“We set out about a month ago and found this place in only a couple of days. We did not see any other land or sea creatures en route. Kwame stayed with us here for about ten days, until he had convinced himself that we would be safe, and then he returned for the others.”
Vivien was quiet for a long time. Then she stood up and stretched. “And that, giant Johann,” she said slowly, “is our tale, such as it is.”
Johann and Sister Nuba stood up as well. “Thank you, Vivien,” Johann said after a brief yawn. “The story was fascinating.”
“You are very welcome, Johann,” Vivien replied.. She took his hand and held it tightly while Sister Nuba excused herself and headed for her sleeping mat.
“Could I interest you in a short walk?” Vivien then asked Johann.
“That’s not necessary,” Johann said. “I can see that you are absolutely exhausted.”
Vivien pulled him away from the cave and the fire, out along the path in the darkness, and put her arm around his waist. “I have not been sleeping well, Johann,” she said. “My thoughts go back and forth from Kwame to the children’s uncertain future…” She stopped and turned toward him. “Would you be willing to hold me tonight? I think it would help me sleep.”
“Sure, if you want,” Johann said. He was going to add something but didn’t know exactly how to say it.
“We’re not going to do anything either of us would regret,” Vivien said. She laughed. “At least not now.” She took Johann’s hand and led him toward the beach.
THE
MASKETS
ONE
KEIKO, WEARING HER finest, freshly cleaned dress, emerged from the trees and ran toward where all the others were standing together on a bluff that overlooked the water. “She won’t come,”
Johann sighed and shook his head. Vivien reached over and took his hand. “Maybe I should talk to her, darling,” she said gently. “After all, in Maria’s mind, I am the one who is displacing her. Maybe if I explained to her again—”
“Thank you, but no,” Johann interrupted. “Maria is my responsibility.”
He addressed Sister Nuba, Vivien, and the three children. “I’ll be right back,” Johann said. “With or without Maria. Please give me a few minutes.”
Little Jomo had already lost interest in the ceremony. “Can I go to the beach now?” he asked Vivien.
Johann found Maria playing with her figurines of Beatrice and Yasin a few meters in font of the cave. “Maria,” Johann called as he approached. “Let’s go. Everyone is waiting.”
Maria glanced briefly at Johann and then returned to her play without saying anything. He came over and bent down beside her. “Everyone is up on the bluff,” Johann said. “We’re ready to start the ceremony. But we don’t want to begin without you.”
“I’m not coming,” Maria said. She did not take her eyes off her figurines.
“And why not?” Johann asked, his impatience showing.
“I don’t want you to marry Vivien,” the girl said.
“But we have discussed this issue many times,” Johann said in an exasperated tone. “I have explained to you repeatedly that Vivien and I are adults, and that we love each other, and that we will all be one big, happy family… Last night you said you understood, and you agreed to participate in the wedding.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” Maria said stubbornly, still refusing to look at Johann.
Johann put his huge hand under the girl’s chin and turned her face toward his. “Look, Maria,” he said, “I love you completely, and so does Vivien, and we both want very much for you to be happy, but we are going to be married whether you like it or not. Now I’m asking you for the last time, as a favor to me, will you please come with me now and be a part of this ceremony?”
Her blue eyes were full of defiance. “No,” she said crisply
Johann’s first frustrated impulse was to seize the girl and carry her forcefully to where the others were gathered. Muttering to himself, he resisted the temptation to use physical force. “All right,” he said angrily, “have it your way… But I will remember this the next time you ask me to do something special for you.”
Maria was now ignoring him and appeared to be totally absorbed in whatever game she was playing with her figurines. Johann walked away in disgust.
FOR THEIR WEDDING night, Johann and Vivien chose to spread their mats only a few meters away from a beautiful pool at the bottom of a waterfall. Because of the lower gravity in their worldlet, the water appeared to glide gently over the rocks on its descent, and fell more softly into the pool at the bottom.
They decided to swim together after making love. “You’re still worried about Maria, aren’t you?” Vivien said as she swam to Johann and put her arms around his neck.
“Yes,” he said, pulling her body closer. “I’m sorry; Vivien, you deserve better on your wedding night. I shouldn’t let her bother me so much.”
Vivien kissed him tenderly “Don’t give yourself such a hard time, Johann,” she said. “Your concerns about Maria are perfectly understandable. You have spent the last eight years of your life caring for the girl and fulfilling your promise to Beatrice… And I must say your strong sense of responsibility is an attribute that I find very attractive.”
“But it’s so damn frustrating,” Johann said. “We have waited all this time just to let Maria adjust to the idea of our being together. We might as well have married three or four months ago.”
“She’s still a child, Johann,” Vivien said, “with very limited experience. You are the only security that she has ever known. She’s never had to contemplate sharing you before.”
“I know, I know,” he said. “You and I have had variations of this same discussion at least once a day for the past two weeks.” Johann sighed and leaned down to kiss Vivien. “I don’t want to hear Maria’s name mentioned again until morning,” he said after the kiss.
Vivien pressed herself tightly against Johann and bit him playfully on the neck. “Your wish is my command, giant Johann,” she said.
