The Shell Collector

by Anthony Doerr

  This—they thumped each other on the backs—was the place to fish all right: a deluxe mountain hotel with a stuffed lynx above the fireplace, gentians in crystal vases, smiling Slovakian hostesses in white aprons who escorted them to carpeted rooms. They shaved, showered, clinked glasses on the canopied deck. Above them, on surround-sound speakers, the delicate staccato of a string quartet. On a massive RCA home theater, a taped replay of the Super Bowl.

  In the twilight the Americans brought gin and tonics to the beach and rented pedal-boats shaped like giant swans. They trolled night crawlers from their bamboo poles, sipped their drinks and nodded to the lovers who paddled among them, spellbound, all of them, in the tangerine dusk.

  For three days they pedaled their swan-boats and caught sunfish. Huge sunfish, to be sure, but the sunfish at their largest got no bigger than a dinner plate, and the Americans unhooked them and let them slap along the fiberglass breasts of their swans until they reached the water and were free. The Americans knew there were muskie in Lake Popradské because the hostesses had shown them photos, but the muskie were not cooperating.

  On June twenty-seventh they got their first muskie in a shallow shoal on a Rapala they had run through that water fifty times or more. It was big, probably thirty-five inches, with faded green gills and mahogany fins. The Americans cheered, brained it with the butt of a wine bottle and resumed their angling with a renewed verve.

  With a week left the Americans were gleefully boating a forty-one-inch muskie when a FedEx van came gliding over a pass into the valley. They watched it park at the hotel. A purple jumpsuited driver jogged to the beach and waved them in where he had them sign for a videotape.

  When the Americans pushed the tape into the hotel VCR, they watched the oversized screen where the Brits bobbed into view, unshaven and bug-bitten, crowded around what looked like the stern of a rusty pontoon boat. The picture zoomed and focused on a crouching Brit who withdrew from the dark water a colossal salmon. His hand entirely disappeared inside the fish’s gill slot. It was overlarge; it disgusted the Americans, its outsized jaw, black-button eyes, sagging belly and massive tail. It was, one American stammered, the size of a first-grader.

  Offscreen the Brits spouted gloats. The image zoomed, fixed on the bloated salmon for an unbearable moment. Finally the camera panned, and with horror the Americans recognized the rotten dock, wire windows and leaning chimney of the gold panner’s hut in the Reindeerlands, unmistakable, rendered before them in crude and superreal clarity. They sat, boggled, while the surround-sound speakers assaulted them with exultant and decidedly anti-American yelps.

  This time no Boston Tea Party speeches were offered up. The Americans sat under a pall of defeat and could not shake the searing image of that overgrown salmon, more real than anything around them now, the dusty lynx above the fireplace or the lake beyond the windows. For the first time they began to contemplate the realities of a naked parade through Times Square, the goose bumps on their white thighs, the foul slickness of that pavement under their soles, the giggles of ogling Europeans come to New York to photograph the New World. What horrible ignominy, what raw disgrace. There wasn’t a muskie in all of Poland as big as that salmon. They would have to return to Finland, maybe take a train into Norway, slog into the wilderness. It was almost too much to stomach.

  Downhearted, dispirited, the Americans returned to Kraków and haggled on a pay phone with a Lufthansa man. There was weather in Helsinki, he explained, thunderstorms, planes weren’t flying near it. He said he could get them to Vilnius, Lithuania. Vilnius was as close as they could get.

  So they flew to Lithuania. They checked into a hotel at midnight and ordered potato chips from the bar, which were delivered to their rooms on fine china. At daybreak they rephoned the Lufthansa man: no flights to Helsinki today. The desk girl spoke a timid English, produced a Lithuania in Your Pocket and showed them the River Neris on a cartoon map. You want to fish, she said, fish here. Right in Vilnius.

  So they took a trolleybus to Vingis Park, past concrete apartment blocks and the drab spaces between them—overgrown weedlot, cracked pavement and bits of shiny trash, Kit Kat wrappers, Pepsi cans. In the park the grass was wet from rain and the air was heavy and the trees were still. A woman with her head wrapped in a gray scarf bent to tear weeds from cracks in the sidewalk.

