by John Benditt
“It’s not so surprising that no one knows these,” she says, brushing the curls from her eyes. As she holds the shells up for inspection the boatmaker notices that the first two fingers of her right hand are stained yellow-brown, like his.
“These shells are rare and precious, almost gone today, though still found on some of the remote islands of the kingdom. They have a fancy scientific name in Latin and a lovely one in the tongue of the native islanders. But we needn’t be concerned with all that. Our own Mainland speech will do just fine—and in our language they are called tidal whelks.”
There is a shifting in the room, a shuffling and creaking on the wooden chairs. It is not a comfortable sound. The boatmaker senses the discomfort but doesn’t know where it comes from.
“Why do I bring them up?” the woman asks, putting the shells down on the desk and turning to face her audience. Unlike the dress of the woman of the town, Rachel Lippsted’s dress is made to conceal rather than reveal; it cloaks her from wrist to neck. Nevertheless, the boatmaker can see that within the dark silk is a small, firm body.
“I show you these shells because for the natives who lived on our own northern islands and beyond, all the way to the Arctic, these shells were money. They were the carriers of value as well as a medium of exchange. To be sure, the natives had other forms of money: polar-bear pelts and teeth, and the wing bones of certain seabirds. But these shells were their most valuable form of money, real currency—every bit as much as our banknotes, printed on the remarkable presses you will shortly see.
“Now, can any of you gentlemen tell me why these shells should have become the medium of exchange for the natives of those remote islands?”
There is no answer. The boatmaker feels a resistance building in the little crowd, a resentment at being addressed in a lecture tone by this small woman, with her exotic name and deep confidence in her own intellect. This truculence comes to him along with the men’s smell, mixing tweed, underwear changed once a month, heavy shoes, tobacco, drink, sausages and machine oil. There’s something else in the smell, too, something like fear and anger, shared among them. It is a smell the boatmaker doesn’t recognize; it doesn’t exist on Small Island.
Receiving no answer, Rachel Lippsted leads the men through a history of money in three stages, pausing from time to time to make notes on the board in her clear, educated handwriting.
The first stage, she explains, exemplified by the tidal whelks with their mathematical markings, is the use of rare and beautiful natural objects as the medium of exchange among small groups over short distances. This is followed by the growing use of rare and precious metals—copper, silver and gold at first, later mostly gold—by great nations reaching across oceans to take, absorb and exchange. Then she comes to the final phase, their own: the era of banknotes, which stand for gold but have no value in themselves. In spite of their lack of intrinsic value, the ghostly abstractions bearing the long face of the king can measure the value of any other thing: animal, vegetable or mineral, including the labor power of men. This is a remarkable capacity.
“After all,” she asks, holding up a Mainland banknote, a pale-green-and-pink rectangle only one of the men in the room has ever seen, in a denomination large enough to purchase a house, “what is the value of this note? Beautifully printed as it is, is it not simply a piece of paper?”
The smell in the room, of shared resentment, deepens. Rachel Lippsted pauses, hands clasped on the front of her purple skirt, then tries another tack.
“Can anyone tell me what is the same in all three phases of the history we have just covered? As different as they are?”
Her questions are met with more moving of feet and creaking of chairs.
“Let me tell you, then. The thing that provides continuity, the thing that is the same in all three periods is faith.”
“What do you mean by that?” demands the man in the tweed suit who was standing ahead of the boatmaker in the queue, reading his newspaper. His face is redder, his brown hair curly, electrified. He twists in his chair, obviously having difficulty remaining seated.
“This is what I mean,” the small woman says. Her voice is steady, but the boatmaker sees in her eyes and clasped hands that she is, if not frightened, then alert to possible danger. “What I mean is that unless the people have faith in their money, it is worthless.”
“Gold isn’t worthless!” the man in the tweed suit bellows, the folding chair trembling under his lean legs.
