Читать книгу Glorious Boy - Aimee Liu - Страница 12

Claire tried to compromise between Ty’s needs and her own by ending their morning walks at the little stone library behind the club. The room was usually cool and empty, and apart from the bookshelves, a mahogany table and four heavy wooden chairs were the only furnishings. Each time she lifted him out of the pram—an ancient schooner-like vehicle on loan from Mrs. Wilkerson—Ty would give her a thoughtful blink and stretch his limbs for the scrubbed slate floor. If she handed him his rattle, he’d take it in both hands and examine it end to end, tracking its changing rhythms.

Her quiet, serious baby. Ty’s hair had grown into a rich curly umber, eyes a dark mossy green. Though he showed no sign yet of talking, he was stubborn and definite in his likes and dislikes. This she’d known ever since they introduced him to the swimming pool, when he was barely three months old. The entire club membership had turned out that evening to celebrate the end of the monsoon season. The baby was a bonus, and the Ross matrons passed him around like a parcel of light. Marian Small pronounced him The Angel of the Andamans. Rita Wilkerson called him The Cherub. The cantonment’s aging wives were as greedy for white babies as they were indifferent to brown ones. Ty’s birth even helped to mitigate their disapproval of Claire’s career ambitions and willful fraternization with the natives.

Still, five minutes of ogling and lavender-scented goosing was more than enough for their glorious boy. He let out a wail, and Claire and Shep fled with him into the water, where they expected surprise, at best a bit of tentative splashing. Instead, the infant took to the pool like a porpoise. Claire felt the tension leave Ty’s limbs as soon as he was immersed. He kicked and chortled and reached for the coral glints of sunset skittering across the waves.

“He’s a natural,” Major Baird declared. “You’ve got yourself a real amphibian there.”

Ever since, they’d taken Ty swimming almost every evening, and no matter how long they stayed, he would fuss when they pulled him out.

He was like that in the library, too. Focused. Definite. Persistent. These qualities took a new turn, however, one morning soon after his nine-month birthday.

At first, Claire saw nothing out of the ordinary. She set Ty on the floor beside her so she could study the library copy of Portman’s Andamanese “history.” M. V. Portman was a British officer who’d overseen the “home” for Andamanese captives on Ross in the 1880s. He’d also taken a stab at documenting their languages.

“Do nga’ araulo,” she read aloud. “I am following you. Do nga’ paiti ke: I am going to shoot you. Do nga’ bilak: I am going to carry you away. Do tra’ mke: I wrap myself in it.”

A swooshing sound drew her attention to Ty, who’d pulled himself to his knees and was rolling his rattle back and forth. His intensity made her wonder again, why did she wrap herself in this work? Why wasn’t it enough to be Shep’s wife and raise their child? Or, why didn’t she just content herself with studying the social customs and arcane rules of colonial society in Port Blair? She could conduct that field study without leaving Ross Island.

She had no illusions about her personal affinity with Leyo’s people. After last January’s abortive field visit, they’d doubtless be happy never to lay eyes on her again. And other than Leyo, who’d spent so much time around outsiders that he was hardly representative, the only other Andamanese in Port Blair was that pathetic drunkard in Aberdeen Bazaar—even Leyo disavowed Porubi as “no good.” Whenever Claire caught sight of the man, sprawled in an alleyway or lifting a bottle of toddy to his lips as he leered at her with those bulging eyes, she hurried away in revulsion. Yet it was the very shame and pity that accompanied this revulsion which answered her question now.

Ruth Benedict had aroused that same shame and pity with her lectures on the decline of the Choctaw, Pima, and Cochiti tribes. The parallels were inescapable. Just as the Spaniards had begun killing natives in America in the name of God, and the railroad industrialists had all but finished them off, so here the same British who built this library had begun the killing in the name of the Crown, and the current crop of prospectors were eradicating the Andamanese tribes to clear the way for timber, rubber, and coconut fortunes. The missionaries had done their job here, too. In the 1800s, following the rout of the natives that the British without irony labeled The Battle of Aberdeen, it was the colonial chaplain who devised a scheme to win over the survivors by “civilizing” them in captivity. Claire pictured the Victorian inhabitants of Ross, as well as their Indian convicts and soldiers, ogling the natives on display, much as she herself as a child had gawked at the dioramas of Northwest Coast Indians in the Museum of Natural History. Except that her gawking hadn’t led to the Coast Indians dying of alcohol poisoning, measles, and syphilis. Not directly, anyway.

