When Mountains Walked, page 13
She didn’t sadden him with her true feelings. Instead, she told him she’d be happier in a big city. He rented a cottage in downtown Calcutta, which they’d call home for nearly two years. It had a high wall in front of it and a garden full of trees. When Johnny was out of town Althea rarely left the place, afraid of the broken beggars thrusting their stumps in her face, of the crowds teeming like ants. She sent the cook to market, and received one or two visitors a week.
Johnny happened to be “home” when the Altai quake was announced on the BBC, but Althea had been the first to hear of it. She sat in shifting, mottled bougainvillea shade, writing next week’s menu and bazaar list for Madhukar the cook. In Calcutta she’d discovered an English news broadcast that she could sit down with every day, when there was electricity. It was so nice to be accompanied by a voice. Within reason, it was her duty to improve her mind as well. She found it strangely pleasant to allow the world to form its garish backdrop to the ordering of her own small realities. Things in Europe were rotten and falling down.
“Monday. Meat loaf. Buffalo, eggs, tomatoes, crumbs,” she wrote in her neat, round hand, placating Madhukar, who had worked ten years for a British family and was proud of his bland cooking. She had pleaded with him to display the fiery delicacy of his own Indian cuisine; he agreed to cook one curry per week.
The last strains of a ponderous Mahler symphony throbbed in the hot green air.
“Tuesday. Fish curry.” She loved this dish of Madhukar’s, tiny river fish fried in mustard oil with potatoes, yellow turmeric, and hot red, green, and black peppers.
This just in. A massive earthquake has taken place in the Altai Mountains of Outer Mongolia, the announcer said. The report by Radio Moscow this morning claims a magnitude of eight point six. No greater earthquake is possible.
“Wednesday. Peeled,” Althea wrote, and forgot cucumbers as her stomach went cold. Though the reporter was speaking from Moscow, she could hear behind his voice the roar of mountains collapsing, the smell of burning rocks. And in her belly the feeling of atrophy that would last forever and a day.
Few deaths are reported, but the geologic crisis is of an almost unbelievable magnitude, the announcer went on. A trench sixty-five feet wide and two hundred miles long has opened in a remote area of these legendary mountains. Fortunately, most of the shepherds of the Altai are nomadic, and have been moving southward to avoid the winter temperatures, which average sixty degrees of frost. Twelve people are reported dead so far, but it is difficult to assess reports due to the extremes of climate and geology. Strong aftershocks are expected over the next weeks. An international team of scientists was assembling in Ulan Bator. The Soviet government had offered travel permits as a courtesy to the scientific team, but it was not known whether the intractable climatic and geological conditions would permit the mission to reach the affected area. Wishing them warm toes, this is BBC Moscow correspondent Nigel Jones.
The reporter sounded smug, world-weary, as if the reason he was glad of the small number of deaths was that it permitted him to report from the relative comfort of Moscow. Althea imagined his Communist apartment with a cheap but ostentatious glass-front cabinet full of cut-glass decanters. Sweating cement walls alive with buried microphones, the reporter drinking vodka to blur his vision of the world as teetering between boredom and disaster. Drunk, he might talk to his walls, pretending to be more than one person, giving misleading information. Althea decided she disapproved of Nigel Jones, though he would make an entertaining guest at a dinner party. She was beginning to understand there were lots of characters like him in foreigners’ enclaves overseas, morally degenerate but full of amusing stories about Cairo, Capri, and Sumatra. Their only remaining innocence was their belief that they’d seen it all. Blue martinis, talking frogs.
She’d seen plenty of wonders here in India, and the mummies in Peru. She’d followed Johnny to the mining camps of the Chilean Andes, two miles high, where her heart flipped in her chest like a dying fish and the wind cut her earlobes until they bled, and she’d watched the dark-skinned men go down into the earth to suffocate and die. For some reason it was from these heights that Johnny had studied the unreliable coast.
Mongolia must be twice as cold as that, unimaginable.
All the more right and necessary that men should go there, to ennoble the mountains and make their collapse worthwhile. She knew better than to believe there might be hidden worlds, nor even the red molten quick at the bottom of the earthquake’s crack. She had seen cracks and they were dry mouths. Still, that stark fissure cutting two hundred miles across the frozen landscape, now that would be almost glorious. At least instructive. Morally.
For what was a worse false faith than stupid trust in the ground underfoot? The ground rose up and killed forty thousand people every year, Johnny said. If he could warn them to move out of the way just for a few days while the earthquake came, at least some of them would be saved. But Johnny did not know the true nature of that which he would warn against. You could not know until you had felt it. And even so, you were doomed to trust the earth—where else were you to go?
Oh, she and Johnny had felt the earth tremble three or four times, slightly, and slightly more than slightly. A blue glass lemonade pitcher had fallen on its side, rolled to the edge of the table, and shattered on the floor. The pictures had swayed on the wall as if at sea. Johnny had yelled, “Up, out, go! Get under the door!” He’d told her afterward how she’d sat smiling as though she enjoyed it.
