary and make Sam’s case for the one with both.

  Only he didn’t take him at the throat. He didn’t send him tumbling down. He extracted no pledge. He only soothed himself with the idea of it as he watched Malcolm leave. There was nothing else to do, twenty-five years old and obsessed with a rich man’s daughter, but stare and want and rage. And talk—all these words with her cousin. Talking, staring, wanting: he had discovered hope’s darkness, how it endured as the absence of itself. Living in Astrobe’s house had made Sam’s Kandy chest into a beggar’s bowl.

  An empty one. She’d given him those dresses to be given, and the next day, Astrobe added some old bed-sheets, an old carpet, an unused set of blue-lined handkerchiefs monogrammed AJ by mistake, two old sunbonnets, one of his old yellow bowlers, a pamphlet entitled “Edited for Student Use: Lord Macaulay’s Essay on Warren Hastings” with DUNTROON stamped on the first and last page, assorted blanched bathing caps. and, pledging Sam to secrecy, a woodcut of Sydney harbour that his friend Preston’s wife had done, the ships and buildings outlined in beetle black and coloured broad and bright as from a child’s hand. After the crate was packed in a drab salad of shredded newspaper and the father’s name and village were extracted for the shipping slip, Astrobe said they were nearly ready and Sam thought, Nearly? Astrobe took a slip of paper from his desk and a pen from his vest and handed them down to him crouched on the floor beside this, his triumph or was it his tainting box.

  “You’ll want to say a few words, I’m sure.”

  “Right. Yes.” Was this a test to see what kind of family man he was or would be?

  “Well I’m not about to write it but please, if you would, say something to your father about the family that has sent this along.”

  “I shall.”

  “Very good.”

&nb
sp; But before nailing it shut Sam still would have dropped a match in the box instead of a note. Let them sift in vain, feast on ash. He could have left the page blank and he could have written out a scroll longer than any Pali chronicle or rich man’s horoscope, a letter of his life that would touch his father from here, to touch him as Sam could still remember him, waking before dawn and bagging up his sarong above his scuffed doorknob knees to step over their murmuring bodies, to step outside and wake the village with his throat clearing before returning inside to mutter them awake as he made his morning puja. The ink left an indigo pottu mark at the bottom of the letter. He’d kept the pen nib still, deciding not to write out Ranjith, the name they had known him by, or any other. Instead he offered a line of cryptic pride, then nailed the crate shut and wondered again why he was doing this. It was her fault, those emptied embraces, and he was filled with hatred and happiness to think of her while he was here in her father’s office, who was seated behind his desk, his own face lost, a cloud of bombsmoke. And meanwhile he imagined something of hers reaching there, the village, passing through the low doorway to the family house, the crate’s blond wood split and blooming mould in the upcountry air, the contents shadowed over with so many brown heads bowing as each cast-off and throwaway relic of Sam’s faraway place was raised for veneration.

  July 1, 1924: their ship was scheduled to leave shortly but they were still in Astrobe’s office. Sam was watching him shake open the drawers of his desk, muttering that it wasn’t ultimately important but he’d like to bring it along anyway, a scrolled menu card for a Federal Conference banquet held forty years earlier at the Menzies Hotel, Melbourne. The New Zealand representative had been a great-uncle of the man Astrobe was going to see in Wellington about securing exclusive agent’s rights to the family’s sheep concern. Sam was coming along to attest, firsthand, to the firm’s care and success in shipping animals—elephants no less. Sam gripped the cool leather and metal handle of the suitcase he had been given for the voyage—he did not ask whose, just as he did not ask why, when Astrobe had presented him with a dark three-piece suit, he recommended Sam change in the coat closet at the office.