by Tahmima Anam
We walked towards her. She was painted so bright we had to squint and shield our eyes. ‘See,’ Ali said, ‘I told you she was pristine.’ The workers gathered three, four deep around the hull. They looked afraid. ‘They’ve done this many times before,’ Ali had assured me. ‘They are experienced, and we will take all the necessary precautions.’ But standing before the ship now, the black trim wedged deep into the sand, so tall, did they wonder how they would ever take it apart? Fewer than fifty of them, with only the strength of their arms against the mass of the ship – a ship put together somewhere else, somewhere with machines and scaffolding and helmets and time-cards and minimum wage – yet it was their job to bring on her death. They would touch every inch of Grace; her heaviness would imprint itself on their hands, and she might, in the course of things, despite their best intentions, take a life or two on her slow way out.
The workers clapped and cheered, sounds to make themselves bigger. After a few minutes a figure appeared on the lip of the deck. He scaled the rim and climbed over, looking as though he was about to throw himself overboard, but really placing his foot on a camouflaged ladder bolted to the side of the ship.
Ali pushed against the crowd, but the workers wouldn’t budge, taking in the prettiest, newest thing they had ever been asked to dismember. Ali told me that Grace had drifted for five days on the Atlantic after the previous captain had died aboard, setting himself on fire in the engine room. Two tugboats were sent to pull her to shore, and a week later she landed in Portsmouth. Then, after a few months, she set sail again, only to be struck by a virus. Grace had stood in the harbour for a month, her passengers quarantined while food and medicine were dropped by helicopter. The owner of the company, a Swede with a superstitious streak, had decided to cut his losses, and Grace was decommissioned, a footnote in the history of unlucky ships.
The captain was helped down by the many arms that reached for him, cushioning his landing. He wore a white uniform with blue-and-gold lapels, tight around his shoulders and thighs. He reached out and shook Ali’s hand. ‘Welcome, captain,’ Ali said.
‘Call me Jack,’ the captain replied, taking off his hat and smoothing down the fine mat of hair underneath, his forehead already streaked with a band of red. ‘Hot here, isn’t it?’
Gabriela rolled her eyes. ‘It’s not an Arctic expedition,’ she said.
The bottle popped. The rest of the crew descended, and Jack introduced a pair of Koreans, an engineer from India, and three Nepalese men who had boarded in Lisbon and been offered a free ride in exchange for cooking and cleaning.
‘So, madam, what do you think of her?’ Ali beamed. The others were already making their way up the beach towards the tent. Gabriela was walking with Jack, her headscarf lifted by the wind, revealing the copper swirl of her hair.
‘It’s hard to believe it will be gone soon.’ I said to Ali.
‘In four months, it will be nothing but scrap.’
I stopped, turned my eyes to Grace, imagining her in pieces, like the Splendour. ‘Is it true that she’s exactly as they left her?’
Ali reeled off the soon-to-be-destroyed virtues of the ship. ‘Casino, cinema, restaurants, swimming pool.’
‘What’s going to happen to all that stuff?’
‘Sold, madam. People coming from Dhaka tomorrow, they’re going to give us a price.’ He crossed his arms over his chest, a satisfied note in his voice. ‘Hotels are interested.’
For some reason, this made me very sad. I kept stopping and turning back.
‘Madam, this is the cycle,’ Ali continued. ‘One ship sets sail, another comes here.’ He looked over at me. ‘You are unhappy, madam.’ He considered me for a moment. ‘What about I take you for a personal tour, you would like that?’
I eyed the narrow ladder to the top. I had always been a little afraid of heights, and the thought of being alone with him on an abandoned ship did not appeal. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I will personally ensure your safety.’
‘I’m not the adventurous type,’ I said, repeating my own catchphrase of defeat.
We ate breakfast in the tent, sitting on wooden chairs at long, rectangular tables. The air was stale inside. Ali insisted I join him at the head table, which was decorated with a red-and-white tablecloth and a small bunch of roses, resembling a shabby version of my wedding. Gabriela was showing Jack how to eat with his fingers, rolling up his sleeves for him and explaining how important it was to get close to the food, to smell it on your hands. Ali opened a bottle of mineral water and filled my glass.
