The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [90]
Niemeyer holds her face in his shackled hands, as he did for that final second on the deck rail to signal their departure. He puts his mouth on hers and she opens her mouth, and with her tongue she pushes the key that had been clenched in her teeth forward, into his keeping. They have difficulty holding on to each other, their bodies being tossed around, and in all that dark sea, the key is something too small and delicate to be passed from hand to hand. As the currents are strong, threatening to pull them apart, he will take the key himself from his mouth and attempt to release the lock. So now he lets go of the girl, lets go of the surface, and sinks with the key, alone, focussed only on unlocking the padlock with his fingers that are already stiffening from the cold. This is the moment when he will or will not remain a prisoner forever.
They have told her not to wait for him. She has sacrificed enough. Her father, if he is able to free himself, will follow and find her wherever she is. The historical ports are ringed around them. It is, after all, the great internal sea, discovered centuries ago and inhabited since, where ships navigated by stars, or by the temples on promontories when it was daylight. Piraeus, Carthage, Kuakas. All those coastal city-states of the Aegean, that were gateways for tribes who simply walked there out of deserts or had swum to shore when their ships were wrecked by high winds in a storm. Asuntha moves away. She has posed for weeks in the profile of a person terrified of water. And now, all that held-back youth drives her forward. She lights out for whatever land will hide her until she is found. So that for now what she swims towards is just somewhere—to one of those ancient cities that was formed originally because of its existence on a delta or a reliable tide—to make a new life. As we too might do when we make our own landfall.
Niemeyer surfaces again for another breath, and in the darkness, in spite of the night wind, he hears the direction she is swimming in. He sees the Oronsay lit like a long brooch, far away, aimed towards Gibraltar. Then he sinks again, not yet free of his lock, whose small, subtle portal is hard for the key to find in this dark water and in the echo and whine of the departing liner’s engines.
Letter to Cassius
FOR MOST OF MY LIFE I KNEW there was nothing I could give Cassius that would be of use to him. And during all these years I have never seriously imagined contacting him. Something about our relationship fulfilled itself during those twenty-one days on the ship. I felt no need (save for a slight curiosity) to know him more. The template of Cassius was clear, at least as far as I was concerned. I knew even then that he would be a self-contained creature, owing nothing. His only gesture outward, apart from our companionship, which was obviously just temporary, was the concern he had for that girl. And when Asuntha disappeared into the sea, I saw my friend, as if burned by an adult truth, retreat further.
An artist with burned hands. What was his life like after that? The last years of his teens must have been a time when he could rely on no one and believe in nothing. It is easy to be such a person when you are an adult, when you can survive on your own. But Cassius, I suspect, lost the rest of his childhood on the ship that night. I remember him standing there forever, no longer beside us, searching the dark blue fluorescent wash.
I know that without all I have drawn from Ramadhin’s quiet kindness, I would not think of going towards Cassius now. He has become a belligerent force in the art scene. There is easy mockery in him. But that doesn’t matter. He had been a boy of twelve and had taken the step to protect someone with a childhood mercy. In spite of his almost natural anarchy he had wished