Bird Read online

  Az

  O mother / what have I left out / O mother / what have

  I forgotten…

  The first time I read a manuscript, I do it quickly. Often so fast that I take in a paragraph at a glance. I am looking for shapes, as I am when I proofread, but it is the overall shape I am interested in at this stage. The big picture.

  Say that the book is a novel about an affair between a Nicaraguan Catholic nun and a young American aid worker. And say that after reading it I keep imagining low whispers, heavy breathing and moans of barely repressed, not-yet-consummated lust. Say that when I walk through Chinatown every morning, past the lane where I breathe in a whiff of air conditioning and rotting food with diesel fuel mixed in, I find myself transported to Central America and it takes me a couple of minutes to re-orientate myself. To keep walking towards SoHo and that coffee I want. If those things start happening to me, then I know it’s time to read the manuscript again. To make sure it is as good as I think it is. To make sure that my imagination isn’t running away with me.

  In many ways my mother’s story is as embroidered and unknown to me as the manuscripts I read for a living. When people tell me about her I listen out for the patterns in their stories and try to link them together in a way that makes sense. Sometimes, though, it is hard to find the relationship between the details I am given. I don’t know how to take in all the contradictions.

  Everyone thinks they know Anna better than me. Perhaps they do. All I know is that she was my beginning. She grew me into a bundle of tiny cells, into a being with a heart that fluttered delicate as a hummingbird’s wing, into a creature that swooshed around inside her body until I was so big that I had to curl up, thumb in my mouth, and wait to be born. After she died Lama Gyatsho held my hand—I loved Lama, how could I not?—and led me to her. Still in her robes, she was surrounded by incense and flowers. A grey tabby cat rubbed itself on the legs of the table that her body lay on. He let me touch her and what I remember is how cold she was. He pointed out that her skin was still good. He showed me the spot on the top of her skull where her hair had fallen out and explained to me that it was where her soul had escaped her body.

  New York was a big town but if you worked in publishing it was a small one. Rumours got around. By the time stories filtered down, people thought they knew all kinds of things about Anna, and about me. They thought my upbringing was tragic. They didn’t understand that the monks were my friends. That I had had Ian and still had Steve, and most of all Eleanor and Marilyn whom I loved—I still love.

  I recently read a novel written by a woman who knew my mother well. Charity was in her seventies and lived with her second husband on the Upper East Side, but had once been the Queen of a Himalayan kingdom. Her novel was good. It told the story of a young socialite who went to Bhutan during the sixties and married a prince: a modern fairy tale. On our third meeting, the meeting where we were to discuss a contract, Charity reminded me that she’d known me when I lived in Darjeeling. I couldn’t remember that and told her so.

  ‘You were only tiny,’ she said, ‘but that time must have affected you. The kind of books you publish. Do you have a particular interest in India?’

  ‘Not really,’ I replied. ‘I’ve only published one book on India.’

  ‘About Buddhism?’ Charity was beautiful still, despite her age. But that smile, her warmth, was getting on my nerves.

  ‘Actually it’s on the destruction of Islamic temples that have been built over Hindu temples. It’s about the BJP.’

  ‘Living there taught me that History never dies.’ She hesitated a moment before leaning forward and putting her hand over mine. ‘You look like your mother,’ she said.

  So.

  I was professional enough to pass the manuscript on to someone else. My colleague, who was younger than me, decided that Charity’s novel was too unbelievable for a book ‘written in such a realistic mode’. I didn’t tell her what she should have known, what any self-respecting editor knows: truth is always stranger than fiction. When I was a child I was told extraordinary stories. Of Rainbow Body. Of monks so fleet of foot that when they ran it was as if they were flying. Of levitation and clairvoyance. These things are no stranger to Tibetans than flying in planes, orbiting Jupiter or surfing the internet. It really is just a matter of perspective, the context, the light.

