Easter Island

by Jennifer Vanderbes

  Each side believed it had the superior force, and by the time the situation was clear, action was under way.

  The German ships carried more big-caliber guns and the weight of their fire was nearly double that of the British. Within two hours the Royal Navy lost two cruisers and nearly sixteen hundred men beside the Chilean town of Coronel.

  Von Spee, from his lookout, was surveying the British cruisers, when suddenly flecks of red and green and yellow burst from one of the flaming ships, like bright scarves in the sky. They swirled in odd circles, then began to flutter—they were parrots. The British officers had released parrots bought in Brazil as gifts. The birds, however, were too stunned by the explosions to accept their freedom. Swooping about the smoky forecastle, they collided with the cannons; they perched on the gunwale as fires erupted around them. It was noted by a young German officer that almost one hundred birds soon bobbed lifelessly on the sea. “This seemed to all of us,” the young officer wrote in the last letter his mother would receive, “a most eerie omen.”

  The Battle of Coronel was the first defeat suffered by the Royal Navy in over a century, and prompted First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill to send almost the entire British Fleet after von Spee. Churchill’s orders were unequivocal: “Your main and most important duty is to search for the German armored cruisers. . . . All other considerations are to be subordinated to this end.” Von Spee was in immense danger. The battle had expended nearly half his ships’ ammunition, depleting the only resources that might have saved his fleet and returned him home.

  Also, the sinking of Admiral Cradock’s ship,Good Hope, contributed to von Spee’s growing tension. Von Spee had known Sir Christopher Cradock since his first posting to Tsingtao; he had sent a man with whom he’d been friends for fourteen years to the bottom of the sea.

  Days later, at a dinner to celebrate their victory, an officer made a toast: “To the damnation of the British navy.” Von Spee then stood and raised his own glass, proclaiming: “I drink to the memory of a gallant and honorable foe!” Without waiting for support, he drained his glass, gathered his hat, and departed.

  The portentousness of such a victory on November 1st would not have been lost on von Spee, a Catholic. It was All Saints’ Day.

  —Fleet of Misfortune: Graf von Spee and the Impossible Journey Home

  14

  The island is honeycombed, a lattice of caves. In some distant past, these were homes, shelters, hideouts for women and children. Now they house only relics, scattered bones, and, according to legend, the spirittatane.

  Two femaletatane —Kava-ara and Kava-tua—are said to live in a cliffside cave on the northeast coast, keeping watch over the sleeping figure of the man they fell in love with centuries earlier and kidnapped from Hanga Roa. It is said that from the cliff’s edge you can hear the man gurgling in deep, silken sleep, and above that the singing of histatane captors as they try—for if his spirit awakens it will take flight—to prolong his slumber.

  This is the only cave Biscuit Tin avoids. He knows them all, the caves strangled by grassy overgrowth, the caves clogged with lava rocks, the ones beneath the sharp cliffs splashed by surf, as though his short life has been spent exploring every inch of this island. Small and lithe, he can wiggle into the smallest of holes, emerging with a bone, a cracked clay pot, a wooden figurine, a salamander. He gives everything he retrieves to Alice, but she cares only for the strange tablet he presents one day: a three-foot-long piece of wood, oiled and worn, covered with pictorial engravings. As if reading braille, Alice runs her small hands across the mysterious script.

  Alice then hands the tablet to Elsa. “Squiggles,” she says.

  The moment Elsa touches it, she knows this is what she has been looking for. This is the script González noticed on his voyage almost one hundred and fifty years earlier, and deciphering it will be her project. Themoai fascinate her, but their story belongs to Edward, and though she is glad to assist him, Elsa needs something of her own. She wants to secure a balance between them, even a distance. The tablet could record a genealogy, a legend, a codification of ancient law. It might help unravel the story of this island. If she can learn to read it, or grasp some small part of it, it will mean all her choices have served some higher purpose.

  Her first task is to see if they can find more tablets. For weeks, led by Biscuit Tin, Elsa searches scores of caves, upturning skeletons, swatting at cobwebs, moving, one by one, the stones blocking secret chambers. Alice refuses to enter, so Edward waits with her outside while Elsa and Biscuit Tin survey the chambers. Edward has offered to go in, to let Elsa sit with Alice, but she has politely declined. If the tablets are her study, she should retrieve them. And, for practical purposes, she knows she is more agile than he is.

