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Literary Review
The Brainfever Bird
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Exclusive, pre-publication extracts from I. Allan Sealy's forthcoming novel, The Brainfever Bird, which is being published later this month.
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Lev Repin is a bioweapons researcher in the old Russia come loose in the new. He brings his special knowledge to India to sell, but last night on the road from the airport he was robbed of his briefcase at gunpoint. Afterwards the taxi driver brought him to the Serai, near Delhi Gate.
HE wakes into Sunday.
His stomach turns over: the briefcase is gone. There's a suitcase under the bed he recognizes. The shoes are his. The briefcase is gone.
He has a number to call. But he has no currency. It's Sunday, the banks are closed. He left his passport at the desk as surety. He has a number to call and nothing to show. And anyway it's Sunday. He had planned to rest up, so that's what he should do. It's gone. He falls asleep again into terrible heat, nightmares.
The next time he wakes the heat is down a fraction, maybe two degrees. He sits on his bunk with the door open and stares. The ground outside is powdered brick, red. He needs to use the toilet. He checks the window, padlocks the door and goes in search. It's in the bathhouse block. He should bathe too, wash the sweat off. He goes back for the Serai towel, a large tea towel with rust spots, but clean.
Hunger. Can he still be hungry with the briefcase gone? It's late afternoon, judging from the sun.
He eats an omelette and buttered bread at the cafeteria, parting with a ten-dollar bill. Till tomorrow, the manager assures him, piously putting it into a separate drawer. The omelette has green chillies in it that he ferrets out after the first burn and pushes to one side of the plate. He drinks mineral water, takes the bottle with him. Checks the padlock on the cabin and goes for a walk.
Across the main street the shops and offices have their steel shutters rolled down. Most of the larger signs are in English, others in both English and a language he takes to be Hindi. He pictures the young St Isaak struggling with the script. There's a smell of waste, human waste alongside vegetable decay. The people are all a whole head shorter, but then he's tall in Russia too. They walk differently, a slackness he puts down to the heat. The men have their shirtfronts out. The saris are not as rich as in magazines. Drab is how the mass looks; individuals stick out freshly bathed, scented with oils and talcum.
He wanders past the old city gate, marooned by itself on an island in the traffic. There's a pavement book sale in progress on one side of the main street beyond the gate. The books, mostly in English, are laid out on the pavement. He sees two copies of Anna Karenin from the Raduga Press. Off to the left are narrow lanes that appear to tunnel into the past. An enormous tree blocks half of one and rises four storeys.
People stare at him with frank curiosity; curious, he stares back. Highway robbers, he wants to think. But they look so humdrum and preoccupied with their own narrow lives he's not convinced. Where the books end there's a footbridge over the main road but he's inclined to follow the pedestrians picking their way through the traffic to the other side. It's a strange press of humans and machines and cattle. Mingling with them he falls into a black hole of thought.
Sitting in the consular Volvo, waiting. Outside the Asian school, waiting to pick up the consul's children, he feels the street go still, the shops round about go dead. This is how a city sounds after a successful delivery of Kurile-E. Not a roof tile touched, but a schoolyard gone absurdly quiet. Peter a ghost city where the traffic lights change from red to green and back over and over. A whole office block where the computers have switched to the screen saver of a journey through deep space.
Shepherded across by the crowd Lev comes safely to the other side. In the distance he sees a fortress of red stone. It rises out of a field and curves away seemingly for miles. He's drawn towards it but the heat and traffic defeat him. As he's turning back he sees a great mosque of matching red across the way, the dome an anchored cloud, the minarets stone kites, soaring. Some other time. Early morning maybe, when it's cooler, less crowded.
He walks back on the other side of the wide street, past chemists and television stockists, Sunday-closed, till he's back at the old city gate. The gate is a monument now, protected by a high iron fence. Its large uneven blocks of grey stone are fringed with red, the red of the fort and the mosque. Life flows around it: the old city wall in which it once stood has been breached on either side to let the traffic through. Here where he stands was once wall. Not fifty metres from a police station, the pavement has been occupied by squatting teastalls and primitive eateries.
There's a park at Delhi Gate. Lev finds an empty bench under a tree. The locals are sitting out the afternoon heat. A shoeshine boy comes by. Alex's age, maybe. Lev shakes his head and shuts his eyes. He stays that way for a long time going over the night's events, the journey, the leavetaking at Peter. Someone sits down at the other end of the bench but Lev keeps his eyes shut. The person leaves.
There's something tapping at his shoe, a rat gnawing at his foot. He wakes with a shout. It's the shoeshine boy again, still young enough to expect fun on the job. The boy backs off startled, scolded by other sitters as he goes.
Lev looks around. The lawns have begun to fill up with men taking their leisure. A blue-turbanned journeyman squats down beside a client and grips the man's ankle. He twists the foot each way, plucks at the tendon and tentatively prods the calf. He massages his way up the trunk to neck and arms then sits the man up like a rag doll and starts on his head. Lev watches with interest. He feels his watching being watched by others. The masseur is aware of the crosscurrents of interest. He too begins to look at Lev as he works, hamming it up. Cheap and healthy, his eyes say.
`No good.'
The woman's voice carries great authority. Lev turns his head. On the bench beside him is a partridge in a cage.
`No good,' Laiq repeats in his clear alto and gathers up his birdcage as if to say he will have no more to do with this travesty.
`No?'
`No,' Laiq says, and places the cage in his lap. `I know, I am barber. I cut hairs. I give massage. Real massage. Not... ' And he shakes a loose finger at the grinning man on the grass.
Lev stands up. Laiq is on his feet so fluently the decision to leave could have been his.
`Massage is... ' Laiq recalls when they have fallen into step, continuing a discussion begun centuries ago, `science.'
Lev hears signs, then works it out. Science. He must listen with special care to this other English.
`Massage is art. Not for the donkeys, the owls. Doctor of Massage, MD. Study muscles, one-one muscle, upistair, downistair, head to leg. My shop here, just only next building. You are Englishman?'
`Russian.' Lev is not sure why he's going along except he feels he's owed something after last night. Some discharge for the bile that's been building all day. He won't even think about the briefcase. Possibly what he's looking for is distraction.
`Russian!' Laiq is impressed. `Engineer?'
`Scientist.' Consular driver no more. Immediately the briefcase alarm sounds. Gone. Résumé, letters of introduction, papers, briefing notes, slides, the works.
`I also read science.' Signs. `Physics, chemistry, biology. But no jobs. Lot many science graduates. Too much scientists in India. Saloon.' He points.
Lev looks up. There's no visible shop sign. Is this a hoax? Another holdup? For some reason he flashes back to the pastel drawing under St Isaak's feet: a large red horse. The barber unlocks his shutters and folds them back. Then he unlocks the inner door; the crossbolt squeaks as he works the leaf up and down. Laiq hangs the birdcage on its hook and something in the act reassures Lev. The barber fills the doorway, passes through and turns.
`Well-come.'
Lev sees the high chair, the mirror, the framed vignettes of men's heads, and is persuaded.
`Please.' Laiq draws back the chair.
Lev settles into it, his long legs finding purchase on a concealed footrail. Laiq washes his hands at the basin and pats them dry on a cloth that might be his shaving towel. He comes and stands behind Lev. For a moment his hands shape the air around Lev's head as if deciding where to begin. Then they settle on the crown together, with the same calm authority as the voice. Massage is language, they state, its structure universal. All skeletons are one. But muscles overlay the universal skeleton with a grammar whose elements must be discovered afresh with every skull.
The Brainfever Bird, I. Allan Sealy, Picador, Rs. 425.
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