Enchanted Islands (36 page)

Later, after the sun rose, I would go back to the apartment and climb into bed next to Ainslie, who would sleepily put his arm around me. We would make our preparations, buy our supplies, book our passage. I would make him promise to never again let me learn things secondhand. We would live our dutiful, desiring lives.

Now, though, I was relieved; I'd been holding my breath and was finally able to exhale. It wasn't just leverage I had over Ainslie; it was understanding. Ainslie and I were laid bare. And beyond that, he had chosen me. I loved him. I knew him better than any other being, and he me. This was intimacy, the like of which I'd never known except with Rosalie, and even that relationship was fraught with secrets. We can know each other deeper than mere facts. We can love each other deeper than our actions.

We spent two months on Baltra, Ainslie overseeing the dismantling of the base, giving away the building supplies. It made no sense to me—build a base and then allow residents to come cart away the supplies just when the war had ended. We'd had two world wars in thirty years; didn't anyone think we'd need the base? A lot of military decisions were made like this, I came to see. They made sense in the short term, were politically expedient and curried favor, but disregarded any long-term good or savings.

Ainslie carried a clipboard everywhere he went, and I have to say he looked handsome in his uniform. He created a list of raw materials and a priority list ranked by need of locals who wanted the wood and furniture. The distribution, though, was as chaotic as all things Ecuadorian. Even the best strategies falter under native execution.

The whole process was remarkably quick. There was a fully functional (albeit almost empty) base one day, and the next the buildings were reduced to mere foundations, the locals having carted everything off like ants at a picnic. I took a walk among the ruins—that's what they looked like, ruins. I've never been to Europe, but I assume this is what the remnants of Greek civilization look like, a blueprint of what once was. Nature, too, had already started to encroach on the site, with grass and small shrubs poking up through any slit in the concrete. Iguanas had reclaimed their territory. A dozen of them were crowding onto one cement block, each refusing to cede his perch to another. I took a long walk down the runway. This would be the flattest walk I'd take for as long as we were on the islands. And the only one where I could walk upright without fear of a branch or a thorn catching me.

The sun beat down, the heat shimmering in the distance. “I'm sorry,” I whispered to no one, to myself. I think I meant it both ways: apology and regret.

Floreana gossip had reached us on Baltra. When our acquaintance Leif Jurgensen came to Baltra to collect building materials, he told us that the Muellers had caught a ride on his fishing boat to Chatham. Apparently they thought that Alexandre's philosophy would help the German war recovery. So that left only Elke and Heinrich and the Jiménezes.

Only the latter came to greet us at Post Office Bay. Gonzalo was effusive in his handshake, Gansa squeezed me tightly, tearing up. She had worried about me in the United States, a country at war. It was useless explaining to her that although our country was very involved in the war, the closest actual fighting was several thousand miles off the coast. I think she imagined hand-to-hand combat in Philadelphia.

Gansa had given birth to two children in our absence, but both she and her husband looked unchanged in the four years we'd been gone. The children were perched placidly in baskets on Chuclu, who was still trodding his stubborn path. He didn't look happy about having two papooses strapped to his side, but then he never looked happy about anything. I gave Gansa my congratulations, and told her I was sure I had something for the children in my boxes, once I unpacked.

“How long are you staying?” Gonzalo asked.

I looked at Ainslie, but of course he hadn't understood the Spanish. “Oh, a while,” I answered breezily.

They apologized for not having their burro available to help us. We assured them it was no problem—we had brought our own from Chatham, who liked us scarcely better than Chuclu. But he didn't have a name.

Gonzalo waited patiently until the crew had loaded the burro into the panga, much against its will, then stared it in the eyes once it had arrived gratefully on land. The donkey stared back at him and let out noisy flatulence that made Gonzalo laugh like it had told him a hilarious joke. “His name is Pedo,” he said. I looked it up later. Translation: fart.

I asked after Elke and Heinrich. I was nervous to see them. Their not appearing on the beach was not a good sign. But Gonzalo said that they had tired of boats and visitors during the war and now didn't come to the beach. I tried to imagine what they must be feeling, and failed.

We trekked up to our home and found it largely intact. Someone had obviously made use of the platforms and stuffed mattresses, and then the birds and rats had torn them apart. There were empty cans on what was left of the beds.

We gave up on the mattresses and slept on the floor in our bedrolls the first night. When we woke up the next morning, sipping our cold coffee from the flask I'd brought, Ainslie strategized bringing our belongings up from the beach. He would go down straightaway and check on poor Pedo, whom we had tied up to a tree for the evening. I was anxious, for what exactly, I didn't know, until Ainslie said, “Go see her.”

“What?”

“You're obviously not going to be able to do anything else until you do, so go ahead.”

“Who, Elke?”

Ainslie gave me a look that said, I'm no dummy.

“I'll go later. We'll get settled first.”

“Go now, Frances.”

I packed up a bit of water and some fruit leather and set off on the path toward Elke and Heinrich's house. My anxiety grew as I traveled. What was I worried about? That she would be cold? That she would be warm? That it would be awkward?

The dog greeted me first, wary, but then sniffing my crotch she recognized me and bounded back to the house to let Elke know that someone known was arriving.

Elke's hair had gone grayer in the time we'd been away, but otherwise she was her usual no-nonsense self. She was genuinely shocked to see me. Her jaw actually dropped, the way it does in cartoons, and she ran over, still holding the spoon she was stirring the pot on the stove with, hugging me and dripping liquid down my back.