Atonement, then. Was that why she felt this sense of obligation to study and record what was left of the Biya? Atonement for the sins of the white man everywhere, not to mention her father’s forsaken dreams, her brother’s death, her mother’s undying sorrow. Her own unspeakable guilt. Pity, plus shame, equals sin that must be atoned for by sacrifice, study, and work?

Or, was that all just a noble front for selfishness? Dare to call yourself a scientist, Dr. Benedict had urged, and conduct yourself accordingly. Dare, in other words, to be ambitious, to see your opportunities and seize them. As she had seized Shep and lunged for the Andamans in the first place. Not out of guilt, but for—

Shifting, she kicked Ty’s rattle, and looked down to find that her son had crawled all the way to the opposite wall, where he sat on his bottom, blue sunsuit straining across his shoulders as he reached for the open door.

Claire hurried to retrieve him, but she’d only taken a step or two when he sat back and lofted his hands in the air. Facing away from her, his interest had been caught by the light from two stained glass windows across the room. At this hour the tableau of the Peaceable Kingdom streamed in vivid hues onto the door’s smooth white panels.

“That’s a lion,” Claire heard herself say. “And those are his little lambs.” Her family had never been much for churchgoing, especially after Robin’s death, and she had only a superficial knowledge of Bible stories, but in this case, the moral was clearly a plea for peace.

Ty reached to pet the lion, but before he touched the door his hand cast a shadow, and the color caught his arm. He spent several seconds examining his golden skin, then his shadow. Then he turned and, oblivious to Claire, raised his face to the stained glass. She could almost see his mind working as he looked from the high window, back to the scene projected onto the door. He studied the slanting bars of color in the air, watched the motes of dust rain through them.

Again, he raised his hands, now grasping. The particles spun faster.

“Ty,” she said. “Your hand is red. Now it’s blue.”

The shadow of his arm found the edge of the open door. His lips pursed in silent concentration as he opened and closed his fingers, testing to see if his shadow alone would move the door. When it didn’t, he scowled and scooted forward.

Again, Claire thought she should stop him, but the pointedness of his concentration warned her against it. He wasn’t interested in going through the door; he was transfixed by the changing patterns of light and color that resulted as he pulled the door toward him and pushed it back. Stretch the lion like a snake, or bunch it into a sliver.

“Look what you can do!” The singsong of her voice sounded idiotic as it echoed off the stone walls. When Ty didn’t react, she moved in front of him and knelt down. “Those are shadows, Ty. That’s color.”

She listened for some response. A coo. A consonant. A murmur at the back of the throat.

For a moment he paused and gave her a long impassive stare. He pulled on a lock of his hair. Without making a sound, he returned his attention to the door.

The pang of rejection this triggered in her was ridiculous. Or was it? Babies were supposed to be distractable, weren’t they? And sociable? Instead, Ty went into his own little world and became all but unreachable. Even when he was nursing lately, his interest would wander off through the window or into the mirror, and he’d fail to eat. Shep said it was normal for some babies to wean themselves early. He was proud of their son’s self-sufficiency, and Jina, too, assured them that they were fortunate to have a son who demanded so little, but at moments like this Ty seemed to Claire unnervingly remote. Maybe she should follow Jina and young Naila’s example and simply let the child lead.

She pulled up a chair and waited while Ty bent his head in and out of the light stream, tried to lick the color in the air, to grasp the separate spears of illumination. If he was disappointed in the results of his experiments, he didn’t show it. Every now and then he rocked forward to reposition himself as the sunbeams shifted, but he never made a sound—or so much as glanced at her for ten full minutes.