‘Is it true the ship is cursed?’ Gabriela asked Jack.
‘That’s what they say.’ He tore off a piece of bread and dipped it in his curry.
‘Bad luck is finished, now you are on Prosperity Beach,’ Ali said. Then, eager to change the subject, he told Jack that I had lived in America.
‘So what are you doing here?’ Jack asked.
‘We’re making a film,’ Gabriela said.
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Hope nobody dies taking this thing down!’
Gabriela tapped his arm. ‘That’s a fucked-up thing to say.’
Ali took a bite of his bread. ‘Shipbreaking is important for Bangladesh. We need steel. Lot of construction everywhere.’ He pointed south, towards town.
‘Hey look, as far as I’m concerned, you got a giant recycling operation here,’ Jack said. He had finished eating. A waiter was summoned with a bowl of water and a small piece of soap.
‘Will you have sweet, sir?’ Ali said.
‘What?’
‘He means dessert,’ Gabriela said.
‘Oh, yeah. Great.’ The waiter returned with a bowl of rice pudding in a shallow clay dish. Jack looked around for a spoon.
‘Use your hands.’ Gabriela said, indicating to Jack that he should dip his fingers into the clay dish.
‘How about I take you both aboard, one last hurrah before she gets crushed?’
Gabriela’s eyes widened. ‘Really?’
‘Sure, why not? Ali, you game?’
‘Of course, I was telling madam Zubaida just now, we must go up.’
When I peered, at that moment, towards the horizon and saw Grace, how white and still and majestic she was, I felt a tug in my chest, and I knew that the breaking I was about to witness would involve giving something up, because I was used to imagining the lives of things that were long dead, and I would do the very same for Grace. I would imagine not only the lives that had been lived aboard, the trips and holidays, the food that was eaten, the icebergs escaped, barnacles studded to her underside, dolphins following in her wake, but the ship herself, her disappointment at having spent so little time afloat, her sadness at being consigned to the scrapyard, her pain at being taken apart. I felt all of this, and also, perhaps, I had a premonition that Grace would yield more treasures than I could know, that she was a mystery beyond my comprehension. I looked over at Gabriela and allowed her to accept the invitation, a part of me hoping I would maybe slip and fall down that metal ladder and into the warm, shallow water below.
Elijah, I’m on the beach now, and Grace, our totem, has arrived. I am about to meet Mo. And Anwar. Are you starting to love me back? Who am I kidding, of course you’re not. You see how I tease myself, here in the prep lab, and in the empty apartment with only Nina to keep me company, telling myself it’s just a matter of time, and words, before you return to me, knowing, in fact, that the possibility of our ever being together will require an altogether less linear, less knowable set of possibilities, an alchemy of which I am neither the scientist nor the author.
It has been snowing for eighty hours. I have been holed up at the lab, surviving on vending-machine snacks. Nature Valley. Cheetos. Vitamin Water. My tongue is glued to the top of my mouth. Diana accuses me of losing my sense of history. The hands that arrange her bones, that brush away the layers of earth that weighed heavy on her for fifty million years, those hands should be light and unattached, not heartsick, that embarrassing word, not
longing for human touch, for the particular grooves of another person’s lifeline, but something else entirely, a pair of moving parts mindful of all that is ancient, and endures. I bristle at her rebuke, knowing she is right.
In the morning Ali had changed his mind. ‘Too dangerous,’ he said, shaking his head. I looked up at Grace and found myself insisting it would be all right. Gabriela and Jack backed me up. ‘It’s nothing,’ Jack said, ‘I’ve been up and down that thing a dozen times.’
‘Let’s be explorers,’ Gabriela said. She had swapped her headscarf for a bandana and tan workman boots, which she wore over her trousers.
Ali passed his hand over his forehead, lifting up the prayer cap, smoothing his hair, and lowering the cap back down on his head again. ‘We have never allowed it before,’ he said, ‘I would not forgive myself if something terrible happened.’
