by Jim Crace
‘IT WAS a wearying experience,’ said mother. ‘As you would expect, the men made all the noise, with their own backache and sickness and their stomachs distended with phantom offspring. The women were silent and out of sight, of course.’ Her recollections were bitter and, perhaps, distorted too. She described a village barmy with pregnancy. And then one morning the men went off into the forest to give mimed birth to the stones which they decorated or to the wooden dolls which they had carved. And in the shelters of the village the first curious skirlings of the babies began. It was an orphan chorus of human gulls, she said, the clutter rather than the mystery of birth. ‘The Professor, of course, was not welcome at that time with his calipers, camera and notebook. Nor would they accept assistance from me, though my presence, with Puppy at my side, was at least ignored. The births themselves seemed relatively easy; labour was short – as if the stones and dolls now produced by their men had freed the women from a punishing confinement. Or so your father said. For myself I have never discovered the attraction of small babies. And here were two hundred or so, pupped like seals within three days.’
How many survived? How many bore healthy offspring? Some were stillborn, cordulated or drowned. Others perished within minutes or hours or days. The unlucky mothers – children some of them, a month or so older than Puppy; in a kinder world they would have been schoolgirls – ruptured or haemorrhaged. For some the placenta tore and there was bleeding, pain and slow death. But for every bereaved mother there was an orphan child to suckle. ‘Left to its own devices, nature is cruel but tidy,’ my father noted. And once the men had returned and the waste had been buried and the dead separated from the living, the forest people went back to their business, as gentle and as calm and as casual as sheep without rams.
My father whispered his proposition to mother in the darkness of their bedding – that they had encountered humankind in its sexual infancy, that the forest people were specialists in the brief encounter, like that observed amongst bullfrogs, hammer-headed bats, kakapo parrots and the mass aerial dance of mosquitoes. And, of course, his dreadful legions of tiger crabs. ‘Where is the evidence?’ my mother asked him, dutifully displaying the cynicism on which he as her teacher had insisted. ‘All you have is a host of shared birthdays and the four-year-old gossip of a trapper. His testimony might not impress a scientific seminar in quite the way you hope.’ ‘We will gather evidence,’ he said. ‘How?’ My father patiently listed the rituals and procedures of scientific field study to his bride, his student. ‘And for this, of course,’ he said, ‘a cadaver is required.’
In his journal, he wrote: ‘The estrus cycle or period of “heat” during which female mammals are receptive to males is, if Elgie’s work is to be accepted at face value, controlled by the ovarian cocoon. Follicles secrete a natural scent to advertise readiness and availability and, also, to trigger a sexual response in the males. Is this the secret of the forest women, simply an enlarged cocoon inactive, except occasionally and communally, once a year or less? Are the odours of chemistry still as eloquent here as amongst bears and antelope, while we – our estrus lost as surely as our tails – enjoy our tamed and liberated embraces, triggered by our hearts and not our tyrant vesicles, free and equal, donors and recipients of physical affection?
‘What of their men? It is evident that the testes of the forest males are considerably enlarged. Measurements of my own testes and those of the reluctant trapper, who is now employed as my assistant and interpreter, compare unfavourably with those of the two young males who quite amicably allowed us to take calipers to their private parts. I estimate a size difference in an approximate ratio of five to three. What can be the function of the larger testicle other than the enhanced production of sperm and the increased power of impregnation necessary for the precise and efficient service of females who are sexually receptive for a short period only? I become more convinced that my hypothesis will sustain closer scientific analysis. If I were dealing with one of the lower primates, I would instruct my trapper to shoot some specimens. The matters of genital volume and weight, of sacs, cocoons and vesicles, could then be readily established with scalpel and scales. But here we are dealing with humankind – in almost every detail of surface anatomy, proportion and pigmentation identical to myself and my dear wife. But what are the subcutaneous secrets of these people? Only surgery and autopsy can provide the answers. What will the knife reveal?’
THE TRAPPER’S ‘forest’ was not equal to the task. He could flap his plosives in simple barter or requests for food. But no words, he said, in this or any language were adequate for what my father was now demanding. Sixteen women, a dozen or so foetuses, had died in birth. Their bodies were lying in a shelter under damp leaves. Soon, unless they were burned or buried, their flesh would putrefy, provide nesting sites for swag-flies or lunch for termites. ‘Tell them I want one female adult,’ said father. ‘And a male infant. And a male of reproductive age, if at all possible. I’ll pay. Can you explain the urgency, that flesh rots, that I am a scientist, a wise man?’
The trapper did his best and devised a sentence. ‘Scientist’ he could not translate. But he knew the word for Magician. ‘Body’ became Meat. ‘This man big magician,’ he said, pointing at my father who stood with a fixed smile on his face and his mediocre genitals well hidden by his fieldwork trousers. ‘You give magician meat of one woman, one man, one boy. Dead meat from that house, very quick.’ He pointed at the shelter where the victims of childbirth had been placed. Those few of the men who could understand the trapper’s words shook their heads, not in anger but in puzzlement. The man-who-pincers-testicles is a man-eater, too, they told their comrades. The information seemed to cause hilarity rather than anger. ‘What are they saying?’ asked my father. ‘They think you are a cannibal,’ said the trapper. ‘You want dead bodies – what else could you be?’
