Deflated, Odysseus carries on. At night, he feels the sudden urge to break the oar and burn it. He picks it up and raises it over his knee. Its shaft is smoothed and worn from his long touch, its butt rounded to a soft bump. His sweat polishes the wood. The skin of his fingers feels like bark. He cannot destroy such an intimate thing. He sleeps that night with his arms around the oar, his cheek pressed against the blade.
A few days later, Odysseus arrives at a grass plain that stretches far to the horizon, interrupted only by an archipelago of mountains. At an oasis way station, he asks the travelers and merchants about the oar. They speak no common tongue so the people take the oar off his shoulder to show Odysseus how it is used. This is a winnowing shovel, one woman explains through her motions. She carries the oar to a pile of grain, which she lifts into the breeze. You use it to separate the grain from the chaff, and even better, to cleanse the grain of weevils. Odysseus smiles as the air fills with wheat dust. No, no, the baker interrupts, give it to me, I’ll show you. He takes the oar to his ovens and slides it under a pillow of flatbread. With a turn of his wrists and a swivel of his torso, he plops the steaming bread in front of Odysseus. The baker ends his performance by brandishing the oar like a spear and stamping his feet. Between mouthfuls of delicious bread, Odysseus cannot stop laughing.
In exchange for a few bronze clasps of jewelry, the hero acquires a ram (Teiresias told him to sacrifice a ram, a bull, and a wild boar to Poseidon, but Odysseus decides that the ram will just have to do). He goes into the steppe at night dragging the ram behind him. Under the bright constellations, he plants the oar in the ground. He closes his eyes to offer a prayer to the sea god. For a moment, the wind over the grass sounds like the wind over the sea, the way he has heard it and forgotten it and heard it again, skimming foam from the caps, chasing shadows on the water, cooling his blistered cheeks. The ram looks at the oar with ugly suspicion and bleats. Off to Poseidon with you, Odysseus says. He slits the animal’s throat. The bowl Penelope packed for him is so small that it overflows almost immediately with the creature’s blood. A red pool forms at the base of the oar. Odysseus completes his prayers and the necessary carving, and then lies down. He wills himself to dream of his wandering years, of the pleasures and miseries of the mariner: Calypso’s legs, the roaring whirlpools, the blood sunsets over orange waters, and then that eternal terror, when sails tear, oars snap, hulls shiver, when the great beamed mast topples over the deck and sailors shed the membrane that keeps them from the hateful sea.
When he wakes, there is the taste of salt on his lips. It is strange to walk without the oar over his shoulder. He makes his way to the oasis, which is not in the direction he remembered it to be. I’ve grown even older, he thinks. The mountains, too, seem to have drifted off their moorings. I thought those were to the north, not the south. At the oasis, he asks the people there if they could remind him which direction he came from. They shrug. When the grass ends, they explain, there is only forest all around. Odysseus grows frantic. Which way is the sea? he mimes with every possible contortion of his body. They do not understand. He speaks, using all the words he can think of that mean sea in each language that has passed through his head. One of the words reaches shore. Sea, a man says, sea! Yes, sea, Odysseus grasps his hand, which way is the sea? The man smiles. He gestures at the infinite steppe. Sea.
8
In the upper reaches of a medieval European map—one of those beautiful Italian planispheres drawn from Arab traditions of cosmography, with the south at the top and north at the bottom—bobs an enormous Indian caravel. You could miss the detail and think it is only another European ship, another plucky foot soldier in the white man’s conquest of the sea. The inscription tells another story. The ship is an “Indian junk,” built with four masts, housing sixty cabins’ worth of merchants. Though large, it was so ingeniously designed that it needed only one tiller. Its navigators didn’t require compasses because they had in their ranks a full-time astrologer, who would steady himself on the deck with his astrolabe and shout out directions from the stars.
This Indian vessel in 1420 sailed to the southern tip of Africa, called Diab by the monkish cartographer. From there, the ship journeyed two thousand miles west. Finding only water and wind—not even ice or penguins or the dribbled little islands of the South Atlantic—the Indians decided to turn back. The astrologer had lost his bearings. In this way, Indians missed the best chance they had to discover Indians.