A doorway had saved her in Huaraz, the house collapsing behind her. She’d nearly squashed little Christopher, holding him too tight. She had watched lights coming out of nothing in the ground. Waves of earth advancing like surf across the patio, then shaking in a pattern of squares and diamonds like water shaken in a flat pan. The roar in her ears was like a million trains. Days later, living in a tent with Peruvian women, the earth had not stopped trembling. People wandered shaking their heads, and when a new tremor began they screamed. The river ran black, bile and metal from the body of the earth. They filtered the water through shirts. No wood to boil it; the few trees were buried in the landslide. They had mixed water and raw flour to eat, and everyone had gotten sick from the poison in the water.
When Johnny talked of geology he talked of slowness, the earth like half-melted butter heaving in its sleep. Slowness was pleasant in the imagination, making the mind so vast. The fast part of geology was more difficult. Johnny’s calculations encompassed awful things—how many ergs it would take to twitch a road aside from its destination, to lift a slow green river into a series of foaming waterfalls—but this was all afterthought. He still believed that his geologic mind could know the way the earth was. In his mind, science left no room for terror. He’d shown her pages of equations in which S was strength, E was elasticity, B was the breaking point of rocks. Althea was afraid for him.
She wanted to save him from his colleagues, too, who laughed at his ambition. On their scale of geologic thoughts, earthquake prediction was at once too vast and too microscopic. How could you be accurate about one day, even one year, out of an eon? How could you hope to predict the arrival of the unpredictable? Johnny was careful, canny. He was building a small, visible, and acceptable career upon his genius for mapping and his descriptive studies of fault systems in remote parts of the world, primitive and unstable areas where tens of thousands of people died in earthquakes every year, so many that no one in the States could ever imagine them as people, but saw them instead as ants under a mudslide. Places where there was cholera, dysentery, and tuberculosis; where other Western geologists—much less their wives—were reluctant to spend their lives. He got paid by companies and governments to do their kind of work; his own work he carried on at night, by oil lamp, or candle, or weak bulb.
Johnny would go through any hardship to learn what he needed to know; this was one of the things Althea liked about him. He was fond of saying that there was no further use to be extracted from beetles crawling across the windowpanes of Oxford University, that the Japanese and the Californians didn’t need earthquake prediction because they could afford to engineer houses to withstand the movements. No, it was Peruvians and Turks and Indians whom Johnny wanted to save. Besides his wife, they’d been the last to see his son alive. He’d make it worth Althea’s while that she’d stood in that doorway to save herself. He knew she had sometimes regretted it.
In general, Johnny didn’t believe in filtering his data through the soft cracks of any human brain. He had been in Belgium during the Great War, and his body had stopped reacting to the whistle of incoming bombs, as if it had finally understood something bodies rarely did: that death was not a choice but rather a matter of uncontrollable timing. Later in the war; he was hit by a sniper and lay wounded in snow until an enormous white pigeon’s breast lowered itself upon him. Waking up in the dark, pain was visible as a line of steely light gleaming along the rail of his hospital bed. In the morning, he began a second, unexpected life. Purple centipede tracks crisscrossed his belly. The Alps had been white and perfect outside his window. His first sight on returning from the dead. Mountains became his gods. He went to school to learn them.
What would he do when the mountain fell? Althea could still feel Huaraz breaking things inside her. A shaking beyond the contours of her body. It had been a year. It was not just Christopher, not just the sacrifice of a child that had turned her and broken her. Earthquakes were terrible, and terrible in being unknowable. Suddenly they were there; when you were in one, you could not perform all of the necessary knowing.
Maybe Johnny could find a way to trap the shaking in an equation. He already had an idea about the continents’ motion. If you could measure the growth of mountains, the spread of coastlines, you might find out how many earthquakes were necessary in a year, or one hundred years, or one hundred thousand years. Johnny had the mind for that, if anyone did.
But he would have to suffer first. He’d need to feel what it was when the solid earth became untrustworthy. Not just untrustworthy: when it turned against you, against itself, revealing a part of its nature that was demonically strange. One day there might be a symbol for that demonic exhalation; no one had caught it before. A curl across a page. If Johnny wanted this, Althea had to give him his chance. She didn’t know whether she was helping his theory or trying to bury it.
Before the news report had ended, she had decided to fire their two servants and let go of this bungalow house. As she stood up she had already begun to miss the waxy red tile floors and this bougainvillea the size of a coral reef, but she’d long since learned that these were the worst moments of missing, when departure had been announced but had not yet begun. Things sat innocently in their positions. She had betrayed the objects around her, made some tragic admission that all the love which their mute existence bore toward her was not enough to stay her here among them. By her departure, the objects’ helplessness was terribly revealed, as was her own failure to have cared for them sufficiently. The table with its chipped green paint, the whitewashed river rocks encircling the rosebush, now looked so stripped and defective that there was nothing to do but run away from them. She had endured this awful juncture dozens of times since marrying Johnny. Soon enough, she knew, the spasms of sweaty effort would begin, too chaotic and detailed to leave room for sadness. Boxes would be packed, the furnishings disappear, servants cry and press her hands, and somewhere amidst it all, grief would give way to anticipation. The heart was corrupt in healing. New things would absorb her; she’d reckon their superiority or inferiority to the ones left behind, learn their quirks, submit to their fascination, allow them to fill her existence until she could very nearly forget that she would leave these things, too, in their turn. It was horrible, all of it.
