by Nancy Burke
Then, at dawn, they heard the nasal whine of a plane approaching overhead, growing louder as it circled lower and lower, almost grazing the tops of the trees. They watched it as though hypnotized, their bodies swaying as though it were pulling them into a vortex by a transparent rope. At last it rose and flew off in the paca direction, leaving an eerie silence in its wake. Dabimi stepped into that silence, standing on a log on one side of his kaawa, calling out words of promise and reassurance, impotently praising St. Girard, while Larry stood on the other side, shaking his head, waving the map he had retrieved from his pack, shouting out directions to the most likely tract of uninhabited land. The attempts by Larry and Dabimi to eclipse each other alternated with oddly rational debates about who should go, since there was only a hand of boats for each of the three villages, each of which could carry only a hand or two of persons. The land route was too treacherous, still flooded so early in the season. From these debates, the inevitable conclusions were derived; by the morning of the third day, when Sodeis appeared in the clearing, still wearing the cuffs, which had been sawed from their chain, flanked by ten men who looked like insects, wearing hardhats and goggles and pads at the elbows and knees, their saws dangling from thick straps around their necks, the engines growling intermittently like dogs who could barely be restrained, all persons had already thrown themselves to their task with such a collective desperation that the fearsome sight of that swarm of ant-men barely attracted notice. Under the row of goggled eyes, each person strained to dismantle his own house, pulling up the thick corner-sticks while the women filled the baskets with possessions, mats and straps and quivers of arrows and food. The women carried the baskets and set them together in the clearing while the men unlashed the rows of sticks that had formed the walls of their huts and carried them off in bundles to the burning ground, to be cast among the other bones of the dead. All morning long, the village folded in on itself, until at last, when the possessions had been gathered and tightly packed, and when the pyre had grown larger than it had ever been and set alight, they turned to the task of uprooting the chajans which now stood unclothed, surprisingly spindly, straddling the rubble-strewn ground. Men and women ran to join the teams, binding their waists with the pulling vines and hurling themselves forward with an insane abandon. In every instance, before the final groan, there was the same excruciating stillness one feels before a tooth is extracted, when opposing tensions match, and then a sudden violent rush as a line of persons toppled into a heap of legs and arms as a chajan gave way, dragging them through the dirt. The view from the plane, had it remained circling above, would have been of a battlefield of giants, broken limbs littering the ground, ornate, surreal, terrifying still, indeed even more so than before, like all fallen invincible things. In the midst of such ruin, the orderly flow of the chajans to the river, pulled along by vines by the living of their kin, the systematic way in which they were aligned and lashed together and sealed with wax, the smooth, almost silent launch of the finished rafts into the river, were more terrible than the chaos, than the roiling clouds of smoke from the burning ground, or the whining of the saws at their backs, or the frantic wheeling and screeching of the parrots, whose perches were upended for the masts. Persons streamed down the path as though it were itself a river that fed into the larger water, upon which gently bobbed a lengthening flotilla of ornately painted craft.
Joaquim and Jorge and Sam planted themselves beside the river, tying the rafts into a caravan, testing them, filling their cracks with wax. Dabimi’s raft was the first in line, and the first to push off upstream. He himself took the oar, shouting out in an intoxicated voice, as though the draught had not yet loosened its hold on him, the song of traveling to the hunt. He threw himself against the current, but the river, which had only been feigning indifference, sensed his inexperience as an oarsman and denied him easy passage. The sun glinted in the rivulets of his sweat, and his arms shook as he strained at the oar, until at last he handed the long wooden post, formerly the corner–post of his house, to his son-in-law, and positioned himself beside him at the bow, waving his arms as he sang.
As Larry looked down from the head of the path, the riverbank swarmed like a tree branch covered with ants, and shimmered like the river itself. Standing with his hand on Iri’s arm, Larry remembered movie scenes of crowded stations, overhead shots of hats accumulating like rows of dark brown marbles against the muted grey torsos of trains. From above, he could see how the accumulation began to overtake the rafts, and he could make out his own raft, constructed of a gathering raft, pressed on either side by the legs of the chajan of his house, standing empty while the others filled. Intermittently, the whine of the saws would subside and he could hear wisps of Dabimi’s shouted song.
“We need to go,” he whispered to Iri when he found him, taking a few steps down the incline towards the rafts.
“Where’s mother?” said Iri.
“I don’t know,” he said, speaking in a muted, emotionless tone.
“Where’s Oji?”
Larry shook his head. He stopped walking, but didn’t turn around to look. He took two long steps sideways off the path to avoid being carried by the stream of persons from the middle village pouring towards the river. By the time he finally allowed himself to glance toward Iri, he was gone. Larry stumbled down the incline, pausing before he stepped onto his boat. Everywhere, people were calling to one another, clasping each other, or standing together, hanging their baskets from their crossbeams, kneeling to press more wax into the crevasses between logs. Larry hung his baskets and then sat silent, cross-legged, looking out over the shoulder of the river.
