by Tania Aebi
Tony, seventeen, had written that he had his first girlfriend, Maggie, and even went so far as to say that he was in love, which he would never have admitted two years before. Jade, sixteen, had written a list of all the new slang words that were cool at the moment and informed me that my alienation from New York would definitely make me into a social klutz. My father said she was doing well in school and he approved of her friends.
“They’re all normal,” he said, a pointed afterthought.
And Nina, nineteen, it seemed, was her same old radical self, her political views and future aspirations becoming more and more diffused after one and a half years of a Cornell education. It had always been close to impossible to read Nina’s handwriting, which now seemed to have gotten worse.
“But it’s OK, Tania,” she had written, “intellectuals don’t write neatly. Look at Einstein.” Nina was busy burning her candle at both ends, my father was pleased to inform me, and doing well in school, and he mentioned a vague worry that she might even be expecting too much of herself. I told him to send her on a vacation to me and I would teach her how to calm down.
“That’s right,” he grinned. “If anyone has perfected the art of taking it easy, it’s you.”
Tony, he said, had completely stopped his obsessive childish tantrums, which had plagued him long after the troubles with my mother and the divorce. His irrationality had disappeared into thin air after he met Maggie. Jade had even written, “Tania, you won’t believe this. Our brother Tony has become polite. Tony, Maggie and I were heading uptown on the crowded subway, when all of a sudden two empty seats popped up in front of us. Maggie sat down and Tony turned and asked me if I wanted the seat. Yes. You’re not seeing things. That was Tony, our brother. Let me tell you, I almost keeled over in shock. . . .”
In yet another attempt to draw out one of his children and instill a zest for life, as my father put it, during the summer of 1985, just after I left New York on Varuna, my father, Fritz and Tony had taken a trip to Baffin Island in the Arctic Circle. A helicopter dropped them off on an icy plateau and they were left to fend for themselves for two weeks.
“We wanted to go hiking for several days, but you know Tony,” my father said. “He kept whining to us to slow down, his feet hurt, he was freezing, he was tired, why couldn’t we stop to rest for a while. Ach! Finally he started to cry that he couldn’t go on. I lost my temper and told him that Fritz and I would continue alone without a crybaby and that we would come back in a couple of days.” The next day, with the thought of polar bears, he and Fritz got worried, so they turned around and hurried back.
“There was Tony,” he continued with pride. “He had set up his tent, a little fire and he was lying down, reading a book, totally calm and happy. So, for the rest of our time, we talked, laughed, caught and smoked many salmon and met some Eskimos.”
Immediacy with my family had been impossible until now and my father’s presence brought color and animation into personalities that in the year since my mother died had only been words on paper. Throughout our troubled past, we children had only each other for stability in a family that had very little for so long, and now our paths were diverging. I began to worry that by the time I got home, so much would have changed that I wouldn’t know them anymore. For the three days that Siri drove us around Sri Lanka, my father and I talked about everything, and I pumped him for description after description, story after story.
• • •
Back in Nuwara Eliya, when Siri’s engine finally coughed to a start, we headed for the ancient sixteenth-century capital of Kandy, the home of Buddha’s left eyetooth, a symbol of sovereignty preserved in its own temple. It is said that Buddha’s tooth was brought to Sri Lanka during the fourth century, hidden in the hair of a princess whose father’s throne (he being one of the Kalinga Kings of India), was being threatened by non-Buddhists.
As we strolled past Kandy Lake and into town, I looked into the faces of the thronging people. Although poverty was pervasive in the cities, there was a quiet pride and carriage in the people that I had never found in the metropolis of faces at home, and I wondered what was missing there that these people seemed to have. Not to do any evil, to cultivate good, to purify one’s mind, this is the teaching of the Buddha, and it could have been as simple as that.
These people had no conception of the materialism we take for granted back home. For the Sri Lankans, as well as for people in most of the other places I had visited, it was still possible to function without Mr. Coffees, telephone-answering machines, or the 150 different brands of detergent that we have to choose from in a supermarket. They survived with what they had and I felt a parallel between their lives and my life on Varuna, even though mine was a matter of choice rather than necessity.
Kandy was a riot of color against the ornate facades of the Eastern-style buildings drenched in sunshine. Most of the men were swathed in somber cloths but the women were wrapped in bright head veils and saris. Many smiles revealed that their owners had red, corroded teeth as a result of their habit of chewing the fruit of the betel palm. On a street corner, Olivier and my father bought a prepared chewing package at a stand and bit into a concoction of lime and betel nuts wrapped in betel leaf. They instantly spit it out, deciding that betel nuts are an acquired taste. I didn’t even want a smidgen.
Clashing with the stubby red teeth, splashes of orange identified the small groups of young sandaled monks who seemed to be everywhere. Often, young Sinhalese men join a monastery for several years early in life to absorb the teachings and purity of the Buddhist way of life before heading out into the real world.
