An Obvious Enchantment

by Tucker Malarkey

  Each year, a current has brought crates to M’s beach, providing them with seeds and flowers unknown to Africa. The current is called the Agulhas. Agulhas is the palace, the haven he repaired to. It is the spring that nourished his kingdom. It is the warning and the revelation of a new king.

  M says God provides for the faithful, issuing sweet water from rock, a clear pool in a desert of sand.

  Swahili proverb: Tellers there are. Listeners there are none. He who wants all will miss all.

  Luqman: 31:27

  And even if all the trees on earth were pens, and the ocean ink, backed up by seven more oceans, the word of God would not be exhausted, for God is infinite in power and wisdom.

  It has begun. M’s niece will not speak to me, will not look at me. M will divulge no details but I know it must have been a white man. Gus? Wicks? She will heal, M says. But there is no healing from such a wound.

  Al-Baqarah: 2:81

  Truly, those who commit evil and become engrossed in sin shall be the inmates of the fire; there they shall abide for ever.

  I tell myself it is only a man’s dreams that have disturbed the peace. If the man could see the folly of his dream, perhaps he could alter it. I must do my part to help him see. . . .

  The words trailed off into Arabic. Ingrid showed them to Hamilton, who shrugged and shook his head. She stared at the pages one at a time, at the dance of swirls, dips and arcs and suddenly she could feel him again. She touched the letters, wanting to know them, wanting to breathe them as he had onto the page, wanting to be with him through his words as she had so many times before.

  “We come back,” Hamilton said. By now he was uneasy. “The man with the key said only ten minutes.”

  “Can’t I take these?” Ingrid asked.

  “It’s against the law.”

  “What law?”

  “They don’t belong to you. They belong to the professor. In his absence, they are protected by the man with the key. Habib.”

  “That’s the law?”

  Hamilton nodded.

  Ingrid leafed through them quickly. “They’re mostly empty. That’s not like him.”

  “Come, then, Miss Ingrid. Leave everything the way it was.”

  She returned the notebooks reluctantly to the briefcase and slipped it back under the mattress. Again the statue caught her eye. She lifted her arm to touch it and then changed her mind and turned for the door. “I suppose he prays,” Ingrid said as she emerged from the room, gesturing toward the courtyard. “The guard, I mean.”

  “Of course he prays,” Hamilton said.

  Ingrid spent the warm afternoon hours on her roof, thinking. If Hamilton was right, Templeton had been in his room on or around the day she had arrived. The coincidence was disturbing. The island was too small for him not to have heard of her arrival. How was it that no one had seen him—and why were Ali and Danny so certain he was not around? If he had truly gone off somewhere, why had he left his notes behind?

  In the strangely portentous world of his diary, it was impossible to make out his sources. Outside of a few marked passages toward the end, which she took to be from the Koran, there were no documents, no pointers, nothing concrete to go by—none of the precious facts she had promised the department. And nothing to indicate what, if anything, he had found.

  Ingrid could not decide what to make of the inscriptions, at once menacing and promising, that filled the early pages of the notebook. She resolved to search her Koran to establish whether they too were quotations.

  Only after determining this slender course of action did she allow herself to consider that something could have happened to him.

  She got up and walked around the roof. It was odd that Hamilton knew nothing of an African king. Templeton had always given her to understand that the legend was one of the island’s central myths of origin. He had told her once, in a rare moment of intimacy, that this was why he had chosen Pelat as his base for so many years.

  Ingrid stopped at the washbasin and splashed water on her face. Perhaps she had been wrong to read his personal writings. She hadn’t even tried to stop herself, hadn’t considered that it might be a violation. When it came to him, she had made blunders of enthusiasm before. That he did not seem to notice one way or the other was one of his generosities toward her.

