The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [106]
“Nobody belongs to anyone,” she says, and for the first time she looks ugly to him. “That’s a disgusting way to talk. My bicycle belongs to me. My jade ring. People are free, and if they aren’t, well, that’s less than human. Or they’re just slaves.”
He kisses her good-bye, miserable. She has used the word “loathsome” about herself, but he knows it rightly applies only to him, and he can’t wait to shower in his own bathroom, but it isn’t only his. Miranda’s shampoo, Breck, is in the shower, and he opens it, smells it, uses it to wash his own hair, as if then he could be with her, could become her, pure as she is pure, and the water falls on the flesh that he can only loathe and the smell of her shampoo pierces his heart. The words he uses for himself he never imagined he would have to use. “Profligate.” “Betrayer.” He is unworthy of Miranda, unworthy of her love.
Miranda, in Pakistan, is exhausted, overwhelmed, in despair, thinking there is nothing she can understand. She can hold back for an hour, a day, the tidal wave of horror, the psychological correlate to the tidal wave, the typhoon that is the natural disaster that is the reason for her being where she is. If she is not absolutely engaged in an activity, the images return: the bloated bodies floating like black dolls, the swollen cattle, drowned, the wandering children, their mouths open, silently abashed. And even when she feels that something is being done to feed and clothe the victims and provide medicine, she has to come to terms with the corruption and cruelty of people to their own people. Her romance of poverty, the solidarity of the poor, is blasted through, as if a cannonball had breached the solid ramparts of her understanding. She sees a young man stealing a blanket from a shivering old woman. Then she observes some small act, some gesture—two boys share a piece of bread, a woman tears her shawl in half and gives half to another mother—and she thinks: people are good, they can love each other.
Too tired at night to write more than a few lines, and unwilling to worry Adam or her parents, she provides only telegraphic news assuring them she is all right. She is working with Fatima and her father, on a team set up by the WHO. Fatima’s father asked her to contact Miranda because he remembers that what she is good at is organization, and he sets her the task of keeping track of people and supplies, and she understands that, although she isn’t relieving suffering directly, she is making marks on paper, creating files, telling people to go here or go there, making something a little better, doing something to cut into the chaos of this world of death. Half a million dead, mostly women and children, a world into which she wakes each morning and from which she retreats gratefully into sleep.
At night as she lies on her cot she questions for the first time in her life the goodness of life, the desirability of living. For the first time she thinks it would not be the worst thing to be dead. She begins to understand that she is getting sick. She knows she is really sick when, trying and failing to straighten a stack of files, her eyes fall on her own hands, and they become her father’s hands, and miraculously (she was her father so she did not succumb) she gets herself to her desk and sits shaking, realizing she is really ill. She slips into a delirium in which she is herself, her father, her father’s hands, Adam’s hands, of which they had to be so careful touching the white keys, but the music she produces is dangerous, unsoothing, and she says to someone (but she is alone in the office, there is no one there), If I die please let me die as myself.
In her fevers, she dreams of the safe, clean, sweet-smelling solid world. Her place beside Adam’s body in the bed whose sheets she’d chosen, washed, made up for the comfort of their sleeping. At night hearing the sounds of