All the Names They Used for God

by Anjali Sachdeva

  * * *

  —

  By the time she was thirteen, Effie had the poise of a grown woman. She was never frivolous or petulant, and Van Jorgen assumed it was because she had spent so much of her young life caring for him. The idea disturbed him, but it did not bear thinking on; he knew that without her, he would not be able to survive. Van Jorgen would not go to the shops or even to church without her. On the rare occasions when she was sick or busy, he stayed home.

  One evening as he and Effie sat at their dinner table, Van Jorgen noticed that his daughter was quieter than usual, and that her face, rather than its regular contemplative calm, had something guilty in it. She ate too fast and spilled soup on the front of her dress, then jumped up and went into the kitchen to dab at it with a rag. When she returned to the table she was flushed and silent.

  “Sick?” Van Jorgen asked. He still spoke only with difficulty, but Effie was used to his terseness and usually understood him perfectly.

  “No, Papa, I’m fine.”

  Van Jorgen chewed carefully and stared down into his bowl. Greta was always telling him that he should take more of an interest in Effie, as if she were not his only interest. “She’s a girl,” Greta said. “She won’t tell you anything if you don’t ask her.”

  “Reading now?” Van Jorgen asked.

  “No,” said Effie, and Van Jorgen frowned. This was not what he had meant, of course, he had meant what was she reading, and if she had not been so distracted she would have known that. The question was too trivial to bear repeating, so he searched for some other topic of conversation.

  “Greta,” he began.

  Effie looked up at him and said, “Aunt Greta says there’s a job, at the science and art museum.”

  Van Jorgen pictured the museum, where they had gone once with Greta. It was a tall, yellow sandstone building in the center of town. Effie had adored the place, stopping to read aloud to him every placard and scrap of information, until Greta told her to leave off or they would never see a tenth of the collection. The museum had made no great impression on him, except as a place filled with imposing echoes.

  “Won’t take me,” said Van Jorgen.

  “No, Papa,” she said. “Not for you. For me.”

  Van Jorgen could not have been more surprised had a squirrel or a house cat stood up and told him that it planned to seek a post at the bank. Effie, for all her manners, was still a child. He did not mind if she took in washing or mending to earn some extra money, but what could Greta be thinking, sending her off, alone, to that great stone warehouse? Van Jorgen’s hands quivered where they rested against the table on either side of his bowl. There were so many flaws in her proposal, so many thoughts to be voiced, that even if he had had the full power of his lungs he would not have had the breath to list them all. He shook his head. “No.”

  “It’s only a secretary’s position, nothing difficult,” Effie said.

  Her father did not answer, only stared at her. She leaned back, thin shoulder blades pressed flat against her chair, her nose and lips coloring as though she were about to cry. But her eyes stayed dry and steady against his. She had been so seldom defiant in the years since his accident that he was now utterly unnerved by a display that most fathers would have found commonplace.

  “I’ve told them I’ll do it. I’ll start next week. But I can still walk with you to the streetcar in the morning, and be home before you are. So you shouldn’t worry. It’s a very good job, and I’ll be good at it, I think.”

  Van Jorgen drew the slow breath he would need to protest, to say that she would be good at anything she tried but that fathers supported their daughters, not the other way around. But Effie disappeared into the kitchen again before he could speak. He banged his spoon against the table, the nearest he could manage to a bellow of frustration and bemusement, but she did not respond.

  * * *

  —

  The man Effie would work for—an archaeologist named Otto Freyn—had a face filled to bursting with aimless ambition. It puffed his plump cheeks, gave a slight glow to his skin, and forced his fair hair into childish ringlets no matter how short he cut it. His fingers were imbued with a slight tremor that, Effie learned much later, did not abate even when he slept. It would be enough to keep him out of the war and leave his naïve optimism intact. He was twenty, freshly graduated from the university, and eager to outstrip the classmates he had left behind.

  When Effie’s Aunt Greta shepherded her into his office for the first time, they found him reading a large red leather-bound volume entitled Ancient Peoples of the Southern Americas. He did not acknowledge them, and when Greta coughed politely, he held up a single finger to beg their patience and read to the end of the page before carefully setting the book down. The look of scrutiny he directed at Effie made her feel as though her head were too big for her body. But soon Freyn recovered himself, and smiled, and offered her a dish of dusty chocolates from the corner of his desk.

  It quickly became clear to Effie that Dr. Freyn had never had a secretary, and that he was pleased to have the honor conferred on him, even if she was only a girl of thirteen who had never had any proper schooling. He seldom looked directly at her, preferring instead to give dictation while she paced behind him down the musty halls of the museum’s storage areas, or while staring off into a corner of the room if she were seated beside his desk. For the initial years of her appointment, they carried out a series of menial tasks: cataloguing old collections, drafting letters of thanks or of pleading to philanthropists, serving as couriers for valuable artifacts on loan from other museums.