“Franzi!” She kept saying my nickname and she alternately hugged me, drew back to look at me, and hugged me again.

From behind the house came a young woman in her late teens. “This is Brigitta,” Elke said in Spanish. “Gitta. Her father sent her here for the war,
Gott sei Dank
.”

She had Elke's ruddy coloring, the same concentration of features in the middle of her face, the same open gaze.
“Wie geht es Ihnen?”

“Es geht mir sehr gut,”
I said.

“I knew you understood German!” Elke said in triumph in her native language.

“A bit,” I said. I considered telling her that I grew up speaking a version of it in my parents' house, and decided not to. Perhaps not all confidences needed to be shared.

Any worries I'd had about awkwardness were immediately banished. Heinrich greeted me warmly as well and asked after Ainslie. I said he was very well. They were anxious to show me the improvements they'd made in the house since I'd left—a new hearth, a bigger table, a second room for Gitta, a pipe that led the stream directly into their kitchen.

“Oh, das ist deiner!”
Elke said, handing me a pot I'd given her.

“Keep it,” I said. “It was a gift.” I answered her in English, and this, then, was how we began to communicate, each in our own language, which seemed somehow fairer and more honest. I was committed to honesty now. It was my religion.

“And your brother?” I said to Gitta. Elke's eyes welled up and she walked out of the back of the house to the garden.

Gitta's eyes turned to the floor. “He was fighting on the Russian front and he didn't come home.”

“Entschuldigung,”
I said. I had wanted to say “My condolences,” but instead I had apologized as though it were my fault that he was dead. There was a silence.

Elke came back into the house with some lemons. She was sunny again. “I will make lemonade.”

We settled back into life on Floreana, no spying necessary. “How are they justifying our pay?” I asked Ainslie.

“Dunno,” he said. “That's the wonderful thing about government, no justification necessary. We're integral to maintaining postwar peace.”

“Peace with blue-footed boobies?”

“Well, that quest for peace is what's keeping you in the style to which you are accustomed.”

“Oh, what style!” I spread my arms out to indicate our hut. “The luxury.”

“You wouldn't have it any other way.”

“I would have it a bit differently, if I had my druthers. Plumbing would be nice, for instance. Perhaps some mail service.”

“People can't even imagine what our life is like here, can they?” Ainslie asked.

It was around then that I went back to turning my diary into a book. Usually the entries were boring: “Garden, lunch of
camotes
and beans, cut wood, fed goat.” “Hiked to lava flow, Ainslie trapped a boar.” But I discovered that with a little embellishment, they were amusing. More amusing in the telling than in the living. There was interest in living like we did, and maybe we could earn a little money from publicity. We would need money. Even if we had escaped a discharge, Ainslie would be asked to retire at the first opportunity, of that I was sure.

So I busied myself in writing down all the things that happened (few though they were). I had always been told I had a flair for writing, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. We had come prepared this time, so I had more leisure time, and I used it well.

Every few days I would go to Elke's or she would come over and we resumed our habit of dividing our grudge work. She was kind enough to give us plants to replenish our garden (they had been using it to grow manioc and roquette in our absence and let the other plants go to seed—she said it grew better with less shade than their garden had), so it was in decent shape.

We had agreed, tacitly, to wipe the slate clean. We had only one conversation about what happened, and it was full of metaphor, conducted in our new German-English habit. We were talking about our childhoods and I told her about a time, which actually happened, when a chicken had bitten me at Mrs. Keane's farm in Nebraska. I had never seen a live chicken before, and this one was beautiful, with multicolored feathers and a fluffy head that looked made for making pillows. It pecked its way near to me, and I held still so that I wouldn't scare it away. The underside of its beak was blue like a morning sky and before I thought about what I was doing, I put my hand out to touch it. The chicken struck first, pecking my hand two or three times before I could pull it away. Bright spots of blood appeared on my palm, and a searing pain caused me to cry out and jump up. When the housekeeper asked me what happened, I said I had been attacked, which provided no end of amusement. For months afterward the words “Attacked by a chicken!” could send the whole household into fits of hysteria.

Elke laughed, then turned serious. “Sometimes chickens attack,” she said, “when they feel threat.” We were no longer talking about chickens.

“I know,” I said, forgiving her. “Chickens are just being chickens. I should not have stuck my hand near its beak.”

“And still you love chicken.”

I smiled. “I do,” I said.

One day Ainslie came back to the house in a pitch of excitement.

“Franny, he's here. He might be here!”

“Who?”

“Guess! Wait, don't bother, you'll never get it.”

“Okay,” I said. “I won't guess.”

“Hitler.”

“You're right,” I said, “I wouldn't have guessed that. Because he's dead.”

“Ah, but is he?” Ainslie asked.

“Ainslie, that's completely ridiculous.”

“Of course it is,” he said. “But how much fun will we have while we look for him?”

Indeed, it was a total flurry of activity by the Ecuadorian military, the coast guard, and the U.S. Air Force. For three days I cooked nonstop for the fifty-odd men who were on our island, no small feat considering that it was all done on a one-fire hearth. The best I can say is that no one died from my cooking.

While looking for Hitler, who was obviously not on the island, the search party came across some human remains, bones bleached white from years in the sun. Who knows whose they were or how long they'd been in repose. A mutineer exiled on the island. An intrepid, doomed survivalist. I thought it might even be the famous baroness, but the bones belonged to a man. They buried them in a grave near Black Beach, but before they did I caught a glimpse of the bones, white and straight like pieces of a ruined picket fence.