a human being disappear?’
‘I don’t know, Father.’ And Ross began to weep.
Father De Montfort tried to comfort Ross and, at the boy’s insistence, gave him absolution for the sin of being angry with his friend and wishing for his disappearance. Father De Montfort tried to convince him that, if he was telling the truth, it was illogical to feel guilty, since it was not possible to make a human being disappear simply by wishing it. The priest also advised him not to repeat the story, since it would feed the superstitions of the ungodly and, in any case, was unlikely to lead to the recovery of his friend.
* * *
In August that year it was announced that Basil Raatgever had achieved the top marks in the A-level examinations and would have been awarded the scholarship to do university studies. Ross was named proxime, having achieved the second best results in the country and in the absence of Raatgever was offered the scholarship. He accepted it, reflecting sorrowfully that he and his achievements still seemed tied to his vanished friend. Ross studied law in England, returning to Guyana after four years. He worked for a while in the Public Prosecutor’s office then, in the mid-1960s, he was appointed a legal officer in the Attorney General’s office, and has remained there to the present.
By all accounts, Basil Ross became a taciturn, solitary individual; he played no games, never competed with anyone and neither married nor pursued the opposite sex. He seemed to live for his job, gaining a reputation as an excellent drafter of complex legislation and legal opinion, though by virtue of his position his name was never formally associated with the work he authored. One can guess that this struck Ross as peculiarly appropriate: Raatgever had disappeared because of him, and he might have felt comforted by the thought that there was no identification of self or personality in the work he did; that he, Basil Ross, had disappeared almost as completely as Basil Raatgever. He refused appointments to other, more prominent positions in government service and while his superiors relied more and more on his knowledge and experience, there were others happy to claim the prominence he eschewed.
Ross, in turn, relied on his secretary, Miss Morgan – an efficient, old-fashioned civil service spinster – to keep the office running smoothly and to shield him from public exposure. The country had long forgotten the mystery of Raatgever’s disappearance, although on one or two occasions, not long after his return from England, Ross had permitted himself to be interviewed about the incident. He had hoped vaguely that the interviewer might have some new angle to explore; he knew that he had nothing useful to add to all that had been said before. He had been disappointed on each occasion, and decided he would not subject himself to any more journalistic probing.
People who knew him said that Basil Ross had changed physically after the incident: that he had become thin and ascetic-looking and, as the years passed, his physique began to resemble that of his vanished friend. He lived a life of careful routine – home to office, office to home. He visited his close relatives occasionally, but said very little and seemed to find casual conversation difficult. He remained devout in the practice of his religion and he was careful, through those oppressive years, to keep himself strictly above politics.
That might have been the end of the story, but then, in the mid-1990s, Basil Ross had a revelation. A number of eco-tourism companies had opened resorts in the Essequibo-Mazaruni area and one of these had rediscovered the Baracara falls, cleared the path and constructed a bridge over the little creek. A bathe in the ‘therapeutic waters’ of the falls was advertised in their brochure as one of the attractions of their tour package. This brochure had caught Basil Ross’s attention. This was in 1996. On the brochure there was a small picture of Baracara falls with a few tourists in swimsuits arranged on the top ledge of the falls and on the boulders. Behind the veil of falling water next to the vertical edge of one of these boulders, Basil Ross thought he saw a face. Rationally, he knew it could not be a real face, but he was struck by the fact that it was the first thing he noticed when he looked at the photograph. He visited the office of the tour company, spoke to the proprietor’s son and then the proprietor himself, found out who had taken the photograph and, with some difficulty and expense, managed to locate the negative and have a large blow-up made. This confirmed his belief that the face behind the veil of water was that of Basil Raatgever – the face of his classmate of 1957: the large forehead, the eyes, the wide mouth, the shadow of a moustache. Raatgever, Ross saw, was smiling.
No one else could see the face, though some agreed that there was a suggestion, in the pattern of water falling over rock, of eyes and a mouth – but only after Ross had pointed these out to them. The fact that no one else saw what he saw did not surprise or discourage him. He saw the face quite clearly and had no trouble recognizing it. He had the enlarged photograph framed and hung on the wall of his bedroom and a smaller version stood on his desk at work. He became convinced that the face of his lost friend had been made visible to him to free him from his years of guilt and sorrow, and he felt truly liberated. Basil Raatgever was there after all – had been there all along, there in the falls. He had reappeared in the place where he had made himself disappear in response to his (Ross’s) angry wish.
At the office they noticed that Mr. Ross was more relaxed and approachable. He smiled with uncharacteristic frequency and seemed more inclined to stop and chat with his fellow workers. Some surmised that he was mellowing with age and perhaps looking forward to his retirement in a few years.
One day, Basil Ross stopped before the desk of his faithful secretary. ‘Miss Morgan, I don’t quite know how to say this, but... Well... The fact is that I find myself in possession of two tickets for something called an “Old Time Dance”. I understand that there will be music that was popular in the fifties and sixties and refreshments of some sort. I was wondering if you...’
‘Oh, yes, OK, Mr. Ross, I’ll take them off you – you know I can’t pass up a good dance. I’ll get one of the friends in my little group to go with me. You’re giving me the tickets, or do I have to pay?’
‘Well... You see, Miss Morgan...’
But Miss Morgan didn’t see... She couldn’t see why Mr. Ross was making such a fuss and seemed so awkward. He had passed on many such tickets to her over the years. She couldn’t help thinking that by now people should have realized that Mr. Ross didn’t go to public events of that kind.
‘Well, the truth is, Miss Morgan,’ Basil Ross continued, ‘I thought I would rather like to go myself – for a change, you know... to remind me of my youth, so to speak... Oh, I don’t know, but I was wondering if you would do me the honour of allowing me to escort you.’
Miss Morgan opened her mouth, but no sound came from it. She was stunned. The honour of allowing me to escort you... The words rang in her head for a long time before she worked out that Mr. Ross was in fact asking her out to a dance, and it took her still longer to recover the power of speech and respond.
* * *
The evening at the dance was a revelation to Miss Morgan. She had never associated Mr. Ross with any social skills or with activities engaged in simply for pleasure. She had thought that she would have to humour him and be embarrassed on his behalf for his awkwardness, but would cheerfully endure this while savouring the novelty of the situation. But Mr. Ross danced like a man possessed. He was lively and fluent in the quicker numbers; he twirled her around and pulled her towards him with the utmost grace and perfect timing, but it was the slow, soulful hits of the sixties he seemed to like best. As the music sobbed rhythmically, Mr. Ross swayed and glided, his hips and shoulders drifting effortlessly with the waves of sound, and his feet hardly seemed to touch the floor. It took all of Miss Morgan’s considerable skills to keep up with him and she noticed, with genuine pleasure, that they had begun to attract quite a lot of attention. Several couples, indeed, had stopped dancing to watch them. Mr. Basil Ross was entirely oblivious – he was floating, he was free. It was as if a long lost