“NOTHING EITHER VIVIEN or I say makes any impression on her, Sister Nuba,” Johann said. “Would you please try to talk to her?”
“Yes,” Nuba replied, “but in my opinion it won’t help the situation any. In Maria’s eyes we adults have all betrayed her. I’m as guilty as Vivien or you because I performed the wedding ceremony… No, Johann, as difficult as it may be for you to accept, I think there’s nothing we can do to speed up this process. Maria will adjust, or she won’t, according to her own timetable.”
Johann reached up to the next set of branches and plucked three more pieces of the round yellow fruit. He placed them in the basket that Sister Nuba was holding. “What if—” he had just said, when they were interrupted by the sound of a child’s wail coming from the cave area almost one hundred meters away.
“Uh-oh,” Sister Nuba said, “it sounds as if Beatrice has been hurt.”
Johann and Sister Nuba walked briskly back to the cave. Beatrice was no longer crying when they arrived. “But there must have been some other reason, B,” Vivien was saying, “surely Maria didn’t punch you just because you picked up one of her figurines from the sand. Did you say something to provoke her?”
“No, Mother, I didn’t,” the girl said. Her left eye was already beginning to swell. “Ask Keiko. Maria came over to me, jerked her stupid toy out of my hand, and then hit me as hard as she could.”
Keiko verified that what Beatrice had said was true. Johann felt his anger rising. “Where is Maria now?” he asked.
Keiko shook her head. “I don’t know, Uncle Johann,” she said. “We left her down on the beach.”
Johann started down the path. “Remember,” he heard Sister Nuba say behind him, “she’s only a child.”
Maria was not playing on the wide beach down the path from the front of their cave. Johann called her name but there was no response. After searching for a few minutes, Johann finally found her in an isolated cove farther up the sho
re, near where the bay spread out into the lake.
“Maria,” he said, “didn’t you hear me calling you? Why didn’t you answer?”
Five figurines were spread out on the ground in front of the girl. The one representing Vivien had her head nearly twisted off and looked grotesque. “Ah, friends,” Maria said, “the real Johann has arrived, just as I said he would.” She picked up the Johann figurine. “Say hello to Johann, Johann.”
Maria laughed at her own witticism. Johann was not amused. He moved into the space where she was playing with the figurines. “Did you hit Beatrice?” Johann asked.
Maria nodded.
“And why did you hit her?” he said.
“Because she was interfering with my game,” Maria replied nonchalantly, her eyes still focused on the figurines in front of her.
Johann was having difficulty controlling his anger. He jerked the Johann figurine out of Maria’s hand and then reached down on the ground and swooped up the others. Her response was immediate. “Give them back,” Maria shouted, struggling uselessly with Johann’s closed fist. “They’re mine!”
He bent down directly in front of her face. She bad already started to cry. “Now you listen to me, young lady,” Johann said in a voice louder than he intended. “You will not hit the other children. Under any circumstances. Is that clear?”
Maria had become frantic. She was now tearing wildly at his hands. “They’re mine!” she shouted again through her tears.
“If you ever hit Beatrice or Keiko or Jomo again,” Johann said, “then I will take all these figurines away from you. Permanently. Do you understand?”
Maria nodded her head vigorously up and down. “Please, Johann,” she then managed to compose herself enough to say, “may I have them back now?”
Johann dropped all the figurines on the ground. Maria picked them up, one at a time, inspecting each carefully “There now,” she said in her play voice, “it’s all over. Everybody’s all right.”
TWO
JOHANN WHISTLED TO himself as he picked the flowers. When he felt that he had enough of the royal blue bulbs with the creamy white centers, he wandered across the meadow to where the long, skinny red-orange flowers were growing. He picked three or four, and then tried several different ways of mixing them in the bouquet he was carrying in his arms.
He was in a great mood. That morning Vivien had risen from their bed at dawn, taken five or six steps toward the bay, and thrown up their dinner from the previous evening. “That’s the final confirmation,” she had said to Johann with a broad smile when she had returned a few minutes later. “Twelve days late, swollen breasts, and morning sickness can only mean one thing.”
Vivien had plopped down beside him and then leaned across his chest. “You, giant Johann, are going to be a father,” she had said.
Johann had been surprised that he was so excited. As he had lain there in the early morning hours, cuddling Vivien who was again fast asleep, he had felt a surge of joy that he had not anticipated. I’m going to be a father he had said to himself. For the very first time. At the age of forty or so.
All day long Johann had allowed himself to delight in fantasies of the future. Earlier, he had imagined that he was out in the bay with his son (always in his mind’s eye the unborn child was a boy, never a girl), teaching young Siegfried to swim almost before he could walk. Now, as he finished gathering the flowers, Johann was conjuring up a vision of an overnight camping trip with the boy, some four or five years hence, to show Siegfried the bizarre giant insects that lived in the bushes with the huge leaves on the far side of their island.
The bouquet completed, Johann decided to wander back toward their cave. By his own reckoning, he was about a kilometer away Instead of taking the normal route home, Johann decided he would try to find a shortcut though a small, dense wood of tall, stately trees with white trunks and very large red leaves.
