by Esi Edugyan
11
TANNA AND I LAY in the grey light of our room in Haarlem, listening to the traffic pass by the open window. There was the clatter of carriages, the low moan of an aged horse. From somewhere far off, so that it carried only faintly to us, came the cry of a child. Ice broke up softly in the water urn on the washstand across the room. In the corner, the two-headed specimen sat hidden in its case.
I kissed her still-damp skin, the hollow at her throat. She tasted of salt. Naked and with her hair spilling about her, she appeared smaller, vulnerable.
“I adore your naturalness,” I said, kissing her breast.
She gave a lazy smile. “Is that a euphemism to say I’m plain?”
“I admire your lack of adornment.”
“So I am plain.”
“Surely you noticed Peter Haas staring at you. You augment your beauty gently, with small things, so that your actual features are the more noticeable.”
“You have been reading a manual on how to make love to a woman, I see. God save us.” She smiled faintly. “The irony is that for years and years I begged my father to allow me to wear jewels, and to paint my face, and to dress in the latest fashions. And he resisted me a long time, long past the point when such a thing was natural for girls my age. When finally he allowed it, I was given a purse of money and told I could purchase the four items I most desired: a dress of pale muslin; a handbag with a single emerald clasp; a skin powder; and a very red lipstick. I put them on at once.”
“And you looked garish, like a street mime.”
“I looked breathtaking—very like a living doll. My father was so astounded by the transformation that he apologized for having so long refused me. I think he saw at once the fine match I could make, the easy life I might have as a beauty. And yet. Something happened to me, dressed so. I became emphasized in the world, sharpened. I stood out, and felt the constant touch of others’ eyes. And the more people looked, the more effaced I felt, as if I were disappearing. It was the strangest feeling. I did not feel as though all those glances were scraping away some essence, though that is possibly a part of it. It’s more that the heightened expectation made me retreat deeper into myself. I had a feeling as of physical obstruction, as though I were standing in front of myself—I needed to shove this second self away, to open the view to the true self. I was so dull in those months, Wash. At every conversation, a great vacancy would fill my eyes, an air of departure, as if I’d already left the room. I began to get a reputation for being stupid. Pretty and stupid.”
“No one could think you stupid, Tanna.”
“Silly, then. Trivial.”
“Well, now you are silly and plain,” I said teasingly, kissing at her hair, “what purpose do you serve?”
“To stop you acting out stupid whims.”
I smiled, but felt softly criticized. I settled back onto the pillows.
“Mister Haas’s story about his stolen instrument took on quite the opposite resonance for me from the one he’d intended, I think,” she said. “I kept thinking, but what of the poor Tahitians? Being shot at, having to suffer the condescension of these strange arrivals and their frightening tools.” She shrugged.
“Morocco,” I said. “I would never have thought it. I wonder what it is that drew him there.”
“Shadow grams, wasn’t it?”
“Why say it that way?”
“What way?”
“Disdainfully.”
She breathed out deeply. “Your obsession is grown so relentless you have even begun seeing him in strangers.” She rolled onto her side. “At Newgate, when you ran from me in the crowd—you thought you saw him, didn’t you? And now you are already thinking of rushing off again.”
“Rushing off?” I said.
She gave a bitter shake of the head, a few fine strands clinging damply to her forehead. “Must we pretend? Must we entertain this ruse?”
I said nothing, watching the light drift in a slow creep across the ceiling.
“I used to believe it was only a matter of finding the source of your origins. That Titch represented your early life, that there was something unresolved there. But we did that, we went to the Abolitionist Society. Kit was your mother. And yet here we find ourselves, in Amsterdam.” She raised her softly rounded thighs, hooking her arms across them. I stared at the back of her matted head as she mumbled something. Realizing she had not been heard, she turned her face to me. “Do you mean to kill him? Is that it?”
I glanced at her, taken aback.
“Of course you do not—I say it only to show you how senseless all this has been. How confusing and strange it all seems to me. I do not understand it—I have tried and tried and I do not. Why do you hunt him so? Do you imagine you will be made stronger by this?” She shook her head. “You will be weakened. You will be wrecked.”
I was flooded with anxiety, with sadness. I knew in some measure she was right. But something in me would not cease—a great lunging forward, a striving rooted as deeply in me as the thirst for water. I had gone this far, seeking a truth that might not exist; I could only go on.
“Is it because you feel my father stole your idea?” said Tanna, her voice anguished, her face calm. “Is that why you run from us? Ocean House was taken from you, and now you are moving farther and farther away from it, as if to rid yourself of the loss.”
I knew I should bite my tongue. Instead, rising up on one elbow, I said, “Well, was it not taken from me? I’ve spent over a year working out the science of it—even now I work on it. And what will it bring me in the end? Nothing. My name nowhere.”
She was trembling softly. “Is it a question of your name?”
“No,” I said, and it was the truth, though it also wasn’t. I knew only that I had believed the project would be a testament to my contributions in the world, and that this, somehow, would mark my passage through it, confirm that my existence had been meaningful, and worthy. But already that certainty was fading; I did not know what to believe anymore.
“Washington,” she said.