‘Come on, man,’ said Jack, who was wearing a pair of shorts and a baseball cap with a Yankees logo on it. The rumour had spread that a small expedition was going on board, and a few of the workers had gathered around. I was starting to recognise some of them, and when I passed by, they looked down at their feet to acknowledge they knew who I was. It was fully day now, light reflecting harshly off the white hull. It didn’t seem possible to climb all the way up, there must have been a hundred little rungs, narrow and cylindrical and slippery.
Gabriela went first, followed by Jack. They seemed to ascend easily, wind-licked and beautiful, as if on a cable car on a snow-capped mountain. Then it was my turn. The rungs were cold and my legs trembled as I took the first steps.
‘Look only straight, madam,’ Ali called out from behind me.
I started to climb. Rivets. Thousands and thousands of rivets. How would they ever unbraid this machine? A clear sky now, and the sun struck me full in the face, and in the distance, I heard the cry of a lone gull.
‘We have reached halfway,’ I heard Ali say. His voice was dampened by the wind and the growing distance between us. I hadn’t realised it, but I was rushing, putting one step after another in quick succession.
I couldn’t help but glance downwards: a mistake – my stomach lurched. I stalled. The crowd had grown below us. Would they catch me? I believed they would, they were used to rescuing each other, every day on the line with the welders and ropes tied around their waists. I told myself to take one step at a time. My palms were slippery, but I pushed ahead and climbed steadily, one hand over the other, my calves straining to keep a strong foothold, knowing that if I stopped the sensation of falling would overtake me, and finally the ladder curved over the hull and I pulled myself up and over and found myself on a large green square with a circle drawn in white in the middle. A helicopter pad.
The rest of Grace rose above me, three more storeys of staterooms, ballrooms, restaurants, and whatever other delights cruise ships contained. I stepped aside and Ali followed, panting and whispering another prayer under his breath. Jack and Gabriela had already crossed to the other side of the white circle and were leaning over the railing and looking out onto the horizon. Everything was quiet and shining. I felt the skin on my face burn in the reflected light. We followed Jack, who led us across the deck and around the promenade, passing the closed doors of passenger cabins. Beyond lay an empty swimming pool.
‘What does everyone want to see first?’ Jack said, holding his arms out. ‘How about the engine room?’
‘It will be dark,’ Ali said, handing me a flashlight. ‘Please madam, be careful.’
‘Where that captain killed himself?’ Gabriela asked, pulling her bandana down and letting it hang around her neck.
‘Yep.’ Jack took her arm and they began walking to the other end of the ship, passing a bank of lifeboats. Ali rushed to catch up with them, motioning for me to follow.
I lingered behind, peering over the edge. Sea on one side as far as I could see, and on the other, the beach, the tent still there from yesterday’s party, and beyond, the workers’ dormitory, the bamboo shacks that had accumulated around it, and in the distance, the Dhaka–Chittagong highway, the markets flanking it on either side, soon to be adorned with the takings from Grace. I recalled being up high before, behind a wall of glass on the top floor of a new high-rise in Motijheel, or one time when Rashid had come to Boston and we had gone up to the top of the John Hancock building, but this was different, because everything around was so flat, the broken copper sand, the bay with its outstretched arms. Not a living thing in sight, not a gull or a fish breaking the surface of the water, unless you looked down towards the sand, to the men waiting on the beach.
They were still gathered below, in knots of three and four. One of them waved. I hesitated, then waved back. When I turned around, I found I’d lost sight of the others. I walked away from the prow, and back towards the helicopter pad. I found a doorway with rounded edges that led to a stairwell. I climbed down. The stairwell seemed to narrow as I descended. I turned on the flashlight and waved the circular beam of light around but there wasn’t much to see; the walls were white and unmarked except for a few scuffs here and there. I went around a corner and through a passageway and down further, deeper into the ship, where the air was cool and dense and tinged with metal. Finally, on what seemed like the lowest level, I found a hallway with many doors at regular intervals. I stopped and tested one. It was locked, and so were the next three I tried. The forth swung open, revealing a small square room with a low ceiling. There was a bunk bed against one wall. I traced my finger over the chair bolted to the floor. The ship was not meant to be so still. It was meant to move, to sway, to resist a force stronger than itself.