  Settling into the hammock, she draped a scarf over her eyes and made an attempt to recall his journal entries in full: the earlier entries suggested a ratification of Templeton’s hypothesis about the story of the African king. But she couldn’t make out whether the story as transcribed was authentic, a local legend, or the product of Templeton’s own imaginings. It seemed someone had helped him fill in the details—but who? Then there were the later Koranic verses, for which Templeton had been good enough to scribble down verse and line numbers. Even these were unsettling. Their words offered not only specific guidance, but prophecy. They seemed to dictate an incisive response to something or someone. But to what or whom? And why?

  Templeton’s African king was some kind of a touchstone for a more complicated confluence of events. Though he was somewhat eclipsed by the stronger presence of an angry God, Ingrid was reluctant to let the king recede. However immaterial, she did not want to lose hold of the one element of Templeton’s thinking she could still grasp.

  She found some level of comfort in thinking about the new details of the story, details that did not diminish the epic quality of the king’s journey of faith, but instead made it more real. Ingrid found this faith both extraordinary and appealing. Perhaps the ultimate freedom it granted had intrigued Templeton too.

  It was clear that the second hotel made him unhappy. Someone he cared about had been hurt. He was angry. In years of academic challenge, contention and competition, Ingrid had never seen Templeton angry.

  She flipped through her English-Arabic translation of the Koran, reading a passage in English and then studying the crescent shapes on the adjacent page. The ancient writing excited her imagination. She took notes, struggling to keep her mind on track. He had found answers in this text. Perhaps she would too.

  This book is not to be doubted, she began. It is a guide for the righteous, who believe in the unseen. It was not long before she came across a passage similar to the one she had read in the opening pages of Templeton’s notebook: In the creation of the heavens and earth; in the alternations of night and day; in the ships that sail the ocean with cargoes beneficial to man . . . She read on past the section he had transcribed in his journal: Yet there are some who worship idols, bestowing on them the adoration due to God. But when they face their punishment the wrongdoers will learn that might is God’s alone, and God is retribution. Ingrid’s happiness at locating the verse was instantly tempered by its content. Retribution? For what, she wondered.

  When the day grew too hot for her to continue, her thoughts became fluid, melting into one another in a sluggish brutality she couldn’t direct. She watched the ocean from her hammock. The unreality of its color both soothed and disquieted her. Fighting off sleep, she started and then abandoned a letter to Dr. Reed. Composing coherent thought was like trying to climb the steep sand dunes in the back of the village, sinking and sliding back to where she began, more tired with each effort. She continued to force her attention outward, resorting, finally, to her own journal. She began writing down her observations, pinning herself down like an insect on a cork board. She would record everything from objects to emotions, as Templeton had once taught her. Think not only about what you are looking for, but specifically where it has taken you. Details details! The relief was immediate, and, for a few minutes, she was free of him.

  My current residence, she wrote, is a traditional Swahili stone house, built from rag coral. These patrician houses look much the same from the outside. Their character is within the walls, which are hard to penetrate. Even as a paying guest, I am hurried through the family area of the courtyard. It seems that outside of Abdul and a few small children, there are only women, but it�
�s hard to tell because the women lurk in closed rooms off the courtyard as dark as caves. I have seen one old and humorless enough to be Abdul’s wife, and a few younger ones. Daughters, maybe. They don’t seem to mind if I watch them on my way upstairs. One even smiles at me. Abdul doesn’t like it and rushes toward me in a greeting that is more of an interception. But he is a good Moslem and is gone for all five prayer times, when I can meander in peace.

  Ali tells me Abdul is a rich man; he has two wives. One of the young women is a newly purchased wife, going these days for about ten thousand dollars. She mostly stays in her room, across the courtyard from the rest of the family. She seems alone and not terribly happy. (But maybe she’s perfectly happy—God knows I’ve been unfairly accused. Some people can only look glum. In photographs, my mother is smiling but maybe the glum photos were thrown away. This is something I will never know.)