‘We packed up for departure speedily then,’ said my mother. The Professor feared that we had outstayed our welcome, that the people would take against us.’ But he and the trapper were conspiring. A cadaver which could not be bought, they reasoned, could be stolen. They could camp a safe distance from the village and then return at night with a donkey and some ropes. Three bodies was too ambitious, clearly. But the body of one of the mothers would provide useful data … and would perhaps not be missed from beneath those damp leaves.
‘They wished to spare my feelings,’ she said. ‘The Professor told me that they would spend the night trapping the bat-moths which were conspicuous in those parts. He and the trapper – did we never learn his name? – went off at dusk with a donkey and a rifle and, I must presume, circled our campsite until they had regained the path to the village. How could I guess their true purpose? I slept, glad to be free of squalling infants and the attentions of the Professor who, even after his erection had been reduced, would nightly sleep against my back as if I were a child’s bolster. We were camped at the edge of the trees and there were few sounds except the snapping of the donkey halters and the occasional owl. I dreamed, too. Something sweet and domestic and kindly, with my sister and our mother brought back from the dead – all of us eating and me singing and that house of wood with its cool flapping screens.’
And then – that cliché – a dry twig snapped in the trees followed by the silence of held breath. It could have been an owl, roosting carelessly on bad wood, or a bell nut splitting and showering its seed. But it woke my mother as sharply as a gun shot. As far as she could see in the darkness, with the moon behind the trees and her eyes still startled by sleep, the donkey, the equipment, the specimen boxes, the dry rations were still where my father had left them. She imagined a thief or villager cutting loose a donkey. Or a scrub dog snouting for food. It seemed safer to leave the tent and crouch by the donkey. She walked the few yards in bare feet, taking with her an iron pot which she could beat on a stone if there were animals to scare off. Then a timid dove took wing as a small voice spoke to her from the darkness and a figure moved out of the trees t
owards the camp, still talking, ‘Viper-biper-parb …’ ‘Who is it?’ mother said. But she knew. The girl, Puppy, had come.
MY FATHER’S journal is silent on the events of that evening. These are the possibilities. Perhaps by the time he and the trapper reached the village, the dead were already buried. They found the site of recent digging but, as their only equipment was a length of rope, a lantern and a moth net, what could they do? Or, perhaps, the forest people lay in wait. They had expected my father to return. They chased him off. Or my father took fright. Halfway through the trees, startled by a cracking twig as Puppy, maybe, passed them in the dark, he and the trapper lost their taste for body snatching. Or they reached the shelter of the dead and pulling back the leaves they found stench and rankness. The termites and the swag-flies had been at work.
But when my father returned without so much as a single bat-moth, his mood of irritation was soon replaced by a vivaciousness which my mother could not trust or understand. She and Puppy sat cross-legged in the shade like tailors as my father and the trapper concocted their tale of misfortune, of moths evading their net, of opportunities thwarted by undergrowth too thick for the night-time lepidopterist. ‘And why is she here?’ asked father, pointing at the girl. In reply Puppy herself pointed out across the plain towards Etar. ‘She followed me,’ said mother. ‘She wants to come with us. She thinks it’s paradise out there. She wants a dress like mine. It’s all impossible. You’ll have to take her back.’ My father disagreed; he couldn’t go back, he said. He wasn’t welcome. ‘Then what’ll you do?’ asked mother. ‘Leave her here? She’s little more than a child. What is she, twelve, thirteen?’ ‘She can come with us,’ said father. ‘You’ll need some help around the house. You’ve said you like her.’ It was, according to mother, little better than kidnapping, slavery. But father was determined. If they left, the girl would follow, he said. She was like a stray puppy – yes, the nickname had been apposite – which had found a warm home. She wanted to come. She was an adult almost, no matter how tiny her breasts and narrow her hips. She was a free individual. This was her chance to make something of her life. Let her come. Make her welcome.
II
MY MOTHER slept, while my sisters and I, made self-conscious and dutiful by her illness (her madness), aired and tidied the house, polished the cluttered sapwood tables of the reception rooms, threw out old papers, dry plants and bad food. And (as if she was already a corpse) we opened her unanswered mail, checked the contents of the family box which she kept beneath the bed and leafed through the albums of cards and photographs.
‘She’s remarkably strong for a woman in her nineties,’ the doctor said. ‘Her heart and lungs are good, but her mind has gone.’ She was cogent, it seemed, but cantankerous, and meddlesome. That is why we had been summoned. She had thrown soup at the night-nurse. Her ‘things’ went missing, she said, and everybody – the doctor, the neighbours, old friends – had been accused of theft. She spat out her pills. She lived in the past. Which of us, the doctor asked, had room enough and time and patience to offer mother a home. ‘We’re none of us young,’ I said. ‘I’m seventy-two. My heart and lungs aren’t strong, not like mother’s. I smoke. We all smoke.’ The doctor shrugged. He’d done his duty. It was up to us to sort it out.
