Landfalls

by Naomi J. Williams

  The commandant’s expression sagged only a little. Within an hour, Lesseps and Golikoff were housed in an elegant suite of rooms near the palace.

  * * *

  The dashing young Frenchman was promptly invited to all of the best houses in town. Lesseps was hard-pressed to keep up with social engagements while preparing for the next leg of the journey. For his part, Golikoff spent most of his time in their rooms. One day he reported to the local garrison that would be his home once he saw Lesseps safely on his way to Moscow. Otherwise he remained in the suite with the dispatch box at his side while Lesseps rushed about town securing transportation, obtaining passports and letters of introduction, and playing the part of amiable French diplomat.

  “Are you actually from here?” Lesseps asked one night when he returned from yet another dinner and learned Golikoff had not left the building that day.

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “Why ‘unfortunately’?”

  “Never mind why,” Golikoff said. Then he laughed and indicated the elegant furnishings around them. “These are the finest rooms I’ll ever occupy, barin. Forgive me for enjoying them as long as I can.”

  * * *

  The night before his departure, Lesseps dined with a wealthy merchant who had agreed to convey most of Lesseps’s belongings to St. Petersburg. The two men were finalizing details over a delicate poached fish and a bottle of French wine—the first Lesseps had drunk in almost two years—when a deep rumbling began, first as a sound, its origin unplaceable, then as a sensation visibly rocking the floor beneath them.

  Lesseps caught his wineglass before it toppled and got to his feet, simultaneously alarmed and fascinated by the clattering of windows and the violent tinkling of the chandelier overhead. Servants rushed in to keep china and glass from rolling off the table. His host remained seated and unperturbed, silently regarding his pocket watch till the movement subsided.

  “Almost one minute in duration,” he said, snapping his timepiece shut.

  “A minute?” cried Lesseps. He sat down and gulped what remained of his wine. “Surely it was longer than that.”

  “Time seems to stand still during earthquakes,” the merchant said, refilling Lesseps’s glass. “Any great shock will do that, I find.”

  They resumed their conversation, and Lesseps felt his pulse gradually return to normal, when another temblor struck, stronger this time. The servants rushed back in, one with the express task of keeping a longcase clock from falling over; the others extinguished all the candles. Riding out the movement in darkness increased its terror, but Lesseps realized the measure was to prevent a house fire from breaking out. He could hear bells pealing angrily through the town, the sound of breaking glass in another part of the house, a woman’s shriek, and somewhere distant, a heavy, dull crash.

  As soon as the shaking ceased and the safety of the household was assured, Lesseps made his excuses and raced back to his rooms by the palace. People filled the streets, exchanging stories with the exaggerated energy and cheer of near disaster. He overheard snippets about injured neighbors, a kitchen fire, a fallen turret, frightened horses that had run off. And then there was Golikoff, standing before their building, scanning the crowd, the dispatch box cradled like a child in his arms.

  “Oh, thank God,” Lesseps cried, embracing him. He buried his head on Golikoff’s shoulder. That particular combination, not unpleasant, of damp wool, cigar smoke, leather—for as long as he lived, he thought, he would recognize that smell as belonging to Golikoff.

  Settled in their drawing room, where a chair had toppled but there was otherwise no sign of disorder, Golikoff poured a glass of clear liquor and handed it to his charge. Lesseps downed it, wincing against the burning sensation.

  “Your first earthquake?” Golikoff asked.

  “First and second,” Lesseps said.

  “It doesn’t improve with practice,” Golikoff said.

  Lesseps leaned back against the sofa and closed his eyes. “I thought I was finally safe.”

  “Safety is an illusion.”

  Lesseps opened his eyes and leaned forward. “You’ve kept me safe—me and my dispatches—a thousand leagues and more. That’s no illusion. Sergeant.”

  Golikoff blushed, then absentmindedly refilled Lesseps’s glass and drank it himself.

  Fearing another quake that might send them into the streets, the two men spent the warm night in the drawing room, sleeping fitfully with their boots on, the battered dispatch box in the satchel between them. Lesseps woke at dawn with a headache, his body stiff from being draped over a narrow, too-short giltwood sofa. Golikoff lay on the floor below him next to the satchel and the empty bottle of spirits. He was shirtless. Lesseps could see dark lines of bruising along his ribs.