  At first, Effie was awed by Freyn’s knowledge; if she phrased her questions properly his answers might last an hour or more. But she soon came to realize that his intelligence was matched only by his single-mindedness. It was impossible for him to divide his attention. If they were cataloguing stuffed birds, he would pore over volumes of ornithological texts, ransack the storage rooms for every last specimen, and create for Effie long lists of scrawled Latin names to be regurgitated by the typewriter and affixed to identifying cards for the display cases. But ask him, in the midst of this fervor, to explain some aspect of Sumerian architecture and he was at a loss, though they had finished with the Sumerian collection only a month before. While Effie absorbed everything he told her and filed it away as neatly as she did the papers on his desk, Freyn seemed to have no memory; or rather, what memory he had was an overgrown jungle in which Hindu temples and Arthurian chalices and even the beloved Ancient Peoples of the Southern Americas were similarly lost among the luxuriant creepers of his far-flung learning.

  In four years, Effie cultivated a working knowledge of several sciences and mastered the typewriter. In this time Freyn’s stature as an archaeologist increased incrementally, but it was more through the torpid crawl of obligation than any great respect on the part of his colleagues. He published an occasional article in minor journals, suffused with garbled brilliance, but had nothing he could claim as his life’s work. His ambition expressed itself most often now as a fevered brightness gleaming from the depths of his eyes.

  “Why don’t you write a book?” Effie asked him. “Or some lectures?”

  “What about?”

  “Anything. Mesopotamian pottery.”

  “Done. Charles Holcomb, Clay Work in the Fertile Crescent.”

  “Zunis, then. What about those sculptures that were so interesting?”

  “Whitfield, done, Zuni Prayer Totems, Their Uses and Construction. Only two years ago.”

  “Well, really.”

  “I want something that’s mine.”

  “You won’t find it in someone else’s book,” Effie said, looking pointedly at the stack of thick volumes on his desk, newly arrived from the library. “You’d do better to check the storage halls.”

  “Do you think?” he said, staring at her suddenly in a
way that left her flustered and hot-faced, the kind of look she had previously seen him lavish only on antiquities.

  “What?” she asked. “I don’t know. It couldn’t hurt.”

  Freyn reached out toward her, as though he might brush back one of the strands of loose hair that lay across her forehead, or place his hand on her cheek, but just as abruptly, he pulled his hand back and slipped it into his pocket, looked down at the floor and shook his head. “You’re right, I’m sure,” he said. “Very astute of you.”

  The next day they began to explore the dark recesses of the storage halls, moving through the grimy rooms as though the museum’s basement was their own private country, a dusky, bereft world that smelled of excelsior and naphthalene. The keen glass eyes of stuffed rodents observed them from forgotten display cases as Freyn and Effie squeezed between old packing crates. The thrill of exploration consumed them both, although Freyn turned his enthusiasm indiscriminately to everything they saw, while Effie dismissed most of their finds after a few minutes. After several weeks of searching, they discovered an Egyptian collection that, according to the packing slip, had been shipped to the museum more than twenty years before but had never been uncrated. Attached to the slip was a letter written in a cordial, wavering hand from an old professor in Vermont, thanking the curator for giving a good home to the collection it had taken him a lifetime to accumulate.

  Throughout the winter the Egyptian artifacts absorbed all of Freyn and Effie’s attention. Their workdays grew longer and longer, and it was often past suppertime when Effie arrived home in her dust-streaked dress. Sometimes she felt a stab of guilt when she saw the look of distress on her father’s face as she walked through the door hours late, a guilt that only deepened at the way he turned aside and quickly composed himself before he welcomed her home. But the draw of the museum was irresistible, and when she and Freyn were in its grip everything else was crowded to the back of her mind.

  It all came to an end one morning when Effie arrived at the office to find Freyn thoroughly drunk, waving a large sheet of paper covered in his scrawling handwriting. Translating various arcane works from the Egyptian collection, he told her, combining information from several hieroglyphic inscriptions, triangulating a location with the oases at Siwa and Farafra, he had pieced together a map of a burial site in Egypt that he felt confident would yield treasure unlike anything the museums of the world yet possessed.

  He offered her a glass of brandy in celebration, which she refused, and soon fell asleep at his desk. Gently, Effie withdrew Freyn’s notes from under his cheek, and picked her way through his tangled chain of thought. Every link was strong. Excitement bloomed in her chest, like a crocus unfurling from the snow.

  * * *

  —

  The next several months were a flurry of secretive activity as Effie and Freyn attempted to plan an excavation in Egypt without letting anyone know what exactly he hoped to find. If his supervisors at the museum discovered his intention, they would surely send someone else. Worse yet, if the British or the Germans were somehow to find out about it, they would have their own teams in Egypt hauling the grave site over before he had even set out. Everything, from raising money to hiring assistants, had to be done with the utmost artifice, and in this, Effie was indispensable. She had a way of convincing people to be helpful without them feeling that it had been her idea, and soon Freyn had a sizeable budget and two dozen steamer trunks’ worth of supplies.

