The Caretaker Read online

  “Leave the candle burning. Please.” The crow’s wingbeats are receding, but he needs the light to banish its image.

  “You were screaming. A nightmare.”

  “I’m sorry. Go back to sleep.”

  She props herself up on an elbow and stares down at him. “What were you dreaming about?”

  He feels her waiting for his reply, but he cannot speak. The candle behind her casts dark shadows underneath her eyes and nose.

  As the silence grows, she leans in, her breath warm with sleep. “Do you remember the first time you came to my house?”

  He nods, and she continues. “It was very hot, remember? You came with those Brazilian men, you were unloading the truck in the driveway. I was just returning from a run, and I was soaked in sweat. The Brazilians knew I was the Senator’s wife, they dared not look directly at me, but they sneaked glances at my breasts, at my legs. I felt them looking.

  “But you … you did not even glance at me. They helped you unload the granite, and when they left, you started to arrange it into piles. You were so … apart. Alone.

  “I went into the house and drank some water and watched you from behind the curtains. I watched you all afternoon as you measured and cut stone. Everything you did was so precise. I said to myself, this is not an ordinary man.”

  He lies in the darkness, feeling her hand stroke the back of his neck.

  “I don’t believe in God, or fate, or destiny, any of that. It’s stupid. But that day I felt as though you’d been sent to me. And when I finally had the nerve to talk to you, it was worse, much worse, because I found out you had a wife and a child, and I had nothing. You understand how it hurt? So that afternoon in September … I … I was selfish, I wanted you so badly. You must have been very confused. I’m so, so sorry.”

  He can tell by her breathing that she is crying. He reaches up and pulls her face to his, feeling the hot tears on her cheeks.

  “Anna,” he says. He says her name like a prayer, over and over, Anna, Anna, Anna, till she muffles it with her lips.

  * * *

  She is slow and deliberate.

  He lies on his back and she straddles him carefully, her muscular arms reaching upward to pull off her own T-shirt, her breasts rolling free. Their hard points push into his chest as she leans forward to kiss him.

  Her hair brushes against his face, giving off the faint scent of sweat. Her breasts, when she feeds them to him, taste like water.

  Crouched over him, she guides his hand to the wetness between her thighs.

  “Like this,” she whispers, “like this.”

  She moves against his hand, her palms flat on either side of him, her entire body taut as a bow. He watches her lower lip tremble, watches her eyes glaze over. Then she is kissing him hard, breathing into his mouth. His hand is cramping when she pushes down and says, Yes.

  When she is done she topples beside him and hides her face in his chest. He pulls her to him with one arm, moving to cover her with the comforter, but she shakes her head and says, “No, I’m not done.”

  “Anna, I don’t know if I can—”

  “Shhh. No talking.”

  Lying next to him, she covers his mouth with hers, and her hand moves slowly down his chest, and despite the pain, he is aroused. The softness of her body is underlaid with muscle, and she is very strong; the hand that grips him down below will not be denied. She kisses his chest, then moves lower, licks and nuzzles. She knows exactly what she is doing.

  He feels her breasts pressing against the inside of his thighs, feels her mouth on him. She is eating him alive, but that is not all. She is devouring him and ministering to him at the same time, drawing poison out of his body, years of curdled desire.

  Pleasure mixes with searing pain. There is a taste in his mouth from childhood, of mangoes sprinkled with coarse salt, both sweet and painfully salty.

  He moans and collapses. It is as though she has drawn blood from him, blood he cannot afford to lose.

  Her face moves up next to his. She sees his expression, grateful and bashful and pained, and holds his face in her hands.

  “What are you thinking of? What is going on in that head of yours?”

  The part of himself that remains detached watches himself lying in bed with her.

  “Nothing.”

  They lie in the darkness, intertwined, till she rises naked from the bed.

  He watches her crouch in front of the fireplace, placing more logs and arranging torn newspaper. She lights a match, the fire catches, and her face turns golden-orange. Her muscular legs and arms are a faded brown, her small, rounded breasts and stomach the color of milky coffee.

