by Glenda Adams
“Look!” cried Lark. “They’re lowering the lifeboat again.”
The boat hit the water, and the oars began to dip in and out. When the boat reached them the water was at their waists. It was Mr. Blut who now sat in the bow. He brought the boat around so that its broadside was next to Lark and Donna, who both grabbed at it. Mr. Blut lifted their fingers off.
“One first, the other then,” he reprimanded.
The sailors hauled Lark in, then Donna. Both sat in the stern, shivering in the wind.
“Ha, ha,” said the Captain with his Humpty Dumpty smile as they clambered onto the deck. “You see coral, we check the boot. All is in good order.”
Lark stood for a moment, then walked up to him and kicked his shins and punched his chest. He took her wrists in one hand and held her at arms length.
“You tried to kill us,” she yelled.
His eyebrows went up, as he kept on smiling. “It was a yoke, a practical yoke,” he said, “for crossing the equator.”
“Practical jokes can kill people,” Lark yelled.
“But you must go in the water at the equator,” the Captain laughed. “It’s tradition, and it is the time for yokes. Bad luck if no yoke.” He looked at each of them in turn. “Very clever ladies who know so much should know about the equator.”
Donna stood adjusting her scarf, pulling on her trousers against the sun. “I love practical jokes,” she murmured.
The Captain put his arm around Donna. “Did I fright you?” he asked.
Lark flounced off.
She stayed in her cabin for dinner, and for breakfast and lunch. She placed the piece of coral from her pocket on the ledge beside her bed and next to it her espadrilles with the rope soles that were now torn and ragged.
When she went in to dinner the next night, she wore high-heeled sandals and a long skirt. The others were already sitting at the table, laughing. It was the night for stuffed peppers again and the night that Donna Bird said “mouse.”
“So sexy tonight? No more the little child?” the Captain said to Lark. “Such fine shoes? I shall buy some for my lady friend when I am next in New York.” He nudged Donna.
Lark sat down without speaking.
Donna Bird was in her most splendid form, chattering about meeting a famous painter, a friend of her father’s interested in primitive art, in Paris when she was twelve.
“Ah, that’s one thing we Europeans know about, the value of art. And Manfred Bird, too, of course. Even during wartime, we took care of our art,” said the Captain.
Donna went on to describe watching an avalanche in the Swiss Alps when she was seven, progressing through interminable interim tales, finally arriving at the Tower of London by river in a special boat.
“Can’t you ever stop?” Lark shouted, slamming down her knife and fork.
“Larkie, darling,” whispered Donna, “you think I’m still lying?” She smiled, almost happily. “But you never say anything at all. You just sit there, doing nothing. Like a child. You could help out at times.”
The three men had given up on Donna’s stories, so profuse were they this night. When Lark shouted at Donna, they looked up for a moment, then back to their plates. Paul Crouch, clearing away the remains of the green peppers in his customary state of detachment, looked as if he had not heard anything at all. He brought in the dumplings.
“Our handsome Paul,” said Donna. The men were hacking at their dumplings. Donna called them to attention. “We were talking about Mr. Crouch, how handsome and strong he is.”
The Captain gave a grunt.
“He could probably leap buildings in a single bound.” Donna looked around. “If he wanted to, that is. A lot of little boys imagine themselves to be Superman.” The men looked at one another and continued eating. “You can imagine how it happens, the little boy’s view of the superhero, looking up at the towering body.” Donna’s face was radiant, as she recreated the scene. She was like the boy herself, looking up at the ceiling, lifting her head and opening her mouth in wonder, sinking back a little into her chair, as if retreating from that overpowering figure. “That ballooning chest, those muscles, those strong legs in blue tights. You can imagine how impressive, overwhelming, it would be, a little child looking up at that overpowering mouse.”
And here she stopped. She seemed surprised at what she had said, and she looked around the table. “I mean man,” she said, and giggled, then remained silent while she finished her dumplings. During coffee and the after-dinner biscuit that accompanied the coffee she said, “Larkie, he is right about the equator and the tradition of playing practical jokes. That had completely slipped my mind as a possibility.” She smiled at the Captain. “I conquered a fear. Such fun. So pedagogical. Not bad at all, for a joke.”
The men laughed, glad that Donna Bird was herself again. “Equator such fun,” said Mr. Blut. “King Neptune is a kind one.”
“It was a good yoke,” said the Captain.
“Joke?” said Donna. She paused. “We’ve done something no one else in the world has done. Thank you, Captain, so much?”
“And tomorrow,” said the Captain, lifting his glass to Lark, “we have no tomorrow, ha.”
Donna chuckled.
“Tomorrow we have no tomorrow,” the Captain repeated.
And finally, when Lark refused to play the game of questions and ask why, he said, “Tomorrow it will be today again. We cross the dateline, and when we go east, we have the same day twice. We live a day longer. When we go west we lose a day in our life. Sad.”
“Better than losing your life in a day?” said Lark.
“A yoke, a yoke!” said the Captain. “The afraid lady is yoking. She is better again.”