It was slow going though the woods. Johann had only taken a few steps into the thick undergrowth before he decided to turn around and return to the meadow. Just as he turned, however, he heard a peculiar, high-pitched yelp only a few meters away. Johann bent down, holding the bouquet in one hand and parting the plants with the other, and found what appeared at first glance to be a large, oval brown fruit, roughly the size of Johann’s fist. Sticking out of one end of this apparent piece of fruit was an unusual animal face that had been the source of the peculiar yelp.
Johann picked up the object so that he could examine it. The dark little face squirmed, and yelped again. Its toothless mouth was just below its pair of widely separated eyes, which were outlined in a raccoonlike mask of pure white. Everything else on the face was a dark brownish-black. Above the white eye mask, arranged in a row across the forehead, were three small indentations, each containing a different structure unlike anything Johann had ever seen on a living creature before.
Johann brought the fruit up closer to his eyes so that he could inspect the extraordinary tiny structures on the animal’s forehead. The frightened creature writhed and pulled itself back inside the fruit, out of Johann’s sight. He heard a guttural growl only an instant before something with sharp claws landed on his back, knocking him forward into the trunk of one of the bigger trees. Johann remembered dropping both his bouquet and the unusual fruit just as he lost consciousness.
WHEN HE WOKE up Johann had a headache and a large knot on the upper right side of his forehead. As he rose and stumbled back into the meadow, he felt the pain from the scratches on his back. Johann reached around to check himself and realized, from the wetness of his shirt, that he had been bleeding. Remembering what he had been doing in the first place, Johann then retraced his steps back into the forest and retrieved the bouquet that he had dropped. The unusual fruit was nowhere to be seen.
He heard Vivien calling him when he was about halfway back to their living area. Eventually they met in a glade near the stream from which they drew their drinking water. “Where have you been?” Vivien shouted when she first saw Johann. “We have had another crisis—”
She stopped in mid-sentence when she was close enough to see Johann’s condition. “Good grief,” she said, running up and immediately examining his head and back, “what happened to you?”
“That’s a good question,” Johann replied, wincing from the touch of her fingers on his back. “I’m not altogether certain.”
He forced a smile. “Here, mother-to-be,” he said, handing Vivien the bouquet. “These are for you.”
“Our baby and I thank you,” Vivien said, accepting his gift. “But you may have paid too dear a price for these, giant Johann,” she added. “Your back is a total disaster.”
Johann laughed. “I wasn’t attacked until after I finished picking the flowers,” he said. He quickly summarized for Vivien what had happened to him in the woods, spending most of his time describing the strange animal with the white mask and forehead indentations.
“Your attacker may have been a mother protecting its child;’ Vivien said. “Sometimes, Johann, your curiosity needs to be tempered by a little judgment.”
“You’re probably right,” he said. Johann changed the subject. “Now what were you saying about another crisis?”
Vivien sniffed the flowers and looked up at Johann as they walked along. “After what you’ve been through already today,” Vivien said, “I don’t think you want to hear about it.”
“Is it Maria again?” Johann, asked.
“Yes.” Vivien nodded. “But we can wait until tonight to talk about it.”
Johann stopped walking. “I’d rather know now,” he said.
Vivien turned to face her husband. “Maria and Beatrice have had a terrible brawl, Johann,” she said. “I think that Beatrice’s nose is broken.”
“Shit,” Johann muttered angrily “I told Maria if she ever hit—”
“Wait,” Vivien interrupted. “There’s more to the story… I’m very sorry, Johann, but when I was interrogating Beatrice about the cause of the fight, s
he confessed that she had told Maria that her father, Yasin, was a very bad man who liked to hurt women. When Keiko corroborated the story, Maria apparently went berserk.”
“What?” Johann exclaimed. “How do Beatrice and Keiko know about Yasin?”
“They must have heard his name mentioned many times in the village,” Vivien said. “Children often know much more about what is going on around them than we adults give them credit for.”
Johann was experiencing a tumult of emotions. His anger toward Maria was being overwhelmed by his concern about what she had heard about her father. There could not have been a worse way for her to find out, Johann was thinking.
He tore away from Vivien and started running toward their cave. “I must talk to Maria,” Johann shouted.
“I understand,” Vivien shouted back.
NO ONE HAD seen Maria since the incident. Johann at first assumed that she had gone off to be by herself, as she often did, but after looking in all Maria’s favorite places,Johann began to panic. “She has run away,” he said to Vivien when she arrived.
“Don’t be silly, Johann,” Vivien said. “Maria’s only eight years old… Besides, where would she go?”
Darkness fell and there was still no sign of the child. Johann could not eat. He interrogated Sister Nuba, Keiko, and Beatrice over and over, searching for anything that Maria might have said, even in anger, that could provide a clue to her whereabouts.
He took a torch and revisited all the places he had searched in the late afternoon. At the isolated cove where Johann had confronted Maria after she had struck Beatrice the first time, Johann found her figurines, in two pouches, underneath a bush beside the rock on which Maria usually sat. Had the pouches been there that afternoon? Johann couldn’t say for certain. His only concern at that time had been locating the girl.
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