Sri Lanka was color, sounds, voices, a curlicue, swirly alphabet and a lovely, round singsong way of talking. I could never tell whether people were saying yes or no, because both were conveyed by a wobbly, slow rotation of the head, making the speakers look like dolls with loose neck springs. Other customs were gentle reminders that Sri Lanka was home to four of the world’s great religions-Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam—creating important common courtesies: shoes off in temples, and even in temple ruins; modest dress; and as most people use the left hand to clean themselves, it is considered unclean and frowned upon for eating or handing anything to anyone.
It was a great luxury to know that I would be on land for an entire month without lifting the anchor, regardless of my father’s repeatedly expressed advice to the contrary during the two weeks he spent with us. I had decided that because I was making the trip, the final decisions would be mine; at least where my health was concerned. I was underfed and very tired, with supposedly only one pleasant trip to look forward to, crossing the Arabian Sea. The Red Sea, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic I didn’t even want to think about.
On the third day of our tour with Siri, we headed back from Kandy for a party at Don Windsor’s house. All the cruising people had donned their finery and I was introduced to a four-star general, the former prime minister, and deputy thises and thats. I told my stories to a group of journalists at Don’s request, while everyone kept coming to wish me a happy birthday, which I couldn’t understand at first because my birthday was still ten months away. Finally, when I glanced over at Don and saw him wink, I understood what the occasion for the party was.
He was such a little wheeler-dealer, always thinking up new ideas and schemes to lure in the customers. For sailors, this kind of character was just what we needed. It was always fun to arrive on Don’s veranda at the end of a hot day and see what was new.
No matter where a trip started, to arrive in Sri Lanka on a sailboat entailed many miles and days at sea, with the accompanying stories, and we were like a fraternity interested in the circumstances that had led to each of us being there. There was Henry, the seventy-plus-year-old Dutch singlehander with Coke-bottle glasses, who had originally left from Annapolis, Maryland, sailed the world, and now walked around with a gourd of rum hanging permanently from his shoulder, telling his numerous naughty tales to whoever was sitting nearby.<
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Then, there was the family on Christina, who had given up a kiosk in Germany to take off on a circumnavigation and, except for their seven-year-old son, often partook in the annihilation of Henry’s rum. There was the renegade Allistair who fled Australia, with a young daughter and son, in an anarchistic flurry on a small-scale Gloucester fishing sloop, taking with them a monkey and a wild Australian dingo.
My father fit in perfectly, telling all his wild stories of smuggling gold into India and coaxing an ancient station wagon across the Hindu Kush mountain range from Afghanistan to Pakistan. We’d sit around the dinner table gamming and eating dishes of spicy beef, curried vegetables and buffalo yogurt that Don’s family served up every night.
Often the conversation focused on the thousand-year religious war still raging between the Sinhalese and Tamils in the north country. The conflict hardly touched us except for the fact that the port and public buildings were all heavily guarded.
More often than not, we entertained each other with horror stories of the Red Sea. Everybody had heard of at least one boat that had been hit by a blind ship, and the hair-raising, blasting headwinds were discussed in minutest detail. We all shared the same reluctance to journey up that infamous stretch but were addicted to talking about it, as though sharing fears and laughing about them helped us enter it with lighter hearts.
The Red Sea is 1,200 miles long, stretching almost exactly from north to south. Mountain ranges on both sides funnel the wind down in tremendous gusts, following the direction of the sea itself and oftentimes making headway close to impossible. Reefs fringe the land, making landfalls and navigation tricky, and at times the wind kicks up dust storms, making celestial navigation unreliable. Everyone had heard from someone else that there were, supposedly, pirates and gunrunners, and the unfriendly countries of Ethiopia, North Yemen and Saudi Arabia limited the available landfalls to Egypt and the Sudan. Also, it was a busy highway for all the shipping circulating between Europe and Asia.
The only alternative to taking an endless pounding, while beating and tacking up the Red Sea shipping lanes, would be to have a good engine and wait for the rare calms. All these facts and stories began building a persistent, nagging dread. Nobody was looking forward to sailing this stretch and advice was passed out a penny to the dozen as we exchanged photocopies of guides and tips for excellent anchorages that somebody had heard about from a friend who had a friend who had a friend. . . .
The minute a new sailboat entered Galle Harbor heading east about, the opposite direction from ours, the crews were bombarded with questions about the weather and shipping that they had encountered on their voyage down the Red Sea. Our fears were borne out.
“We had strong winds from behind the whole way,” they always said, “and, yes, there were a lot of ships.” One 80-foot ketch pulled into Galle missing her mizzenmast, which had been carried away by a tanker. We all shook our heads, and the fact that such a comparatively large boat wasn’t seen by the men on the ship’s bridge struck a note of communal worry into the hearts of those of us with small boats. But, along with the woes, there were also times to forget what lay ahead and enjoy the present. A camaraderie existed among the sailing people here such as I had never experienced before.
While my father was there to help, we decided to take Varuna out of the water at the shipyard in Galle to check the play in the rudder and to add an extra coat of anti-fouling paint. As she was lifted by the crane and water streamed off her hull, I was relieved to see that she had held up very well for more than half a world and still looked almost new. Through no fault of my own, I thought, remembering my lack of sailing expertise in the beginning. With my bungling, she had taken a lot of wear and tear, and most of the damage—as with the pulpit—she had seemingly ignored. Varuna had led me by the hand until I had learned how to care for her properly. A real little lady.