  The river was hopeless: a stagnant silt-bottomed canal swirling through the heart of the city, slow and shallow and sullied, populated by schools of plastic bags. The Americans impaled hunks of bread on their hooks, pitched them into the brown current and dragged in carp minnows, one after another. They were slimy runt-fish, dark green with red-fringed fins. Scowling, the Americans pitched them back.

  All morning they worked upstream, into the gut of Vilnius, fishing among buildings, below people crossing a great stone plaza, beside a weathered cathedral, beneath torrents of cars rumbling over a bridge.

  Each hour churchbells chimed all through the city, dissonant, a low and sad cacophony. At twelve bells the Americans smoked Marlboros and sat on the smooth stones of the cobbled banks. A class of girls came tramping crisply toward them, little girls in double file. The girls wore saddle shoes and white socks to the knee and T-shirts adorned with the Lion King or Mickey or Bugs. As they walked they slapped the pleats of their skirts with composition books. They followed on the heels of their teacher, a speed-walking slim-legged beauty in sandals, tan slacks, and a blue blazer with brass buttons, a black hair ribbon trailing behind.

  They were naming things. The teacher threw an arm toward the bridge, her wrist shooting from her brass-buttoned cuff, and the schoolgirls named it in octaves only schoolgirls can reach, gleefully shouting their English, BRIDGE. She threw her arm at the river, RIVER, and at the traffic, AUTOBUS, CAR, MOTOR-BIKE. The teacher pointed at a Marlboro billboard pasted across the side of a building and the girls shouted, AMERICAN CANCER, NO THANK YOU.

  As the class whirled past the Americans with their bamboo poles in their laps, sweating in their waders and smiling at the little procession, the teacher aimed her bony finger at them, and the girls cheerily called out, FOOLS. Giggling, they marched down-river.

  In the evening the Americans climbed into their undersized beds and had ghastly nightmares about British whaling vessels. The next day there were no flights into Helsinki (terrible flooding, chirped the Lufthansa man) and the Americans returned to the River Neris, despondent, clumping off the trolleybus at the Zaliasis Bridge.

  Again at noon the English class came parading downriver behind their teacher, her pointer finger itemizing surroundings. The girls emitted piercing shrieks: RIVER, TREES, TRAFFIC, SIDEWALK, FOOLS. The Americans, feeling vaguely guilty, waded into the mucky current so the class could pass.

  There would be no flights to Helsinki; they gave up trying to get there. They would finish it fishing the River Neris. Each hour the churchbells clanged through the city, mirthless knells. The Americans fished on, not hoping for much anymore, perhaps for a miracle, searching for small things to be happy about, because they were Americans and this was what their upbringings had taught them to do. They found a brief happiness, for example, in the potato chips that came to their rooms on expensive china and in the genuinely hopeful way the hotel girl asked if they’d had any luck. They took pleasure in their morning calls to the Lufthansa man, his wriggly explanations for the canceled flights to Norway. They smiled at the way a church had been built so the setting sun hit it high and perfect and orange, and the way they could follow the river to a park where miniskirted women lay in the grass with headphones clamped over their ears, and even at the way the little student-girls came filing down at noon behind their English-teaching beauty to call them fools.

  Finally there was only one day left, July fourth. Morning bells clanged in the haze above the rooftops. The Americans filed off the trolleybus to fish. By noon they had caught nothing; the water was murky and brown, their casting hopeless.

  The little class came tramping along the riverbank
, screeching English and slapping their composition books in rhythm: RIVER, CHURCH, FOOLS, WALL, STONES, yapping and promenading cheerily behind their teacher. She led them up the grassless slope to the avenue and marched them onto the Zaliasis Bridge where they stopped to lean over the railing, still naming in their shrill voices: SIDEWALK, STATUES, FLOWERS, FOOLS, BILLBOARD, AMERICAN CANCER, NO THANK YOU.

  The Americans groaned to their feet, waded in and cast their soggy squares of bread into the current. And as the girls shrieked, as the brassy river flowed through the city, as the Americans held their poles in a last, hopeless hope, one of their poles quivered, then bent into a steep parabola. Monofilament dragged from the reel. The pole bent and continued to bend; the tip strained unbearably close to the handle. The Americans thought the line must have snagged on some cinderblock or tire or rusty sink, or worse, had lodged itself into the canal bottom, onto some umbilical iron strut plugged into the underworks of the entire city. You’ve hooked Vilnius, they joked. Try pulling that up.

