The Promised Land Read online

  Kolkata

  Feast of the Sacrifice

  I watch the King and his courtiers on television as they peg a ram to the floor and slice its throat, then leave the house for a walk. A gluey layer of blood has settled on the cobblestones, and the air smells of scorched fur and lemons. The silence is punctuated by the odd death-bleat in the distance. The medina is entirely deserted: the prayer sounded a while ago and everyone’s busy eating. Growing accustomed to the city, I start to fool myself. I’m not a tourist – no: I’m a local; at the very least, a dignified semi-local. An hour into my walk, I notice I’m being followed. I look over my shoulder: there’s a boy leaning against a lamppost twenty paces behind me. He couldn’t be older than eleven or twelve. He shadows me for a while, then, appearing to lose patience, quickens his pace to catch up to me. His hand clamps my wrist, abnormally strong. ‘You’re lost,’ he tells me; ‘you should go home.’ Gently, but firmly, as though returning a lost sheep to the fold, he delivers me to my doorstep. He asks for a modest reward. I pay him. He shakes my hand. He has to go: his mother and sisters are waiting for him. At that exact moment, three young men in their twenties appear from around the corner, giggling and singing as they pass a pipe back and forth. The boy eyes them disdainfully. ‘They are not men!’ he exclaims. Then, pointing a finger at the sky, as though to invoke some higher authority: ‘Men must work hard, or stay little forever.’

  Fez

  Postcard from the Cape

  for Declan Ryan and Rachael Allen

  Few feet

  tread the tired timber floors

  of the old Observatory now, a couple

  of tourists perhaps, or the odd

  data analyst skulking in slippers

  down the dark musty corridors.

  The security guard is reading The Pleasure Tube,

  ‘an exhilarating conspiracy aboard a sexy starship’.

  There’s no

  star-gazing tonight and the clouds

  stalk the yellow moon like hungry hyenas.

  In 1820, when the Cape had that wet

  smell of fever about it, Fearon Fallows

  decided his work should devour his life,

  and six years after his wife and children had died

  he installed his telescope atop Slangkop,

  or Snake Hill,

  as the Dutch colonists called it.

  It’s getting late, and the runaways

  from the Valkenberg have grown hungry.

  Little to eat today, just like yesterday too …

  A few streets away, the Malay muezzin

  clears his throat for the prayer call at the mosque

  down in Salt River, past invisible lines

  no whites

  dare to cross. It’s safer indoors,

  inside panic mansions with Alsatians

  and ARMED RESPONSE signs. David Shook

  is in town – one night only! – on his way

  to the lush land of Burundi, where the districts

  are carved into mountains and the mayors

  are ‘king of the hill’. He tips an espresso

  into a tall Coke –

  ‘Haitian coffee,’ he says – and we discuss

  how travel can harden the heart, inure it

  to pity and pain … When dawn breaks,

  I go into the garden and watch Devil’s Peak

  glow like a live coal. My myopia grows worse,

  all I see is a blaze – but who needs high definition?

  If I close my eyes, the whole world feels like home.

  Through the Rockies

  It’s my third sleepless dawn on the Zephyr

  and I’m in Iowa. Outside my window,

  a gopher tunnels out of its purgatory

  and wobbles across the sugary snow.

  Over the aisle, I watch Tanika crush

  grains as pink as the sky, then take

  a quick hit on her pipe. She’s on the run.

  Her six kids are somewhere in Indiana;

  the last time she spoke to her mother,

  the old woman shouted, ‘No good

  comes of breeding with niggers and spics,’

  meaning the fathers of Tanika’s children.

  ‘I wish I was in The Wizard of Oz,’

  Tanika mumbles as we slice

  through the American vastness.

  Everyone here has one foot in life

  and the other in the future, or the past –

  usually in the past. Jane, who looks and sounds

  like Jessica Lange, reminisces about years

  spent working in the circus: ‘It was

  the ’70s. I was living in England,

  and you really needed a union card

  to get any work as an actress,’

  so she spent five gruelling months

  touring the continent on an elephant.

  Her raw tongue licks the edge

  of her jagged teeth: ‘The dwarves

  were the worst: mean, horny things …

  ‘One night, two of them tried to rape me,

  but the bearded lady, my friend,

  gave them a hiding they’ll never forget!’

  At Reno, Jane and the vets in their caps

  begin their week of blackjack and slots.

  We slow down before Denver

  and during a stop munch our way

  through Jane’s special brownies;

  Lenny, our conductor, plucks a steel guitar

  and yells, ‘Yo-delay, yo-delay, all aboard!’

  Later, he hands me the day’s newspaper:

  Russia’s invaded Crimea again.

  If history comes first as tragedy, second as farce,

  then what shall we call this third act

  we’re trying so hard to survive in?