“Gold has value because we believe it does,” Rachel Lippsted says; keeping her voice steady clearly requires an effort. “Gold is beautiful, yes, and easily worked. It makes wonderful jewelry. But as currency it has nothing but the value we endow it with. And this has always been true: Money has the power we bestow upon it by putting our collective faith in it.”
The man in the tweed suit stares, his face raw.
Rachel Lippsted continues. Her voice wavers, but her logic is clear. “Faith is present in all three stages of money. In our stage, the final one, the true nature of money becomes clear. Banknotes have no value in themselves. Yet they are immensely valued. Men will do many things—both good and bad—for just one of these colored notes.”
She holds the pink-and-green bill up to the room. The man in the tweed suit can no longer hold himself back. He stands, the folding chair flattening and falling behind him with a bang.
“The currency is worthless because the Jews have made it worthless!” he yells. “The king is in debt to the bloodsuckers up to his eyes. And you know that don’t you, Miss Rachel Lippsted? Because you’re one of them.”
His lips arch from his teeth in disgust. He takes a long stride toward the woman at the front of the room. The boatmaker wonders whether the ruddy-faced man will assault her. He wonders what the other men in the room would do if that happened. Surely they would not sit by while a woman was being beaten? Would they? He is far out of his depth.
Rather than raising her arms over her head to shield herself, as the boatmaker expects, Rachel Lippsted steps back and leans against the heavy desk. The boatmaker sees her feel behind her, finding something set in the wood. She must be signaling, he thinks.
Sure enough, a moment later, while the man in the tweed suit is still shouting about the Jews and the inflation that is sucking the life out of the kingdom’s money, the door swings open. The twin policemen muscle in and grab the shouting man by his shoulders.
“You Jews will get what’s coming to you!” he shouts over his shoulder as they flank him and march him out. He seems surprisingly unafraid. In fact, as he leaves, he looks as though he might break into laughter.
Outside the Mint, the stone steps are empty. The tours are at an end until the king’s birthday next year. The man who had been shouting stands chatting in a familiar way with the policemen who marched him out. A man in elegant civilian clothes approaches, chats briefly with the other three. Then he turns and walks off, arm in arm with the man in brown tweed. They are not in a hurry, but not wasting time either, one a little taller, a little leaner, than the other, both carrying themselves in a manner that suggests marches, parade rest, attention and conversation in the field over cigarettes cupped against the wind.
CHAPTER 11
In the classroom the semicircle of folding chairs shows a gap where one chair lies flat on the floor. The two whelks glitter on the desk, their checked surfaces reflecting light from bare bulbs. Rachel Lippsted resumes her lecture, slightly unsteady but determined, proceeds to the end, locks the pink-and-green bill in the desk and puts the whelks back in their case. Turning the lights off and closing the door, she escorts her six remaining pupils out of the classroom and down broad worn stone stairs. At the bottom is a heavy door guarded by a soldier who nods them past.
They enter a huge space in which they must stop to let their eyes adjust to the dimness. Light trickles from small windows high on the walls, at the level of the street outside. The floor is bedrock. Cut into it are four bays. In each bay sits a huge
piece of machinery, as tall as two men and much longer. A serpentine of rollers of different sizes leads the eye from one end of the machine to the other. Over everything is the smell of oil and ink and the melancholy of machinery stopped in the middle of its task.
Rachel Lippsted, neatly buttoned into her purple dress, toes of black boots peeping out from under her skirt, explains that the presses are as modern and powerful as any in Europe. Made in England and brought by specially reinforced ships upriver to the capital, they can print thousands of banknotes an hour. The Mainland has moved out of the second phase of the history of money, she says. The country’s wealth is no longer tied to gold or to conquest: It increases with the skill and productivity of its workers.
At the end of the tour the group assembles in the high-ceilinged entrance hall, and the five other men leave without a word. In spite of the strange events of this day, the boatmaker still wants to exercise his privilege of exchanging worn bills for new ones. The woman in the purple dress shakes his hand goodbye. The boatmaker has never shaken hands with a woman. Her palm is cool and dry, smaller and smoother than his.
