Chapter 9

BARDO NOIR

It had indeed been a year since all of this took place, yet it felt far more distant than that. When, after dinner (thukpa with slow-cooked lamb and ginger), I returned to the fire, I felt grateful for how everything had fallen into place. The dog lay at my feet. Xi was doing the washing up. Outside the window by the carport stood a newly serviced Porsche 924, which I admittedly had little practical use for, but which nonetheless gave me a sense of well-being. Everything that had become my life had unfolded over the course of just four seasons.

I had gone from being nobody to being somebody in the fullest sense. All thanks to Alexandra and my new comrades in The Upperworld Movement, who had so generously given me a life to step into. Now it was not a favour but the hope of a return favour, but since my own contribution had not yet been required, I had stopped thinking about it. The fact remained, however, that we had gathered in Darjeeling with a shared purpose: to penetrate The Bureau of Elevation and expose its secrets. The motives, on the other hand, differed. Some had, like me, acted as disobedient clerks and been forced to flee. Others had, like Xi, learned enough about the operation to loathe it on moral grounds, not least because she had come to encounter a fair number of my hollow-eyed colleagues at Jazz Upstairs. Someone, like Naipul in Kathmandu, needed money to finance his idling. The majority had a personal reason to fight the bureau. Most of all Alexandra, whose son many years earlier, during a solo backpacking trip, had been persuaded to buy a journey to Shangri-La. He had never returned to the family home, whereupon Alexandra closed her medical practice, moved to the place where he was last heard from in order to gather information, search for her son and organise a resistance movement which year by year had grown stronger, but also weaker, as dispatched agents vanished into thin air.

In this way, the auction house became mine. It stood empty after the previous occupants, an American couple, had been sent on assignment. They had left behind the house, the car and the dog. So a new couple was needed. My and Xi’s marriage of convenience was thus pure formality. A handshake and we were married, if not before the law then at least in the eyes of the neighbours. The roles we played grew more and more convincing, until after a few months we abandoned the charade of separate bedrooms. We had only each other to choose from, so we chose each other. It was better for sleep than lying alone and yearning for Florence, I concluded. The moment we stopped resisting, what had been stiff became soft, and I soon came to associate her perfume, Voltaire no 6, if not with love then with peace.

Xi too had exchanged a life as the bureaucrats’ occasional lover for something more sustainable. With sufficient desire and commitment she moved through her days, and more than once she spoke of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how she had never understood it until now, when she had finally had the calm to devote herself to self-actualisation, in her case advanced cooking, which I also enjoyed. Every evening I was served an elaborate meal: momos filled with mushrooms, coriander and yak cheese, steamed trout with Sichuan pepper, soy and spring onion, or slow-baked aubergine with miso, sesame and rice vinegar. For a quiet happiness, it truly recalled the deep and powerful.