Easter Island

by Jennifer Vanderbes

  “Edward.”

  “You cannot say their behavior wasn’t odd.”

  Max’s behavior would, of course, seem suspicious to Edward.

  “I realize, Elsa, that my maritime experience has been in the sporting class. But even so. There are priorities when one anchors, a certain hierarchy for what one attends to. Wooden tablets? No. I should hate to see your work, our work, revealed by others. And in the event that they’re interested in photographing themoai, I think it best I hide the excavation work.”

  To argue that Max’s behavior was normal seems pointless.

  “The safest place is the schooner,” says Edward. “I can have the boat cleaned and brought around here to load. They won’t see a thing. I think it best we move your journals there as well.”

  “Of course.”

  There is a yelp from Alice’s tent, and then the words “Bad Pudding.”

  Edward takes a long sip of his tea. “I want you to know that I have set things down for her. I have explained, in detail, the rules for our relationship. Physicality, of any sort, has been forbidden. Kissing, fondling. She understands it is entirely out of the question. She was quite distressed. She’s angry with me. Feels I’ve . . . rejected her. And I think it’s best that for now I stay distant.”

  “Whatever you think is best,” says Elsa, rising from the table. “I’ll see she’s all right.”

  “She may not want to see you, either.”

  “Alice and I had our difficulties long before you came into our life. We’ve fought before. It will be fine. She will be fine.”

  But in the tent Alice turns from Elsa.

  “Allie. You can’t stay cross like this forever.”

  “Pudding,” says Alice. “Don’t be cross.”

  “Allie, look at me. Talk to me.”

  “Pudding is always talked to.”

  “Allie, I’m going to Vinapu. Do you want to come?”

  Alice releases a huff. “Vinapu. Vinapu. Vinapu.”

  “You don’t have to if you don’t want to. I’ll come to see you later, when I’m back,” says Elsa.

  “Pudding never gets to go to Vinapu.”

  Elsa approaches her from behind, and tentatively kisses Alice’s head; Alice sits perfectly still.

  “I won’t be long,” says Elsa. “I’ll see you and Pudding in a little while.”

  Elsa closes the flap of the tent and calls to Edward, “She’s fine. She just wants to rest for a while.” Then Elsa sets out on the southern coast toward the harbor.

  Along the path, the sour smell of burning coal fills the air. She hears the clanging of chains and cables, the rumble of engines, voices rising and falling in waves of German song. Then, mounting the cliff above the harbor at Vinapu, she sees on the water below eight gray vessels. But for the commotion all around them—derricks dripping with cords and lines, wobbly dinghies clogged with sunburned men making slowly for the shore—the ships have the look of vast strips of dead metal. On the side of the largest ship, colliers toss baskets of coal into a row of square bunkers, chanting,Wem Gott will rechte Gunst erweisen.

  Elsa tethers her pony and edges down the path to the bay, where dinghies, pinnaces, and Rapa Nui canoes clutter the shore. A small supply ship has been almost run aground, lashed to the jetty with ropes and chains. A pyramid of blistering wooden barrels tops its deck. Crates rise in a tower. On the rocks, several yards away, dozens of bulging, sap-stained burlap sacks spill yams, pineapples, and pumpkins. A young officer is tugging one bag at a time across the rocks while trying to smoke with his free hand.

  He sees Elsa coming down the path and blows a bored plume of smoke toward the sun. “Von Spee? Ja?”

  “Ja,” says Elsa.

  He drops his sack and leads her to a small motorboat. He flicks away his cigarette and tugs the engine to a coughing start. Elsa watches the shore recede behind them, realizing this is the first time in two years she has left the island. They soon pull alongside the largest of the warships, a vast wall of studded metal rising above them. All along the wall, rope ladders dangle like vines, and at a metal ladder, the officer cuts the engine. He stands and extends his hand, gesturing to Elsa and then to the ladder. “Ja?” She nods. Wrapping her skirt around one wrist, she climbs, her boots clanging against each rung. At the vast expanse of the main deck, chimneys and derricks rise all around her, between them a web of taut wires, like a colossal game of cat’s cradle. She walks along the deck, trying to picture the boat at sea, cutting through frothing waves, abuzz with hundreds of men shouting orders, grabbing lines, taking positions. And guns. They would of course be firing guns and cannons. And would they not, then, also be fired upon?