Olivier and I spent our last day with my father in Colombo trying to locate some canned food—anything other than sardines—a knife, a rivet gun and a few other inconsequential odds and ends that we could have found on New York’s Canal Street in half an hour. The train back to Galle left in the afternoon and Olivier and I had to catch it to get back to the boats.
“Well, Tania,” said my father at the train station’s entrance as he saw us off, “I hope your trip is good. No, I hope it’s excellent. And please try to go as fast as you can or the North Atlantic will be horrible if you wait too long into the season. Anyway, you must be back before November to break the record.” We still thought I had a good chance of getting it.
“I know, Daddy. I’ll see you again soon and talk to you even sooner.”
“Hurry. Remember. This is not a vacation,” he continued, and I finished the well-known last line with him, “This is a job.”
He said all this kindly and looked at me sadly, trying to keep the optimism in his voice. He had just spent two weeks sleeping on Varuna, bumping his head all over the place and experiencing the energy-draining heat. He saw that there were dark circles under my eyes and that I had lost an awful lot of weight. For the first time in a year and a half, I wasn’t just a voice over a telephone calling from the next exotic port of call. Nor was I that irresponsible girl he knew when she was sixteen, but a very tired twenty-year-old in the middle of an undertaking more arduous than either of us ever could have anticipated in those early days of excited planning. Then, with a globe, the world really had been in our hands.
Just before we handed over our tickets and passed through the turnstile, Olivier and he shook hands and he hugged me tight. “By the way,” he whispered into my ear, “I like Olivier. He is a good friend for you.”
It was goodbye again until who knew when. I thought about him hopping on an airplane and going back to the world of air-conditioned movie theaters, bathtubs, telephones, Jeri and my brother and sisters. It would take another nine months of sailing for me to get there too, and as we boarded our train and it began to chug away, the longing for home overcame me in salty tears.
• • •
Although he oftentimes infuriated me, I loved being with my father, hearing his stories and grand schemes and was sad to see him go. I remember that with the same verve that he had just brought to Sri Lanka, my father had swept in and out of our lives when we were children in Vernon. Living with my mother in those days had been something close to hell for us, unable as we were to understand her mental condition and torment. Legally helpless, my father had tried to restore the normality in our lives by squeezing in as much love and happiness as we could handle on the weekends he was allowed to be with us.
In the wake of yet another week of upside-down confusion, uncertainty, fights, being late for school every day, and holy-rolling with my mother’s religious friends, we craved the weekends, when my father’s presence would always bring a burst of excitement and color into our days. He’d regale us with boyhood tales of when he had left Switzerland with twenty dollars in his pocket, hitchhiking through Eastern Europe, the Middle East and ending up in Japan. He told us stories about how he had smuggled gold into India, spied in Red China, performed as a yodeling belly dancer in Beirut, and been put in a Turkish jail for possession of the DDT powder he was carrying to control the flea population living on him. His yarns always went on for days in “to be continued” style.
When he ran out of his own autobiographies, he painted castles in the air with tales of monsters, dragons and fairies, dredged up from the bottomless well of his imagination. One of us was always the hero by turns. In the summer we built a treehouse, went for long excursions in the countryside and up the beginning of the Appalachian Trail.
As the divorce dragged on into winter, we built igloos and snowmen, and then cracked a hole in the ice over our lake, took saunas and ran through the snow to jump in and out of the waterhole. We’d all sit down, and with my father’s guidance, try to induce self-hypnosis, but heads or feet always seemed to start itching at just the wrong moment. He organized contests where the first one able
to stand on his or her hands unaided for one minute could go to the store and choose the largest salami to be had. Many years later, with gymnastics training, Nina finally did it, but by then, she had become a vegetarian.
My mother was never home on my father’s weekends. The courts had made her leave, and God only knows what she did during this time. Knowing what I know now, I believe she probably had checked herself into a hotel and cried over the cards life had dealt her. She’d always make new resolutions, give us little presents she made, come home and then, try as she might to control herself, soon begin acting as irrational as ever.
After a while, rankled by our bubbly joy at the end of his visits, she took to the habit of making us scarce on my father’s weekends. Jealous for the same affection, and frightened that she was about to lose us to a judge who was swaying in his favor, she started checking the family into different hotels after school on Fridays, where we stayed until Sunday night. When we finally got back home, we would each find letters under our pillows from my father saying that he had waited, that he loved and missed us and would be back the next weekend. The painful cycle continued until the day my mother picked us up from school with a earful of luggage, and instead of going home, we had found ourselves in the Swiss boarding school.
• • •
In Sri Lanka with Olivier, I felt a pang of the same empty feeling that I’d had as a child on those Sunday nights when my father would kiss us goodbye and sadly leave the house in Vernon to head back to New York on the bus.
“You have a really nice father,” Olivier said, bringing me back to the present and trying to cheer me up by pointing at the lice nits in the hair of the people who surrounded us on the train. I looked at my blond partner and immediately felt a rush of relief. Having his help and his love through the worst moments and sharing the good times side by side, I no longer could imagine the trip or my life without him.