Mr. Venkatesan made a slow show of getting money out of his trouser pocket — he didn’t have any East German money, only rupees and the Canadian dollars he’d bought on the black market from the travel agent in Trinco — but the Tamils stopped him. “Our treat,” they said. “You can return the hospitality when we make it to Canada.”
Late in the evening the three men, stumbling drunk and jolly, let themselves back into the room that smelled of stale, male smells. The Algerian had come through. They were celebrating. They had forgotten the bread but remembered the beer.
That night, which was his only night in East Germany, Mr. Venkatesan got giggly drunk. And so it was that he entered the free world with a hangover. In a narrow, green mountain pass, trying not to throw up, he said goodbye to his Algerian chauffeur and how-do-you-do to a Ghanaian-born Berliner who didn’t cut the engine of his BMW during the furtive transfer.
He was in Europe. Finally. The hangover made him sentimental. Back in Trinco the day must have deepened into dusk. In the skid of tires, he heard the weeping of parents, aunts, sisters. He had looked after them as long as he could. He had done for himself what he should have ten years before. Now he wanted to walk where Shelley had walked. He wanted to lie down where consumptive Keats had lain and listened to his nightingale sing of truth and beauty. He stretched out in the back seat. When Mr. Venkatesan next opened his eyes, the BMW was parked in front of a refugee center in Hamburg.
“End of trip,” the black Berliner announced in jerky English. “Auf Wiederseben.”
Mr. Venkatesan protested that he was not a refugee. “I am paid up in full to Canada. You are supposed to put me in touch with a ship’s captain.”
The black man snickered, then heaved Mr. Venkatesan’s two shiny new bags out on the street. “Goodbye. Danke.”
Mr. Venkatesan got out of the private taxi.
“Need a cheap hotel? Need a lawyer to stay deportation orders?”
A very dark, pudgy man flashed a calling card in his face. The man looked Tamil, but not anxious like a refugee. His suit was too expensive. Even his shirt was made of some white-on-white fancy material, though his cuffs and collar were somewhat soiled.
Mr. Venkatesan felt exhilarated. Here was another of fate’s angels come to minister him out of his malady.
“The name is Rammi. G. Rammi, Esquire. One-time meanest goddamn solicitor in Paramaribo, Suriname. I am putting myself at your service.”
He allowed the angel to guide him into a rijstafel place and feed him for free.
Mr. Venkatesan ate greedily while the angel, in a voice as uplifting as harp music, instructed him on the most prudent conduct for undocumented transients. By the end of the meal, he’d agreed to pay Rammi’s cousin, a widow, a flat fee for boarding him for as long as it took Rammi to locate a ship’s captain whose business was ferrying furtive cargoes.
Rammi’s cousin, Queenie, lived in a row house by the docks. Rammi had the cabdriver let them off a block and a half from Queenie’s. He seemed to think cabdrivers were undercover immigration cops, and he didn’t want a poor young widow bringing up a kid on dole getting in trouble for her charity.
Though Queenie had been telephoned ahead from a pay phone, she was dressed in nothing more formal than a kimono when she opened her slightly warped front door and let the men in. The kimono was the color of parrots in sunlight and reminded Mr. Venkatesan of his last carefree years, creeping up on and capturing parrots with his bare hands. In that glossy green kimono, Queenie the landlady shocked him with her beauty. Her sash was missing, and she clenched the garment together at the waist with a slender, nervous fist. Her smooth gold limbs, her high-bouncing bosom, even the stockingless arch of her instep had about them so tempting a careless sensuality that it made his head swim.
“I put your friend in Room 3A,” Queenie said. “3B is less crowded but I had to put the sick Turk in it.” She yelled something in German which Mr. Venkatesan didn’t understand, and a girl of eight or nine came teetering out of the kitchen in adult-sized high heels. She asked the girl some urgent questions. The girl said no to all of them with shakes of her braided head.
“We don’t want the fellow dying on us,” Rammi said. Then they said something more in a Caribbean patois that Mr. Venkatesan didn’t catch. “God knows we don’t want complications.” He picked up the two bags and started up the stairs.
3A was a smallish attic room blue with unventilated smoke, fitted with two sets of three-tier bunks. There were no closets, no cupboards, and on the bunk that Rammi pointed out as his, no bed linen. Four young men of indistinguishable nationality — Asia and Africa were their continents — were playing cards and drinking beer.
“Okay, ’bye,” Rammi said. He was off to scout ship captains.
When Rammi left, despite the company, Mr. Venkatesan felt depressed, lonely. He didn’t try to get to know where the men were from and where they were headed which was how he’d broken the ice in back room dormitories in Tuticorin. One man spat into a brass spittoon. What did he have in common with these transients except the waiting?
By using his bags as a stepladder, he was able to clamber up to his allotted top bunk. For a while he sat on the bed. The men angled their heads so they could still stare at him. He lay down on the mattress. The rough ticking material of the pillow chafed him. He sat up again. He took his jacket and pants off and hung them from the foot rail. He slipped his wallet, his passport, his cloth bag stuffed with foreign cash, his new watch — a farewell present from Father van der Haagen — between the pillow and the mattress. He was not about to trust his cell mates. A little after the noon hour all four men got dressed in gaudy clothes and went out in a group. Mr. Venkatesan finally closed his eyes. A parrot flew into his dream. Mr. Venkatesan thrilled to the feathery feel of its bosom. He woke up only when Queenie’s little girl charged into the room and ordered him down for lunch. She didn’t seem upset about his being in underwear. She leaped onto the middle bunk in the tier across the room and told him to hurry so the food wouldn’t have to be rewarmed. He thought he saw the flash of a man’s watch in her hand.
Queenie had made him a simple lunch of lentil soup and potato croquettes, and by the time he got down to the kitchen it was no longer warm. Still he liked the spiciness of the croquettes and the ketchup was a tasty European brand and not the watery stuff served back home.
She said she’d already eaten, but she sat down with a lager and watched him eat. With her he had no trouble talking. He told her about St. Joe’s and Father van der Haagen. He told her about his family, leaving out the part about his sister running wild in the hills with hooligans, and got her to talk about her family too.
Queenie’s grandfather had been born in a Sinhalese village the name of which he hadn’t cared to pass on — he’d referred to it only as “hellhole”—and from which he’d run away at age seventeen to come as an indentured laborer to the Caribbean. He’d worked sugar cane fields in British Guiana until he’d lost a thumb. Then he’d moved to Suriname and worked as an office boy in a coconut oil processing plant, and wooed and won the only daughter of the proprietor, an expatriate Tamil like him who, during the War, had made a fortune off the Americans.
He tried to find out about her husband, but she’d say nothing other than that he’d been, in her words, “a romantic moron,” and that he’d hated the hot sun, the flat lands, the coconut palms, the bush, her family, her family’s oil factory. He’d dreamed, she said, of living like a European.