Easter Island (28 page)

It was a beautiful spring day—a loose net of cirrus clouds caught the bright sun at brief intervals—and she promised herself she would take a long walk after the meeting and try to bask in the end of this rite of passage. She was meeting Jo later, to celebrate, and thought they should have dinner outside on State Street.

She arrived at the lecture hall—the same hall where she had taken Thomas’s class years before—and sat in the front row. There was a bustle among the five members of the panel as they opened their folders and files, and then Professor Jenks, whom she’d last seen at Thomas’s birthday party, called her name. She stepped up to the podium, her folder in hand.

“Mrs. Farraday,” began Professor Jenks. He looked surprisingly tired, disheveled, almost annoyed. The green plaid bow tie he was famous for wearing daily appeared hastily tied. For a moment she was tempted to ask him if he was all right, but thought this would compromise the meeting’s decorum. His wife had been recently diagnosed with cancer; it seemed to be taking a large toll on him. She’d heard complaints that he’d been neglecting his chair responsibilities. In fact, he hadn’t met with Greer about her paper in months.

“Good morning, Professor Jenks.” She tried to lend kindness, of the professional sort, to her voice.

“Yes, yes. Please, Mrs. Farraday.” Professor Jenks stood. “You have of course placed the committee in a most uncomfortable position. And before we go any further we would like to tell you that you will, of course, have the opportunity to submit a new paper. We do not intend for this incident to ever go beyond these halls.” He returned hastily to his chair. “That is the end of it. Take whatever time you need.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Please, Mrs. Farraday. This is awkward for all of us.”

“Me, especially. What, pardon my language, in hell is going on here?”

Professor Jenks let his forehead fall into his palms. “We’ve read Thomas’s paper. Did you really think we wouldn’t?” He looked up and ran his hand through his hair. “Well, anyway, that isn’t the point here. It’s done. Done. And we don’t need to deal with that. Again, Mrs. Farraday, let me assure you, you have our word that this will never leave this hall. It’s of no advantage to any of us, as individuals, or, for that matter, as a department with a reputation to uphold. You have been working very hard in the lab, we know. It’s a tiring job. A thankless job. It can easily exhaust a person. Blur a person’s normal judgment. There is no accusation, you understand, in any of this.”

Greer’s mind was trying to sift the data: Thomas’s paper, her dissertation, no accusation.

“Of course,” Greer finally managed to say, then closed her folder. “I need to review some materials.” She gathered her purse, pens and paper clips spilling as she slung the strap over her shoulder, and hurried from the room. In the hallway, with the door sealed behind her, she took a deep breath and let the eerie silence of the corridor surround her. She walked quickly to the library, fumbling in her heels, soon breaking into a run in front of the periodical shelves. She peeled off her blazer and let it fall to the ground. The man at the circulation desk called out, “Ma’am, are you all right over there?”

She felt along the shelves until she found it:
Nature.
Spring 1967, Vol. III. In the index she saw the title:
A Preliminary Study in the Evolution of the Magnolia Flower
by Thomas Farraday, Ph.D., and Bruce Hodges.

She skimmed the first few pages: descriptions of sample collection techniques, location, data—what she would have expected—and then, at the end, a sidebar:
Magnolia Dispersal: A Mathematical Theory
. She read every word. In it was the same data she had used, the same analysis, and the same equation she had presented to the committee.
Her
equation. Greer closed the journal, set it back on the shelf. She began to walk away, her jacket abandoned.

The man at the circulation desk called out, “Ma’am, would you like some water? Or a chair?”

But Greer said nothing as she pushed open the heavy glass library door, and felt the warm air shock her lungs.

16

V
on Spee must have felt the strain of his predicament. Ammunition and coal supplies were low; the journey across the Pacific had been long and lonely. Would those dusty orders issued by the Kaiser have started to haunt him?
He must never show one moment of weakness.
How, in the knowing approach to doom, would that have been possible? Even for a man known for unwavering confidence, for unflinching calm?

