Читать книгу A Land Without Sin - Paula Huston - Страница 9

Jan and Rikki and I were headed for the North Acropolis. I wasn’t wild about hiking in the jungle at night. You never know what’s prowling behind you, and it’s easy to get disoriented by the intensity of the blackness. Sounds are distorted and you’re always brushing up against something you don’t want to touch. However, we really didn’t have far to go—while it was still twilight, we’d hauled the equipment up our private trail as close as we could get while steering clear of tourists—so after dark, when the last voices faded away down the long trail that led to the park entrance, we were within a quarter mile of the Great Plaza. “There will be guards,” Jan said over his shoulder. “So don’t jump out of your skin when one comes up behind us.”

A few minutes later I was glad for the warning, for a hand suddenly came out of nowhere and touched my arm. I didn’t scream, but I did turn and raise my knee, and whoever it was took a step back. “Buenas noches,” said Jan invisibly.

“Ah, señor,” said someone off to my left. Apparently, we were surrounded. “Lo siento—we could not see you well in the dark.”

“No hay problema.”

“Y quién es esa señora?”

“My photographer.”

“Ah.” The owner of the hand stepped forward again. “Do you need guides?”

“Gracias,” said Jan, “pero no.”

“Muy bien. Entonces buena suerte, señor. Que le vaya bien.”

I was embarrassed at the way my heart was slamming around. I hadn’t heard a single footfall—nothing. They’d surrounded us like a pack of ghosts, and then vanished just as silently. I thought of the Chiapan rebels Stefan talked about in his letters to Jonah, not to mention the ones I’d photographed in Nicaragua and El Salvador the last time I was in Central America.

Jan said, “Are you all right?”

“Si.” It came out more gruffly than intended, but I’d found over the years that the minute you started admitting to men that you were a little shaken up, they went into their hero mode and forced you to consult them about every step you took thereafter.

Just then a roaring began almost directly overhead, and it took every ounce of grit I had not to hit the deck and cover my head. Because of course it was howler monkeys, not jaguars at all, and the funniest thing you can do in the Guatemalan jungle is fall for their mimicry. I wasn’t up for being the butt of anybody’s joke. The roaring went on for minutes, then died away. We stood there in silence in the pitch black. Then Jan moved off and I hurried to catch up.

In ten minutes we broke out from under the canopy to the open grass of the Great Plaza, and suddenly the darkness lightened a bit because we were under the stars instead of the ceiba trees. Jan snapped off his flashlight. The pyramids, enormous black mountains, rose up against the faint glow of the star-spattered sky, and behind them was the black wall of the jungle. Frogs throbbed like drums; a maddened cicada went on and on, but otherwise it was quiet. Rikki and I came to a dead halt, and Jan stopped too and stepped back toward us but did not speak. Gradually, the jungle, which had hushed at our passing, began to tune.

The North Acropolis by day is a maze of tunnels that go nowhere and crumbling rooms and enormous masks under sunshades of palm fronds. Rikki and I had explored it earlier. Five hundred years of building, some of it ritually “terminated,” as Rikki called it, by deliberately filling in the structures with rubble or through a ceremony that involved smashing pots and burning incense. “Because they had to contain the power,” he said, “and redirect it into the new temples. There’ve been all kinds of things found under the North Acropolis. It goes back a long way—the Mayas lived here starting about 800 B.C., and they used to dump all their trash here and bury their dead.”

Jan, ignoring his son’s lecture, trained his flashlight on the outer wall of the complex, and I found myself staring into the face of an enormous monster, one of the stucco masks protected by a palm frond shelter that we had seen earlier in the day. Then he pointed the light to the right of the mask and down. We went carefully over broken blocks, around a couple of sharp corners, and down again, and finally came upon the opening of a passageway less than a meter wide, hidden by a clumsy screen of more palm fronds, which Jan lifted aside. One by one, we entered.

It wasn’t too bad, as passageways go. Narrow, but the ceiling was plenty high, the floor was clear, and there were no major twists or turns. After a while we came to a dead end. While I was looking around to see what happened next, Rikki vanished. One moment he was there, and the next he was gone, though his pack was lying on the floor in front of me.