  Soon they have amassed over twenty tablets and several inscribed staffs, the likes of which Elsa has never seen. The writing is an endless stream of small bulbous figures, hundreds squeezed onto each line. She has no immediate sense of whether the script is logographic, syllabic, or alphabetic. Some combinations of images appear over and over again, and some are unique. As she lays them side by side in the tent at night, the ambition of her task begins to overwhelm her. Where on earth does one begin to understand the markings? What she desperately needs is a key, her own Rosetta stone or Behistun rock, but the tablets seem filled with the hieroglyphics of one language alone.

  She is thankful, now, for the distance from England, from scholars, from those qualified to take on this job. She knows it’s not the kind of project for a former governess, even the daughter of a professor. But she is here. And what, after all, is better than opportunity and desire?

  First she decides to have Alice copy the figures, so they will at least have an accurate record. Also, Alice will be kept out of trouble.

  For several weeks, Elsa sits on the hill above their campsite and reads Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson’sA Commentary on the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Babylon and Assyria and Champollion’sSummary of the Hieroglyphic System of Ancient Egyptians. Alice, beside her, sketches near-perfect reproductions of portions of each tablet.

  As each series is completed, she shows Elsa. “Here, look.”

  “They look like birds,” says Alice. “Angry birds. And trees. My drawings are better, don’t you think?”

  “Much better,” says Elsa.

  Alice’s renditions allow Elsa to examine each image individually. She sorts Alice’s copies, and assigns a number to each character. Soon she has almost one thousand unique figures, which suggests the script is not alphabetic. But it is difficult—some figures look very similar. Day after day Elsa stares at them; at night they dance across her dreams. So many seem to be birds and plants and animals—the very things lacking on the island. If the script is indigenous, it should use representations the islanders would have known. But perhaps the figures are not what they seem—perhaps she is seeing only whatshe has seen before.

  As Alice begins copying the larger tablets, the task seems to bother her. Occasionally she hurls her notebook down and stomps off across the grass. She chucks pebbles at her pony, tugs at her own hair.

  “What’s wrong, Allie?”

  “They’re ugly. That tablet is ugly. All the faces are angry. I don’t want to look at it anymore.”

  “Then we’ll just tuck it aside. You don’t have to look at it.” Elsa wraps the tablet in canvas. “Why don’t you take a break from all that and do some nice portraits? That always makes you happy. How about a drawing of Biscuit Tin?”

  So for several days Alice makes a portrait of Biscuit Tin, though he can’t stop giggling for more than a few seconds at a time, and this only when Alice looks away to grab a new charcoal or a rubbing cloth. As soon as she studies him, he plants his palms on his cheeks and laughs. Then Alice scolds him, tosses grass at his face. It is only in the brief moments when Alice seems to disappear, when her eyes retreat, when the motion of her charcoal suddenly stops, that the boy’s face becomes still and solemn. He composes himself
and sits patiently, as though in the presence of one who is sick. And when she returns to the world, to him, her feet kicking at the sand, he is clearly relieved. After a week, when the portrait is finished, she presents it to him. He has not been permitted to see the work in progress, and when finally he does see it, Biscuit Tin nearly bursts into tears. It has, thinks Elsa, captured his spirit: the disarray of his hair, the loyal eyes, the mischievous grin, the narrow neck suspending the full moon of his face. Snatching it from her, Biscuit Tin darts off across the sand, then through the tall grass, the paper flapping beside him.

  The next day Alice draws a picture of their father’s house in spring, surrounded by thick hibiscus and wild roses, the trees shading the front path, the hills in the distance blanketed with clover and thyme. But the likeness is too good, and Elsa cannot bear to look at it—this reminder of home, of the past.

  When Alice hands the picture to the boy, his eyes widen.

  “Home,” Alice tells him. “That is where Pudding and Father and Elsa and I live. I share a room with Elsa.”

  The boy’s finger traces the flowers, the bushes, the tall trees.