“Joke?” said Donna kindly, putting her hand on the Captain’s sleeve. “Please, jay, jay, joke?”
“Jay, jay, joke?” said the Captain. “And this is no joke. I have interested news for the lady passengers. We shall stop at an island. We must change course. We must pick up some thing from some island. We have new orders.”
“Some island?” asked Donna.
“Some little island owned by some man.”
“Why didn’t you do something?” Lark asked Paul Crouch when they stood together on the deck later. She felt awkward with him knowing that he had watched their ordeal and done nothing, merely waggled his fingers at them as they descended in the lifeboat.
“There was nothing I could do. It would have been mutiny or something.”
“But that Captain is a madman, you know that.”
“Anyway, nothing happened. You’re safe.”
He was right, she supposed. They were safe. But she stayed standing apart from him, leaning on the rail some feet away.
The sudden port of call meant that a new route had to be charted. Lark stopped by the bridge and stood near the Captain as he pinpointed the island and fiddled around with his calculations. He still seemed to know what to do—Lark remembered that first charting, that ruling of the straight line across half the world—despite that foolish coral walk.
“This Pacific, we know it so well,” said the Captain.
Lark climbed the ladder to the deck, where she found Paul Crouch, leaning on the rail.
“There’s your island,” he said.
They stood uneasily together, making a self-conscious, stilted effort to resurrect their conspiratorial closeness, pretending that all was as it had been.
The island was so small that it showed only on large-scale and local navigational charts. The sandy shelf around the island and the river leading into the only port were constantly dredged to make a channel deep enough for a small freighter to come right into the wharf, which ran alongside the main street of the settlement. Offshore, still visible above the water, was the hulk of a ship that had veered into the shallows and become embedded in the sand, perhaps a century before.
The Captain himself sailed the Avis Maris up the dredged channel and docked right in the middle of the village. There were no formalities. A
gangplank and ladder construction were let down directly onto the wharf; and a man wearing khaki trousers, a floral shirt, a pith helmet, and sandals came on board; he nodded at the two passengers and gave them permission to wander around. “But don’t venture far. Don’t go beyond the village. It is too easy to be lost.” It was Mr. Weiss himself, introduced as owner of the island. He then turned away and conferred with the Captain and with Mr. Fischer.
During the time the Avis Maris was docked, Mr. Weiss spent the days on board, playing poker with the three officers in the Captain’s private sitting room, drinking beer, not talking much. At dinner the first night, after Mr. Weiss’s departure, the Captain did not speak at all.
“Poker,” said Mr. Blut, explaining his Captain’s behavior. ‘Herr Weiss always wins and here we are always poor.”
“Always?” said Lark. “You always stop here?”
The Captain looked up. “We stop here sometimes, only.”
Early next morning, Lark ventured out. Within half an hour she had walked up and down the main street of the village, a dirt road, and had ascertained that there were a dozen or so side lanes and a railway line, which ran beside the road. A shuttle of open cars sat on the rusted tracks, looking as if they had not moved for decades. A few peddlars of odd bits and pieces displayed their wares—a spoon made from the shell of a coconut, a plain basket, a tin plate. They seemed to have hurried to spread out their few goods as Lark came down the gangplank.
“You have may day in?” asked an old man who was wearing shorts and an old cotton shirt and sitting beside a tin plate containing large seeds on which were painted faces, just a mouth and eyes and a squiggle or two for hair. He held up a seed on which the mouth was drawn as a rectangle, with straight lines up and down forming squares representing teeth.
“You have may day in?” he repeated.
Lark paused. She wanted to keep walking, to run, and to ignore this incomprehensible demand. “I beg your pardon?”
“May day in?” He stood up and approached her.
Lark backed away. He held up his hand, as if to tell her not to worry.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “May day in.” He pulled up the back of his collar and pointed at the tattered label. “May day in France. May day in Hong Kong.” He beckoned to a child in a doorway. The child stepped forward. The man pointed to the scarf he wore around his head. “May day in America.” It was one of Donna Bird’s scarves.
Lark nodded. “Made in,” she said.
The man nodded. “Good,” he said. He held out the seed to her again. “Art,” he said, then pointed at her sandals.
Lark understood he wanted to exchange his seeds for imported goods. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m terribly sorry.” She hurried on.
“May day in.” The peddlars took up the cry, waving the objects they wanted to trade.
Lark had wanted to eat on shore, to get away from Donna Bird and the Captain, but hesitated now to do so; and Paul Crouch, who might have kept her company, had to be on board to serve lunch. In any case, there was nothing that could be called a restaurant, only one or two coffeehouses, little huts, where she could have sat on a stool, half in and half out of the structure, drinking something, trying to ignore the peddlars. She made her way back to the ship.
“They see Europeans collecting real art—clubs and war sticks and death masks and the like—and they think they can trick us into buying anything,” said the Captain at lunch. Mr. Weiss was there, sitting in Mr. Fischer’s seat, while Mr. Fischer had moved over to the bench, so that Lark, Mr. Blut, and he sat tightly wedged in a row opposite Mr. Weiss and Donna Bird’s empty chair. They had waited five or ten minutes for Donna Bird, who still had not appeared. The Captain waved to Paul Crouch to serve the food. “They think we’re stupid.” He tapped his head. “But they are the ones who are stupid enough not to see we have superior brains.”