  That evening, as we draw near to Chicago,

  the passengers turn in unison

  to face the horizon; I watch a burst

  of dew crystallize in the crisp, purple air,

  each droplet shining like a diamond

  till it fades away in the distance.

  ‘How pretty,’ I think. The next day, Lenny

  will tell me this could only mean one thing:

  someone was flushing the toilet.

  Brief Encounters of the Hopeless Kind

  I was running across Chicago’s Union Station

  and up and down South Canal Street,

  looking for a girl with a dog. ‘Hey, you!’

  a man by his taxi shouted, spotting

  the wild look in my eyes. ‘You high or what?’

  Well, kind of, I thought, but by then

  I was clean out of breath and, lacking paper

  and pen, or a calm, sober mind, mumbling

  a name it was proving too hard to remember.

  ‘Winnie’, or ‘Whitney,’ I’d wanted to say –

  ‘you shake me screw-loose!’ But all I had done

  at the gate where we parted, after four days

  of fast, sleepless travel, was hand her

  a card with my name, and an address

  no longer my own. She’d set her course:

  to hike the frozen spine of the Appalachians.

  No dreams of shelters from chaos for her,

  just Foxy, her dog, and the open trail …

  I kept running down the street

  till my lungs gave out, nursing the lingering

  liquorice of that last, hurried kiss,

  and the feel of her tiny frame, and the smell

  of her dreads, held in place by a chopstick.

  Later, hypnotized by the low flow of the Hudson,

  I thought of her as my half-empty Greyhound

  rattled through farmlands in New Hampshire,

  bought from the Natives, it’s said, for a roll of cloth.

  Like the granite in the distance, my mind petrified,

  while the image of Winnie, or Wendy,

  snug in the woods in her sleeping bag,

&n
bsp; recalled Francesca’s lines to the Florentine:

  ‘Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona,’

  love will see no reason, love will dig your grave.

  Snapping back in my seat, I jumped up

  and recalled the train station’s refrain:

  SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING. I wished I had.

  In the Shadow of Monadnock

  for Tomaž Šalamun

  The bronze Union soldier

  stands guard on the green.

  Behind him, the Town Hall

  where his forefathers voted

  to ‘live free or die’ is for sale.

  The Republic slides to insolvency

  and the few YES WE CAN

  stickers still in the windows

  are beginning to bleach. Spring

  loosens its hold on the rivers; the rich

  smell of rot wafts out from the leaves.

  Something moves in the shadowy pines

  that sway in the strong winds and creak

  like rusty doors in a horror film.

  A fast hammering can be heard:

  those woodpeckers know

  which tree is next to die. I sit

  on the sagging porch of Jo’s red colonial

  and watch the last ribbons of paint

  peel away from the shingles;

  there are five bedrooms inside,

  but only one is kept warm. No TV

  or radio, either: the news upsets Walter.

  Jo’s girls left long ago, off to plough

  the hard field of the City; the milk cow

  that saw them to adulthood died last year.

  New money is spreading like moss,

  while the locals are losing their homes.

  ‘It was easier once: you were born,

  you worked the land, and then

  the land worked you back into it.’

  Now the grocery bags grow thinner

  and thinner. Jo means to stick it out.

  Birds whose names elude us shatter the silence

  in a good way, maybe the best. I inhale the crisp

  New England air and exhale a panegyric.

  Jo smiles, tells me quite a few folk up here

  are suffering from asthma. They can thank

  Pennsylvania for that, she says: it’s the dust

  carried north from the coal mines on the breeze.

  ‘There’s hatred, envy and greed afoot in our world,’

  wrote an old Saxon poet, ‘and this is where you must live:

  among thieves and killers.’ Back in the square,

  I stare into the dead coins of the soldier’s eyes

  and almost hear the trumpets. There’s nowhere to run.

  In the Catskills

  for Zinzi

  We were trapped in a town called Liberty.

  Our cabin lay on top of a hill, where the snow

  kept us caged for entire weeks at a time.

  Down the dirt road, past a couple of bends,

  lay the hamlet of Neversink, which of course

  had been drowned by a reservoir. It was hard

  to think of anything human around us as serious;

  all man had built reeked of failure and rust.

  We lived amidst the ruined remnants

  of a Yankee frontier town – slumbering mills,

  silent railroads, idle factories, gutted houses,

  a few drowsy strip malls … It was the nonsensical

  heart of Angry America, where descendants

  of Unionists proudly flew Dixie flags

  to spite the dark man in the White House.

  The one half-decent bite to eat was at Stu’s:

  a blue Kullman diner formerly on 49th and 11th

  that got pushed out by franchises, then

  exiled upstate on a flatbed, never to return.

  When the mulch plant shut down, the sons

  and daughters of Liberty debated at length

  the great prospects before them: casinos

  or fracking; but the rich second home-owners

  fought the oilmen and won, so casinos it was.