“I am tired,” I said softly.
She hesitated.
The room was darkening, cooling, and in the moist air the whine of a fly could be heard.
“My father’s brother,” Tanna began, and her voice was so quiet I almost could not hear her. “Uncle Sunshine, we called him. He was very morose. When he would visit my father, I had only to see his carriage in the distance to begin running away. He came and he moped and was gloomy. I suppose it’s the Goff temperament—even Henrietta and Judith are often melancholy. Father, too. And of course Aunt Miranda killed herself. But Uncle Sunshine, he seemed to delight in his misery. My laughter only seemed to sadden him further—all children saddened him, as if they were but small reminders of an age when he was truly happy.
“When my grandmother died, she left him a sum of money, as she did to all her children—three hundred pounds each. My father spent his immediately on scientific instruments. My uncle? He bought himself a grand headstone for his plot in the family cemetery.
“He went every day to visit his own gravestone, leaving flowers upon it. Any small purchase he allowed himself would be tied in ribbons and laid chastely on the grave. Once he left himself the dark Portuguese figs we’d given him from our trip to the Serra da Estrela. How I’d wanted him to taste those figs. But onto the grave they went. In the end, he visited that grave more than he visited us. It became his sole destination. When finally he died, it was like a homecoming.”
I smiled, sadly. “Did he even exist?”
Tanna rested her damp head on my chest. “The world is large, larger than we sometimes allow it to be.” She breathed shallowly, her face pressed against my skin.
How exhausted I felt, how drained.
“I will go with you,” she said.
I had already closed my eyes, and falling asleep
, I felt myself reach out for her fingers.
12
WE RETURNED TOGETHER to England with our specimen, and it was never a question that I would again be leaving.
I did not want to bring her to Morocco, to a place possibly inhospitable and dangerous to her. There was also Ocean House to prepare, and the frailty of her father to consider. For though Goff was hearty and in the best of health, he was still sixty-six years old, and we did not want him climbing ladders and lifting heavy equipment. His was a peculiar old age in which the outward strength of his body seemed to signal an inner weakness. It was as though some hidden thing lay waiting to break out, as though he would wake suddenly one morning white-haired, blind, deaf and stumbling, in an explosion of old age.
And yet, to our surprise, Goff gave his blessing, even insisted. He had discovered almost at once that Tanna had accompanied me to Amsterdam. Wandering in New Bond Street one afternoon to clear his head, he’d glanced up and spied his sister Judith herself leaving Savory and Moore’s Pharmacy. He accosted her, and the bewildered woman wept openly in the street, confused at his anger. He followed her to her carriage, ranting and raving as she cried great loud thespian sobs, pleading that she knew nothing of the matter, so that at last a man tried to intervene, thinking Goff was a random harasser. Goff returned home, and was just then making plans to hunt us down when we arrived with the porpoise in tow, glistening like onyx on its freshened bed of ice.
He was too shocked by the creature to scream at us. Staring down at it, his face blanched and he was silent a long while. Finally he said, “I have never seen such beauty in such ugliness.”
We were scolded for our lie, but that was all. The next days were spent making arrangements for the two-headed creature, testing Visser’s suggested methods of long-term preservation, discussing the ways in which it might best be displayed. If our octopus from Nova Scotia did not recover, this, perhaps, might be our centrepiece.
Goff began to speak of another colleague of his, a marine zoologist in Marrakesh. “He wrote of a very rare squid.” He spent the evening mapping out the location where we might find the man.
And so the weeks passed in making preparations for our journey, and in hard work. A silence reigned at Ocean House, the outside world dropping away. With the door shut tight, the air reeked greenly of preservative fluid and rotted plants, of stagnant, murky water. Sun streamed through the dirty windows, dust spinning in its glow. I turned all about, seeing our tanks of Aesop prawns and molluscs and crabs and sea worms and polyps. A display of velvet fiddlers writhed silently in the corner.
I felt, in those moments of looking around, ferociously proud—of this strange, exquisite place where people could come to view creatures they believed nightmarish, to understand these animals were in fact beautiful and nothing to fear. But a part of me felt also somehow anguished, ravaged, torn at. For I glimpsed, in each and every display, all my elaborate calculations, my late nights of feverish labour. I saw my hand in everything—in the size and material of the tanks, in the choice of animal specimens, even in the arrangement of the aquatic plants. I had sweated and made gut-wrenching mistakes, and in the end my name would be nowhere. Did it matter? I did not know if it mattered. I understood only that I would have to find a way to make peace with the loss, or I would have to leave the whole enterprise behind and everyone connected with it.
One tank held the drifting pink rag of a jellyfish, and next to it I watched one filled entirely with nudibranchia. Very slowly I went to it, and I pressed my hand to the cool glass.
13
THE LIGHT WAS dazzling; it shuddered in waves off the rooftops dotting the white plain. So grand was it, so powerful, that we raised constant hands to our eyes, blinded by the haze.
It had all been a great mistake. Peter had arranged for a guide to meet us, but that man was nowhere to be discovered at the loud, bustling port. And so we were obliged to take rooms in Marrakesh while I wrote to Peter of the error, begging his assistance in procuring a second guide. There was little to do but wait.