  But the little girls, their pale faces leaning over the bridge railing, began to shout excitedly in Lithuanian, pointing and nodding. The American with the straining pole let out a fierce cheer, and the other Americans splashed around him and watched. The line began to wander between the channel banks, patiently, almost indifferently, cutting broad S shapes. Eventually it crossed to the near bank and hung there, motionless, a dead weight.

  The American with the rod strained and grunted and finally grappled it into the shallows between his feet. Then he set down the pole and gaped and the Americans around him shook their heads and gaped too. The girls on the bridge began to shout more loudly, leaping as they shouted, and soon they were racing down from the bridge and sprinting beside the canal. They stopped at a distance of a few yards, panting, staring wide-eyed at the Americans who heaved a great homely fish onto the cobbled banks where it lay gulping.

  It was a carp: grayish-ocher, as if it had absorbed the color of the city at its most dismal. Some of its scales had come loose and lay on the stones like translucent half-dollars. Its tattered fins were fringed with red, and its lidless eyes were twice as big as the Americans’ eyes, and the curl of its whiskers made it look like a sullen and venerable Spaniard, lying wounded, gasping.

  The Americans stood staring sheepishly down, arms slack. Above them traffic rumbled along the bridge. The fish was huge, surely bigger than the Brits’ salmon, surely one of the biggest carp ever caught. It waved its pectoral fin slowly, raising it, lowering it, an awful gesture.

  One of the Americans lifted the fish, cradled its sagging mass in his arms, and proclaimed it fifty or so pounds. Sixty, maybe. He held it, not knowing what to do. Its belly sagged between his hands. A string of excrement trailed from its anus. The sun weighed down heavily through the haze. The teacher arrived frowning and huffing behind her students.

  The carp shifted, a small shrug, no more than a slight leaning, but it was enough to slip the grasp of the arms that held it. It thudded jaw-first onto the bank and slid a little on its side, leaving the stones it had slid across wet with slime. It came to a stop and lay there, flexing its tail. The Americans produced a disposable travel camera, but when they went to click the button, the camera stuck. They fumbled with it; it fell into the river, and sank.

  The carp sucked and gasped, its round mouth and four barbell whiskers making feeble O’s in the air and a line of blood, barely visible against the scales, went trickling from one gill. The girls began to cry. The teacher sniffled.

  The Americans looked over at this gaggle of girls in saddle shoes, standing openmouthed, with fingers laced in front of their composition books, little girls with gold crucifixes around their necks and a few with bruises on their knees, bangs coiled against their foreheads, knee socks sagging in July fourth heat, tears on their chins. Behind them their teacher had her fingers on her temples, elbows against her chest, one trembling lip between her teeth.

  Fools, she said. You fools.

  What a fish. What schoolgirls, what Americans to let that carp go, its fins dappling the surface of the river, lazy, ugly, wandering into the whorling depths of city current. Churchbells sounded, and at some point the Americans decided they would do better on the next continent. They would research and avoid risks, not fish in illegal places, not drink so much, not heed the advice of every stranger, they would carry two sets of everything, two rods and two fleece jerseys per man, next time they wouldn’t have to wait until the last day, they would map out routes and make contingency plans, and the boundless resources of America, its endless undulant swale, its nodding wheat and white silos gone lavender in the twilight, its vast warehouses and deft craftsmen, would unfurl to help them.

  They would not lose, they could not lose; they were Americans, they had already won.

  THE CARETAKER

  For his first thirty-five years, Joseph Saleeby’s mother makes his bed and each of his meals; each morning she makes him read a column of the English dictionary, selected at random, before he is allowed to set foot outside. They live in a small collapsing house in the hills outside Monrovia in Liberia, West Africa. Joseph is tall and quiet and often sick; beneath the lenses of his oversized eyeglasses, the whites of his eyes are a pale yellow. His mother is tiny and vigorous; twice a week she stacks two baskets of vegetables on her head and hikes six miles to sell them in her stall at the market in Mazien Town. When the neighbors come to compliment her garden, she smiles and offers them Coca-Cola. “Joseph is resting,” she tells them, and they sip their Cokes, and gaze over her shoulder at the dark shuttered windows of the house, behind which, they imagine, the boy lies sweating and delirious on his cot.