  A few days after the power blackout I began to make a list of all the books I had published. I told myself I needed to do this work for my CV, though trawling through a crappy, counterintuitive database and laboriously cutting and pasting the details of all the books I’d worked on for the last five years seemed like a lot of work to go to for a CV. Then I went back another five years, which meant asking the IT department to pull up electronic archives. I wouldn’t get those for a few days. To go back further still, I would have had to get paper files released from the warehouse. That was more bureaucracy than I could bear so I combed through my bookshelves and memory and wrote down the details of every book I remembered commissioning in those first years.

  In the end I figured I’d published a hundred or so books. Of those, fifty of them were novels. I did a nice line in erotica, published under a specialist imprint, and when I considered the dates of publication it became apparent that the less sex I was getting in real life, the more dirty books I published. (I collected them too, in fact. Of course, Lolita was considered a dirty book in the fifties. ‘Howl’ was declared obscene; the woman who wrote The Story of O, Pauline Réage, was one of France’s most respected book editors; so perhaps what I mean is I collected classy dirty books.) But it was the non-fiction that struck me. I’d published books on twentieth century history, which often meant books about war. Pearl Harbor; the imprisonment of American Japanese during wartime; the Gulags; intergenerational silence between Holocaust survivors and their children; Stalinism; the Dutch famine; a history of St Petersburg. More generally, I’d published memoirs of children in search of biological parents and the associated mother-daughter reunions.

  I figured this out over the course of a week during breaks from editing the book I had most recently signed. That book was a popular treatment of trauma theory and the author was considering the kind of repetitive behaviours enacted by people who have experienced some terrible difficulty; their elaborate metaphoric beating of head against wall to draw attention to their distress. Staring at the list before me, it finally became obvious that I would have been a perfect interviewee for the book I was working on. That belated understanding must have been what I was seeking when I began my list—a clear articulation of my work life as a map of my mother’s life and my own, my public life revealing a private fault-line. I felt mortified. The people I worked with—who knew Anna’s story and knew mine—they all must have seen what had just become obvious to me: that history defined me.

  As that realisation sank in I glanced at the absurdly stylish clock above my door. It was almost eight o’clock on a Friday night and I was still at work. I picked up the phone.

  ‘Robert? It’s Ana-Sofia…Yes, from the subway. I hope you don’t mind—is it too late to ask you out? For this evening, I mean?’ That was the first time I called him. I’d thought of him often since the blackout, but I assumed he must have given up on me by now. The relief, when he sounded happy to hear from me, was like the feeling of the first clear and sunny day at the end of a hard winter. The moment you know spring is coming.

  ‘I want to take you,’ I said, ‘to this jazz bar I like on the Upper West Side.’

  As I sat down at the table in Cleopatra’s Needle, I felt a moment’s panic. How would I recognise him? I’d first seen him in the flicker of a lighter flame. When he introduced himself, above ground, it had been chaotic and we’d only spoken briefly. All I’d really noticed was his wry smile. I certainly didn’t recognise the man who was walking towards me, my name tentatively on his lips.

  Robert was tall, quite a bit taller than me, with short, greying curly hair, brown eyes and olive skin. He looked
good, slender in a stylish brown suit. He kissed me briefly on each cheek and I felt a blush sweep up my neck; I had to look away before it fanned out across my face. Steve liked to warn me that men smelled desperation, and blushing certainly felt desperate, though Robert didn’t seem to notice. We sat together in slightly awkward silence waiting for our drinks to arrive.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he finally burst out. ‘I am…this is…well, unbelievable as this might sound, this is the first time I’ve gone out with a woman since my divorce.’ He hesitated. ‘Three years ago.’

  I laughed with relief. ‘Thank God. I was terrified you’d be smooth and I’d be a klutz.’

  ‘Well I still hope I might be a bit smooth,’ he was smiling now. ‘Getting back on the bike and all that.’ He caught his accidental innuendo. ‘Though klutz seems more likely. Obviously.’

  Steve and I had come up with a lot of dating rules during our years of singledom. Rule number one was never talk about an ex on a first date, but Robert was soon making jokes about the fact he was fifty and his ex-wife’s boyfriend was thirty. It wasn’t long before I was telling stories about my ex-husband, Jack.