  * * *

  A few hours later, they were met at the banks of the Angara River by the regional governor, the helpful commandant, and the officer assigned to accompany Lesseps as far as Moscow, a brutally handsome man who waved a large stick he declared was his guarantee of a fast trip. “No one fails to cooperate with this,” he said, slapping the stick against the palm of his hand, then stroking its length with a look of satisfaction. Lesseps turned to exchange a disbelieving glance with Golikoff, but Golikoff was looking away. The party took a ferry crowded with merchants and pleasure-seekers across the wide, placid river. The officials spoke lightheartedly of the previous night’s earthquakes—a cupola on one of the churches had crashed to the ground, but only minor injuries had occurred, and they knew of no fatalities on account of the temblors.

  On the opposite bank, amid the bustle of tea merchants preparing a caravan, a commodious postilion with a smart driver and well-fed horses awaited. Lesseps warmly thanked the governor and commandant for their attentions and stepped up into the carriage, then suddenly stopped. “Where’s Golikoff?” he cried.

  He found the soldier hiding behind the carriage with his face in his hands. When Lesseps touched his shoulder and called his name, he sank to his knees.

  “My dear Golikoff,” Lesseps said, torn between embarrassment and sorrow.

  His new escort, the officer with the stick, approached to help extricate his charge. Lesseps waved him away. Crouching down, he put his hands on either side of Golikoff’s head and raised it. The soldier looked back at him with an expression of such raw longing and grief that Lesseps felt an altogether physical shock. He seemed to be seeing the familiar features—the earnest brown eyes, the neat beard and mustache, the long nose—for the first time.

  “I would have died for you,” Golikoff said.

  Lesseps smiled. “Fortunately that wasn’t necessary.”

  “Do you remember the night you were sick?”

  “What night? I was never sick.”

  A familiar expression of exasperation crossed the soldier’s face. “You had a terrible fever. I thought you were dying.”

  “It was just a cold.”

  “It wasn’t,” Golikoff said. “You were raving all night.”

  “Raving?”

  “Then you grew still and quiet. I couldn’t find your pulse.”

  “Pulses are hard to find when it’s cold.”

  Golikoff shook his head. “I made a deal with God.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Golikoff grabbed Lesseps’s hands. “Just listen, for once,” he implored. “I made a deal with God. I said if your fever didn’t break by morning, I was going to sacrifice myself and then you would live.”

  “Sacrifice yourself? How?”

  “By slitting my wrists.”

  Lesseps suddenly remembered that winter morning—waking up shivering in sweat-soaked clothes, finding Golikoff next to him with a folding blade, Golikoff bandaging his arm. “You said you’d nicked yourself. You said you were going to shave me.”

  Golikoff nodded. “You do remember.”

  Lesseps imagined for a moment waking up that morning to find Golikoff inexplicably dead beside him, his blood frozen where it had spilled on
the ground. “How would that have helped me?” he cried, his voice catching.

  “We had no shelter, no medicine, no doctor, almost no food or water. There was only God. I was desperate.” He shrugged. “And then you woke up. Maybe it was enough for God to see I meant it.”

  Lesseps shook his head, reeling from the knowledge of what might have been. “All this time I took you for a more sensible man, Igor.”

  Golikoff tried to smile, but tears spilled from his eyes. “We’ll never meet again.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do know. And so do you.”

  “My whole future is with Russia and its people,” Lesseps said. “You’ll visit me in St. Petersburg.”

  Golikoff shook his head. “What would an ambassador have to do with a soldier from Irkutsk?”

  “Everything,” Lesseps said, but he knew Golikoff was right.

  At length—five minutes later, or perhaps it was an hour—the commandant and the officer came forward and separated the two men. Lesseps had to be helped into the carriage. He was too distraught to look through the window to see how Golikoff fared. Fortunately, his stick-wielding companion remained silent while he wept. The dispatch box sat next to him, still in Golikoff’s satchel. He had meant to return the satchel but had forgotten. The sable cravat lay buried in his luggage. It was now too worn to serve as a gift for the queen.