After leaving her, he climbs stone stairs and walks through offices, asking for directions, until he finds himself in a small room with frosted glass rising from a wooden divider. There are two arched openings in the frosted glass. Etched in the glass between them is an oval enclosing the king’s initial surrounded by an intricate floral design. Against the far wall, under the familiar portrait of the king, are benches. The benches and the arched openings in the frosted glass are empty.
Although no one can see him, the boatmaker turns away, screening his sealskin bag. Reaching under his overalls and long underwear, he opens the bag and draws out three notes: one each in blue, buff and yellow. Money in hand, he turns back.
A woman appears in one of the openings in the glass, next to the oval bearing the king’s initial. She is middle-aged and small, her hair pulled back in a neat silver bun. At the throat of her blue blouse is a gold pin shaped like a beetle. Her blouse is dotted with yellow butterflies, their wings spreading until they almost touch.
“May I help you?” she asks in a tone that is correct, even chilly.
“I’ve come to change,” the boatmaker says.
“Change?”
“Exchange, I mean,” he says, blushing under the color of a man who works outdoors. “I was told I could exchange old bills.”
“Let me see.”
The boatmaker moves forward, stiff and apprehensive, as if one cross look from this teller, a small woman behind frosted glass, could vaporize him. He places his bills on the counter, its oak worn smooth by thousands of banknotes moving back and forth—the silent, invisible pressure of money.
The woman picks his bills up by the edges and sets them aside. The forefinger of her right hand is covered by a rubber tip. She reaches for a ledger bound in red leather and pushes it through the arched opening, indicating with the rubber tip where the boatmaker should sign. He signs his name and hands the book back. She reads the name, looks at it again, picks the book up and carries it down the counter to another woman about the same age. They peer into the book, gray heads poised over the fine blue lines bearing the names of the people of the capital. Without leaning forward, the boatmaker tries to hear their whispers, but he can’t make out the words.
The woman with butterflies on her blouse returns and puts the red ledger down. She reaches into a drawer and removes three crisp notes. She counts them once, twice, then a third time with her rubber finger and pushes the bills through the opening. Although it is not hot in the room, the boatmaker is sweating under his overalls. He takes the bills and turns, slowing his legs so that he can depart at a dignified pace.
He retraces his steps through the warren of walls, stone stairs and wooden doors to find his way out into the July evening, still noon-bright though it is past six. The broad stairs leading to the Mint are deserted. It is the evening of a holiday; the festive energy has been spent. Everyone is home with family or in a tavern settling down to a nice quiet drunk to avoid thinking about what awaits the next morning. The boatmaker has no family and tries to avoid taverns, especially when he is alone. This evening he is tempted, but he knows it isn’t just one drink he is avoiding: It is a whole world, with many places he would rather not revisit.
He returns to the boardinghouse. The landlady’s room is on the first floor. She is in her fifties, straggles of iron-gray hair pulled into a disorderly bun. She is rarely without a cigarette and a volume of Kierkegaard; she often smells of drink. Sometimes she darts out at the slightest sound on the stairs, cigarette burning, wiry hair flying. Other times, nothing rouses her for days, and then she reappears wearing a look the boatmaker knows all too well from the inside. This time, as the boatmaker passes the door stays closed. No sound comes from within.
Lining the walls of the narrow stairway to the second floor are portraits of the landlady’s ancestors, the oldest at the bottom and the newest at the top. Most of the portraits are paired: man and wife. At the foot of the stairs knights with rude faces under bowl haircuts stare out of severely carved gothic frames. A little higher up, burghers in urban black with ruffs that curve and recurve like mathematical functions gaze from frames heavy with gilt. Higher still, elegant patrons of the arts, slightly bohemian, lounge in simple frames with classical lines. At the top is a portrait of the landlady herself as a young woman, painted in a daring style, then new, with patches of bright color that make her face resemble the flag of an unknown country; the frame is a simple line of black.