  She put her pen down. It was only three-thirty. The slowness of the hours had a discombobulating effect, like a car braking suddenly at high speed. Things behind her flew forward, landing jumbled and all together at her feet; events she had forgotten, objects, memories, desires. She thought briefly of her night with Finn at the Chichester, and then quelled the memory, pushing herself back further, to Jonathan’s soft kiss and her father’s strange parting words. She had called him from the airport.

  “I’m sorry I’ll be missing your birthday.” She was sitting in a phone booth and already feeling far away. She stared at the floor while a blur of bodies passed her line of vision, a turbulent river of legs and feet. So many kinds of shoes, in so many states of elegance and disrepair. Ingrid closed her eyes. “Are you angry?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Isn’t the department giving you a big seventy-year bash? And your one family member won’t be there. It makes me look like an ungrateful brat.”

  “You’ve long been beyond reproach, Ingrid. Mine, anyway.”

  “Let my birthday present be that I’m enough like you to survive. Let lightning strike.”

  “Ingrid, darling”—she could hear him smile—“you’re a woman. You’re not like me at all.”

  What did that mean, exactly? She considered her shoeless feet and wondered at the shape of her toes. Had her mother’s toes looked like this? The second toe nearly as long as the first, the fifth toe barely there, wedged against the fourth. She bent down to pry her fifth toe free. “Be your own toe,” she instructed it.

  As the afternoon wore on, her waking state became bare, a step away from sleep. Ali appeared, like some hallucination materializing out of the heat. He sat with her on her rooftop and peeled the bark of a bundle of little sticks with his teeth, wadding them into his cheek where they bulged and distorted his speech. Ingrid would have asked him to leave but she was fascinated by the sticks. “So,” he said, sucking his bits of bark. “You have been married?”

  “No.”

  “You seem to me like a widow. Sad like a widow.”

  “I’m not sad. I’m trying to get some work done.”

  “You are alone, then?”

  “No. I’m not alone. Not exactly.”

  Ali smiled, pleased with the ambiguity of her answer. “I will call you my widow.” Ingrid pretended he wasn’t there. Not exactly. She had to do better than that. I’ve been too engaged with the bones of the dead to find a partner among the living. And Templeton had been there all along, very much alive next to the dead and the lovers she had occasionally had. Not alone exactly.

  When Ali left, Ingrid changed her clothes and went down to the street. The muezzin had called for the final time that day. The rose light of sunset fell through the silent village and she walked alone through the streets: the men were in the mosque; the women were preparing dinner. She stopped at the village store and bought a stout white candle and a book of matches. As she made her way to Danny’s, clouds gathered above the ocean and the sun pushed through in narrow rays, dimming the day’s light to a silvery minimum. She thought if she started from Danny’s, she would remember the way to Templeton’s room. But the light had changed the feel of the village and she was no longer sure of the direction she and Hamilton had followed.

  After two wrong turns that ended in shadowy culs-de-sac, she found the courtyard again. She walked as Hamilton had walked to the office with the keys, reminding herself she had a right to be there, that this was the reason she had come.

  The wooden blocks hung from nails on the wall, crooked and randomly placed. She reached for number three and wished for a sound besides the relentless trickle of the fountain. She knew she had at least fifteen minutes—the guard would stop at the coffee hut after evening prayer along with the rest of the men. Quietly crossing the courtyard, she practiced her excuses. She didn’t know it was against the rules. She had left something there earlier and had come to retrieve it. She knew Templeton and meant him no harm.

  The room was dark. She moved tentatively toward the bed where the shape of the wooden figure lay dark against the mattress. To calm her imagination, she touched its face with her hand. Just wood—a dramatic prop to protect a passport.

  Relocating the leather briefcase, she removed the notebooks and placed them on the floor. Then she struck a match, remembering too late to close her eyes, and blinked for a moment without seeing. When her eyes adjusted, the room, alive now with shadows, had become unfamiliar. Beyond the shadows, there was an object in the middle of the floor. She crawled forward with the candle. The room around her warped with shapes.