“Jan?”

“Put your equipment down. We will have to come back for it,” he said, moving to the left into what looked like the juncture of two blank walls but was not. The edges of the limestone blocks that formed the corner were slightly ajar, leaving just enough room for a man’s body to slip through. Inside the new, much smaller passageway, Rikki was crouched, waiting for us. The light played over the tiny corridor, slanting downward and covered with jagged rock chips, and which from this angle looked impassable. Jan said, “It gets better after thirty yards or so.” Thirty yards. It didn’t look like we could get thirty feet, especially if we were carrying the packs. But Jan was already pushing ahead, scrambling over broken chunks of cut stone and shining his light backward so we could see.

It was like being in a cave. The air was perfectly still except for the rock dust we were stirring up, and it had a dead, unhealthy quality to it. Even víboras, I thought, would not be brave enough to live this far in. So I put them out of my mind as I crawled on all fours over the broken stones. And then there was the silence, which, without our grunting and breathing, would have been absolute. Once again, we were entering Xibalba, realm of the dead.

I’d been in old jungle temples before, with Robert in Thailand. But that was a wetter, hotter jungle, and the vines had woven their way into every crack, and with the vines came the forest creatures. Those temples were like decaying trees. As they crumbled, they fed new life. And in the midst of the decay were incense pots, still smoking, and bits of food left in sacrifice, and scraps of bright cloth tied to twigs, so you knew nothing had been truly finished in these places and the cycle was still going on.

This was different. The full weight of the pyramid sat directly above the four-foot ceiling. And we were crawling deeper and deeper, on a long descent, into the center of it. Suddenly, though I was not afraid, I did not want to go on. I inched along a few more feet, fighting the urge to stop, wiggle around, and make my way back up to the mask that guarded the entrance of this little hellhole. Jan, however, was moving steadily forward, his light bobbing ahead and behind him, and Rikki was breathing hard behind me. This was crazy; we didn’t even have the cameras. Someone was going to have to run back and get them after we got where we were going. But at last Jan stopped and waited till I had come up almost to his back, with Rikki on my tail, before he silently pointed the light forward.

At first, all I could see was another apparent dead end. A three-and-a-half-foot block sat directly in front of us, sealing off the way. Jan edged up to it and shouldered his way into the corner, again to the left, and the light was suddenly gone. “In here,” he called back, and his voice sounded odd, as though he were speaking into a conch shell. A thin wedge of light appeared on the floor in front of the block, and I crawled toward it and squeezed through, with little bits of rock rattling down around me and my braid getting caught on the edge of the slab. The stones were cold. Jan had the light trained through the crack for Rikki, so wherever we were was not yet visible, but I could sense we were in a bigger space. I could stand up, for one thing, and Jan, beside me, was standing at his full height too. For some no doubt deeply psychological reason, it was easier to breathe.

After we were all inside, Jan snapped off the light for a moment, and we stood there close together in the thickest darkness I’ve ever experienced. No sound, no light, no up or down. If there were eyes that could pierce the blackness, then we were at their mercy, because we were helpless as cave fish. I briefly wondered if death might be like a cave. My greater impulse, however, was to not think at all but find the nearest human being, which is what I did. As it turned out, I had snuggled up to Jan, who almost dropped the flashlight in his effort to get away.

“Look,” he said, sounding flustered, and clicked on the light. In less than three seconds, he’d managed to put half the chamber between us. I gave a mental shrug. He was either a lot more married than he looked, or there was something a wee bit off here. I’d met guys like him before. They were only dangerous if you were the kind of woman who engaged in a lot of self-doubt.

We were in some kind of vault, not large but much roomier than the passage. The walls, white stucco, were covered in glyphs painted in black, some of them as large as a man’s head. One group of them, in long vertical rows, looked calligraphic, as though they had been done by a professional; others were more like children’s drawings—simple, animal-like shapes with teddy bear ears and large noses. The number and complexity of the professional-looking glyphs meant that someone had spent a long time decorating this little chamber cut deep into the bedrock below the pyramid. My guess was that this was not art for art’s sake.