  He thinks that she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.

  She comes back to the bed shivering, half warm from the fire, her back cold. He takes her hands in his and massages them, and soon they are warm.

  * * *

  The room heats up, and the air is scented with the smell of their lovemaking.

  Her warm fingertips find the scar under his chin and she caresses it, as though trying to smooth away the raised ridge.

  “Ranjit Singh,” she says quietly, “where did you get this scar? I want to know, I really do.”

  Closing his eyes, he lies back on the soaked pillow. He is quiet for so long that his own voice startles him, as though he is talking in his sleep.

  “I was high up on a glacier, between India and Pakistan. Most people don’t even know it exists. It was beautiful up there, but there was a war going on. A war, and not a war. It was the strangest thing, like two men fighting in a room, but they mustn’t make a sound, because nobody else is supposed to know that they are there…”

  She props herself up onto an elbow. “Go on, I’m listening.”

  “There was this nineteen-year-old in my platoon. Skinny kid, his ears stuck out, he was a real jokester, used to keep the men laughing. He listened to this band all the time, I think it’s called Guns and Roses. Always the same song, Loaded like a freight train, flyin’ like an aeroplane…”

  He can’t help smiling, thinking of Dewan high up on the glacier, headphones clamped over his knit cap, nodding to his music. He’d listen to the same song till the batteries of his Walkman froze, then put them in his armpits to warm them up.

  “… and there was my Sergeant, Khandelkar. He had no family, and the army was his whole life. He’d gone into East Pakistan in 1971, fought counterinsurgency missions in Sri Lanka in the eighties, but he had no hate. You’d see him darning his socks, and think that he looked like an old grandmother, but when the shooting started he was the calmest head around. He taught me everything I know about leading men, about war. He was like a father to me.”

  Anna’s face is so close that he cannot see her expression. “I’m listening, Ranjit. What happened to them?”

  He breathes deeply. “They’re dead. They’re both dead. Only I survived.”

  * * *

  He talks into the night, filling the silence with his words.

  It had been a cloudy day when he disembarked from an army transport plane and saw the Kumar Base Camp for the first time. With its parade grounds of crushed stone and red-roofed regimental buildings it had looked like any other camp, just more desolate, and strangely silent.

  When the clouds lifted, he was stunned. The rocks and rubble of the glacier gave way to a tongue of snow that swept endlessly northward, and to the west were the towering peaks of the Saltoro Ridge. The sky was a deep blue he had never seen before, and as he watched, a lone white cloud floated through it, casting a patch of shadow that flitted across the barren mountains.

  There was a sudden, chattering roar as the Cheetah helicopters began to fly, taking advantage of the clear weather to evacuate the wounded from high up in the mountains. They looked like bumblebees, scarcely more than a glass bubble canopy and a skeletal tail, and behind them came the M-17s, large lumbering choppers that parachuted in heavier supplies. White silk parasols bloomed in the air, and he gasped, thinki
ng that he had never seen anything more graceful.

  And the mountains! They were dazzling, taking on the pink and orange of the setting sun, their snow cones a stark white even in the darkness. Mountains without names, some only with coordinates, twenty-four thousand feet high, and unclimbed. Unlike Mount Everest or Kanchenjunga, whose every inch had been mapped, these mountains were mysteries.

  As darkness fell, the Cheetahs came clattering back. They unloaded men, some walking, some on stretchers, their hands and feet blistered with frostbite. He was not dissuaded by the sight, and even remained cheerful the next day, when an avalanche on the mountain buried an entire outpost, and dog teams were helicoptered out to find the bodies.

  The main thing was that there were mountains to climb, heights he had dreamed of scaling since he was a boy.

  His first command was a two-week watch in the command post at Bilafond La Pass. As they climbed toward it, he saw for the first time the damage that the war had done. The pipeline built to transport kerosene oil up the glacier leaked continuously, staining the snow black. The high pass was littered with the dried-out corpses of dead mules, their grinning skulls stripped by the crows. And as they climbed higher, he saw strange, tall pillars jutting from the glacier, almost as though giants were standing motionless in the snow.