  Alone in a circle of meager light, Ingrid noticed the comforting boundaries of walls and corners had melted away. In front of her, on a plain white plate, was a yellow starchy substance, a simple piece of meat and some kind of wilted green. She put a finger on the meat. It was cold.

  Nothing else in the room seemed to have been altered. There was no sign that Templeton had returned. She moved back to the bed and tried to ignore the plate. Who else had access to this room? She pulled out a sheet of tracing paper and held it over the drawing of the amulet. When she had finished copying the inscription, she looked at her watch. Ten minutes had passed.

  Adrenaline propelled her next transgression: she located Templeton’s last few entries in Arabic and tore them out. After folding them into her pocket, she turned to the remaining pages of the journals, which were mostly empty. Toward the back of the notebook, she came upon a hand-drawn map with an arrow pointing from the Arabian Sea to the Indian Ocean. Along the arrow was the word “Agulhas.” An island had been outlined, with two dense areas of crosshatching on either side. Another arrow came from the interior of the smaller of these, originating in the middle of a tight circle of stars. The two arrows met at an intersection with a third line, cut off not far from this point. Ingrid brought the map closer. On one side of the island was a light drawing of a small crescent moon. On another was a Christian cross.

  At the bottom of the page were two lines in Arabic written in red ink. Or was it ink? She held it to her nose instinctively, as if to detect, as an animal would, the presence of blood.

  Outside she heard something stirring. It could have been nothing more than wind in the trees, but a palpable fear rose in her. You don’t know this place, these people. Then she added to herself, You don’t know this man. Ingrid blew out her candle and quietly ripped the map from the notebook.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Finding Finn

  Ali came looking for her just before noon. She had grown restless on her roof trying to decipher Templeton’s unreadable Arabic script and was glad when he called up the stairs for her. Ali had become a pleasant irritant which, for the time being, she tolerated. He was her only regular company, and while he did not speak Arabic, occasionally he taught her things.

  Ingrid had searched Templeton’s books that morning to find a possible explanation for the plate of food. She marked a paragraph that described something called Kafara, a Swahili rite intended to purify a polluted or dangerous place. The source of pollution and danger were majini,
invisible spirits that could possess or haunt humans. Where angels were made from light and humans from clay or dust, the majini were created by fire. They were thought to be the first inhabitants of earth and were said to have once lived in paradise alongside Adam. When their leader, Iblisi, refused to bow to Adam as God had instructed, he and his followers were driven from paradise and made invisible to man.

  And when God said to the angels,

  “Bow to Adam,” they bowed,

  except one, Iblisi:

  he refused, and showed arrogance;

  and he was of the ungrateful . . .

  Majini could be either good or evil, male or female. They could assume startling human dimension and even cohabit with people, becoming spirit husbands or wives who would participate in the raising of spirit children. The majority of Swahili people believed these majini were real, living in the same villages, walking the same paths. To Ingrid, this seemed improbable and she allowed herself a measure of incredulity, which, on this island, seemed like necessary protection.

  The rite of Kafara was performed to expel an evil majini. A plate of food was left to absorb the pollution and, after doing so, was thrown out into the bush or the sea. What Ingrid didn’t know was if the pollution they were trying to purge from the room had come from Templeton or from her.

  Ali took her down to the beach to show her the sea eagles. As he had predicted, they found an eagle balancing on the wind above the shoreline. He whistled to it and produced a fish, which he waved in the air. The eagle cocked its white head as Ali stood poised to hurl the fish into the water, the round muscle of his shoulder smooth and tense. When he let the fish fly, the bird tucked into a dive, plunging swiftly toward the waves. It slowed itself with sudden outstretched wings and extended its talons, snatching the fish from the water and flying off behind the dunes, the dark shape of its catch dwarfed by its tremendous wingspan.

  Ingrid looked away from the eagle to Ali, who bowed. It was a strange triangle of death and deliverance, and something about it was unsettling. Because it was so clearly a performance, Ingrid applauded.