Finally, she packed up her notebook and returned the Portman to its shelf. Ty’s diaper needed changing, and he ought to be hungry.

Straightening the linens in the pram, she announced brightly, “Time to go, Ty.”

No response.

She shook the rattle to entice him, then bent down and caught her son under his arms. “Come on, now, love.”

His fist met her eye with a force that detonated her vision. In her shock, she let go, and the baby dropped with a short searing wail.

She was afraid his leg had twisted underneath him, but he quickly scrambled back onto his knees, reaching again for the light.

She got behind him then and unceremoniously dumped him into the pram, whereupon Ty started bawling in earnest.

Tired, Claire told herself. Hungry. She heard her mother’s once-confident voice murmuring in her ear. It’s only colic. Don’t be afraid. He just needs a little food and comfort.

She looked around to make sure they were still alone, then pulled up a chair, undid her blouse, and lifted her screaming son onto her lap. It was like fighting a cornered animal. She wrapped her hand around his head, made low, cooing sounds, and pinned his flailing limbs.

She’d watched this scene countless times when Robin was a baby, and her mother’s breast invariably brought peace. But Ty kept turning his face away, his decibel level rising. When at last she forced the nipple into his mouth, he bit down so hard he drew blood. Then he spat her out.

All right, she commanded herself as she lowered her wailing son back into the pram and wiped the stain from her skin. Read this signal. Respect his wishes. Conduct yourself accordingly. And do not get pulled under.

She would return to the forest for just a few days. Jina and Naila could manage Ty during the daytime—Naila would be over the moon, and Shep, too, would welcome evenings with his glorious boy to himself.

She’d take Leyo with her, of course. They’d test Lutty’s code, as planned. She’d get her field work back on track. Claire admonished herself to view Ty’s willfulness as a gift, though the persistent throb in her left breast warned otherwise.

April 5, 1938

Behalla

Dear Dr. Benedict,

I should be composing my notes, but I cannot resist this chance to write to you from the site of my first solo field trip. I arrived yesterday afternoon and shall be here four days—a duration that my husband and I had to negotiate, since he’s in charge of our little Ty while I’m gone. My hope is to build toward longer visits in future, but for now being here at all seems a kind of miracle.

It’s just after sunrise, and everyone around me is moving sluggishly. The heat and mosquitoes this deep in the forest make sleep a dubious enterprise, in any event, so mornings always get off to a slow start, but last night there was much dancing, and the Biya chief Kuli hasn’t even emerged yet.

Kuli has a solemn, somewhat sad demeanor despite the rakish way he wears his red headband and shells strung from his belt, but he’s a generous teacher. With his help I’m trying to work up an alphabet that at least suggests the core elements of the old Biya language.

The rest of the time, while my guide Leyo and his friend Sempe are out gathering orchid specimens for my husband’s botanical research, I try to fold myself into the women’s lives. Sempe’s young wife Imulu and the elder widow Mam Golat let me come along when they dig for roots, and they’ve taught me how to roast grubs! I actually managed to swallow one. It tasted like charred fingernail.

I’ve also been trying to create a field code for the tribe’s signs and gestures. So little is spoken, but much is communicated. We’ll be sitting around the fire and spontaneously—or so it seems to me—everyone will erupt into laughter as if a joke has been told. Or they’ll all get up as if a bell has rung. Leyo tells me the light and the wind tell them when it is time to start a new task, to leave or return, but I suspect a great deal more is communicated through the mischievous looks they exchange—especially at my expense!

Sadly, Jodo, the club-footed child we met on our first visit, was killed by a wild pig three weeks ago. From where I sit I can see the small dark hut where his mother grieves, and I can’t help but think that if my pregnancy hadn’t cut short our first visit last year, we might have persuaded her to let Shep take Jodo and operate on his foot, and he’d be alive today. I fear that his mother knows this, for she will have nothing to do with me.