In the slow, hot days we made several attempts to find Goff’s marine zoologist. We were led on many twisted routes, the last ending in confrontation with a man demanding heavy compensation. And so we gave up the hunt. Instead we began to explore the city, with its smells of clementine and dried leather and fresh plums, the stench of donkey excrement and the sweating pelts of camels penned at market. We passed a man pulling at a rope threaded through the nose of a furious camel, blood spilling from its head in dark-red stripes. How indignantly the beast lifted its jaw. It kicked and bucked and gave out guttural roars, and this made no impression at all on the noise and bright laughter of the bustling outpost. Tanna looked away, and seeing her turn her face, an onlooker came over to us with his shuffling gait and began to mime an explanation. But we could not understand him and finally, with a look of profound disappointment, he went away.
Later we strolled the markets, wondering about a possible return to England, though this struck me as a defeat. The stalls were all distinct: some were overhung with beautifully woven baskets, some with dusty red peppers, some with dyed wool bursting forth in a riot of crimsons and yellows and blues. In the rope stalls several rope makers sat fast at work, their hands flitting quickly over the hemp. The jewellers had a courtyard all their own, and from beneath the shadowed awnings their gems winked like human glances.
I discovered a jeweller who spoke broken English. All at once I began to ask after the strange Englishman in the desert, if he had any knowledge of this man. I asked also after Goff’s colleague. He peered out at me from his dark robes, his face vacant as a freshly washed plate. Then he broke into a sudden smile and, in a shiver of shuddering shrugs, said no, no, no, no.
All this we took in with the nervousness of having left the known world behind, of moving blindly forward. With each day I became more convinced that Titch was here no longer. We grew exhausted, and though I was careful not to show Tanna my fearfulness, she could no doubt sense it.
One morning I paused by the side of a market to wash my hands in a basin. I felt a man’s gaze on me, and lifted my face.
He stepped forward as though summoned. I stood and dried my hands uneasily on my pant legs. He was a slight fellow with an angular, jutting jaw, so that he appeared to always be disagreeing with something, though his eyes were kind.
He stood before me, the sun behind me gilding his brown eyes the colour of burnt butter. Tanna looked nervously across at me from the folds of her blue shawl.
“Washington Black?” said he, flattening the a’s to e’s.
To our surprise he was the very man who was to have led us to Titch in the first place. He had been sick these last days, he explained in his broken English. Now recovered, he had come to the city with the dim hope of finding us. How astonishing that it should actually come to pass.
And so he led us in a small, rattling caravan towards a seemingly empty horizon. The paths carved from the desert were vast and twisted, and as we creaked along the sandy passageways, away from the great noise of Marrakesh, I felt a sense of diminishment, as if we were disappearing in the heat and the light. The air felt very tight, full of salt. My eyes began to itch at their corners, and as the hours lengthened, a fine trace of blood leaked through a crack in my lower lip. I held a damp cloth across my nose, breathing.
“I promised your father I’d return you safely,” said I.
“And you shall keep the promise,” Tanna murmured, half-asleep.
I peered across the hazy plain. “How far do you suppose Dahomey is from here?”
But she was barely listening. Her blue shawl was draped over her head and face, and from the dark folds her eyes shone out incredibly clear, almost orange in the light. As we cantered through the landscape, all speech seemed to drain from us, so that even the instinct for it died. With each mile the terrain shifted, brightening and darkening, and every hour I became conv
inced we were lost, that even our driver must be disoriented by the changing light. I peered out at the plain, exhausted. Here again, through no volition of his own, Titch had brought me to a place of great unfamiliarity.
The hours passed. We stopped to eat and relieve ourselves, still not much speaking. In the arid wind I began to hear sounds, though there was no life for miles. Strangely I could not place the origins of the noises—the ones from the west seeming to emanate from the east, the ones in the south drifting from the north. My skull felt dry in my head; I drank. The heat was all at once suffocating then dropped away in layers.
Abruptly, night fell. It was as though someone had set a lid over the earth, so quickly did it happen. The stars came suddenly, like sparks, illuminating the plain. And just then, what looked like small buildings rose up in the distance; they were so much what I wanted to see in that moment that I felt I had imagined them. Mute, we cantered up to a series of sudden walls; it was some time before I realized the walls were actual houses. There were few windows to the street. I could just make out, through the narrow buildings, the wide circle of a darkening courtyard. We disembarked, our legs stiff, as the driver cut down our belongings in an explosion of dust.
It did not seem we could have come to the right place. This was no town as Peter had described it, but rather a few scattered dwellings, built almost as an afterthought at the desert’s edge. It was difficult to picture survival here, so far from the lushness of the city. There was a feel of desolation and abandonment, of darkening distances.
Just then a boy stepped out from the courtyard. He could not have been more than nine years old, his bones thin as ropes, prying from beneath the skin. He had an oblong but delicately made face in which the eyes were sunken deeply. He appeared both tired and fresh, like someone made privy to a damaging truth before he could fully make sense of it. Dust threaded the strands of his glossy black hair.