  Getting closer, he recognized the beautiful parachutes he had seen, fallen to earth and frozen into high plumes. Near them were tall columns of garbage, discarded jerry cans and human excreta. The cold of the glacier, which preserved everything, held in its grip all the detritus of the war.

  When he finally reached the command post he could not believe what he saw: a cluster of fiberglass igloos at one end of the ridge, linked by a trench to a machine gun post and a toilet platform. The Pakistanis were on the neighboring ridge, and if he forgot to duck as he walked along the trench, he’d get his head blown off.

  Each day up there passed in a haze of exhaustion and fear. Pakistani artillery shells boomed in at all hours, thrown off course by the howling winds, but close enough for a freak hit. The igloo was heated by a kerosene stove, and at night they breathed in its thick smoke; after a few days, like the other men, he began to cough up its black residue.

  Two weeks passed up there, and when he came back down he went straight to the commanding officer and volunteered to climb higher, into the death zone, if necessary. The CO pulled his file, saw his climbing record, smiled and said, “We just had one officer retire, I think you’ll be an ideal replacement for him.”

  That was the first time he met his men. Initially Sergeant Khandelkar just watched him, not saying a word, but after he led the men on their first sabotage mission, climbing a sheer cliff and two ice walls, the Sergeant put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Sir, not bad. Not bad at all.”

  With Khandelkar’s help, he recruited real climbers. Not the showoffs who hacked their way up with spurts of machismo, but the boys with the faraway look in their eyes, the ones who climbed for the sheer love of it. They found Dewan one morning, scaling a cliff with no crampons and no rope, and watched open-mouthed as he made his way down, grinning with excitement.

  The mountains were real and he climbed them with respect and skill, leaving behind the death and the waste and the stupid politics of the war. He took his men, again and again, through situations that were thought to be impossible, emerging like ghosts on top of the Paki posts, and then setting up mortars or calling in the jets. The Generals took notice of the tall Sikh Captain who spoke little, who came back mission after mission with all his men, filing terse reports: “Indira Col is now clear of enemy combatants,” “Two positions taken and destroyed,” “Eastern approach route now usable.”

  When they asked him to go on that final mission, he felt a rush of excitement—he knew that no one had ever climbed the eastern face of the Sia Kangri—and agreed without hesitation.

  * * *

  The fire is dying. The flames in the fireplace flicker up wildly and then collapse, leaving only the glow of red-hot embers. Drying sweat has made Ranjit’s skin feel clammy, and he huddles close to Anna as he tells her about that last mission.

  “My men had already been out on three missions that month. They should have gone down below and rested. I ignored the fact that my best climber—the kid I was telling you about—was pushed to his limit. Other men found it difficult to acclimatize to those altitudes, but I could only breathe freely when I was up there. If I hadn’t been so greedy to climb, my men would have lived.”

  Her breath is warm on his cheek. “Don’t blame yourself. People die in a war.”

  He moves away from her slightly. “That is not all. I made a much worse mistake. I thought we had found a Pakistani outpost within the sector they had given me. I didn’t bother to check.” He pauses and looks away. “I called in an air strike and killed sixteen of our own men.

  “The scar you want to know about? My own people tried to kill me. After I came back from the mission, this General Handa, he wanted me to cover up my mistake and blame the attack on the Pakis. He wanted to prolong the war, but I refused to lie.

  “The General tried to have me killed, but he failed, and I went on trial. The story got out and it made headlines in the papers. Suddenly the Indian public learned about a dirty war going on up there. There were questions in Parliament, editorials, and the journalists descended.

  “The army sentenced me to three years in jail, and it was worth it. Now there is a cease-fire on Siachen, but my men are still lying up there. They’re still there.”

  Anna takes a deep breath. “That’s a terrible story, Ranjit. So that’s why you ended up coming to America, to the Vineyard?”