  TEN

  THE REPORT

  Maouna Island, Navigators Archipelago, December 1787

  We haul the wounded aboard the frigates—the Astrolabe first, then the Boussole. We keep our men from shooting the natives. We frighten off the canoes. We count the men who have returned from the cove alive. There are forty-nine. We count again. Forty-nine. Then Monsieur de Lapérouse marches me to his state room, where he asks me to write an official report on what happened. He says to do it right away while my memories are fresh. I remind him that Lieutenant de Boutin is senior to me. You oversaw the retreat, the commander says. But sir, I protest, Monsieur de Boutin has experience writing this kind of report. It’s the wrong thing to say, a painful reminder for both of us of last year’s calamity in Alaska. The commander draws his eyebrows together and says, his voice low, Vaujuas, Monsieur de Boutin is injured. Of course, I say, ashamed. How can I have forgotten? I hauled him up the side myself, held him when he staggered on the deck, blood dripping into his eyes.

  Monsieur de Lapérouse toys with a marble bust on his desk. He has two—one of Rousseau and one of Captain Cook. He fingers the base of Rousseau as if he might chip away at the stone. Any more questions? he says. I shake my head, but he is not looking at me. No, I say. Then you may return to your ship, Lieutenant, he says. I leave him, but at the state room door I look back and see him leaning his head against the fingertips of both hands, as if he were holding his skull together.

  * * *

  Alone in my cabin on the Astrolabe, I find pen and ink but not paper. When was the last time I wrote anything other than a navigational observation in a logbook? Could it be the condolence letter I wrote in Monterey for Jean’s family? No—in Macao I wrote several letters to my own family. And sent another, to my mother, with Monsieur de Lesseps when he left us in Kamchatka. That was only a few months ago. Where have I put my writing supplies? I rummage through the clutter I have let pile up on the extra cot, the cot that belonged to Edouard de La Borde. Has everyone else spread out as I have in the spaces vacated by the dead?

  I find what I need stashed in a box of books that belonged to Edouard and his brother, books I mean to return to their father once we are back in France. But now it is dark, and I am shaking with headache, hunger, and accumulated grief.

  The report can wait until tomorrow.

  * * *

  This morning our surgeon, Monsieur Lavaux, who was struck by a large rock in yesterday’s melee, has to be trepanned. I refuse to watch, remaining in my cabin while the operation takes place on the main deck. Unfortunately, I cannot avoid hearing about it—how Lavaux made his own diagnosis; how he directed our botanist, Monsieur de Lamartinière, through the procedure; how dreadfully the hand drill ground against skull bone; how Lavaux remained conscious throughout; how our chaplain, Father Receveur, himself the victim of a vivid black eye, did not; how François, our late captain’s servant, calmly cleaned up after the bloodletting.

  The men seem only too happy to relinquish their grief for a gory spectacle. I despise them for it. But now, once again, it has grown too quiet on board.

  * * *

  A boat comes from the Boussole with a parcel for me. It contains a copy of Boutin’s report from last summer, with a note from the commander: Model your report after this one. Simply begin at the beginning and continue to the point when you returned to the frigates. He has signed his name “laperouse”—no accent mark, the l oversize but not capitalized. I heard once that Lapérouse was not the commander’s original name, that his family appended the name when he joined the Navy, to make him sound more aristocratic. The signature is that of a man unimpressed by such things. Undistracted by grief, I am tempted to say, but then I remember the way he held his head in his hands.

  Begin at the beginning, he says. Is that half past twelve, when the four boats left the Astrolabe for the cove? Or one o’clock, when we landed at the beach? Or later, when I found some shade, and sat down alone, away from the others? Or later still, when the first rock was thrown? Or perhaps earlier, that morning, when our captain, Monsieur de Langle, invited me to join the outing. A walk on dry land will complete your recovery, he said. Perhaps that is where the story begins—a month ago, when our descent into this tropical heat left so many of us ill. Monsieur de Langle was a great believer in the benefits of fresh air, clean water, terra firma. He invited the convalescents on both frigates to join his watering expedition. That was how little danger he foresaw. I am not sure how many of us set out. Between sixty and seventy. I will need an official count for the report. Sixty to seventy Frenchmen, but at least twenty of us ill—off duty, unarmed, ambulatory but not strong. This did not help our odds when the crisis came.