But it’s the youngest member of the tribe, Imulu’s little girl Artam, who is my greatest interest. A toddler now, she eyed me with suspicion when I first arrived, but the others just laughed and patted her leg, tickled the reddish pads of her toes until she forgot all about me. She rarely cries. When hungry, she still rides in the birch sling so she can suckle while her mother goes about her business.

Imulu tolerates my presence. She can be sweet and gentle with her husband and Artam, but otherwise she has a gruff demeanor, and I think she finds me ridiculous with all my nosey questions. Still, she answers as best she can and lets me play with Artam, as she lets everyone. And although the little girl seems to trust and respond to us all with amusement, it’s clear that her mother is her base in the world. I so envy their ease with each other.

Artam calls her mother Amimi and her father Amae. I’m still not sure how she (or I) will learn the Biya’s “spirit language.” So far she seems to be learning to speak as most children do, babbling and imitating.

It’s my own son, ironically, who remains speechless. He’s ten months old now and has yet to say even ma or pa. Though his tantrums prove that there’s nothing mechanically wrong with his voice, he’s otherwise almost completely silent. I confess that this perturbs me in a way it doesn’t his father. Shep assures me that Ty will speak when he’s good and ready, and I can see for myself that the baby’s otherwise as healthy as he is temperamental. Indeed, as I watch Ty play with the servants’ daughter, a girl of just eight who seems instinctively to understand his every whim, I wonder if the failure might not lie with me.

Professor Ruth Benedict

Columbia University

Department of Anthropology

New York City, New York

July 20, 1938

My Dear Claire,

When I received your last letter, I had to smile. Did you know that Margaret Mead addressed your concerns in her New Guinea papers? Despite parental encouragement of speech in Pere, she found many untalkative children, but the Manus people attributed this to temperament rather than intelligence. Margaret noted that when the quiet children did finally begin to talk, they displayed as rich a vocabulary as the garrulous infants, and often showed even greater comprehension, not only of the words but also of their environment.

Margaret and I have often surmised—based on observations in our own culture!—that there may in fact be an inverse relationship between intelligence and the compulsive need to narrate aloud one’s every thought or impulse. I suggest you concentrate on your work—which sounds like it’s proceeding brilliantly—and your most intelligent son will doubtless learn to talk at his own pace and in his own unique way, through no fault of yours.

ARTIFACT LOG

•Biya—cowrie shell ornaments (gift from Kuli 4/6/38)

•Biya—Pandanus halter (gift from Mam Golat 4/8/38)

•Biya—twine necklace (gift from Ekko 4/8/38)

•Jarawa—iron arrowhead (relic, found en route to Behalla 10/17/38)

•Biya—rope dog leash (gift from Sempe 10/18/38)

•Biya—birchbark nursing sling (gift from Imulu 10/20/38)

•Jarawa—red loincloth (found near Behalla 10/21/38)

November 18, 1938

Ross Island

Dear Dr. Benedict,

Something so extraordinary has happened, I hardly know where to begin. It’s both ghastly and wondrous, and I suppose as an ethnographer, I should keep an objective stone face, but it’s difficult when I feel simultaneously like ranting and celebrating.

You see, thanks to my darling husband, I’ve spent an entire afternoon with two members of the Jarawa, the mysterious and reputedly hostile inland tribe. However, the circumstances surrounding this encounter were monstrous.

We have a new and odious police commandant whose territory spans the entire archipelago and whose moral compass stops well short of his heart. This man, Denis Ward, heard that a bush policeman and a couple of hunters were killed up north last week near one of the forest outposts. The murderers most likely were Burmese poachers, who are a scourge in these islands, but Ward went up with his men to investigate and decided, in his infinite colonial wisdom, to wreak vengeance on the natives.

I suspect his Indian deputies encouraged this scheme. There is no love lost between the imported “locals” and the indigenous people here, and because the Jarawa are reclusive and violent when approached, they’re the least trusted of all the tribes.

The upshot is that Ward’s vigilantes ambushed some fifty Jarawa men, women, and children, opening fire on them as they were crossing the Middle Andaman strait by raft. According to Ward’s own (gleeful) report back at the club, it was wholesale slaughter, but to prove what a saint he is, he brought in for treatment an eight-year-old girl who’d been shot in the thigh, along with her mother, who refused to leave her.