“Who was buried here?” I asked.

“A king and two sacrifice victims,” said Jan as he ran the light over the amateur side of the wall. He still sounded a little stiff, but that was his problem, not mine.

One by one, the simple shapes with their rounded ears and goggly eyes came into view. I saw that some of them had little arms, turned up at the ends where hands should be. “Did the Mayas have a thing about sacrificing kids?” I asked.

“These sacrifices were adolescents, maybe sixteen or so.”

“That means kids.”

He shrugged. I looked over at his son, who was studying one of the vertical lines of the glyphs, and remembered the way the sunlight had caught the edge of his ear on top of Temple IV. “His age,” I added, nodding toward Rikki.

Jan looked at his son, then at me. “So what is your point?” he said bluntly.

This time it was my turn to back off. Why was I even bringing this stuff up? It was not like I hadn’t seen much worse. I’d been in hospital camps in Darfur where the kids who were still alive looked like they were made out of pencils. I’d been in Iraq after the Kurdish genocide. So where did I get off begrudging Jan his two teenaged sacrifice victims? “Nothing,” I said. “What do you want me to shoot in here?”

He studied me for another long moment and I realized that I’d not yet seen him smile. He was a genuinely somber man, but I was actually starting to get used to him. You could count on him. Always preoccupied, unless you deliberately woke him up, as I had without meaning to when I leaned into him in the dark. He didn’t chat for the sake of chatting, or tell stories about his own exploits around the campfire at night, a habit endemic among the crowd I usually ran with. He didn’t joke. And most of the time, except when he was deep in thought or angry, he treated Rikki and me with old-time courtesy. A serious man. Aside from Stefan, who was lighter about it, I’d never met one before. I began to wish I hadn’t startled him so badly.

“Over here,” he said finally, and put his hand toward a glyph that had been partially obliterated by the crumbling of the stucco but was unmistakably a version of the same one I’d photographed in the first temple, back at camp. The four-petaled flower inside the squarish oval, but this time with no streamers attached. Once it had been pointed out to me, I couldn’t see how I’d overlooked it the first time. It stood out among the teddy bears, and it did not fit with the other glyphs either, almost as though a third artist had been at work. Too bad we didn’t have those cameras.

“There’s an easier way in,” said Jan, reading my mind, “but almost impossible to find from the outside at night. We will go out that way, leave Rikki to mark the entrance, and you and I will get the equipment.” He glanced at me. “If you don’t mind.”

Truce. I nodded.

At the other end of the vault was a small opening that looked completely blocked and was, indeed, a tight squeeze for Jan, who was not a large man, but then it quickly turned into a steep but spacious passageway made out of earth instead of rock, like a mine shaft. We climbed for fifteen minutes, the light bouncing ahead of us, and as we approached the end of the tunnel, it began to close around us once again until we came to another tight squeeze.

Though we were still inside, I could taste the first breath of night air and hear the faint throb of the frogs. Suddenly, I could hardly wait to leave the Underworld. “I’m smallest,” I said. “I’ll go through first.”

Jan hesitated, then handed me his flashlight, and I scrambled up into Rikki and Jan’s cupped hands and used their shoulders to lever myself out into the world. Tired as I already was, for a moment I thought about heading back to camp and leaving the two of them to their mysterious underground enterprise. Instead, I dutifully aimed the flashlight at the entrance so they could see their way out.

Naturally, the minute Jan and I had loaded ourselves up with the camera equipment, it began to rain. We were just stepping out of the shorter passageway for the hike back to where Rikki was waiting for us at the mouth of the shaft with only a penlight for company when the sky came bucketing down. You couldn’t see through it and of course we hadn’t brought the ponchos. And I wasn’t about to risk my cameras if I didn’t have to. I made eye contact with Jan, and he motioned with his drenched head for us to get back inside the passageway.