  As much as Effie appreciated her professional relationship with Dr. Freyn, she could not help imagining, from time to time, that he might someday see her as more than a secretary. It was true that he sometimes took her hand as they discussed the best strategies for his upcoming trip, but he did so with the same distracted air with which he handled his paperweights and pens. He listened to her ideas with enthusiasm, but she had no reason to believe it was any different from the enthusiasm he lavished on mummified cats and rusted iron figurines. And why should it be? She was his subordinate, after all, and when she thought about it she realized that she knew almost nothing about what he did outside his office. In addition, he was leaving for Egypt in two months, and might be gone for years. And of course there was her father to consider; it was only pride and selfishness that made her entertain such thoughts.

  Nonetheless, the idea continued to plague her, but nothing in Freyn’s words or manner gave her any particular hope until one day, as she was preparing to leave, he grabbed hold of her hand and said, “Miss Van Jorgen, I wonder if you will join me for supper tomorrow at my house?”

  Effie caught her breath and stood speechless for a moment, torn between the desire to accept immediately and the impropriety of what he had proposed; of course she could not visit him alone.

  Freyn blinked back at her for several long seconds before the puzzled expression cleared from his face. “Ah,” he said. “And of course your father must come, too. You live with him, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Effie quietly, believing that she would never convince her father to go, but overcome with curiosity about Dr. Freyn’s home. She imagined it would be messy; he always left papers and odds and ends around the office. But he will have a housekeeper, she told herself, and a cook, and who knows, maybe a valet, too. If I were to live there, what would I do with myself all day? She blushed, embarrassed by her own daydreaming, and said she would give him an answer the following morning.

  * * *

  —

  Effie repeated the invitation to her father, unaware of how the corners of her mouth twitched up in a shy smile whenever she said Freyn’s name. As she went on to describe the voyage Dr. Freyn would soon be undertaking, the genius of his discovery, and the fame that would undoubtedly be his, Van Jorgen noted her exhilaration with growing dismay. At last, he stopped her with a wave of his hand and said that they would go. He could tell she was surprised, but she only nodded, picked up a basket, and left to buy the groceries for their supper. Van Jorgen sat in an armchair in front of a window that had a view onto the street below. He saw Effie emerge from the building, and step lightly across the cobblestones toward the market.

  She was not a girl anymore. He had known, of course, that someday she would fall in love, be married, and leave him, but he saw now that he had never really let himself believe it. If he had been a different man, the man he should have been, her suitors would have come to him first, looked at him with fear and respect and courted his favor as well as Effie’s. Instead they invited her to supper without even showing him their faces. He was not a man now, not even a father; he was only a cripple. His daughter would make sure he was provided for, of course, hire some garrulous matron to wash his clothes and wheel him to church in a chair while Effie attended to the needs of her own household. But the heart of it was that she would marry and go. He longed, for the first time, for Denmark, for a place where old men were propped up at the supper table, fed soup, and cared for even when they were beyond use.

  The pall of dusk had settled over the streets, and the people walked more hurriedly. Effie would be darting from the baker to the grocer, accumulating vegetables and bread and maybe some cuts of meat, the basket growing heavier on her sturdy arm, a ready smile for everyone she met. He should be with her, to protect her in the gathering dark, but he was no help to anyone. He could not even buy her a wedding dress in which to leave him.

  * * *

  —

  The following night, Van Jorgen and Effie arrived at Freyn’s house just as the lamps came on, Van Jorgen leaning on his daughter’s arm. He was wearing his Sunday shirt, and Effie had a length of satin ribbon in her hair that Van Jorgen had presented to her as she was getting ready for the evening. He saw now that it was a different shade of green than her dress, but she had thanked him with tears in her eyes all the same, and kissed his rough cheek.

  The housekeeper greeted them at the door, but Freyn, unable to control his eagerness, stood just be
hind her, looking over her shoulder. Van Jorgen saw the face of his enemy and was disarmed by its childishness. He had pictured a man who was slick and handsome, pompously dressed, but Freyn’s collar stud had come undone, he was sweating, and his smile was exuberant and fawning.

  “Very good to meet you, sir,” he said, and shook Van Jorgen’s hand.

  “Papa doesn’t speak much, on account of his health,” said Effie.

  Freyn smiled and nodded. “Maybe we should sit down?” His eyes moved back and forth between Effie and Van Jorgen, as though he were not sure whom he was asking.

  They moved to the drawing room. Effie and Freyn chatted comfortably, starting out with talk about work but then moving on to politics, the war, and finally to things of no consequence that made for more pleasant conversation. Once in a while Freyn would remember himself and direct a question at Van Jorgen. Van Jorgen would gather his breath and issue a terse reply, and soon the conversation would drift away from him again. It did not matter. He did not care what they were saying. What was more important was the way they looked at each other, sat so comfortably close, the easy way that Effie laughed. He had not heard her laugh so much since she was a child, perhaps not even then. She was flushed and glowing before him, her infatuation all too clear.

  Van Jorgen stood abruptly and moved away from the two young people. Freyn did not notice, and chose that moment to grasp Effie’s hand and begin describing in detail the difficulty of finding reliable workers in Egypt.