9
The earliest documents we have in the now-extinct Sogdian language come from a bundle of undelivered letters. Archaeologists in the 1970s found this ancient mailbag in the ruins of a watchtower in western China. Nearly two thousand years ago, the tower was besieged and burnt to the ground. The letters survived, preserved for centuries in the dry desert.
Of the poor postman, we know nothing. Presumably, he went up in flames along with the tower. Or he never made it to the tower, was stripped of his mailbag and gutted by the Chinese border garrison. Or he was swept up in the attack on the tower and died on its ramparts. All sorts of sad fates could have engulfed him. Letterless nomads had sacked the capital and destroyed many cities. Rebellions rippled through the teetering empire. The postman was carrying missives out from a devastated land.
Like so many of the liminal peoples of the world, the Sogdians were traders. They settled across the expanse of the silk route in communities tethered to their homeland in Central Asia, the twin cities of Samarkand and Bukhara. Caught up in the frenzy in China, they wrote home.
Here, a merchant’s representative reports to headquarters of the unfolding debacle. Here, a trader, who does not expect to return home, asks that the interest accumulated in one of his deposits be allotted to a certain orphan in Samarkand.
Here, a woman complains bitterly to her husband that she and her daughter have not heard from him in ages. To pay his debts, she says, they have been forced to work as servants in a Chinese household. She begins the letter in the conventional way: To my noble lord husband, blessing and homage on bended knee, as is offered to the gods. She ends in unflinching rebuke: I would rather be a pig’s or a dog’s wife than yours!
Here, the same woman writes to her mother. No one will allow her daughter and her to leave, she says, no one will guarantee their passage out of China. She has only one source of comfort and hope: a charitable priest recently offered her a camel.
Here, a trader informs the chief merchant that a colleague sent into the Chinese interior eight years ago has not been heard from for three.
A year must have been shorter then than it is now. The greater the speed of our news, the slower the speed of our time. Like ours, the Sogdian calendar was three hundred and sixty-five days long. Like us, they kept four seasons. In the last month of winter, they spent a day tearing at their faces in mourning for the dead. On certain days in spring, thieves and crooks were allowed to bring counterfeit goods to the market and sell them in the open air. The Sogdians counted their years in the reigns of kings, which means they never had to count for very long.
And yet no stretch of time feels as long as the wait for a message. If they were not killed, or further displaced and dispossessed, these letter writers would have watched the arrival of every rider with expectation. They would wonder why no response ever came. They might pray. In lantern-lit nights, they wrote more hopeful letters. Somebody took those away, dropping them into the world in the scuffing of boots, the sound of hooves, the slow shrinking of a caravan from lumps to nothing. If anybody could hear the absolute silence of the desert, it was the letter writers.
10
Siberia is so big there are still rivers without names. A family raced out of time into the hugeness of the taiga. They dug out a home in the wooded hills, hundreds of kilometers away from the nearest human beings. Over the years, the things they brought with them from the modern world—a kettle, a pot, salt—all melted away. They read the Bible by firelight. In seasons of plenty, they ate potato patties. In famine, they
ate bark and leaves. When they were bored, they assembled in the dark cabin and revealed to each other the splendor of their dreams.
After his wife died of starvation, the old father took to watching the night sky. He noticed with surprise the growing number of stars fleeing across the blue. These were satellites.
Soviet geologists discovered the family in 1978. They watched from a distance and then left gifts on the threshold. Little by little, they established ties with the family. Soon, the father and his children began to troop down to the geologists’ camp. One son was absorbed by the wonders of the sawmill, its perfect planes of wood. The rest of them watched TV. The father looked at the images through his fingers, whispering all the time, This is forbidden, this is forbidden, this is forbidden. His children would watch for a while and then run around the corner to pray for forgiveness. Then they watched some more.
Within three years, almost all of the family were dead, killed by the hardship of their remote lives now that they had come into an understanding of their remoteness. The father and lone surviving daughter lived together for a while. When he died, she buried him with the help of the geologists.