“What’ll we do?” I asked once we were out of the thunder of the rain. You could hear it, but it was muffled, like stones being shaken in a far-off box.

“Wait it out,” he said. “It will slow down soon—this is not the rainy season.”

So we spread out the wet packs and made ourselves comfortable on the floor against the wall. Then Jan turned off the light to save the battery. Silence, except for the hollow racketing outside. After a while I cleared my throat and said, “Rikki will crawl back inside the tunnel, won’t he?” It wasn’t actually meant to be a question—Rikki was a big boy, he could take care of himself—but it came out that way.

“Oh, yes,” said Jan out of the dark. I heard the snick of a match and the sound of him drawing on a pipe. I hadn’t known he smoked a pipe. I love pipes, don’t ask me why. Nobody at the tamburitza bar smoked them. Neither Milo nor Bruno smoked them. But somewhere in my misty infant days, I must have had a happy pipe experience with a person I’ve by now forgotten, somebody I trusted, whose fragrant pipe smoke was burned into my memory.

A little rosy glow lit up the bottom part of Jan’s face and the sweet aroma of burning tobacco rolled my way. I closed my eyes and took it in through my nostrils. Neither of us made any effort to talk. We were too tired after the long crawl, and there was too much left to do. Jan puffed away and I took surreptitious sips of his smoke and thought about my adventurous pal Dirk settling down and getting married.

Sometime during Jan’s second pipe, I closed my eyes and must have dropped off for a bit, long enough to have a dream, anyway. In the middle of it, I heard my name—Eva, Eva—being repeated softly, and at first I thought Stefan was calling me, the timbre was so close, and then I realized it was Jan, who was trying to wake me without startling me. “Look,” he said. “Down by your feet.” He had the flashlight on, but shielded by his jacket so the light was very dim. I could just make out something moving around in the passageway on four legs, not large but definitely alive. It was sniffing the air and its eyes shone wildly green. It turned, and I saw the sweep of a long tail.

“A coati snooping around to see what we might have in our packs,” he said. “I did not want it to frighten you.”

Half-asleep as I was, the coati looked like an emissary from another world. “Oh, wow,” I whispered.

The creature seemed more interested in me now that it had heard my voice and came closer, bobbing its small nose toward my boots. Sometimes on trips like these, I’ll find myself in a situation that is so un-Chicagolike that I start thinking about what it would have been like to stay there. But when I try to imagine Chicago, it is as weird as the place I’m in. So over the years, I’ve stopped trying to figure out why I’ve chosen the life I have. In spite of occasional bouts of homesickness for a home that doesn’t exist, it’s been a good way to handle things. Except that this unexpectedly trusting animal was all of a sudden making me feel wistful. Or maybe it was the pipe, still lingering in the air.

“Still raining?”

He nodded.

“You must know this place pretty well. Rikki said you were here for six years.”

He cleared his throat, nervous, probably, about talking so much. “There is no place like Tikal, that is certainly true.”

“What do you mean?”

He readjusted the flashlight so we could see each other’s faces. The coati was speculatively circling around us. “This is where the Classic Maya culture probably got started. If you are an archeologist, it is like getting to work at the junction of the Tigris and the Euphrates.”

I nodded. I may be ignorant, but I can recognize the seat of Western civilization when I hear it.

“My training was all in Asia Minor. But years ago I met a Mayanist at a conference in England and he convinced me that the most exciting digs in the world were taking place here in Central America and Mexico.”

“Why?”

“The breakthroughs in glyph translation. It was finally starting to open up after centuries of false starts. It was the linguists and ethnographers who were responsible, not so much the archeologists. But I wanted to be here so that when they started to put together the written history of this culture and they needed people who knew the sites and where the inscriptions were, I could help.” He stopped abruptly, as though he’d just inadvertently dominated an entire dinner table conversation.

“Go on,” I said. “Please. I don’t know much about all this.”

But he’d withdrawn again. “Not much to tell. I was lucky enough to be here for some interesting burial discoveries, and my wife . . . well, being here for six years, you get to know a place because each site is different. You will see what I am talking about when we get to Palenque. To be here when the dynasties were being compiled was a rare privilege. I am glad Rikki could be in on part of it, even if he was just a child.”

