The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [54]
Did the years fall away when I saw her move the strap of a summer dress not more than a quarter-inch, so that I interpreted it as an invitation to that mutual friend? As if it were suddenly essential for him to see that small sunless part of her shoulder. I say this long after the bitterness and accusations and denials and arguments. What was it that made me recognize something in the gesture? I walked into our narrow garden and stood there listening to the night traffic racing past Colliers Water Lane that made me think of the constant noise of the sea, and then all at once of Emily in the darkness of the Oronsay, leaning back against the railing with her beau, when she had glanced for a moment at her bare shoulder and then up at the stars, and I remembered the sexual knot beginning to form in me as well. All of eleven years old.
I’ll tell you the last time I thought about Ramadhin. I was in Italy and, curious about heraldry, asked a docent in a castle for an explanation of all the crescent moons, their tips facing up. A series of crescent moons and a sword, I was told, meant members of a family had taken part in the Crusades. If only one generation participated, then the crest would have just one crescent moon. And then the guide added, unasked, that having a sun on your crest meant you had a saint in your family. And I thought, Ramadhin. Yes. He leapt, all of him, into my thoughts, as a sort of saint. Not a too-official one. A human one. He was the saint of our clandestine family.
Port Said
ON THE FIRST OF SEPTEMBER, 1954, the Oronsay had completed its journey through the Suez Canal, and we watched the city of Port Said approach and slide beside us, the sky dark with sand. We stayed up all night, listening to the street traffic, the chorus of horns and street radios.
Only at dawn did we leave the deck and climbed down several levels into the heat and the prison-like light of the engine room. This had become a habit of ours each morning. Here the men lost so much sweat we’d see them drink tepid water from the emergency fire pails while the turbines around them swivelled, flinging their pistons. Sixteen engineers on the Oronsay. Eight for the night shift, eight for the days, nursing the forty-thousand-horsepower steam machines that drove the twin propellers, so we could travel through a calm or a storm-filled sea. If we were there early enough, as the night shift ended, we followed the crew into the sunlight, where they stepped one by one into the open shower stall and then dried themselves in the sea wind, their voices loud in the new silence. It was where our Australian roller skater had stood just an hour earlier.
But now, as we docked in Port Said, all turbines and engines stilled, and there was a different purpose and manner among the crew. Their anonymous work became public. The passage through the Red Sea and the Canal had resulted in desert sands blasting millions of fragments of canary-yellow paint off the sides of the ship, so while we lingered for a day in that Mediterranean port, sailors hung in rope cradles, scraping and repainting the yellow hull, and the Engineers and Electricals worked among the passengers in the hundred-degree heat, securing the ship for the final leg of the voyage. The Wipers blew oil sludge out from the pipes, collecting the black phlegm-like substance into barrels. As soon as the ship was free of the harbour, they hauled those barrels up to the fantail and dumped them over the side.
Meanwhile, sections of the hold were being emptied. A brief afternoon rain continued down three levels into the base of the hold as workers, soaking wet, rolled seven-hundred-pound drums towards the mouth of the waiting crane, and hooked the chain and each drum to an I beam. They grabbed and steered tea chests and carpets of raw rubber towards the opening. Bags of asbestos broke apart in mid-air. It was angry, fraught work. If