Her story ends predictably, not in narrative but in image. The geologists last saw her standing “like a statue” in her forest, willing them to leave her alone. Go on, go on, she said with movements of her stony chin.
Let’s not leave her there, memorialized in the stoic expression of her strange life. Let’s say this instead. On her own, she built a coracle out of reeds and branches. She filled it with her family’s things, the things they kept, the things they made. With her hands and legs she rowed down the nameless tributary that she had drunk from her whole life, south into Mongolia. There, she cleared a small patch of forest and made her little home. In her last summers, she came down into the high pastures and befriended the herders. They let her help mind the children. She told the Mongolian kids her dreams, and they, in their own way, told her theirs.
CULTURAL PROPERTY
It was forged heavy in ornament, light in bite. Perhaps the blacksmith—dark with sorrow for the loss of his lord—mocked up a quick one to join the thane’s passage to the next world. Centuries under the earth made the sword vegetal, the shaft mushroomed with warp, the pommel barnacled beyond rust. Perhaps it had a name: Shadow-sting, Iron-strong, Doom’s Face, Edge of the World. Or perhaps it was nameless, just another sword in a time of swords, when men slopped drunk between the boards and the winter drafts tugged at the ankles of the slaves.
I kneel over my discovery. I am by myself but for a few colleagues roaming the edges of the site, taking the day’s last measurements, packing up their things. Tracy yells that the bus is leaving. I’ve chosen to walk back every day of this dig, so she allows me my crouched silence. I listen to her crunch over the lip of the excavation, to the hydraulic embrace of the shuttle. It rumbles away with its cargo of professionals and students. A seagull nuzzles the sand in front of me, searching for crabs. I give it a conspiratorial nod.
Between the fenced site and our shorefront hotel lies over a mile of forlorn beach, spat at by the glacial disdain of the North Sea. I climb down to the sand and pull out my mobile phone. Yarmouth Harbour’s cranes cobweb the horizon. Wind turbines hover over the surf. I ring a number. A voice answers, Where? I explain where. Good, stay there. I hang up. A tanker shrinks into the distance along the old sea road to Rotterdam. So many people have been here before me, teeth chattering, in centuries of damp woolen cloaks and rough-cobbled boots, looking across the water with dread and longing.
The sun sinks behind me and I watch my shadow reach toward the sea and disappear. With the toe of my shoe, I trace my name in the sand in every script I know, three dots over the sheen in Persian, a C for the K in Old English, the emphatic Hindi bridge over the top, before wiping them clear and starting again. I am nervous. Soon, dark vans will pull up to the excavation site. The security guard won’t have time to react. When offered so unimaginable a bribe, he’ll throw up his hands in happy surrender. Do as you please, sirs, and Yes, I’ve angled the cameras in other directions, and Don’t worry, I’ll record over the tapes to be certain, and Would you like a cup of tea? The men will be too professional for tea. Within minutes, they’ll have the sword and any other objects in its vicinity treated and contained, ready for transoceanic travel. I will get a handshake and a phone call to confirm the delivery. Someone will give me an envelope of cash that I will neither deposit nor spend. I don’t do this for the money.
Exile should be kind to the sword, even though it will settle in a country dangerously humid for Anglo-Saxon iron. It will live in a humming climate-controlled case, organized into some meaningful narrative: “Warfare in European Late Antiquity,” “Beowulf and His Age,” or a hopeful crowd-pleaser, “Primitive Britain.” In any case, visitors will probably not notice the curators’ scheme, the careful framing of the sword within its social and temporal milieu, its echoes on tapestries or in priestly illuminations. No one really sees anything in museums. They’ll come from Chandigarh and Bhopal, Mysore and Mathura, Coimbatore and Siliguri, snapping pictures on their phones, loudly texting, trailing the debris of their nagging conversations (Idiot child, why did we bring you here if you don’t look, look, look at this thing?) and channa chur (try as they might, the guards can do nothing to control snacking; Indian museumgoers are the deftest smugglers). They will look at the sword and say, Oh, wouldn’t that be a terrible way to go, or, It’s not fair to judge, but don’t you think our swords are more elegant? or, It really makes you think how bleak England was, or, It really makes you think how bleak the world is. If they read the caption (they won’t), they will learn that the item was excavated for and is the exclusive property of the Nalanda Museum of Art and Global Culture, Patna. All the bleakness is ours.