“You have an outstanding son, by the way.”

In spite of the pipe, he looked as somber as ever. “How so?”

I didn’t much want to get into the details—I don’t like revealing my soft spots—but I did say that Rikki had an ability to relate to adults in a way that was almost unnerving, and that he was one of the most courteous teenagers I’d ever met. Also impressively intelligent.

Jan seemed pleased. “If things had gone better, he would have been a good epigrapher by the time he was twenty. He was taking what his mother taught him and training himself. I will never catch up with him as it is. I am better in the dirt.”

“So his . . . mother was a Mayanist too?”

I felt him pull away, as he’d done in the dark tomb when I leaned against him. I thought he might not answer at all. After a moment, however, he said, “Considering she was self-trained, quite a good one. She is gifted in languages, but took a degree in art history. It was a good combination for work in Central America.”

I was trying to decipher the tenses. I took another stab at it. “Rikki said I might be meeting her soon. In Palenque.”

He nodded.

“Well,” I said, “I’m looking forward to meeting Rikki’s mother.”

I thought this was subtle, but apparently not. He made a little motion with his hands, as though to brush away my words. Then he got to his feet and walked quickly toward the door of the passageway and stood there for a few minutes. When he came back, he said, “We can go now.”

I got the message. We gathered up our packs, re-strapped everything, and headed back out into the jungle. I looked behind me just as we went out into the night. The coati had vanished.

Poor Rikki was waiting for us, wet and shivering but loyally marking out the spot. It can’t have been any fun hanging around alone that way, especially with the deluge going on and only a pocket-size penlight for a weapon. “You’re some guy,” I said and patted him on the shoulder.

Back in the death chamber, we set up the tripod and lanterns and off-camera flashes, just like the night before. The first glyph I’d photographed and drawn had been so faint that I hadn’t really had a chance to absorb it, except as a technician. This one was quite clear, however, and I spent some time just looking at it before going to work. I’m no handwriting expert, but I was positive my first impression was right—neither the professional scribe nor the amateur cartoonist had done this particular glyph. It seemed to be in another hand entirely; the brush lines were thinner, and the proportions were different. It was larger, for example, than the official glyphs, but smaller than the teddy bears. And it seemed to have been placed to catch the eye, as though all the other painting had been done first and this one was added as an afterthought.

“Jan,” I asked casually, “is this one of the glyphs that has been translated?”

He paused over the tripod, as though considering whether or not this information might ruin me as an accomplice, then said, “It has.”

“What does it mean?”

He paused again, this time looking at Rikki, who was clearly dying for me to know, then gave an exasperated sigh. “It has several meanings. It is a very common glyph—you find it almost everywhere, including in some month names, some god names, and in a lot of the iconography. Nothing mysterious.”

I waited.

“The most common meaning seems to be k’in, which refers to the sun,” he added reluctantly. “Also, time in general. And k’in is the name for day. So you can see this is a very mundane sort of glyph, really.”

Which is why, I thought, we just army-crawled thirty yards to get to this chamber. Which is why we are hiking around in the middle of the jungle at night and poor Rikki is probably going to die of pneumonia.

“I see,” I said. “Thank you, Jan.”

I went back to my camera. He went back to his light stand.

In less than two hours I was done. I’d taken another two rolls of film, one up close and one with the glyph in context, and at the end of the evening, I handed Jan the sketchbook with six new drawings in it, one of them pretty damn good. He seemed pleased with the night’s work, though I was suddenly exhausted. We hadn’t had a shower for two days, and our tents were going to be soaked. It was close to 11:00 p.m., and we still had the hike up the shaft and the long trudge back to our camp. This was nothing new in my line of work, but I’d been spoiled, maybe, by the rest in the passageway with Jan’s cozy pipe. I could hardly stagger around.

Jan caught it. “Steady on,” he said, more kindly than I’d ever heard him. Maybe he was starting to get used to me.