  ‘He was a lawyer,’ I said. ‘And rich, and a Catholic, and a Democrat. It was like I’d nabbed my very own Kennedy.’ It was an old joke. Robert didn’t laugh.

  ‘What did you have in common?’ he asked.

  ‘We liked throwing dinner parties. We liked each other’s friends. We bought my cat Minx together, when she was a kitten, so tiny she could fit in the palm of Jack’s hand.’ I was about to launch into a description of Minx’s infinite qualities, then stopped myself. I did not know where this man stood on the crucial point of cats.

  ‘Dinner parties aren’t much to have in common. All my wife and I had in common was sex, but sex seems more to go on.’

  ‘I was young. I didn’t have a clue how you went about these things,’ I said, truthfully. ‘I was very concerned with security.’ There was another awkward pause during which, I guess, we were both deciding how much to find out about each other, and how fast.

  Robert grinned at me. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you and Jack had good dinner parties?’

  ‘They were fine.’ I was blushing again, I knew.

  Robert gestured to the drink waiter. I briefly considered another of Steve’s rules, the one about not getting drunk on the first date. ‘Please,’ I said.

  Our conversation was interrupted as a buzz opened up in the room. I felt it. We both did. The few people there—there were maybe twenty of us—became expectant. I wondered if someone famous had arrived, someone famous enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck, for that was how intense the atmosphere had become. Two seconds later Herbie Hancock walked onto the stage. It was only ten p.m. and we were in one of the city’s smaller clubs, but there was no doubt about it: that was him, dressed in a white cotton Indian shirt and drawstring pants. His very presence moved me—he hadn’t even laid a finger on his piano—and it was something more than charisma. I wondered, for a moment, if it was anything to do with his practice. Hancock was a Buddhist, lots of jazz players were; Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins.

  ‘Don’t you all be ringing your friends,’ Hancock said, wiry and fit-looking despite his years, as he surveyed the room. Half the audience had their phones to their ears. Embarrassed, they slowly put them down. ‘I’m just here for a bit of fun. Don’t get much of a chance to play without fanfare. Tonight it’s just us and the music and whoever is lucky enough to walk in that door.’ As he spoke more guys gathered behind him, double bass, guitar and saxophone.

  ‘Funky, funky!’ A young man called out.

  ‘That’s right, man,’ Hancock was a phenomenally cool old guy. He was used to people shouting non-sequiturs at him. ‘It’s going to get real funky.’ He closed his eyes and held his hands over the piano keys for a few moments before he began to play ‘Cantaloupe Island’. Laid back and gentle, the music crept up on me, triggering a memory so deep it was not even a memory. My mother bought Empyrean Isles about a year after I was born, then played it night and day until every note had entered my ears, my heart, my bloodstream; until it was a part of my chubby baby body. I was not even aware that there were tears rolling down my cheeks until Robert’s finger traced their tracks down my face. When I opened my eyes he didn’t ask me what was wrong, and I didn’t speak. We just looked at each other and smiled.

  It was a beautiful night and when the music was done we decided to walk all the way down town. We crossed Bethesda Terrace and as I looked across to the lake, I saw Ian hovering in my peripheral vision—a ghostly flicker of moonlight, perhaps—squatting down by the lake. When I first moved to New York, a few years after Ian had arrived, he and I used to hang out in Central Park. I wasn’t a kid anymore but still, he taught me to skip stones. It was hard to find the smooth flat ones you needed around the park lake, and as often as not my stone would hit the water with a heavy splash before sinking. Sometimes, just to destroy my sense of order, Ian would throw in a stone of his own, deliberately making our ripples crash into each other. It wasn’t just the lake that made me think of him but the Angel of Waters, whom Ian and Steve had seen as their guardian angel. A breeze whipped up a flurry of autumn leaves; Ian disappeared.

  ‘My mother was into jazz,’ I said to Robert. ‘She met Miles Davis and Charlie Parker.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’d want to meet my heroes,’ Robert replied.

