The Siege of Krishnapur - J. G. Farrell [132]
It was Fleury who, remembering how he had made a visor for his smoking cap, found the solution by whipping his Bible out of his shirt and tearing the boards off. He gave one of these sacred boards to Harry and took the other one himself. Then, using the boards as if they were giant razor blades, he and Harry began to shave the black foam of insects off Lucy’s skin. It did not take them very long to get the hang of it, scraping carefully with the blade at an angle of forty-five degrees and pausing from time to time in order to wipe it clean. When they had done her back, they turned her over and set to work on her front.
Her body, both young men were interested to discover, was remarkably like the statues of young women they had seen...like, for instance, the Collector’s plaster cast of Andromeda Exposed to the Monster, though, of course, without any chains. Indeed, Fleury felt quite like a sculptor as he worked away and he thought that it must feel something like this to carve an object of beauty out of the primeval rock. He became quite carried away as with dexterous strokes he carved a particularly exquisite right breast and set to work on the delicate fluting of the ribs. The only significant difference between Lucy and a statue was that Lucy had pubic hair; this caused them a bit of a surprise at first. It was not something that had ever occurred to them as possible, likely, or even desirable.
“D’you think this is supposed to be here?” asked Harry, who had spent a moment or two scraping at it ineffectually with his board. Because the hair, too, was black it was hard to be sure that it was not simply matted and dried insects.
“That’s odd,” said Fleury, peering at it with interest; he had never seen anything like it on a statue. “Better leave it, anyway, for the time being. We can always come back to it later when we’ve done the rest.”
But at that moment there was a noise behind them and both young men turned at once. There stood Louise, Miriam, and the Padre, gazing at them with horror.
“Harry!”
“Dobbin!”
The Padre was unable to find any word at all; his eyes had come to rest on the golden letters “Holy Bible” on the back of Fleury’s razor blade.
“You couldn’t have come at a better time,” said Fleury cheerfully. “Harry and I were just wondering how we were going to get her clothes on again.”
23
“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his goodness to give you safe deliverance, and to preserve you in the great danger of childbirth; you shall therefore give hearty thanks unto God...”
At the beginning of August when the heat, humidity and despair reached their zenith in the Residency, when all eyes searched the Collector’s face for the signs of collapse which they knew to be imminent, two babies were born. One of them died almost immediately; its little body was dressed in a clean nightdress and linen cap and its arms were folded on its breast; then it was taken at night to be buried. Burial was a risky business now since the churchyard was constantly swept by fire, and for adults it had been abandoned. Mature Christians were dragged to the more distant of the two wells in the Residency yard and, without discrimination