As the boatmaker climbs, the landlady’s ancestors regard him with their varying degrees of piety and pride. Although her home has become a shabby boardinghouse in a questionable neighborhood bordering on the Jewish quarter, the landlady’s family is one of the oldest and noblest in the land. The boatmaker, who has no lineage to consult, cannot imagine what it must be like for her to live among pictures of her stock going far back into the history of the Mainland, almost as far back as the time of the sainted Vashad. At the top of the stairs he turns left and goes down the hall to his room. He lies on his narrow bed without taking off his corduroy jacket or boots.
Since he arrived on the Mainland, understanding money has become something like a mission for the boatmaker. Now, after what happened at the Mint, he knows the Jews are somehow bound up in his questions.
Lying on his back, he reaches into his sealskin pouch and pulls out the three banknotes the woman in the butterflies gave him. He holds them above his head to look at them. Pulls them down and smells them. Rubs them against one another, feeling the very slight roughness, like that of unimaginably fine sandpaper. If you worked with new bills a long time, they would probably sand your fingers to the bone, he thinks. No wonder the woman at the Mint wears a rubber tip.
He holds the bills up toward the ceiling, squinting at the image of the king. It brings back the image of the Jew on Big Island, silently estimating the value of his compass, the whispered words of the woman at the Mint over her red ledger, the violent outburst in the classroom, the shaky determination of Rachel Lippsted to continue her interrupted lecture, the enormous power of the machines that print the banknotes. The boatmaker knows that all these things fit together, but he does not see how. When he came to the Mainland, he wanted to understand more about money, which seemed to him like just another part of everyday life. But the desire to answer some apparently simple questions has led him into a dark confusion. Lying on his bed, he feels as if a swarm of bees, trapped and angry, is buzzing in his head.
He lets the bills drop and fumbles a cigarette and matches out of his pockets, lights the cigarette and watches smoke rise to the ceiling, flattening like the cap of a mushroom as it meets ancient plaster. He wonders how many thousands of cigarettes it would take for the ceiling to be as stained as his fingers, Rachel Lippsted’s and his landlady’s are. He wonders whether he should simply lie on his bed and smoke until answers appear on the ceiling.
He
hears a knock on his door, and Crow enters without waiting for a reply. Behind him, White is an enormous shadow.
“Why are you lying there?” asks Crow. “Are you ill?”
“I’m thinking.”
“Thinking?” The little man gives a laugh that shows his opinion of the boatmaker’s capacity for thinking deep thoughts. “Better leave the thinking to me. Or better yet—to our friend White here.” He gestures with his thumb at the man behind him, who fills the room like a polar bear. White chuckles at Crow’s cleverness.
The boatmaker says nothing while he lets smoke drift to the ceiling. He knows that Crow understands all the curves and angles of the world, all the places where things are fastened—and what holds them in place. The boatmaker is often amused by Crow and impressed by his worldliness. But today the little man’s words seem to be coming from far away. Outside the window the July day is ending slowly, the sky covering itself up like a boxer seeking respite from the unrelenting assault of daylight.
“I went to the Mint. For the king’s birthday.”
“Wanting to find out about money, eh? Well, aren’t we all, my friend from Small Island? You’re not going to get any closer to it at the Mint, though, I can tell you that. They don’t leave it lying around loose over there.” White laughs a white bear’s rumble. To Crow and White, the boatmaker is the king of the rubes. They like him partly because in his presence they feel tougher and smarter than usual. Even White feels superior in worldly knowledge to the man from Small Island.
To Crow, the boatmaker, with his remarkable skill at working wood and his Small Island origins, is something of a novelty. As always when confronted by novelty, Crow has been trying to figure out how to turn it to profit. When it comes to calculating how to get his cut, Crow has nothing but patience. And he knows a drunk when he sees one. The boatmaker’s dryness is a ruse Crow will sooner or later penetrate. He’s not worried. He’s been getting past deeper ruses, from much trickier customers than the boatmaker, all his life.