  * * *

  Later, tacking in front of the cove, we see our wrecked longboats on the beach. They look like the remains of an old skirmish, not yesterday’s, of an encounter gone wrong between the islanders and some other explorers, not us. Amazingly, five or six native canoes come out to trade breadfruit and pigs with us. Does yesterday’s catastrophe mean nothing to them? They lost people too. The Boussole finally fires one of its guns. The cannonball splashes right in their midst without hitting them, no doubt exactly as the commander has ordered. One canoe capsizes but is quickly righted again, and the natives hurry back to the shore.

  Where are the bodies? someone asks. I turn to find Lieutenant de Monty, now acting captain of the Astrolabe, standing next to me at the rail. He has always had the stooped shoulders of a young man surprised by growing suddenly tall, but now he also wears the pinched expression of a man who finds his ambitions fulfilled in a way he cannot possibly enjoy.

  What? I say, although I heard clearly enough. The bodies, he repeats. What do you suppose has become of the bodies? I stare out at the beach, at the outlines of our ruined longboats, trying to remember who fell where, while trying not to remember the sickening sound of clubs against flesh—when suddenly I lurch forward. Monsieur de Monty grabs me. I’m sorry, sir, I say, shaking him off and trying to stand up straight. I’m sorry, I repeat. I lost my balance. You’re still unwell, Vaujuas, he says. Go below and rest.

  * * *

  After dinner Monsieur de Monty stops at my cabin, ostensibly to ask how my report for the commander is progressing. I tell him I am studying Boutin’s report from last year’s incident in Alaska, so I can see how it’s done. That seems to satisfy him. He pats my shoulder as he leaves, trying out a gesture of Monsieur de Langle’s, but we both flinch, and he draws away. When he leaves, I take up Boutin’s report, which begins like this:

  On July 13 at 5:50 a.m., I left the Boussole in the small
boat. I was under orders to follow Monsieur d’Escures, who had command of our pinnace.

  I take up my pen, and at the top of a clean sheet of paper I write: Tuesday, December 11.

  But I cannot tell how to go on. I was not on duty yesterday. I had no orders to follow.

  * * *

  Three days later, and the men are starting to talk again. I wish they would not. They stand in knots of two or three, considering aloud some detail they remember or have learned of the disaster. Even the Chinese sailors we took on in Macao huddle together on deck, and though I cannot understand their unlovely tongue, I know what they are talking about from the way they look at me when I pass. Thank God I am still officially on sick leave, which gives me license to avoid people.

  I still need to fix the number of men who were at the cove, however, and this requires conversation. It’s awkward: I was the most senior of the Astrolabe’s officers to survive that day, but I was not on duty. That distinction belongs to Pierre Le Gobien, the midshipman who joined the Astrolabe eight months ago, when we met up with the Subtile in the Philippines. He should have the figures I need; he would have overseen the loading of our two boats that day. I saw him in the wardroom just this morning, and he looked up at me with a quick, sad smile, expecting me to speak to him. I nodded back but said nothing. I saw in his face a first experience of real grief, a yearning to draw someone into his confidence, and I recoiled. I cannot play the consoler, not for this. I write Le Gobien a note and leave it under his cabin door. Monsieur de Langle would disapprove. He always insisted that his men speak face-to-face.

  I send a similar note to the Boussole for Boutin, asking for an accounting of who went on the expedition from his ship and who returned. I hear that although he is still recovering from his injuries, he insists on aiding me with the report. Do I feel grateful or put upon by his interest? Perhaps he believes he should be writing it instead. I wish to God he were.

  * * *

  We have finally sailed away from the island. Monsieur de Monty says it is called Maouna, but the men are calling it Massacre Island. I hope they are calling it Massacre Island still in a hundred years. Nine leagues away we encounter another island that looks much the same. We are surrounded by canoes that look just like the canoes we scared off two days ago, canoes filled with breadfruit and bananas and natives who look just like the treacherous natives we left behind. Some of our men claim to recognize a few of the murderers and are ready to open fire, but Monsieur de Monty has strict orders from the commander. We are not to fire upon anyone without cause, we are not to allow any natives on board, we are not to anchor till we reach Botany Bay. We trade by raising and lowering a canvas between the deck and the canoes. I see one native attempt to scale the side of the Boussole. He is beaten back with a long oar and falls screaming into the sea—a sight and sound that fills me with horror and pleasure both.