“That’s what the fascists used to say, still say,” said Lark.
“You are a child still,” said the Captain. “You know nothing of the world, nothing of fascism, nothing of Europe and of history. You know nothing.”
“One could ask how these people even know about Europeans and their art collecting. Who taught them about it?”
The Captain did not bother to answer. When Donna Bird was absent, he was always surlier, more belligerent, more himself, as if he could relax. Mr. Weiss looked up for a moment, then went back to eating. He did not speak at all during the meal.
After lunch Lark set off with Paul Crouch to walk the length of the village along the main street lined with houses made of tin, past the villagers offering sad little household items, and up the hill, at the top of which was a church overlooking the village and the river.
“The Captain’s crazy, of course,” said Lark. “Like Donna Bird. And where is she? Sulking in her cabin? Out trading her bizarre wardrobe with the villagers?”
“Let us hope she’s in her cabin. It would be a good sign, the mouse not leaving the ship.”
The church, Stella Maris, was of stone, in contrast to the village houses and all the other structures they had seen. A nun in full black habit came out to meet them, speaking first in German, then switching to English.
“I have been forty years here,” she said. “I have a degree in English from the university, and I enjoy it when, every sometimes, the Avis Maris comes and discharges a person who climbs to this hilltop and speaks with me. In German, in English, it does not matter, but if it is English, then I practice. Perhaps one day I shall be required to serve people who speak English. Perhaps one day I will go to America.”
“Did you say the Avis Maris often comes here?” asked Lark.
An old man, a native of the island, approached them, squatting and waddling forward, a bowl in his outstretched hands. He said something to the nun, who excused herself and went inside for a moment, returning with a plate of gray rice, which she tipped into his bowl.
“This week he is Catholic,” the nun said. “We’re giving out rice to attract converts—rice is not native to the island and it is a luxe compared with the local root. Herr Weiss could do a little more than he does to help these people, and we have to keep our numbers up. In return for the rice, they are obliged to come to church.”
The man half stood and backed away, delicately shoveling the rice into his mouth with one hand.
The nun looked away, thinking. “There is a problem,” she said, leaning toward them. “You may not walk like this, together. We cannot have a man and a woman walking the way you are. It is not the way of this island.”
“We’re only friends, walking,” said Lark. “You know, walking. Germans walk all the time, I hear.”
The nun shook her head. “Do not generalize. These islanders do not walk. It is not the way here.” She looked at them more closely. “I see you are not Catholic, are you?” They shook their heads. “Then you will have to go to the Protestants at the foot of the hill.”
“We’re not signing up, we don’t want rice,” said Lark. “We only came to look at the church and the view, to get off the ship.”
The old nun pointed back down the hill. “It is the agreement the two churches make for visitors.” She turned and hurried away.
Lark was furious. “Do you suppose the Captain telegraphed ahead to warn them about what he likes to call liaisons?”
She walked to the edge of the churchyard, beyond which the hill fell away to form a cliff, a steeply sloping, sometimes sheer rock face, loose with rubble, which descended to a beach and the river below. A few bathers were splashing in the water. She climbed down the cliff a little, knocking loose a few small rocks and pieces of broken stone and sending them tumbling over the edge, out of sight, to the beach. She found a ledge, somewhat horizontal and broad enough for her to sit. She drew her knees up and rested her arms and head on them. Paul leapt down and sat beside her.
“What a terrible island,” Lark said. “They seem to do nothing here. Nothing moves.”
She leant back again
st what appeared to be the firm cliff face, but her leaning dislodged a slab of rock. She lost her balance and was thrown to one side, her body drawn in the wake of the boulder crashing down the cliff. Indeed, she would have fallen if Paul had not quickly put his arm around her shoulder and held her against him.
“You must leave. You must go to the Protestants.”
They looked up and saw the nun’s head poking out from the rim of the cliff, outlined against the sky, a white moon with a black halo, peering down at Lark pressed close against Paul. Then beside the nun’s head appeared Donna Bird’s, partly hidden by her camera, which was whirring as she panned past Lark and Paul to the river and beyond. “Fantastic view,” she said.
“I told you what is our way here,” the nun said, and the two heads disappeared.
Paul and Lark climbed back up to the top of the cliff. Neither the nun nor Donna Bird was in sight. Without saying a word to each other, Lark and Paul followed the dirt road back down the hill, then inland around the base of the hill, away from the river and the village. It brought them to a rectangular tin building. Two lengths of two-by-four timber nailed together to form a cross were tied to the apex of the tin roof. A man and a woman, husband and wife, Lark assumed, came to meet them. Seeing Paul and hearing his name, they started speaking German, then like the nun, when they realized their mistake, immediately switched to English.
“It is our pleasure to speak to others, every now and then,” they said, “when now and then the Avis Maris brings someone to us.”