“Did you see Oji?” said a voice beside him.
“No,” said Larry, looking up, squinting, as though he barely recognized Panar.
“He’s near the end, with Kararar’s line. I’m three rafts down.” Panar put one foot on the chajan log for balance as he leaned over to grasp Larry by the arm, but rather than providing an anchor, the pressure of his leg pushed the boat out from under him, so that it floated off into the current of the river. Panar threw himself forward and crawled up beside Larry, shaking off water, while Larry jumped for the oar and started maneuvering the raft back to shore. He heard a shout and looked up to see Iri waving frantically, holding up one of Aran’s arms while Martina held the other. Larry reached the oar out toward the bank and Iri grabbed it, still clutching Aran with his other hand. The boat tipped precariously; the baskets thrashed on the crossbeam. Larry and Panar yanked the oar and Iri was flung onto the raft, trailing Aran in the water behind him. They reached the oar towards Martina and pulled her aboard. Then Iri and Martina grasped Aran’s arms and together pulled her up. Her eyes were closed and she wasn’t breathing. Larry turned her and shook her and breathed into her mouth, and she began to move again, coughing, gasping and writhing without opening her eyes. Panar and Iri tended her while Larry jumped up and grabbed the oar, throwing himself against it to avoid their being hurled by the current into the raft behind them.
It was a full minute before he could force himself to look up, to confront the three men standing even with his raft on the shore, whose existence he had almost forgotten, who were watching him, motionless in all the stir of activity. He was overwhelmed momentarily by the temptation to push off, as if by leaving them behind, he could obliterate the nightmare that was playing out in front of him, or could abandon himself to it along with them. He hesitated and then shouted above the din, “Are you coming or not?”
He pulled the raft even with the shore and Martina stretched out her hands to steady Jorge. Jorge did the same for Joaquim, who suddenly seemed weightless and shriveled as Jorge lifted him over the abyss. It took the three of them to drag Sam across and pull him in, as their craft listed violently and lowered in the water, threatening to sink altogether, or to throw the rest of them overboard. At last, they steadied and pushed off, with Larry at the oar, into a world made up of nothing but reflection.
By midday the rafts
had cleared the Rin bend of the river without once having to be dragged or carried by their runners. The shore slipped away behind them, with its stands of Siritana and its turtles sunning on rocks and its intermittent cusps of sand. The river fanned out and shallowed, and the rafts bobbed on its sun-flecked surface like an unfathomable number of brightly colored Janka leaves. Larry rowed for a long time without pausing even to assess where he was, or to notice the rafts of the others jostling in his wake as he passed them. At last, he lifted his oar and looked around. There was no one in sight. On his raft, Panar and Iri and Martina were squatting beside Aran, who slept, breathing hoarsely, her eyes moving beneath dark, wrinkled lids. Sam clung to the mast, breathing heavily with his eyes closed. Jorge sat between Panar and Iri, staring into the water. Joachim sat alone at the front of the boat, staring straight ahead. Larry pulled his oar out of the water, securing the tip of it in a crevasse in the wood, and leaned against it, listening for any wisp of human sound. Just as he set the oar to row again, Pitar’s boat appeared in the distance behind them. Larry waited as he drew up, and they went on together, handing the oars to their sons so they could squat as they used to, with their backs against the sun, watching the slow procession of the clouds. They were unchanged, but only sharpened, aware at some level that they were dreaming, certain that their illusions would betray them. When they assumed the oars again, they rowed in the same rhythm, two men who shared one breath. By afternoon, the licaro came into view, the place where the river divided. Without a word, they both took the left fork, away from St. Girard, and then waited while the other rafts came into sight. None seemed to hesitate upon reaching that rend in the water; each moved in a smooth, unwavering path, either toward them or away behind the wall of trees. He saw a metallic glint as Dabimi steered his raft off to the right, and started as he caught sight of Oji, with Kararar and her father and her sister, disappearing after him behind the dark green curtain. The stream of rafts was a body falling on a blade, and the blade split it as it split the water, into two quivering, ultimately unviable halves.
As they pushed off up the thinner strand, the crimson light of sunset spread down to meet them, blending them and the forest and the river together in a monochrome. Maroon-colored bats circled overhead, and dark red-purple monkeys muttered and fussed, and a huge, gray-rose caiman launched itself without a ripple into the glowing red river and disappeared. Larry passed the oar to Iri and squatted beside Aran, who, although her eyes were open, would not look at him, but only spat onto the wood near his feet. After watching her in silence for a while, he got up and knelt down beside Joaquim, squinting upriver into the sun’s red eye. The rafts were gathered in front of it, a shifting black pupil around which its rose light sharpened and splayed. Their flotilla filled the corridor between the riverbanks, lodging between a towering wall of trees on the one side and a broad praia of glowing pink sand on the other, along which a sill of granite boulders formed a natural harbor. As they dragged their rafts, some into the harbor and others onto shore, Larry watched them from the water with a growing recognition of that levee of boulders, that shaded brow of sand, stirring within him.