* * *
My task is simple enough. I just have to wait, ensure a safe and smooth transaction, keep the security guard happy in coming weeks, and carry on digging as if nothing ever happened. The sea sludges against the rusting shore. I imagine my colleagues eating cheese toast in the hotel’s lounge and watching Question Time with David Dimbleby, “this week from Basingstoke.” Life can be comfortable amid the ruins.
A shape approaches along the beach. I thrust my hands into my pockets, sink my neck into my collar, and contemplate the water. As it draws near, I yawn. Nothing to see here, just an Indian archaeologist communing with Poseidon, move along. The footsteps slow and scuff to a halt. I turn. Thought I would find you here, Tracy says.
It’s mesmerizing.
And stupidly cold. She pulls a hip flask from her jacket. The whiskey scrapes the back of my head. Mind if I sit? she asks, crossing her legs on the sand.
I look at her through my teeth.
You may as well make yourself comfortable. She smooths the sand beside her. I sit. She looms next to me in the dark, an immovable block of stone.
The clouds shift, and a sliver of the moon slips through the gray bank. Tracy glows. You know, the rest of them find you very endearing. Such a romantic, all this lingering and willful solitude. She lifts one knee and twists closer. They don’t know that you’re actually such an inexplicable grouch. She kisses me and rakes my teeth with her malty tongue.
Do they know you’ve come out here? Do they know about us?
About us? What about us? No, she says. Maybe Tim. And Liz, too—she’s giving me the evil eye. I reckon she fancies you. A fine eyebrow arches at me. What would it matter if they all did know?
It’s deeply unprofessional.
Don’t be ridiculous.
It is. It is. Who would ever send a couple on a dig? Who would trust them with funds or take their receipts?
Couples work together all the time.
Incorrect.
Are you calling us a couple?
I grunt, a bit lost.
Don’t get ahead of yourself, she says, you’re going to have to put in more time before you use words like that.
We kiss again and within
me deep down, beneath many strata of cultivation, I begin to feel the rumblings of an ancient fear.
Listen, I say, this is silly. Meet me at the hotel. In the warmth. Under the covers.
With a mug of hot chocolate? I quite like it out here with you.
I’ll meet you there in a bit. I promise. I just need some privacy to make a few phone calls.
To who?
I want to talk to my mother.
Your mother? It must be two in the morning in India.
She’s traveling, giving lectures in the States.
Okay, that’s fine. Tracy makes no move to go.
Well?
I’ll just sit here, I’m not going to eavesdrop. You can walk away from me if you wish. But don’t go too far. I like looking at you.
Tracy.
What, it’s not like you’re trying to take a piss. I won’t hear a word. Go on.
I take a swig of whiskey and rise into the wind. Once I feel a safe distance away, I redial my last call. There’s a problem, I say. It’s too late, the voice replies, they’re almost there. Make the problem go away. The line cuts out, but I keep the phone held to my face. I look at Tracy, a green and black bundle on the ashen sand. She waves. The first time we kissed we were in Scotland in the dregs of the summer, bumping out of a pub into the greasy glare of a chip shop, then to the back of a miraculous taxi. She didn’t mind my love of the drunken procession, my childish habits, if anything she seemed to find them endearing. I was flattered, and surprised. She had spent the evening needling me, first about my overpronunciation, then the schoolboy side-parting of my haircut, and finally my vocation. You don’t regret the strange life you’ve chosen, clawing at these marshes with us? Maybe I should have been born in India, and you here. I told her I’d come to Britain so many years ago for the incomparable weather and food, of course—and for the women. She smiled. Some of us are glad for your poor taste. In the taxi, she traced the calluses on my palms as I devoured her neck. She spooned around me in the morning and whispered into my hair. Well, now you should have one less thing to regret.
Swimmer Among the Stars Page 13