The Life to Come. Michelle De Kretser

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СКАЧАТЬ soap?” he would suggest. “Desiccated coconut?” His gray hair, flattened with something like oil, was combed back from his forehead in a style Cassie associated with young men setting off to fight for the Spanish Republic; it brought old, lost causes to mind.

      In the far corner of the shop, a door led to the storeroom. A length of reddish cloth banded with gold that might have been sari fabric hung in front of the door. The shopkeeper noticed Cassie looking at it. “My wife made the curtain,” he said. “A door without a curtain is like a person without clothes.” His oiled hair gave off an odor as he stood beside Cassie in the narrow aisle between the shelves. That top note was followed by the smell of his scalp. Cassie was unable to decide whether these scents were unpleasant or exotic.

      “My curry-leaf plant died,” she said. “Do you think I overwatered it?”

      “What to do?”

      Relaying this to Ash, Cassie mimicked the gesture that accompanied the Ashfield Tamil’s stock phrase—the wrist twisted sharply, “like a spin bowler.” She also said, “His shoes don’t go with the rest of him. They’re the kind with Velcro fastenings.”

      “They’re cheaper,” said Ash. He was too polite to add, Obviously.

      The shopkeeper wasn’t a refugee, Cassie told Ash. Two of his children had migrated to Sydney, and he had followed with his wife. “So it was quite easy for you to come here?” Cassie had asked, pleased. She clung to an idea of Australia as a place where kindness prevailed over expediency. It had rarely been true in her lifetime, but was one more creed that had emerged from the rainbow valley, like the belief that the human race would tire of shopping. The Ashfield Tamil repeated, “Easy,” in a neutral tone as if hearing the word for the first time. Cassie remembered something her Viennese grandmother used to say: “The worst thing is, we are required to be grateful.”

      Cassie always came back from the Spice Mart with another segment of the shopkeeper’s “story”—that was what she called it when talking to Ash. The Ashfield Tamil had three sons. The middle one was still in Sri Lanka, although his parents pleaded with him to leave. He was a teacher in a seaside town; in Australia, he would have to drive a taxi or clean hotels like his brothers. “What to do?” asked his father, and Cassie echoed him, twisting her wrist. Whenever she mentioned the Tamil, Ash remembered his dream of the wardrobe. Cassie’s interest in the man mystified him. To Ash, people were not figures in a story but subjects in history. He was familiar with the historical sequence that had brought a Tamil civil servant from Sri Lanka to the counter of a shop in the west of Sydney.

      When he said something along these lines, Cassie, postmodernly tutored, replied pertly, “Isn’t history just a set of competing stories?”

      “Not really,” said Ash.

      If someone had informed Ash that Cassie thought of him in conjunction with the shopkeeper, he would have been merely incredulous. No brain, however feverish, would ever place Ash in a paddock, not even disguised as furniture and in a dream. Yet the connection persisted in Cassie’s mind, not just because the two men were the only Sri Lankans she knew, but because she secretly believed that they had entered her life to alter its course. Her relations with each had an atmosphere of inevitability. She was aware that these fateful beings were partly her own invention, but that didn’t diminish their power.

      As if he had peered into her thoughts, Ash told her, “Your Ashfield friend dreams of improvement—all immigrants do. You and I, on the other hand, would like to be more fully what we are. The fulfillment of the will is an old aim, the fulfillment of the heart a modern one.” The purpose of this lesson was to point out an unbridgeable gulf, as deep as history, with the Tamil on one side and Cassie and Ash on the other.

      Cassie said, “I’m so happy I was born.” Ash feared that she had heard only “You and I” and “the fulfillment of the heart.” She lay naked on top of her cold bed. It was past midnight, but Ash was not to join her yet. She said, “I want you inside me, but I want to imagine it first.” That was just silly. Ash felt himself vaguely stirred by the shell-pink luster between her parted legs, but what remained uppermost in his mind was the meeting he had to attend at nine the next morning. Cassie was an overgrown child whose emptiest make-believe had been labeled “creativity” by her parents. In Ash’s view, that indulgence was directly responsible for Cassie’s grubby habit of bringing home scraps of paper that had been written on and discarded in the street. They were stored in a tin whose germy contents she had spread before Ash like treasure. He read, “Tickets. Facial. Jackie—card. Teabags, cheese, stock cubes, matches.” The list had been trodden on and bore the muddy imprint of a heel. Cassie believed that handwriting was disappearing, and that her gleanings would one day have the status of precious artifacts. She asked Ash, “Have you ever seen your little sister’s writing?” Her chin lifted slightly when she scored a point. Ash was reminded again of his mother. His future didn’t contain Cassie, he was sure of that.

      Another thing that grated was her habit of referring to the shopkeeper as “the Ashfield Tamil.” Surely the man had a name! Then Ash thought, benevolently, She can’t pronounce it. He remembered his mother’s tongue twisting around Tamil names. Jeyarajasingham. Saravanamuttu. It would be something like that.

      Ash didn’t know that on her first visit to the shop, Cassie had said, “My name’s Cassie.” The Ashfield Tamil received this as impartially as if she had said, “The chief export of New South Wales is coal” or “There are ten mammals, four birds, and thirteen fish on the list of critically endangered Australian animals.” As time went on, it was too late to ask his name—it would have embarrassed them both. By then he was greeting Cassie warmly, saying, “Welcome! Welcome!” even though she typically bought only a few inexpensive items. One day, when there was no more of Ash’s favorite mango chutney on the shelf, the Ashfield Tamil produced two jars set aside especially for Cassie, bringing them out from under his counter with a triumphant flourish.

      “A very good brand,” he said. “MD is Marketing Department. Government guaranteed.”

      When Cassie reported this to Ash, he said he found it strange that a Tamil would have faith in anything guaranteed by the Sri Lankan government. “Other than torture and extermination, that is.”

      The shopkeeper confided his anxieties about his rivals to Cassie. The Indians had chosen their location with cunning. There were more pedestrians on the main street, and the Indian shop was also readily visible to drivers stuck in the sluggish river of traffic on Liverpool Road. Once, when Cassie had let three weeks pass before returning to him, the Ashfield Tamil asked, “Have you been going there?” The Indians sold packaged curries, he told her. “Highly convenient for young people.” Cassie took this to mean that he had forgiven her, although no disloyalty had occurred. He was as easily alarmed as a bird. When she stumbled over one of the giant packs of rice on the floor, he cried, “Please be careful! What will happen if you fall and break your leg? You will sue me!” Cassie didn’t take his fears about being ousted by the Indians seriously. Curiosity had taken her to their shop: a pastel-walled, air-conditioned box, where a girl whose plait was thicker than her wrist played with her phone and ignored Cassie. In fact, there was nothing she could have done for a customer, as the stock was brightly lit, rationally arranged, and clearly labeled. One shelf held an assortment of incense, but the shop smelled of nothing. Cassie, inclined by nature to hopefulness, felt confident that these antiseptic premises could pose no threat to the Ashfield Tamil’s chaotic, atmospheric cave.

      One morning, there was an elaborate geometric pattern on the pavement at the entrance to the Spice Mart. It had been somewhat scuffed by feet. The Ashfield Tamil told Cassie that it was a kolam, drawn in rice flour by his wife. “She didn’t lift her hand once,” he said proudly, as Cassie surveyed the intricate design. A kolam brought prosperity and protected against evil spirits. “It also provides СКАЧАТЬ