  “Hallo! Hallo!”From belowdecks comes a smiling officer, his white uniform bright in the sun.

  “Ich suche Admiral von Spee?” she asks.

  At her words, his face, tanned and fleshy, fills with delight. He strides forward and leads her down a ladder, through a labyrinth of narrow corridors lit by naked bulbs. At a black door with gold insignia, the officer delivers four swift knocks. Just before the door opens, he bows to Elsa and whisks his arm into a slow, gallant arc. But as the handle unlatches, he offers a full, sharp salute just as the face of the admiral emerges.

  “Max, this is a floating . . . city.”

  “Weg,” commands Max. The officer turns, departs.

  Max rests his hand on Elsa’s shoulder. “You made it. And you look rested.”

  “Where is everybody?”

  “Shore leave. It has been a long time at sea for them. Come in, sit down.”

  She follows him into the small cabin. Maps and charts spill from a table beneath the porthole, but the room is otherwise spare. She sits down on a cushioned bench, what might be a sofa or a bed.

  “I must confess, I imagined you living in a bit more luxury.”

  “You should have seen her at Tsingtao. Carpets, paintings, French tapestries. The deck done up with awnings for dances. This cabin had wood paneling. I have had my share of luxury.”

  “And you redecorated?”

  “Everything flammable . . . we left in China.”

  Flammable. Again the image rises before her of the ship firing its cannons, smoke clouding the decks. She stands and looks out the porthole, toward the shore. “The islanders will be visiting you. Their canoes are out. They enjoy sneaking up on people.”

  “They’ve come by already. We gave them some soaps and tinned meats, though we have little to spare. It’s costly, this peacetime charade.”

  “This will go down in Rapa Nui history, you know. They don’t get many visitors.”

  “So long as it does not go out on the wireless.”

  “There’s no wireless—”

  “I know.”

  She turns now to face him, and his eyes meet hers with solemnity. “They are looking for us, Elsa. The British.”

  “Thank goodness the ocean is so large.”

  “Germany is thousands of miles away.Thousands of miles.”

  She looks at the charts spread on the table and rolls back the edges of one, then another. “How long can you anchor here?”

  “Not more than a few days. We are awaiting one more ship.”

  What can she possibly say to him? Don’t leave? She imagines the plea rising in waves over the whole of Europe at that very moment. She knows its futility, its naïveté.

  “Well—” He breaks the silence. “Now you see what I do when I am not leading the children through the forest.”

  Elsa drops the charts. “And now you know what I’ve done since I stopped running around after your children.”

  “He is much older than I envisioned.”

  “Hah! You’re not one to speak.”

  “Oh, no. Have I aged?”

  “Everyone looks older with a battleship.”

  But as swiftly as their playfulness swells, it subsides. A bird flapping briefly through the room and out the window.

  “It is serious, isn’t it?” says Elsa.

 
“Yes,Liebling. ”

  “And you’re in real danger.”

  He takes her hand. “There are almost two thousand men in this fleet. Most of them younger than you. At Samoa, they went ashore, they flirted with the women, they drank, and then they wrote, as they have always done, on the tree trunks and the large rocks.Fritz was here, 1914, Sailor on the Scharnhorst. Before we left we sent another party to scratch everything out, all their names, the marks they had wanted to leave.” He pauses. “They are hunting us.”

  She understands now what he is trying to tell her but can’t say: He cannot make it home. The odds are impossible. And that is why he has come.

  “Tell me, Elsa. What thoughts are in your mind?”

  She is thinking of his ship being stripped of all its wood, all its fabrics. She is thinking of the ship aflame. “England,” she says. “My father’s house. I would like to see it again.”

