The rains were on their way. Weeping egrets turned the ridge and circled overhead. You never heard anything like it. We filed outside to watch. After a while we stood around kicking the grass, watching the prayer sayers, the wheel turners. We found ourselves at loose ends, having sold all the vans to a cortege of wealthy but exhausted French trekkers who were delighted to get them. Chartreuse had come across one of them in prison. They hadn’t committed any serious crimes, he’d explained, just a little hashish, but their vans had been confiscated. (I’d seen those trekkers, though. They looked like junkies to me.) Chartreuse lay on the grass now, smoking. All he wanted to do was to lie outdoors and look at the sky. You couldn’t blame him. He pulled himself up when he saw me. He was wearing a backpack.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
He shrugged and took a death-defying pull on his cigarette. “I thought I’d join the trekkers. They need a cook. I don’t know.
I’m fed up.” His yellow eyes looked through me. “I’m sure Wolfgang can manage on his own, eh?”
I tried to hide my disappointment. “Yes. Yes, I guess he can.”
He chewed his lip with savage intent. “It was Wolfgang who put the police on to me, you know.”
“Chartreuse, it could have been anyone.”
“No, but it wasn’t. They told me at the station.”
“Chartreuse, let’s be fair. Everyone suspected you.” I hung my head. “Even me.”
His eyes narrowed. “He will get his. What goes around comes around, n’est-ce pas?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned …”
We looked together, up the hill and past the waterfall, at our profound memories. I’d been so fond of Wolfgang at the beginning. But now, when things had gotten to the crunch, well, it just seemed to me that he’d shown himself a really small and bitter person. And Reiner, who I’d found despicable, had turned out to be a decent human being, with values.
Harry came bounding up the path. “Want to take a walk over to the little orphanage?” He looked at us over his armload of short-legged jeans. “I thought I’d give these to the children in the orphanage.”
“Good idea.” I loved Harry. I just did.
“I’ll help you carry them.” Chartreuse lifted them from him.
“Want to come, Claire?”
“No. No, thanks,” I said. I wanted to get a couple of things straight with Blacky, this time without an audience. “Later.”
“Later.” Chartreuse winked and he gave me a special look, filled with charm and meaning. He feels good about himself, I remember thinking.
Blacky, however, thought the orphanage might need him to do some checkups. “I’ll just run over there with Harry and
Chartreuse,” he told me happily. But he said it like he was asking my permission. I held my nuggets of turquoise and garnet and rolled them around in my hands. I was sorry that he felt that way. But I had always wanted to own him. That was my dynamic with him. I smiled. I could wait. He continued to stand there. Perhaps he felt he’d gone too far. Isolde came up. She regarded the wedge of silence between Blacky and me. “Look, you two,” she swung her long black hair around and pulled it into a knot, giving an exasperated sigh, “we’re stuck here for a week, probably, anyway. You might as well make up.”
Reiner marched up the road with his clipboard and a bounce to his step. “Plenty of rooms at the Kailesh Hotel. Daisy, I reserved first pick for you.”
“Lovely!” Her abundance of Tupelo’s jewelry dangled, Cleopatra-like, between her breasts. She would have to wear all of it at once.
“Looks like we’ll be here for a while.” Reiner leered at her, thinking of later. “Once the rains start, the roads turn to fudge,” he reminded us. He looked skeptically up at the dirty sky. “Pity about the light.”
“Doesn’t matter now.” Wolfgang sucked a tooth. “It will be a superb ending with Tupelo’s death. We couldn’t have made up a better one. I can hardly wait to get back and start cutting the film. Isn’t there any other way out?”
Reiner lifted his new Tibetan bonnet and wiped away some pearls of sweat. “No chance. There’s just Hula’s husband and his coal truck. We’d all hardly fit. They’re letting it make its delivery and once it heads back to Delhi, they’ll be shutting the road.”
“So how do we get—”
Not to be interrupted, he gave a small authoritative toot on his whistle. “There’s a state bus that comes through next Sunday. By then the weather should relent. That will take us as far as Delhi. From there we can all fly home to Munich. Make sure you’ve
taken all your gear from the vans as I’m giving the keys to that Pierre fellow in an hour. As we are all determined to leave as soon as possible, when the pass becomes clear I shall purchase tickets for everyone.” He took hold of Daisy’s hand. She snuggled up to him. “All right,” she agreed.
I walked over to the half circle that was now our diminished caravan. For a moment I stood outside it, not liking to go in. I opened the door. It reeked of Harry’s spoiled bananas. I had to get the rest of my things. Very quickly, I piled my meager wardrobe and my toothbrush in my largest lightweight bag. I took my best Kuchi dress off the hook, my dwindled box of personal toiletries from the shelf. I went to Blacky’s van. I took Tupelo’s last unopened bar of soap.
I looked around for the last time. There was a refrigerator that had broken down in Greece, a sink that had broken down in Turkey, a bookcase over the bed, and a table, if you wanted it, to raise up and peg on the floor. I touched the knife grooves in the worn red plastic plates, put my cheek against the orange plaid curtains that had let in so much light. I kept my money underneath the false bottom of a crock. It was that harmless-looking yogurt pot I’d picked up in the Khyber Pass. I put it in Frau Zwekl’s soap box with the rosary beads and the false teeth, shut the lid, and took it with me. Several bottles of scotch snuggled comfortably in a pile of Pakistani scarves. The trekkers would be happy to find them, all right. You couldn’t take them past the border. Under a cushion I saw what I was looking for. I’d left my blue notebook in here. I took it. Who knew. Someday when I was old, maybe people would wonder what it was like when I was young; the things that had happened here and on the way, our journey into what would be the evening of Aquarius. I picked the bananas up gingerly. I went outside and felt the beginning of the soft rain on my face. It was just a mist. I walked the bananas to the dump. The eagles swooped down instantly and tore them apart with gusto.
I had an idea. I took out Frau Zwekl’s false teeth and brought them over to Hula’s father. It was a long shot, but … I placed them on the table in front of him. You’d have thought I laid out the crown jewels. Conversation stopped throughout the place. “You’ll have to wash them,” I began but it was too late. He’d picked them up and already stuck them in his mouth. I waited. I thought, Surely they won’t fit. The old man continued to sit there but he refused to open his mouth again. That was it, the joint was shut. I got up. “Well,” I said, “good luck.” I walked away.
Blacky was coming in the door.
“Claire,” he said. “Sit down.”
“What?” At that moment I knew he was going to ask me to marry him. He looked so earnest.
I turned on him my most bewitching smile.
He seemed a little short of breath. “They. Wolfgang. Someone stole the film canisters.”
I was still smiling. “What?”
“The film,” he choked. “They’ve stolen it! Every can.”
“Who! Who’s stolen it?”
“If we knew that!” he snapped.
I turned and looked out the open window. The waterfall tumbled down. Whatever had happened there’d always been that one thing that had given justification to it all: the film. Whatever had happened. I shook my head. A series of pictures, months, scenes from our journey like a shuffle of cards floated past me. All we’d been through! I looked up at Blacky. He looked away. Someone was shouting out in the street. It was Wolfgang. He seemed to be throwing a fit.