Ward insists on calling the mother Topsy-One and the girl Topsy-Two. But . . . now they’re under Shep’s medical care.

And that’s how I wiggled into the act!

After Shep initially treated the girl, Ward put the captives under house arrest with a Bengali sergeant and his wife. Naturally, Shep had to go check on his patient, and I tagged along as his assistant.

Trouble was apparent as soon as the young Bengali wife opened the door. They’d been given no warning, she complained. The MPs had simply dumped these “savages” upon them, forcing her into the role of jail matron and “desecrating” her good home.

Shep pulled rank and insisted she allow him to do his job, but the prisoners’ cell turned out to be the size of a broom closet, with bars on the window and chains on the door. It stank of human waste and wouldn’t fit the four of us, so while he examined and re-dressed the girl’s wound, I tried to calm the matron. There was no sign of her husband.

You would have been proud of me, Dr. Benedict. I assured the woman that her prisoners were as eager to leave as she was to be rid of them. I listened to her opine that Ward should have killed all the Jarawa, instead of “just” fifty. Then I reminded her that all this mother wanted was to protect her child, and I disabused her of the persistent local myth that “these creatures eat human flesh.”

All the while, the broom closet resounded with wails and thumps. So finally, I dropped my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. I told the good woman that I’d been studying the local tribes, and I’d found that they were really clever devils. If a door or window were left unlocked, they’d vanish back into the forest without a trace, and this ordeal would be over for everyone. Then I gave her a wink, as Shep and I traded places.

The mother and daughter resembed the Biya, but were smaller, more wiry. They wore their tribe’s distinctive red fiber bands wound tightly around their foreheads, arms, waists, and ankles, but nothing else. And their talk sounded much faster and higher pitched than Biya, though that might have been because they were angry and frightened and wanted nothing to do with me.

I felt so awful for them, crouched in the corner, defeated by loss, injury, and exhaustion. Their eyes stared, large and deep in their sockets, and their skin, made darker by the contrast of the girl’s white bandages, shone blue-black.

The sun striped shadows through the barred windows, and the morning heat was climbing. A bowl of untouched rice sat just inside the door, beside an empty chamber pot. The stench of urine and feces wafted from the opposite corner, where the prisoners had also flung the hospital gowns in which they’d been transported. Mother and daughter held hands, watching my slightest move.

I tried introducing myself: “Attiba Claire.” I had to guess at the pronunciation, but Radcliffe-Brown had given me the word for name. Then I embraced myself as the Biya do in greeting. At that I detected a flicker of attention.

I knew they had to be ravenous. Shep said they’d refuse to eat anything they didn’t recognize, so I’d brought honeycomb, cashews, raw cane and mangoes. It was a good bet. As soon as I showed the contents of my bag, the mother lunged for it. Never moving their eyes from me, the two devoured every morsel. Then, for over an hour, I listened and took notes as they demanded their freedom in a twittering language as distinct from Biya as Gaelic is from German.

I felt deeply privileged to meet these supposed headhunters firsthand, more privileged still as they entrusted me with their pleas and complaints, but that sense of privilege was overshadowed by dread. The girl and her mother closely resembled young Ekko and Obeyo. All share the same ancestry, and the dressing on the girl’s leg made it impossible to forget what Ward had put them through—or what he’d do to the Biya, too, if given the slightest provocation.

The mother—Bathana, she called herself—grasped my arm as I started to leave. “Malavu bhedu.” She pointed urgently to herself, her daughter, clearly expecting the impossible.

I had to pull away, and the look of betrayal on Bathana’s small anguished face took a slice out of my heart.

Outside I found Shep and the sergeant’s wife perched on the stairs like old pals. Shep was regaling the woman with tales of Shanghai, buying me time. Would that I’d done more with it.

And yet . . . when I woke next morning to the news that the Jarawa girl and her mother had escaped back into the forest, I felt redeemed.