When a leaf falls into a river and is borne away, it carries along with it a residue—bits of pollen, spores, bacteria, seedlings, some of which have already sprouted and are feeding from its veins, cultures in the broadest sense, the distillations of old habitats, dust of civilizations—awaiting reconstitution or dissolution by the rains. Lying awake in the sand beside Aran under the upturned bowl of the stars, amid the sounds of the forest and the river, of snoring and groaning and weeping, Larry could discern the shudder of her troubled breath, and curled his body around hers, pulling her back into his chest. Never in the past would she have stretched out on the ground like that, as an animal would, as though there were no difference between them. Now, it wasn’t so much that the difference had been erased, as that, in the face of intolerable certainty, such symbolic confirmations no longer bore their familiar meanings, and would have to be constructed anew. For every expulsion, every act of flight, brings with it special obligations afforded only to persons: to name the lost world Paradise, and to mourn, in their steads, on behalf of all its creatures, and to bear the curse of memory, pulling the weight behind, the vines wearing marks into the skin. Larry curled around Aran and she hardened like a fossil within him, embedded as though within his rib, an unfathomably cold knot inside his bone.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I OWE SO much to so many, and so does this book. I would not have begun it at all were it not for Gene Borowitz, and would not have finished it were it not for the many people who have offered their help and encouragement along the way. Linda Sue Baugh read and critiqued all my early chapters as they were written, and offered much wise and sensitive guidance. Sigfried Gold’s writing companionship was invaluable in keeping me on course. Joan Matlack believed in the book, promoted it, and pushed me to publish it when I fully expected that it would live out its life in the bottom drawer of my desk; I happily call her my unofficial agent and have her to thank for the fact that it did not. The members of my book club family of nearly 40 years, including Joan, Libby Ester, Laura Tilly, Alexa Hand, Barbara Beck, Beth Kaplan, and Karen Reeves (who went out of her way to keep my spirits alive during the hard times) were generous and supportive in their critique, and the late Sarah Hamilton went above and beyond book club protocol and gave the opening sections of the manuscript a thorough copy-edit. The late Barbara Muday was a mainstay of support. My graduation committee at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, including Peter Shabad, Dale Moyer, and Lucy Freund, supported my final project towards graduation, which included a presentation of reflections on this book. I am forever grateful to Deborah Robertson and Gibson House for giving my novel the chance to see the light of day, and to Deb for sharing her vision of a literary/musical nexus with me. I am fortunate that the late Terrance Turner, perhaps the foremost anthropologist of the peoples of Amazonia, gave the book a careful reading and offered me many useful suggestions as well as enthusiastic support. I thank Steve Dawson for his encouragement of me as a writer and for his transformative role in my musical life. Poornima Apte’s able editorial skills saved me from myself many times over, and I have been grateful to have the guidance of Mary Bisbee-Beek on those aspects of creating a successful book from which I am most likely to recoil. I’m grateful to Christian Fuenfhausen and Karen Sheets for their elegant design work and helpful image-sleuthing, and also thank the plant information people at the Chicago Botanic Garden for their research help. Many others have offered publishing advice or have read drafts of the manuscript and made hands-on suggestions, or else have offered general encouragement, including (alphabetically) Karen Smith Biastre, Jena Camp, Mark Caro, Kathy and Paul Davidson, Karin Deam, Bob Drucker, John Friedman, David Fuller, John and Joyce Fuller, Denise Gibbon, Karen Gilman, Eve Gordon, Ingrid Graudins, Lorel Greene, Jane Hamilton, Karen Hanmer, Tom Jenks, Tim Keating, Lucia and Waud Kracke, Cecile Margulies, Tom Recht, Fran Rivkin, Ann-Louise Silver, Saadya Sternberg, David Vigoda and Peter Zeldow. The writing of this manuscript was supported by an Artist Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council. I am grateful to the Writers-Editors International Writing Awards, NAAP, the Fish Literary Awards, the James Jones Award for the Novel, the Eugene Walter Prize for the Novel, the Illinois Arts Council Poetry Awards, and the other organizations that have supported my writing with awards, honorable mentions, finalist designations, cash prizes and other forms of recognition over the years. I thank the Unicorn Café for providing me a refuge in which to write, and am grateful to Sophie Harp and Natalya Harp for their insight and inspiration, and also to Sophie for her efforts to help me arrive at the book’s title. Most of all, I thank my husband, Steve Harp, for offering his support and encouragement every step of the way, and for teaching me how to value my own work in the midst of this life-I-am-incapable-of-living.
MARTHA ABELSON
NANCY BURKE is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Chicago and
Evanston, Illinois. Her poetry has appeared in After Hours, The American Poetry Journal, Permafrost, and other literary magazines. Her recording of original songs is American Goodbye. Undergrowth is her first novel.
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