  He nods, and the silence between them grows. The room suddenly feels very cold.

  “Death,” she says softly, “always death, everywhere … The Buddhists say that death is a release from the suffering in this life, but still…”

  She stiffens in his arms, a dark mood settling over her. He cups her face in his hands and kisses her, but she does not kiss him back.

  He speaks softly, trying to comfort her. “You know, I like it here, on the Vineyard. The space, the feeling of being cut off from the crazy world. I wish I had come here twenty years ago. It must have been a very different place.”

  She thinks a moment, and her voice brightens. “Yes, it was different. No traffic, no presidential visits, no multimillion-dollar houses. It was wilder, a magical place.”

  “You grew up here, right?”

  She nods. “I’m the third generation in the Vineyard, you know. People are always shocked to find out that we’ve owned that land in Aquinnah for over a hundred years. But the island has always been a refuge for people like us…”

  She is deep in her memories now, and he feels her body soften in his arms.

  “I grew up in Oak Bluffs—my grandfather had a big dry-goods store there, and that’s where Daddy had his law practice—but I always loved going up-island. Every weekend Daddy would load up his old station wagon—with sandwiches, beer for him, orange soda for me—and we’d drive up to the shack in Aquinnah. For two days we wouldn’t bathe or change our clothes, but I didn’t care.

  “Up there, free from the town, my father was a different person. He’d shoot birds mostly, but in season, he’d hunt deer. By the time I was twelve, I could skin and butcher a deer; I’d show up for school on Monday morning in bloodstained jeans. Oh, the other girls teased me mercilessly. Bad enough being the only black girl in the school, but to also dress like a boy…”

  “That’s when you learned to shoot?”

  “Oh, I could shoot soon after I could walk. Daddy taught me. But he stopped hunting when I was in middle school. He had some bad luck, he lost a string of cases, and suddenly his Harvard degree was no use; he became just another uppity black man. We’d still go up to the shack, but he would start drinking the minute we got there. By nightfall, he’d be too drunk to hunt, and he’d stay that way all weekend. After a while, I stopped going and stayed in town.
He’d go alone.” She pauses. “He wasn’t an angry drunk, he never hit me or anything. But drunk, he became sloppy, he stopped hiding things from me.”

  “What do you mean?” In the darkness he cannot see her face.

  “When I was a kid, he would sometimes get a babysitter for me and go out, on a Friday night—he was a handsome man when he cleaned up, and a great dancer. I remember him coming back late, leaning into my bed to kiss me, smelling of cigarette smoke and scotch. He always came back alone, no matter how late.

  “But drunk, he’d bring women home. I woke up one Sunday—I must have been fourteen—and there was a woman’s dress thrown on the bathroom floor. I was so mad, I screamed at him and he made her leave. He was deeply ashamed, I know, and soon the women stopped. All he did was drink.”

  His voice comes out of the darkness. “And you—how did you handle it?”

  “Handle it? I was a teenager, Ranjit … well, you wouldn’t know about that, you didn’t grow up here. You know those kids, the ones who hang around behind the ferry terminal?”

  He nods.

  “Well, I was one of them. Not a skateboarder, though, back then the style was punk: ripped jeans, purple hair, the whole deal. Oh, I got quite a reputation. People would call the cops on us, but the police knew Daddy, they’d always let me off with a warning.”

  “And then?”

  “Well, my father had gone to Harvard, so I guess I was a legacy, they had to take me. All those nice preppy black kids from New York and Connecticut were a real shock, but I soon got used to it. I stopped coming back to the island. Every summer I’d stay with friends in New York, Taos, San Francisco. Then I got into law school, and I was busier than ever. By the time I moved to Washington and started working in Clayton’s office, I wasn’t even talking to my father anymore.

  “The poor man died all alone out in the shack, and a hunter found him a week later. Clayton came back with me to the funeral—it was closed casket—and on the ferry afterward, he proposed, and I said yes. There’s nothing else to tell, really. We built the house out in Aquinnah, and it was as though I had never left.”