  ‘Liberty, son,’ an old schoolteacher told me,

  ‘is where the past comes to die.’ Ain’t it funny to think,

  my beloved, that this was where our future began?

  III

  * * *

  History is my only country.

  ANTAL SZERB

  The Other Achilles

  ‘My mother says I have a choice’

  The world can do without my name.

  Give me a happy backwoods: servants,

  a palace, fleets, taxes, maybe a pet too;

  a life well lived as any. Pride, I fear,

  is pointless. There are no kings, or pawns,

  only squares, and a limited number of moves.

  Tell me, mother: how long is everlasting?

  Not long enough. Let Troy and Greece

  fight on without me; no doubt they will. I,

  on the other hand, once buried, will fertilize

  the green that grows around their ruins, and

  like ivy choke their stones, until they crumble:

  crumbling, turn to sand.

  Atticus

  for Mark Ford

  Unlike many

  of the sad schemers Rome birthed in his time,

  Titus Pomponius Atticus is best remembered

  for how he died, and not for what he tried

  and failed to conquer …

  Indeed,

  the Gods never abandoned him, as they did

  Cicero, Caesar, Brutus and Anthony – yet

  to say he played both sides and lived

  a long and contented life

  at the expense of others

  would be terribly unjust; in times of need,

  friend and foe alike found food and drink

  under his canopy, and though he shook

  many a hand,

  none were ever greased.

  Seventy-seven and still untouched by scandal,

  an ulcer took hold of him, and took him hard.

  After three months spent in bed, old Titus,

  stoic as ever, placed a hand

  over his loins

  and whispered: ‘enough’. That was when

  he decided to die, to starve himself

  until his life slipped from his lips.

  When his fast was in its second day,

  the fever,

  as though frightened by the man’s stubbornness,

  left him suddenly. Begged by wife and friends

  to relent, Titus submerged himself in silence,

  and for three days bore his hunger

  with the utmost dignity,

  until death took him on the fifth. Many wept

  at the sight of his litter leaving his home

  on its way to the Appian. Little else is known

  of Titus, who set still less store by his words,

  and history,

  as if to reward him, has ensured none are remembered –

  allowing, by that, no shadow to fall on his memory,

  as often befalls a great many of those we hear about,

  who gossip without a stray thought for posterity.

  Patience

  The old Roman emperors knew a thing or two about exile. On discovering a poet who had taken too many liberties, or a relative grown uncomfortably popular, they selected an island, ideally somewhere sunny: Africa, perhaps, or a rocky outpost off the coast of Sicily; then, having chosen a location that was suitably isolated, they dispatched their prisoner there. At first, life wasn’t so bad for the new exile. Letters from friends came and went, and slaves catered to their every need. The climate was pleasant; the villa spacious; their allowance ample; and their stay, they were assured, only temporary. The exile was allowed to roam freely within the village. Occasionally, they even made friends. As the years went by, a routine of small pleasures would help to mitigate the exile’s nostalgia,
making their longing almost bearable. Languishing in indolence, however, the exile would grow to look upon his changeless fate as worse than death itself. Finally, when the Emperor saw that sufficient time had elapsed, the soldiers were dispatched: small handfuls of men-at-arms who, washing ashore on the island under cover of darkness, would bring the long vacation to its promised end.

  The Crisis of the Third Century

  They were dying, the Romans, and they knew it:

  fewer sandals took to their roads, and wars

  were getting pricier, bloodier; less satisfying, too.

  Once fear got hold of the Romans,

  it never released them. Their solution was walls,

  higher walls: the blind ecstasy of mortar and brick.

  The more spirited ones threw lavish parties,

  orgies – their spirits sinking as each of their guests

  abandoned sinful pleasures for the sanctity of the Cross.

  Some blamed it all on the polluting barbarians,

  and edicts were passed to outlaw the mixing of races.

  Of all their flawed remedies, it would be their last.

  The Pagan’s Lament

  ‘The Christians burned down my father’s school

  and across the sea, by the mouth of the Nile,

  they butchered a colleague of his in her classroom.

  I’m told she was beautiful: curly locks, full lips

  and a mind as bodacious. Unlike my old father,

  I keep my opinions to myself; my husband

  fervently believes in a God who some

  describe as jealous, a murderer, even. My husband’s

  friends frighten me: last night they slaughtered

  a man for insisting an angel might also

  be called a nymph – one of the finer points

  of their canonical law … Today I heard my husband

  say a rational woman was a sign of decadence,

  of end times. I see dark days ahead for my kind.’

  Put Not Your Trust in Princes

  After four decades of early mornings and late nights,

  Ferdowsi had completed his epic, the Shahnameh,

  and thus he decided to visit Sultan Mahmoud,

  who’d once promised him a gold piece per couplet;