It was over cigarettes that we discovered a photograph which none of us had seen before. I pulled it from a brittle envelope amongst the monographs and dissertations which our mother had preserved from my father’s archives. A pale triangle cornered the photograph where seventy years of sunlight had blanched the print. Its year was 1914, the year of my own birth. My father, looking older than his thirty-five years in a half-beard, was seated on the veranda at a table – the one that now stood in the corner of mother’s room, heavy with medicines. My mother – a little blurred – was standing at his side, dramatically cutting slices of gourd for the guests and for the camera. We could recognize one or two of the faces, younger versions of the remote professors and their wives who worked with my father at the Institute and who had ignored us when we were children. We recognized crockery, too, and the chairs, and the white heads of the fessandra bushes where then – and still – the cats took their refuge. The ‘kidnapped’ maid who stood in the sunlight at the edge of the veranda, half-turned and smiling like the guests into the camera, was – as mother had described her – tiny, sweet and thirteen. She wore service gloves and a white cotton dress. An empty tray hung by her side. Her feet were bare. Of all the people there she seemed the least self-conscious, attempting to present nothing of herself except the smile. ‘Well, she looked happy enough,’ I said.
But other papers in my father’s handwriting made me wonder. He noted her listlessness during the early days of their return from the forest, her reluctance to stay for long inside the house, the chaos of her digestive system as she encountered city foods for the first time. She lost weight. Her face, pert and cheerful by nature, thinned and paled. ‘The Professor took measurements, of course. What else? Her height, her cranial circumference, her daily temperature,’ said mother, awake and garrulous again with the photograph of the veranda party in her hand. ‘But he did not consult doctors. Doctors have colleagues. They gossip. Can you imagine the rapacity of these men, the anthropologists, the quacks, the weathercocks, the dilettantes, the journalists, the tuft-hunters, if under the cloak of science they could attend the village of the mating tribe. Communal intercourse, global mayhem. No, your father wanted Puppy all to himself. “She’s our secret,” he said. And so to our friends and the neighbours, she was just another country girl, none too bright, illiterate, clumsy, compliant. The men adored her.’
But my father, she said, seemed unmoved by Puppy’s innocence and charm. For him she was briefly, each morning, an object of scientific scrutiny, and then forgotten. Eventually the girl would be returned to her home, the village in the forest. But first he wished to monitor and chart her cycles. His charts survive amongst his papers – two columns of figures with dates relating to … two women? Only by standing amongst the cabinets and desks of what had been my father’s study could I construct from these numbers and chemical abbreviations a picture of my father in research. His daily readings measured the presence and absence of vaginal acids secreted during ovulation and that period of sexual excitement titled estrus amongst the lower mammals. The first column – Puppy’s? – recorded unbroken torpor. The second – my mother’s? – showed a conventional monthly cycle, the acids increasing towards the middle of the cycle and then decreasing.
Was this, then, the household ritual? Breakfast served and eaten. My father in his study coat, my mother in her morning clothes, Puppy in that white cotton dress and those incongruous gloves. The couch in the corner of the study. Sterilized bottles, cotton swabs. The forest girl, for reasons she could not quite guess but which she could have taken as some odd city custom, required to lie back and raise her knees while my father conducted his inspection and made his notes. And then my mother’s turn, her mistress, her hopscotch pal, submitting in the same room at the same time to reassure the girl that all was normal.
Once more, from mother, we heard her portrait of my father sharp-set and pestering in her presence, particularly on those days when swabs revealed her to be chemically receptive. ‘He’d been a studious bachelor for too long,’ she said. ‘Through me he was catching up on all those lost liaisons which should have occupied his youth instead of skeletons and dried skins and birds’ eggs. But I was not so foolish as I had been on our forest expedition. Look at his charts. You’ll see what games I played.’ Indeed, within four months of Puppy’s arrival the acid levels of my mother’s discharge in the ovulation stages of her monthly cycle halved, then quartered, and then (by the seventh month) disappeared entirely. ‘The Professor was perplexed,’ she said. ‘His appetites, poor man, were no longer justified by scientific data. He became less troublesome.’
In his journal, father wrote: ‘An unexpected development. My wife who has acted as a conventional control agains
t whom I am able to verify the results of my experiments with P. continues to menstruate in a more or less regular pattern but her vaginal secretions of oliphatic acids have ceased. Her estrus levels now synchronize with those of P., unchanging from day to day, with no peaks or troughs to indicate sexual and reproductive readiness or periods of non-fertility. The two women now chemically harmonize and correspond in their sexual inertia. Here we observe the fact if not the mechanism of reproductive synchrony. Modern sexual licence comes into line with the more ordered ways of simpler times.’ ‘He was a fool,’ said mother, ‘and careless. I douched myself with potash soap in those days when my acids were expected. His swabs were worthless.’