  “Yes,” he says. “I, too, dream of home. Strasbourg.”

  “The garden.”

  “The garden,” he sighs. “Your sister is here, is she not? Alice?”

  “Alice.”

  “Is she well?”

  “Well? Yes. But different.”

  Elsa steps to the porthole, Max following, and they look through the glass toward the shore, toward the cliffs, the parched grass, and fallen statues. How small it all seems from here.

  “It is an odd thing, this landscape,” he says. “It’s not what we have seen on other islands. I’ve never seen an island with so little.”

  “What have you seen? On the other islands?”

  “Breadfruit trees and coconut palms. Turtles and tropical birds. The other islands are like jungles.”

  “I think this was as well, and then something happened.”

  “What?”

  “It has to do with themoai, how they were moved, and why they are like that, fallen on their faces.”

  “They are like tombs, those statues,” says Max.

  “They are tombs,” she says. “Those platforms they stood on, people were buried beneath them. The statues are symbols of the dead. Ancestors. And I don’t think they fell. There are stories on those wooden tablets. Histories of this island. This place was once covered with a forest. It could be just legend, just folklore, but—”

  “Tell me.”

  “You really want to hear it?”

  “Why would I not?”

  “It’s sad,” she says.

  “Good,” replies Max. “Then we know it is true.”

  For the next six days, Edward dismantles the excavation and moves thekohau, their notebooks, her journal with therongorongo translation, and theirmoai sketches—anything the Germans might make off with in the night—onto the schooner, which has been cleaned and brought around and is now anchored off Anakena once again. Elsa helps Max provision the ships. Beef, lamb, and chicken are bartered. She even helps several officers purchase wood carvings.

  When finally she and Max say their good-byes, it is in his cabin. In silence, they sit beside each other, listening to the din of the anchor lines, the noise of the waves against the ship’s side. It is like the times they sat in the garden, except this past week there has been no need for propriety. As if to simply relieve the need to talk, Elsa kisses him, and soon she can feel his full weight, and in this weight his absence; already she can sense the moment when his body will be gone, feeling all at once his presence and its loss. And it is now, as she lies beneath him, that her mind returns to Edward’s house, when she stood looking at her trunk, wondering what lay ahead, as if she has, after a long journey, finally become that future self.

  She pulls him toward her.

  “Don’t cry,Liebling. ”

  “I never cry,” she says. But she can feel a tear run from the corner of her eye.

  When Max finally stands, she can no longer suppress the urge. “Don’t go.”

  In the half-darkness, he smiles. “Finally. I wondered if you might not be trying to get rid of me.”

  “Stay.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Then, when this is all over, we’ll see each other. You will come visit me in Hertfordshire. You’ll see our gardens in spring. You’ll tell me the name of everything in bloom.”

  “Of course.”

  “We can take the train to London and see the British Museum.”

  “Absolutely. The museum.” He puts his arm around her and a look of pain washes over his face, a look she has never seen before. As though speaking to himself, his tone expressionless, he says: “Our lives will be filled with great bliss.”

  “So they’re off, then?” asks Edward.

  “Yes,” she mutters, remembering Max’s instructions. “They’re headed to Pitcairn to look around for several days, and then on to the Marquesas and Tahiti.” That is, in fact, where they have just come from. “It seems they’re on a grand tour.”

  Now the reality of their departure hits her. Max is gone. The fleet is gone. They have returned to the ocean, where they will be tracked down. Elsa tries to remember what lies ahead: Kasimiro, yes, she must return to see Kasimiro. She must get her key. Max agreed that this was of great importance. The tablets, therongorongo. That, at least, is permanent.

  “Alice has been upset,” he says nervously. “You’ll see she’s all right?”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. It is the same thing. The rules.”

  “Has she needed to be reminded of the rules?” Her voice is testy. She does not want to return to this life, this confusion.

  “I promise. I’ve made her understand.”

  “All right.”