Now that the squadron was off the coast of South America, cables and telegrams once again reached him on the ship’s radio. Despite the clear impossibility of the fleet reaching Germany, Berlin advised: “Break through for home.” At the same time, von Spee learned that Japan, France, and Britain were concentrating their entire naval efforts on his squadron. (“Thus,” Churchill would later write of the hunt for von Spee, “to compass the destruction of five warships, only two of which were armoured, it was necessary to employ nearly thirty, including twenty-one armoured ships, for the most part of superior metal, and this took no account of the powerful Japanese squadrons, and of French ships or of armed merchant cruisers.”) But information as to the enemy’s position reached von Spee only weeks after dispatch, when it was no longer useful. As he was rounding the coast of South America, the enemy, larger, more powerful, and invisible to von Spee, was closing in.

Von Spee knew he could not lead the squadron’s two thousand men safely home. Is it not likely this plunged him into despair? Despair so great it caused him to miscalculate at the Falkland Islands, an error, in the end, that would cost him the fleet?

Shortly before leaving for the Falklands, at Valparaíso, von Spee sent this message to his Kaiser: “I am quite homeless. I cannot reach Germany. We possess no other secure harbor. I must plough the seas of the world doing as much mischief as I can, until my ammunition is exhausted or a foe far superior succeeds in catching me.”

When a visitor aboard the ship handed him a bouquet of purple irises, von Spee is reported to have said: “Thank you, thank you, indeed. They will do very nicely for my grave.”

—Fleet of Misfortune: Graf von Spee and the Impossible Journey Home

17

The small beans, shaped like hearts, arrive in the middle of the night.

At dawn, when Elsa walks down to the ocean to splash her face, there they lie: small black hearts, wet and glistening, scattered like pebbles along the beach’s rim. They have come, she knows, from somewhere far. She tries to calculate how long they’ve been at sea. If it was three weeks by boat from the mainland, then drifting on the current alone would take at least two months. Two months—assuming they left the nearest landfall. But they could come from anywhere—Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia. And this reminds her, as nothing for the past year has, of lands beyond this one, each bean like a bottle with a distant greeting. Plucking them from the sand, Elsa wipes each one on her skirt, and then cups them in her hand. She is collecting them to make a necklace for Alice’s birthday.

It is October and the weather is getting warmer. A party will be held on the beach—Elsa making the traditional taro cake as she has learned from the islanders, Te Haha singing. Too many birthdays have passed without event. Christmas and New Year’s marked only by sips from the small remaining store of brandy. But now, Elsa has decided, they will return to tradition, will pretend, if they can, that their lives are proceeding normally. And so seaweed is strung like tinsel from the tents. A white lace cloth sewn from Elsa’s old petticoats is laid across the small table. When they are all seated on their linen-covered crates, the coconut that miraculously washed up the week before is cracked open, its white flesh sparkling like ice, and is admired from all angles before Alice lifts the first crescent to her mouth.

She gnaws at the meat of the nut, sucks the inside of the shell. “Try it, Beazley,” she says.
“Co-co-nut.”

Edward takes his share, then Elsa, then Biscuit Tin and Te Haha. They all nibble slowly at their slivers of the white nut. It could be months before another washes ashore.

Elsa lifts the necklace of hearts from her lap and hands it to Alice.

“Twenty-two hearts, Allie. For the twenty-two years my heart has belonged to you.”

Alice fingers the necklace. “Beans!”

“It’s for your neck. To wear.”

But Alice simply sets it beside the ruins of her coconut.

“And, Alice,” begins Edward, lifting from his lap a bundle swathed like a mummy in silk handkerchiefs. “For the birthday of my most excellent assistant.”

She unfurls each cloth until she is holding the small figure of a
moai.

“You see.” Edward reaches forward to touch the statue. “It is made from the same volcanic tuff the real
moai
are carved from. From the quarry. The proportions are identical to those of the one we are excavating.”

“My own
moai
! Alice’s
moai
!”

“Yes, Alice. Your own
moai.
”

“Edward, that’s wonderful,” says Elsa. Alice has been helping Edward at the quarry. As the pit around the
moai
’s base grows deeper, Alice can climb to the subterranean level to make sure the workers don’t damage the statue. She describes to Edward any marking she notices, makes drawings of any petroglyphs. Alice has loved working there, her happiness awakened from a long sleep. The gift is perfect, thinks Elsa.