In the top bunk was a sleeping boy, his arm flung over his eyes. I considered waking him up and asking for directions to the engine room, but instead I just held my flashlight over him and saw his chest rising and falling. His hand that was closer to me was curled into a loose fist, and the fingernails of that hand were clean and neatly trimmed. For this reason, I quietly slipped out of the room and closed the door behind me.
I crossed that hallway and another, zigzagging past more closed doors, then went up a few flights. I caught flashes of daylight. Now I was on a promenade deck that circled the ship, and the cabins that opened on to this were spacious, trimmed with metal and glass. I saw deck chairs, fire extinguishers, showers and televisions and refrigerators. I went across and down again. On one of the lower levels, I opened a set of double doors and found a small library of hardbacks arranged alphabetically. Dickens was present in abundance, Anna Karenina, not at all. None of the books appeared to have been touched. I creaked open Robinson Crusoe, hunted, and found, my favourite phrase: ‘For sudden joys, like griefs, confound at first.’
I was going to lean back and read the whole thing from the beginning, fully in thrall now to being lost and on my own, when I heard someone coming into the library and saw that it was the sleeping boy. Upright, he was small and wild, his hair cut very close to his scalp, his shorts torn at the cuffs. I was happy to see him. ‘I’ve gotten lost,’ I said to him in Bangla. He smiled with his mouth, his eyes, his forehead – his whole face – and offered to direct me. I followed him through a door on the other side of the room. We travelled down a flight of stairs, peering through a circular window into an enormous kitchen. Then we were in the passenger area again, a wide courtyard open three storeys to the sky.
His name was Mo. He looked like a lot of the street children I had seen in Dhaka selling flowers or little square packets of popcorn on the street. They smiled at you as if they were going home to air conditioning and train sets. Even when they begged it was with a laugh behind their eyes, a secret only they were privy to, the secret being that if they cried, or looked unhappy, or gave away something of their lives, something you couldn’t possibly stomach, you would walk away without parting with a single taka. Mo had the look of one of those kids who was used to making himself so friendly and indispensable that whoever was passing him little scraps of food or money would decide it was less of a hassle to k
eep him on than to get rid of him. I didn’t know anything about him, but I knew this: his friendliness was a façade, and behind that façade was a decade or so of terrible things I would never know about.
I couldn’t tell if we were lost, or if Mo was taking me on his own personal tour of the ship, and I wasn’t sure why I was following him, but I wanted to be in his company a little longer. He said, ‘Apa, I would like to tell you something.’
‘My name is Zubaida.’
‘Last night, I climbed the ladder and slept here.’
‘In that little room downstairs?’
‘No, a bigger one with sheets.’
‘Was it nice?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t steal anything,’ he said.
Mo stopped in front of a pair of double doors. At first when I pushed against one, I thought it might be locked, but it was just heavy, opening with a swishing sound. Inside, I found an unpunctuated darkness. ‘Torch,’ Mo whispered. I pulled the flashlight out again, and he plucked it from my hand. The carpeted floor tilted downwards, and we followed it, our footsteps silent, until we reached a small wooden stage. I turned and looked behind me and saw row upon row of upholstered chairs. We followed the lip of the stage and climbed up a few steps. A thick pair of curtains bore the name of the company: HEAVENLY CRUISES. We pulled aside the curtain, weighed down with a thick chain. Mo waved the flashlight into the darkness. I saw a wall of ropes and pulleys. I reached out my arms and felt the polished, satin curve of an instrument, the wood warm against my palm. Mo moved the light slowly over it, revealing its legs, trimmed with brass, bolted to the floor, its castors removed. I reached over, pulled back the lid, the white keys shining and alien, and put my hand over Mo’s thin wrist, guiding the beam of light over the keys, where a piece of paper rested, crumpled by the lid. It was sheet music, the notes crowded together and incomprehensible to me. Over the top was written: Shostakovich: Preludes.
Ali heaved an exaggerated sigh of relief when he spotted me. ‘What happened to you, madam? I have been very worried.’
