Читаем Shantaram полностью

The whisky arrived, in four small flasks, and the waiter prised the tops off two soda bottles with a brass bottle opener that hung from a chain at his belt. He let the tops bounce on the table and fall to the floor, then swished a grimy rag over the wet surface of the table, forcing us to duck and weave as the moisture spilled in all directions.

Two men approached our table from different parts of the restaurant, one to speak to Didier and the other with Modena. Ulla used the moment to lean close to me. Under the table she pressed something into my hand-it felt like a small roll of bank notes-and her eyes pleaded with me not to draw attention to it. As she talked to me, I slipped the notes into my pocket without looking at them.

‘So have you decided how long you’re going to stay?’ she asked.

‘I don’t really know. I’m in no hurry.’

‘Don’t you have someone waiting for you somewhere, or someone you should go to?’ she asked, smiling with adroit but passionless coquetry. Seduction was a habit with her. She turned that same smile on her customers, her friends, the waiters, even on Didier, whom she openly disliked-on everyone, in fact, including her lover, Modena. In the months and years that followed, I heard a lot of people criticise Ulla, some of them cruelly, for her flirtations. I didn’t agree with them. It seemed to me, as I got to know her well, that she flirted with the world because flirting was the only real kindness she ever knew or shared: it was her way of being nice, and of making sure that people-men-were nice to her. She believed that there wasn’t enough niceness in the world, and she said so, in exactly those words, more than once. It wasn’t deep feeling, and it wasn’t deep thinking, but it was right, as far as it went, and there was no real harm in it. And what the hell, she was a beautiful girl, and it was a very good smile.

‘No,’ I lied. ‘There’s no-one waiting, and no-one I should go to.’

‘And don’t you have any wie soll ich das sagen, any program? Any plan?’

‘Not really. I’m working on a book.’

During the time since the escape, I’d learned that telling people a small part of the truth-that I was a writer-provided me with a useful and flexible cover story. It was vague enough to explain extended stays or sudden departures, and the word research was comprehensive enough to account for inquiries about certain subjects, such as transport and travel and the availability of false documents, that I was sometimes forced to make. Moreover, the cover story guaranteed me a measure of privacy: the simple threat to tell people, at length, of my work in progress usually discouraged all but the most persistently curious.

And I was a writer. In Australia I’d written since my early twenties. I’d just begun to establish myself through my first published work when my marriage collapsed, I lost the custody of my daughter, and I lost my life in drugs, crime, imprisonment, and escape. But even as a fugitive, writing was still a daily custom and part of my instinctual routine. Even there, in Leopold’s, my pockets were full of notes, scribbled onto napkins, receipts, and scraps of paper. I never stopped writing. It was what I did, no matter where I was or how my circumstances changed. One of the reasons I remember those early Bombay months so well is that, whenever I was alone, I wrote about those new friends and the conversations we shared. And writing was one of the things that saved me: the discipline and abstraction of putting my life into words, every day, helped me to cope with shame and its first cousin, despair.

‘Well, Scheisse, I don’t see what’s to write about in Bombay. It’s no good place, ja. My friend Lisa says this is the place they were thinking about, when they invented the word pits. And I think it is a good place for calling a pits. Better you should go somewhere else to write about, like Rajasthan maybe. I did hear that it’s not a pits there, in Rajasthan.’

‘She’s right, Lin,’ Karla added. ‘This is not India. There are people here from every part of India, but Bombay isn’t India. Bombay is an own-world, a world in itself. The real India is out there.’

‘Out there?’

‘Out there, where the light stops.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I answered, smiling in appreciation of the phrase. ‘But I like it here, so far. I like big cities, and this is the third-biggest city in the world.’

‘You’re beginning to sound like your tour guide,’ Karla joked. ‘I think, maybe, Prabaker has been teaching you too well.’

‘I guess he has. He’s been filling my head with facts and figures every day for two weeks-quite amazing really, for a guy who left school when he was seven, and taught himself to read and write here on the streets.’

‘What facts and figures?’ Ulla asked.