  Joseph clerks for the Liberian National Cement Company, transcribing invoices and purchase orders into a thick leather-bound ledger. Every few months he pays one more invoice than he should, and writes the check to himself. He tells his mother the extra money is part of his salary, a lie he grows comfortable making. She stops by the office every noon to bring him rice—the cayenne she heaps onto it will keep illness at bay, she reminds him, and watches him eat at his desk. “You’re doing so well,” she says. “You’re helping make Liberia strong.”

  In 1989 Liberia descends into a civil war that will last seven years. The cement plant is sabotaged, then transformed into a guerilla armory, and Joseph finds himself out of a job. He begins to traffic in goods—sneakers, radios, calculators, calendars—stolen from downtown businesses. It is harmless, he tells himself, everybody is looting. We need the money. He keeps it in the cellar, tells his mother he’s storing boxes for a friend. While his mother is at the market, a truck comes and carries the merchandise away. At nights he pays a pair of boys to roam the townships, bending window bars, unhinging doors, depositing what they steal in the yard behind Joseph’s house.

  He spends most of his time squatting on the front step watching his mother tend her garden. Her fingers pry weeds from the soil or cull spent vines or harvest snap beans, the beans plunking regularly into a metal bowl, and he listens to her diatribes on the hardships of war, the importance of maintaining a structured lifestyle. “We cannot stop living because of conflict, Joseph,” she says. “We must persevere.”

  Spurts of gunfire flash on the hills; airplanes roar over the roof of the house. The neighbors stop coming by; the hills are bombed, and bombed again. Trees burn in the night like warnings of worse evil to come. Policemen splash past the house in stolen vans, the barrels of their guns resting on the sills, their eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. Come and get me, Joseph wants to yell at them, at their tinted windows and chrome tailpipes. Just you try. But he does not; he keeps his head down and pretends to busy himself among the rosebushes.

  In October of 1994 Joseph’s mother goes to the market in the morning with three baskets of sweet potatoes and does not return. He paces the rows of her garden, listening to the far-off thump-thump of artillery, the keening of sirens, the interminable silences between. When finally the last hem of light drops be
hind the hills, he goes to the neighbors. They peer at him through the rape gate across the doorway to their bedroom and issue warnings: “The police have been killed. Taylor’s guerillas will be here any minute.”

  “My mother . . .”

  “Save yourself,” they say and slam the door. Joseph hears chains clatter, a bolt slide home. He leaves their house and stands in the dusty street. At the horizon columns of smoke rise into a red sky. After a moment he walks to the end of the paved road and turns up a muddy track, the way to Mazien Town, the way his mother traveled that morning. At the market he sees what he expected: fires, a smoldering truck, crates hacked open, teenagers plundering stalls. On a cart he finds three corpses; none is his mother’s, none is familiar.

  No one he sees will speak to him. When he collars a girl running past, cassettes spill from her pockets; she looks away and will not answer his questions. Where his mother’s stall stood there is only a pile of charred plywood, neatly stacked, as if someone had already begun to rebuild. It is light before he returns home.

  The next night—his mother does not return—he goes out again. He sifts through remains of market stalls; he shouts his mother’s name down the abandoned aisles. In a place where the market sign once hung between two iron posts, a man has been suspended upside-down. His insides, torn out of him, swing beneath his arms like black infernal ropes, marionette strings cut free.

  In the days to come Joseph wanders farther. He sees men leading girls by chains; he stands aside so a dumptruck heaped with corpses can pass. Twenty times he is stopped and harassed; at makeshift checkpoints soldiers press the muzzles of rifles into his chest and ask if he is Liberian, if he is a Krahn, why he is not helping them fight the Krahns. Before they let him go they spit on his shirt. He hears that a band of guerillas wearing Donald Duck masks has begun eating the organs of its enemies; he hears about terrorists in football cleats trampling the bellies of pregnant women.