by Jill Ciment
Or here on my left clavicle, a lipstick kiss sewn closed with a needle and thread. It now strikes me as one of those high concepts that seems so clever at the time but wears out as fast as chalk. It’s to mark the third time I might have asked to go home, but didn’t. A tiny sloop anchored in our lagoon around my fourteenth or fifteenth year. I’d long ago stopped counting the years. We assembled into our Great Tapestry to welcome the blond man who swam ashore. From a distance, he looked just like a young Philip. He spoke no English and we spoke no Swedish. From what he conveyed with gestures and sand drawings, we managed to deduce that he was sailing around the globe, solo. The Ta’un’uuans walked away in disgust. Why would a young man voluntarily sail away from home and leave his parents to grow old alone, then sail right back for no reason whatsoever? The poor Swede didn’t know what was going on and started running for his boat. I thought about shouting after him to take me with him, but I wasn’t sure any longer where, exactly, home was.
But there are other images, entire friezes of tattoos, where I seem to have outdone myself. The whole left half of my rib cage. If I squint, then block out the right half with my outstretched hand, it’s rather brilliant. My fearless use of black has resolved the problem of composing on an aging form. From certain angles, you don’t even notice the changes. The lines look like X-rays. Or here on my tongue, my latest tattoo, the firmament. I wanted it to seem like the heavens moved when I spoke. Or here at the base of my throat, the etching for my union boy, a needle engraving a needle, and next to it, a harpoon for my Ta’un’uuan lovers. I took one or two over the years. And here on my lower thigh, the marble arch in Washington Square. I employed a varicose vein to marble in the marble. I wanted the symbol of my youth to age as I aged. Or here on my right earlobe, like a piece of family jewelry, my father’s bewildered and terrified face, and on my right, hard as a diamond, my mother’s arrogant and terrified face, and in the middle, life-sized, their daughter’s ravaged one.
I can now see the differences between Ishmael’s art and my own. Where he composed spontaneously, letting his spirit dictate the line, I designed my imagery beforehand and commissioned a helper to engrave it on me. My lines, though competent, can never compare with his virtuosity. But there is something to be said for my process over his. I had to calculate into the design of each tattoo not only the skill level of my helper but also my own ability to withstand the pain of every additional layer of color, of every extraneous detail, of every act of unnecessary bravado. The greatness of the tattoo artist lies in her ability to gauge the degree to which she can push her art before the art kills the canvas.
There were many days, especially during those first years, when I’d brace myself for the prick of the needle, wondering if I’d gone mad on this piece of rock. Why did I keep inflicting my art on myself? What did it matter? But, invariably, the questions would segue into . . . Is this line too thick? Is that one too thin? Does this image say what I want it to say? Is that one too common? And who will let me know if it is? Who will be my critic? Who will be my audience? Who will be my champion? Who will love me?
Philip’s loss in those moments was so chilling that I’d start to shiver under the equatorial sun. Then I would stop working, stop sleeping, stop eating.
One by one they came to me while I was in these trances of grief, imploring me to tattoo them. Whether it was because they so admired my work or because they were willing to sacrifice themselves to pull me back to life, I didn’t know. My first commission came from Ishmael’s widow. She wanted me to engrave a death mask of her husband on her left breast, as I had engraved a death mask of Philip on mine. Her skin, particularly near the neck, was so scarred from grieving, so crosshatched with inked reminders, that I wasn’t sure if my line would be visible. I mixed an opaque white with palm sap and pulverized seashells, mother-of-pearl, so that the pigment would refract sunlight. It took me three weeks of experimentation to find just the right thickness. It took me another month to etch the death mask with all its tattoos. When I finally finished, and the salves were peeled off, she looked down at the portrait on her breast, a photographic negative of Ishmael’s face, and pressed her forehead against mine. She said she didn’t know tattoos could be made out of light.
My next commission was for a fisherboy. He wanted an iron nail engraved on his body so that he might have better luck finding a real one. He said if he had an iron nail of his own, he could make an iron hook to catch enough fish to get married. I mixed a pale neutral gray, a shade that is only visible in bright daylight, and tattooed a penny nail on his palm. I wanted the nail to appear anew every morning, like the miracle of stigmata. If my tattoo wasn’t really magic, at least it would remind him to keep looking for that nail.
Then there was the commission for Laadah, my dear Laadah—now dead twenty years—who marched us to the taro fields during those first months of despair, and made us plant for the future. On her I drew a garden that never needed tending.
And there were so many others. Shy girls who would whisper to me the names of their secret lovers so that I might encode them on their flesh; and the very old, with so little virgin skin left, and so much still to say. It was endless. Someone would die, then a baby would be born, then a fisherman lost his arm to a shark, and his tattoos had to be moved onto his brother’s arm before any fishing could resume. And there were always the carefree young men and women, born after the massacre, who thought every one of their exploits deserved a tattoo. They had no idea how finite the body is. One day, as I was about to initiate a bride-to-be, her first tattoo, her whole life yet to be written, I happened to glance down at my drawing hand. It was poised above her pristine abdomen, needle at the ready. My hand looked so frail, the skin so thin, the tattoos so faded. My fingers weren’t exactly shaking, but I noticed a tremor in the needle’s shaft. I’d become an old woman here.