  “You know, I still find it exceedingly odd that they hadn’t a single newspaper or magazine with them.”

  “Perhaps Germans don’t like to read, Edward. Good night.” She lights one of the lanterns and carries it with her to Alice’s tent.

  “Allie,” she whispers.

  But the tent is empty. “Allie,” she calls again into the night. And then she sees the cage, Pudding’s cage, in the corner of the tent, its door flung open, a solitary gray feather resting on its floor.

  The necklace of beans lies broken on the ground.

  Her voice rises now, shrieks into the darkness: “Allie! Where are you?”

  24

  The flush of fever came at dawn, crept across her forehead, mounted her cheeks, then made a slow advance down her neck. It attacked her shoulders, tried to shake her from sleep, but she refused to wake. She pressed herself farther into the cool grass. Her fingers, hot and tense, wrapped themselves around a cold stone, a cube of ice. Her mind slowed, slept, then woke with a start. Images spilled before her: a frog dangling upside down, a seed floating in a jar. An island. A white flower in a field of shadows.

  Her tongue swelled, hot and puffy, a loaf of bread rising in the oven of her mouth. Her neck grew firm, her throat thick, every channel hardening until the whine of air struggling through the last open pathway reached her ears. I have become a tree, she thought. She turned then, or thought she turned. Her face met a firm wet surface, her hair, damp with sweat, fell thickly around her. Darkness. Her toes tingled—or was it her fingertips? Where did the crab go? Was it crawling over her now with its thick hot feet—was that the fire she felt moving across her body? Yes, it was so hot here. The sun was rising, spilling its heat like lava. She was in a volcano, tossed by an explosion.

  “You need help. Put your arm around my neck. Please, Greer. Try to move. There. Yes, that’s it. Perfect. See how easy?”

  She was floating now above the grass—was she in a dream? She was searching for the white flower. But she couldn’t keep her eyes open, the ground sped beneath her, shook. An earthquake. She could feel the trembling, could hear her teeth click like tossed dice. And then she landed, and water washed over her face. Flooding her eyes and nose and mouth. And then an arrow, a musket, a revolver, a cannonball, shot through her arm, broke through her flesh to invade her shoulder, her neck, her head. . . .

  Eyes
closed, her breathing thick and strained, she tried to sit up. But gravity, a tidal wave, tossed her back.

  Thick blankets weighed against her, and still she shivered. “Cold,” she whispered.

  “I know. It is the fever. It gives you chills. It will pass.”

  “When?”

  There was silence, and she roused one eyelid from its swollen slumber; a soft yellow light shone on the nearby nightstand—a candle? Or a lightbulb blurred by fever? She barely made out the white wall, the desk, the foot of the bed. Where was he?

  Through the blankets she felt a hand squeeze her elbow. “Here,” he said, but the voice was miles away. Like a recording of a voice, a recording of a recording. She let her head slip onto her shoulder and looked down. On the floor beside the bed he lay supine, one arm tucked behind his head.

  She awoke in darkness to warm water flooding her mouth.

  “Greer, you must drink. You must flush the toxins from your system. Please, you must try.”

  But her lips were heavy, and loose, could barely hold themselves to her face.

  A creature now stirred in her stomach, stretched its limbs, somersaulted in the back of her throat, and broke free with fury. Her throat burned, her nose burned.

  “Yes,querida. That is okay. Your body is trying to cleanse itself.”

  A rancid smell rose beside her. A towel wiped her face. “Bueno, Doctora.”

  “Mahina?”

  “Sí, Doctora.”

  Greer forced her eyes open, and saw the speckled light through the curtains. Like shadows, Mahina and Vicente seemed to float through the small room, pouring water in the basin, wringing cloths, folding towels, whispering in Spanish. They moved fluidly together; they looked like dancers, beautiful dancing nurses.

  “What day . . . ?” Her throat hurt too much to finish.

  “Saturday,” said Vicente. “Three days. The doctor says you are improving. But you still must rest. Rest and drink fluids.”