  “That is home. Far from here. In Europe.”

  Gesturing at the tree, the boy hands Alice a blank sheet of paper.

  “Just a tree?”

  The boy squints, as though trying to figure out what she has said. As she draws two sweeping lines of trunk, he nods.

  “I’m going to put birds in it. A tree without birds is no good.”

  Elsa is happy that Alice is enjoying drawing, but when Alice returns to work on the tablets, they again upset her. One afternoon, returning from a visit with Edward, Elsa finds Alice crying over her notebook.

  “I don’t like them,” Alice shrieks. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  “Very well, Allie. You can do whatever you like. Do you want to go for a ride with me? We can go fetch Biscuit Tin for you.”

  “I miss the boat,” Alice huffs. “I liked the water, going fast on the water. Beazley was funny on the boat.”

  “I know.” Elsa rubs Alice’s back. “I promised you that if you were unhappy, we would go home. Didn’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “And we don’t have to stay here. We can go back on the water, back to London, whenever you like. . . . Do you want me to braid your hair? Here. Turn around. Let’s give you some braids.”

  Elsa runs her fingers through Alice’s heavy hair. Yes. Shehas promised Alice they would go home the moment she wanted to. But what good will come of leaving now? Before they’ve even made a full survey of themoai ? They can’t just abandon the expedition. The voyage took nearly a year, and now that they are here and have finally grown accustomed to the wind and the rocks and the strange language, they are making real progress. This isn’t, after all, just a honeymoon. Their work—the measurements, the copying of the tablets—is unprecedented. Besides, returning to England will take at the very least eleven months, and in that time Alice will likely change her mind. Elsa’s promise to Alice was made before they reached the island, before they even left England. At that point she had imagined the worst; she feared being stranded, friendless, in the farthest reaches of civilization. She had wanted the trip, but had also imagined it as a necessary part of her arrangement with Edward, something she would endure for the sake of Alice, perhaps for her benefit—was it wrong to imagine Alice would flourish away from the scorn of Europeans? But the promise, she now realizes, was really meant for herself. She made sure she could escape ifshe needed to. How could she know this sacrifice would become her greatest pleasure?

  Of course, her hands still blister from washing their bloomers and blouses each morning, Edward’s shirts and socks; her face warms uncomfortably as she stirs chowder over the fire, though she is learning to make the Kanaka-style earth oven; she still hikes down to the shore in the moonlight to plunge greasy pots into the surf. And, as always, she has to look after Alice, and now Edward. She is still pinned like a butterfly to the frame of her circumstances, but here she can, for a few hours each day, at least imagine herself free.

  Riding her pony up the slope of the quarry, she likes to gaze at themoai , the vast stone spirits, the work of strangers who lived centuries before. She remembers reading about the Egyptian pyramids, that tens of thousands were conscripted to build the great limestone tombs. Well, themoai , too, must have been the work of hundreds of men, carving and chiseling in the sun day after day. And the scale of it all—the ages of labor, the tons of stone, the decay of abandon—astounds her. She feels small, irrelevant, and utterly safe. What comfort there is knowing she is a part of something old, something larger than herself. Elsa, when she looks in the quarry, thinks to herself:God . It is the only name she can think of for the feeling the place gives her. Is God, she wonders, simply a sense of history? A sense of others having stood on the exact same patch of earth, years before, of strangers filled with the same fears and regrets?

  Being on the island gives Elsa a sense of peace she has never before known, and with this comes purpose. The past lurks around her like a mystery demanding to be unraveled. Why shouldn’t they unravel some of the mysteries? Perhaps they will decipher the native script, and they will—shewill—be a part of something important. Her life, despite the compromises, might at least have larger meaning.

  “Ouuch!”

  “Sorry, Allie.” She has pulled Alice’s braid too tightly. “Let me loosen it. You know what, Allie? I think we should give the island time.”

  Alice clutches at her braid, feeling the uneven bumps and ridges.

  “Do you love Beazley?”

  “Allie, you know Edward and I are married. We’re husband and wife. Just like Father was with Mother. But I don’t love him as much as I love you. You know that. Don’t you, Allie? You are my true and absolute love.”