One of my duties as a tattoo artist is to sing as I insert the needle and ease the suffering with melody. The prayer the Ta’un’uuans traditionally sing tells the story of the first tattoo artist, a young chief who had boundless strength, great talent as a carver, enough wooden matches to light enough fires to warm himself and his people for a thousand years, an enormous penis, one hundred beautiful and appreciative wives, and many healthy children, but no wisdom. One day, he left his life of bounty and paddled his canoe to where this world met the next. There he asked his ancestors to reward him for the journey by revealing all their secrets to him. His ancestors didn’t respond. So he cut off the tip of his finger and used the spurting blood to paint animals and plants and suns and stars on his flesh, then insisted his ancestors reward him for his ingenuity and talent. The dead sent rain to wash away his offering. Using the fishhook he’d brought along to feed himself, he carved all the animals and plants and sun and stars right into his flesh, then implored his ancestors to reward him for his suffering. The dead only stopped the bleeding, and the wounds sealed shut, and the scars disappeared, and still he possessed no wisdom. So he burned his canoe, then mixed the ash with seawater to make ink, and opened up all his wounds again, and tattooed himself. The dead weren’t impressed. Finally, he was a very old man without a canoe, treading water in the middle of the ocean. He asked the dead to take pity on him and let him onto their shore so he might rest. No shore appeared. So he peeled off his skin and threw it into the sea and as he sank, as the dead finally pulled him into their world, he saw the fishes and squids and gulls tear apart his art, all his hard work, and eat the pieces of skin, and that’s when he gleaned what the dead had to teach him.
To sing the Ta’un’uuan tattoo prayer as it should be sung, in its entirety, every verse a week-long chant, I would have had to have started memorizing it in childhood.
Instead, each time I inserted the needle, I sang the only songs I remembered, the ones my father had sung to me about the storybook yeshiva on the windy Russian steppes, or the little union girl who takes on the bosses. When even those simple lyrics escaped me, I chanted the Hebrew prayers I’d
committed to memory under the threat of the rabbi’s rod in the dank cheders of the Lower East Side. I sang about a people lost in a desert searching for home for forty years. If the Ta’un’uuans didn’t know what a desert was, surely they knew what it was to be alone in the middle of an unbroken horizon.
About four months ago, a seaplane landed in our lagoon. We’d seen planes before, certainly during the war, or nowadays the high white streaks of jets crossing the Pacific, or the twin-engine Pipers of the missionaries who proselytize to the north of here. We hurried to the beach to assemble into the Great Tapestry. My place is now on the far left, third from the end, among the elders. The right half is made up of fisherboys and young marrieds, their tattooed bodies so bright and taut, whereas we on our end look like the fraying fringe of an old flag.
A white man, necklaced with cameras, and a white woman, sporting what looked like an old-fashioned bathing costume (capris, I later learned), stepped onto the wing and waved to us. They wore the same expressions of astonishment, I imagine, that Philip and I had worn when we first saw the Great Tapestry.
The man lifted a camera and aimed it at us, while the woman slipped out of her red sandals, eased herself off the wing, stepped into the water, and waded toward the beach. When she got to the rocks, she put her sandals back on, stepped onto the pink sand, then shielded her eyes from the dizzying sun with a bare blond arm and asked for me by name. A sudden wind gust tore the chiffon kerchief off her hair, and she reeled around to catch it.
I hadn’t heard my full name in nearly three decades.
After securing the pink kerchief with a double knot under her chin, she hooded her eyes once again, with a hand this time, and swept her gaze over the tapestry, as you might inspect an unfurled bolt of silk for a snag.
“Mrs. Ehrenreich? Sara Ehrenreich?” she asked again, all the while searching our faces, one after the other, all the way down the line. “I’ve brought news of home and a few mementos that might interest you.” She opened a purse slung from her shoulder and took out what looked like a couple of photographs. “I’ve also brought gifts for the Ta’un’uuans.” She waved to the photographer. He lowered his camera just long enough to unlatch the cargo hatch near the plane’s tail.
I could make out bright-colored boxes in the dark underbelly. I couldn’t see what the packages contained, but I certainly recognized the palette of the modern world.
She smiled at the fisherboys and they shyly smiled back. “If one of you gentlemen will volunteer his canoe, we can bring the gifts ashore right now.”
The right half of the tapestry was quaking to come undone and see what the whites had brought them. I could almost feel sparks running down the line of young bodies, whereas on my end, the faded fringe, we watched with deep skepticism.
One of the fisherboys couldn’t hold himself back any longer. He sprinted for his canoe. Then the whole right side began coming apart. It advanced toward the woman, encircling her. She looked as if she were being rolled up in a Persian rug. Easing herself free of the fisherboys and young mothers, she approached us elders, two old men and twelve old ladies, one of them me.