“
Moai iti
,” says Te Haha.
Little moai
. He examines it, clearly unimpressed by its artistry. “Humph.” He is, after all, a wood-carver. He is the artist among them.

Alice snatches the
moai
and clutches it to her chest. “
Moai iti
,” she whispers.

Soon the taro cake is presented. Te Haha rises from the table, sits cross-legged in the sand, and begins one of his warbling songs. Elsa feels herself relax. She is grateful to Te Haha, her teacher, their friend. She is grateful for this small family they have forged. Biscuit Tin, who has grown two inches in the past months, sits beside the birdcage. As Alice sways with Te Haha’s chant, losing herself in the music, he watches with fright as she seems to disappear.

Elsa lifts the necklace from the table and strokes the hearts. These beans washing ashore, the coconut on the sand, they make her wonder—could the tablets be made from driftwood? Where else would the pieces have come from?

“Elsa.” Alice’s eyes are on her. “That’s my necklace.”

“It is, Allie. Do you want to wear it?”

“Yes.” Alice leans across the table and Elsa places it around her neck.

“My necklace,” Alice says, squinting. “Mine.”

Several nights later they are having dinner on the beach. To the west, the sky is primrose, the clouds like melting pearls of sunset. The scent of smoke and sweet potatoes and roast mutton fills the air.

“I’ve been thinking,” Elsa says as she pries a pile of steaming banana leaves from the earth oven, “of paying a visit to the leper colony.”

“Elders?” Edward is seated on his crate, leafing through his notebook. He has been excavating eight hours a day; drained, he now speaks only in the most efficient shorthand.

“If rumor is correct, there are at least three people there old enough to remember the Peruvian slavers.” She forks a sweet potato and shakes it onto a metal plate. “And Te Haha says there is a man there who can write
rongorongo.
”

“The lepers? Write?”

“Well, I have to see, don’t I? I can’t pass up what might be a conversation with the only islander left who can read the script.” After all her interviews, her extensive records of the island’s folklore, Elsa feels she is close, on the verge of at least a partial decipherment. “Given the age of some of these people, it would not be wise to put it off.”

“Yes. Quite right, dear. Do go.”

Alice is perched on the sand beside Edward’s crate. “Quite right, dear,” she says. “Do go.”

Edward pats her head and Alice grins. From in front of Alice’s tent, Biscuit Tin kicks at the sand; it drifts into Elsa’s oven.

“You quit that, Biscuit Tin,” Alice says. “He’s misbehaving. See? Biscuit Tin is being nothing but naughty. Go play with Pudding.”

The boy dislikes Alice’s attention drawn from him. Biscuit Tin hasn’t been allowed near the excavation, directed instead to keep watch over Pudding. “Biscuit Tin is just a child,” Alice has said, “and archaeology is for professionals. Only grown-ups are professionals.” This leaves the boy bored—even, Elsa thinks, slightly angry. He now refuses to perform his nightly dances no matter how much they beg. But like a determined sentinel, he stays with them, slumped by the side of a tent or a rock, chewing on a biscuit or a banana. Sometimes he unrolls the portrait Alice made of him, holds it up to her, a reminder of her former affection. Elsa feels sorry for the boy; his heart must be broken. “Perhaps,” she says, turning to him, “Biscuit Tin would like to come with me.”

“Fine,” says Edward without looking up. He says this flatly, his lack of concern—leprosy is, after all, a contagious disease—taking Elsa aback. She knows he trusts her judgment in risking a visit for the investigation, but has he no concerns about the boy?

“Edward, are you well?”

“Yes, fine, Elsa.”

Excavation is clearly sapping every last bit of energy from him. Perhaps he is too old for this, for digging each day beneath the hot sun. When he began in winter, the air was crisp, the days short. Now humidity blankets the island. But he will not complain, he will still not, after all this time, admit to the possibility that this work is too strenuous for him. He has even given up reclaiming their lost items in Hanga Roa. A pair of his boots and another of her Darwin volumes have disappeared, but he has simply said, “The cycle is endless, Elsa. We could do nothing but search for our belongings. Let’s concentrate our efforts on the studies.”

“Good, then,” Elsa says, handing the dinner plates to Edward and Alice and Biscuit Tin.