  ‘Quite wise. My mother met Miles a couple of years after Birth of the Cool came out and he was almost too out of it to play.’

  ‘Some of those guys played better stoned. Parker did.’

  ‘Parker she loved. She sang for him once.’

  It was after two when we got back to my place. Minx was pacing, panther-like, back and forth on the kitchen bench. I went to take her into my arms but she wouldn’t have it. She jumped down and ran to the cupboard where her food was kept and began to head-butt it. I fed her while Robert made himself at home; putting on lamps, selecting music. By the time I had placated Minx, John Coltrane’s ‘Transition’ was on the stereo and Robert was on the couch.

  ‘Come here,’ he said. I put my head in his lap and my feet up. A few minutes later Minx leapt up onto my stomach and stretched out so that her chocolate brown paws and pointy chin were between my breasts and her back legs—brown also, with faint black stripes—were draped along my thighs. She purred for a moment but her rumbling stopped as she fell asleep. Robert’s head fell back as well. I closed my eyes and followed Coltrane’s hypnotic composition; notes stretched taut with a longing for love or God or both, and the insistence of his saxophone pursued me into jazz-filled sleep, the music fusing the three of us together.

  When I woke it was light, Robert and Minx were asleep and the music was still going.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said, and moved my hand over his fly.

  ‘Yes,’ he blinked sleepily. ‘It is.’ He made a half-hearted gesture of protest as I thumbed open the buttons of his waistband. ‘But Ana-Sofia, we have not even kissed yet.’

  ‘So?’ I said. (The murmur in my blood; the heat, building.) I slid further along his body, pressed myself hard against him, my breath hot against the taut cloth of his pants. ‘Anyway, we can kiss now. If you’d like.’

  ‘I am trying to be a gentleman…’ he whispered. ‘This will be too quick’—trying to disentangle himself from my fingers—‘I want it to be special.’

  ‘There will be plenty of time for special,’ I slipped off the couch and lifted my skirt. ‘But right now’—underpants sliding down my thighs—‘right now this minute, in fact’—kicking them away, across the room—‘I want quick.’

  He laughed; abandoned with a sharp outward breath his doomed attempt at romance and shifted his pants down just far enough, before fumbling, miraculously, with a condom. For a brief moment I was shocked I’d forgotten to ask—that was one thing Ian made me promise, always—and the flash of familial conversation threw me off my game. But by that time Robert was, forgive the phrase, on top o
f things. He grabbed my hips to help me take him in; I pushed my weight down, urgent, as we both gasped and suddenly, almost without warning, came. Me first, him a few seconds later.

  I fell against his chest, breathing hard, and he put his arms around me; and that was when I finally raised my mouth to his. A first kiss that was gentle and full at the same time. We kept on kissing each other for a very long time, we kissed for so long I lost track of the time. It wasn’t until Minx began to howl that we pulled apart and gathered ourselves up. Began to make plans for our first breakfast together.

  But I’ve got ahead of myself. I meant to tell you what happened before I left the office to meet Robert at Cleopatra’s. Why it was that it made me cry to hear music my mother had loved. Why it was that the night I met Robert was also the night I decided I needed to return to India.

  After Robert and I had spoken and made our plans, after I put down the phone, I went to stand in front of my bookshelves, the section where I kept books I loved best. Most of them were poetry, the closest thing I had to religion. I picked Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish’ from the shelves and I held it in my hands as if it were the I Ching.

  ‘Should I go to India? Should I seek my mother’s story?’ I asked, imagining Allen’s bearded smiling face as I did so. ‘Should I write it down?’ Then I opened it and dropped the book face down on the carpet. It fell neatly, without creasing any pages. I knelt down to see where it had landed: O mother / what have I left out / Oh mother / what have I forgotten…

  Lama Dorje Rinpoche

  The nature of existence is suffering. Nothing is constant,

  illness, old age and death are unavoidable, and no

  permanent happiness can be found in this world.

  [There is the crackle of tape. The tap-tap of a finger on the microphone. Coughing.]