“I’m from Life magazine. You must remember Life, Mrs. Ehrenreich.” Her eyes never stopped scanning our old tattooed visages for something recognizable. She shuffled through her two photographs, picked one out, then held it up for each of us to study. The picture was taken at my debut exhibit at Gloria Vanderbilt Whitney’s salon. Philip and I posed in the main gallery. I recognized Philip’s hobnail boots and my boa, though our faces were somewhat out of focus. I also recognized the drawing of my davening father behind us, City of Coffins. “What makes you think she’s still alive?” I asked. I’ve never lost my accent.
A faint smile played at the corners of the young woman’s coral lips as she studied my face again, couldn’t take her eyes off it. Her own expression was a mix of fascination and revulsion. Untattooed faces are so easy to read.
“The scientists aboard the USS Neptune told us.”
A steel boat, about the size of a tugboat, had anchored offshore during our last dry season. The men on board had offered to trade us their cigarette lighters for fresh fruit and water. We then offered to trade our carvings for tobacco and canned fruit. They told us they were astronomers, men who study the heavens, and that they’d come to our island to witness a total eclipse of the sun. They explained what a total eclipse of the sun was, demonstrating with three coconuts. The Ta’un’uuans knew perfectly well what a solar eclipse was. It’s a shadow cast by the world of the dead on the world of the living. The scientists invited all the youngsters on board to look through their giant telescope. That night, I paddled out in a canoe, and I asked if I might look, too. The men were topside, sharing a bottle of Courvoisier. A bearded one helped me up the rope ladder and offered me a sip from his glass. He called me “auntie” and asked where I’d learned my excellent English. I told him at a missionary school. The cognac smelled medicinal and achingly familiar. I took a sip, then another, until I polished off the whole glass. I held it out for a refill. He exchanged looks with the others, then politely replenished my drink. On my fourth cognac, he jokingly asked, “Where did a nice old auntie like you learn to drink like that?”
“At the Savoy. Though I prefer Hennessy,” I said. The man’s expression was no less flabbergasted than if, say, the ship’s cat had quipped up that she preferred one brand of tuna over another. When the scientists finally recovered from their shock, they plied me with questions. The cognac had taken effect: I vaguely remember answering one or two. Then I asked to see the stars. They led me to the prow of the ship and sat me beside the giant telescope. A redhead showed me how to focus the eyepiece. I placed my eye against the cold glass. I could no more comprehend that I was witnessing the staggering beauty of the stars in close-up than I could accept that the sweet aftertaste on my tongue was really cognac. That’s when I got the inspiration to engrave the firmament on my tongue’s tip.
“The scientists said they’d met you last year, Mrs. Ehrenreich,” the young woman said.
I took the picture of Philip and me out of her hand and examined it closely—the yellowing paper, the frayed edge, the scratches. Philip was a tall blur with a white mane, and my boa was in sharper focus than my face, but I could make out every line in my drawing, every decision, every mistake.
“I’ve got others. All sorts of documents. Would you like to see them, Sara?”
“Where did you get this?”
“Do you mind if I call you Sara? I searched old archives. Rumors of your existence have circulated for years. Soldiers from the Second World War claimed they’d met a stranded American woman on a South Pacific island. There was even talk of you and Amelia Earhart being one and the same.”
She started to show me an old newspaper clipping, but I looked away. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see it.
The fisherboy had just finished loading the gifts into his canoe and was now paddling ashore. The photographer was crouching on the prow, taking pictures. By the time they reached land, the tapestry was in such tatters anyway that the elders abandoned their places to see what the canoe contained. I turned to join them.
“We just want to talk to you, Sara,” she shouted after me. “I’ve brought lots of pictures. I’ve brought copies of Life dating back to the year you disappeared. Men have walked on the moon. We’ve cured polio. Movies are in color. Aren’t you curious?”
The youngsters were holding themselves back until I joined the other elders for the blessing of the cargo, a row of boxes on the beach. The chief’s first wife, Laadah’s oldest daughter, picked up a small one and held it toward the sun, trying to see if the container was transparent enough for her to peer through the designs and see what was inside. She motioned for me to take counsel with her. She whispered that no one on Ta’un’uu had ever before seen the hard shell that the cargo gestated in. She was surprised to find that it was tattooed. She asked me if the shells themselves were the gifts, or if there was something more inside.
I didn’t recognize any of the products pictured on the boxes. I didn’t recognize the trademarks emblazoned across the cardboard. I no longer recognized the words. Maybe it had been too many years. Or maybe a whole other language had been invented during my absence.
When the boxes were finally opened, the contents disappointed the islanders. Though the younger set found ways to use the wristwatches (the men wore them at the base of their penis gourds), the elders had no use for the walkie-talkies, or the bicycle, or the gadgetry I could no longer name. The steak knives, however, were prized by everyone. While the youngsters examined the cargo, the elders studied the broken shells. They remarked on the beauty of the shells’ colors, the precision of the tattooing, the simplicity of the designs, then tried to piece them back together again. They carefully aligned halved flaps that had been torn open in haste by the youngsters, then sealed shut the wounds with tree gum.
When the boxes were whole again, they called for their children to carry the beautiful shells to the village and hang them up in the meetinghouse next to the carvings.