  “Does Beazley love you?”

  “Of course he does. But not as much as our little Mr. Biscuit Tin adores you! Allie, just think how it would break Biscuit Tin’s heart if you left. You must stay for him. And for now, you don’t have to look at another tablet, ever. I’ll put my poor artistry to work.”

  For the time being, Elsa is busy learning the native language, since fluency seems the natural step toward unraveling the script. Gertrude Bell knew Arabic well before making her journey through Mesopotamia. Elsa’s initial phrase book can get them directions to fresh water and fig trees, but she wants to talk to the islanders about their culture. Where did they come from? What kind of a society did they create? What might they have wanted, or needed, to write on the wood? And now that sheep shearing has ended, the islanders are taking an interest in the expedition. Several children come by the quarry one day to watch as Elsa helps Edward measure themoai. On their ponies, the children laugh and sway, hollering in a fusion of Rapa Nui and Spanish, “Amor los moai?” But when they see Biscuit Tin emerging from behind amoai, they begin to hiss. With his chubby forefinger, one boy smashes his own nose and emits a series of grunts. Another tugs wildly at his own cheeks. A freckled girl with red hair flips back her eyelids and juts out her tongue. Then a dirt-smeared boy jumps from his pony and lobs a large stone at Biscuit Tin, who ducks behind the statues. In a flash Alice lunges forward with her parasol, shrieking wildly. As though it is some mystical weapon, she rhythmically opens and closes the parasol. Alarm spreads among the children and they scream,“Tatane! Tatane!” The boy who lobbed the stone fumbles back onto his pony as Alice continues her charge up the grassy slope. He trots off, his small body convulsing with sobs, just as Alice reaches the rise. Edward says to Elsa, shaking his head, “My goodness, I’ll have to be careful never to incite her wrath.” When Alice comes back down the slope, Biscuit Tin finally emerges from behind themoai . For the rest of the day, he does not leave her side.

  “I like the boy,” Elsa whispers to Edward in the tent one night. “Very much. But I wonder why he’s alone.”

  “Alice likes him too. I think you’ll have to let Alice have him. She seems to have
won his heart.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you want . . . Elsa? I didn’t think you wanted children. . . .”

  “No. Of course. I can’t.”

  “You have Alice to take care of,” he says. “And you think of her . . . as your child.”

  “No,” she says. “But I think of myself as her mother. It isn’t quite the same.”

  Elsa closes her eyes. It is true. She cannot imagine looking after Aliceand a child of her own. But it is more than that. It is the memory of the midwife clutching Alice to her chest, of her father forbidding Elsa to open her mother’s door. “Your mother gave her life for our little Alice,” he had said, trying to mask his despair. “She sacrificed herself for a new child.” But this version of events wasn’t shared by Elsa. Behind that door Alice haddone something to their mother, and for this Elsa felt hate. For an entire year she cursed her sister, whispered angry words when her father was asleep. So when they began to notice the strange roaming of Alice’s eyes, the tantrums and the silences, Elsa believed her hate was the cause. That the curses, the prayers, and the whispered accusations had harmed her.

  “Are you asleep?” she whispers.

  “Not yet,” says Edward.

  “Sometimes, I’ve thought, well, that Alice was my fault. I’m sure it sounds mad. But why should a thing like that happen to a child? To anyone? There must be . . . a reason.”

  “Elsa.”

  “My whole life I’ve wondered if . . .”

  “Alice is a blessing.”

  “I know that.”

  “You mustn’t ever let yourself think it would be better if she were different.”

  “Sometimes, Edward, you sound so very much like my father.”

  “Your father,” says Edward, “was a wise man.”

  For weeks afterward, there are no visitors to the quarry, and Elsa suspects that the story of the Englishtatane with her parasol has been tearfully recounted and embellished. But soon a man on horseback arrives on the crater’s rim. Elsa recognizes him as the man who led the islanders in song that first night on the schooner, his arms thickly tattooed, wearing the same hat he did then: a faded red velvet tricorn with a row of brass buttons. He looks to be in his forties. Thin brown curls, with a few streaks of gray, fall to his shoulder. He introduces himself as Te Haha Huke.