Still, if she’d never left West Texas, following Johnny, Althea would not have known that the world cannot be foreseen. Each new place was unimaginable from the point of view of the one before. Once she left, the places changed behind her, too. Even Texas. For example, Texan skies were the only skies on earth with a sense of humor: row on row of lambs hanging from blue rafters on invisible threads. She hadn’t understood that until she left them, and saw that northern skies were full of dread, tropic ones were often stark white, and the skies over Kashmir’s high mountains were silken, tinted. How could all this shrink down to numbers?
She would stay at the Christunanda Convent, which she’d twice visited. It was a few hours’ train ride north of the city. Johnny could go away knowing she was quite happy and protected. No servants to manage, no work beyond strolling very slowly along the warm shadowy paths of the banana plantation like a glamorous invalid. The notion of sleeping in a bed from which rules excluded Johnny felt a little unwifely, but it could hardly be called improper in a nunnery. It was a temporary measure, she reminded herself.
Mère Anandi, the mother superior, was French. Had she been Indian, Althea would have been afraid to stay at her convent. But foreigners understood about boiling the water, and understood each other’s foreignness. Mère Anandi had a standing invitation to all foreign ladies, tea on the first Sunday of each month. She was not judgmental like the British wives; Althea wondered what kind of life she’d had before renouncing it. She offered cookies baked with lard and sugar, fat red bananas, and Darjeeling tea that was never quite strong enough. Althea spooned in gray sugar coarse as gravel, added lots of grassy milk from the convent’s cows, but the tea’s thin, overdelicate edge could not be blunted and usually gave her a headache as soon as she tasted it.
On both of Althea’s visits, Mère Anandi had not failed to welcome her to spend a quiet week or two at the convent, any time Johnny was out doing field work, but so far Althea had refused. She did not want to assert her solitude while Johnny was out of town. It would be disloyal—her place was at home, waiting for his return.
Convent guests lived for free, and what Althea and Johnny saved on food, rent, and servants would pay Johnny’s airplane fares to Moscow and Mongolia. Living on the economy, Althea had always managed to stretch Johnny’s oil company money and his university grants for nearly twice as long as they’d ever been intended to last. Sending him off to the Altai would be a brilliant twist, a final flourish, justifying her scrimping that sometimes made Johnny so impatient, bordering on insulted. “This tea bag’s dead. What are you saving the money for? I can always get another grant.” She didn’t know how to begin to explain to him how doubling his money made her feel: as if she had earned it over again herself, by her own intelligence.
She took it as a sign that the plan fell together so perfectly in her head. At noon when Johnny came home for lunch she could not wait. The idea burst out of her mouth as soon as he set foot on the verandah, even though he looked dirty and tired, in no mood for major announcements. “I heard on the radio the biggest earthquake just happened in Mongolia, and they’re sending scientists to study it, and I’ve figured out how you can go!”
“Are you crazy? It’s winter there,” Johnny said.
She followed him into the bedroom. He started taking off his shirt. While his face was hidden in khaki she found courage to go on. “The whole Altai range was lifted, I know, but tell me again how you calculate the weight of mountains.”
“Estimate, not calculate,” Johnny said.
“But they say they know,” Althea said.
“They don’t. They’re only guessing.”
Her ankles, then her calves began to quiver, as if Huaraz were rumbling up through this very ground. “Why don’t you go? You’ll notice something important they won’t see. How something falls in, or fits together.”
In the morning, Johnny had woken up repeating her words—how something fits together—and he raised his voice, imitating hers. “The world is not falling in, it’s fitting together. Actually, Althea, you have summed up the ideological mistake of a generation of geologists.” Althea raised her eyebrows, but Johnny did not elaborate. She could not blame him. He was embattled; even the great Richter himself had once dismissed his work. Since then he had hidden his light. She always told him she was certain of his greatness. He could have done his research as part of a team in California, but after Richter’s remark he’d rather make his own mistakes, and take all the credit.
Now Johnny rolled on his side and pulled her leg over his waist. His arms were so strong they still frightened her, even after four years of marriage. His strength had never understood Althea; it would never allow her image to inhabit its density. Just before eight in the morning, it was already hot, airless under the mosquito net. “ We fit together,” he said, “don’t we?”
“Of course,” Althea said.
He sat up. She raised herself on her elbow and watched while he carefully rolled the condom onto his penis. “Now,” he said. She lay down again, envying him the automatic solace he found in her body. It gave her a sad, distant feeling that this joy did not seem to be in her power to offer as her own gift, but came from beyond her and went to him directly. And it had so much more import for Johnny than any of the more painstaking, maneuvered offerings she could ever make with words. He stole warmth from her flesh without the mediation of her soul. She didn’t speak. She had to enter her own state where she could feel the pleasure of hurtling forward, abandoning herself so as to find where Johnny was, a place of warmth such as there was none in her. So as not to be left alone, after she reached him, at last she looked back at herself to discover Althea, whom Johnny loved.
