“He’s an old fool.”
“I had nowhere to go. I was so hot.” Ingrid fought back her tears. “I didn’t know what to do.”
“I’m sorry.” Finn eased the cup out of her hand. “I’m sorry you were alone.”
“Whenever I need something on this island, I can’t seem to find it,” she said.
“Well, you’ll be seeing your professor soon,” he said. “That’s one thing you can stop looking for.”
This information left her silent. Finn watched her closely as she hung her head, shifting his gaze as a sliver of sun pierced the horizon. The instant the warm light touched them, he knew what was wrong with the morning: there had been no call to prayer. In his lifetime on the island, in the thousands of mornings he had seen melt into afternoon, he had never heard silence replace the call of the muezzin.
He hurried Ingrid, leading her to the skiff, stepping down into it first and turning to help her. She fell with exhausted faith, almost tripping into his arms. She sat across from him and watched the sky change colors over his shoulder. Finn was disturbed by the too silent morning. He wanted her to speak.
“Is he like a father to you?” he asked, pushing them off from Uma.
“Who?”
“Templeton.”
Ingrid forced a laugh.
“When I was young I loved a girl, a Moslem girl,” he said, shifting to pull the starter cord. “I didn’t know it was the wrong thing. Everyone told me. Everything was wrong because of it. I had to surrender finally. There are people you can’t love.”
“That’s not what he is to me.”
“What is he, then?” Finn asked, repositioning himself on the seat.
Ingrid looked up as they moved away from Uma. “Do you have the North Star here? It’s a fixed point in the sky. When you find it you can find north and then the other directions. He has been my North Star.”
“He doesn’t seem that steady to me.”
“No.” She paused. “But he’s steady in his unsteadiness. He doesn’t betray himself. He’s like you in that way. It used to inspire me.”
“Such loyalty to self can destroy other people,” Finn said.
“Like you?”
“Not me,” Finn said firmly. “Not yet.”
They did not speak for some time, until the sound of sand sliding under the thin wooden floor of the skiff brought her back. Ingrid blinked and straightened as Finn pulled the motor up and jumped into the water. He dragged the skiff onto the beach above Kitali, his mind focused on the continuing silence of the morning. Ingrid helped herself out of the skiff. He let her hop for a few meters and then picked her up. “This is easier, I think,” he said.
She looped her arm around his neck. She could not hear the sound of his steps or even feel that he was walking. They seemed to be floating. The light angled through the leaves and flickered against her eyelids like flames.
In a clearing was a man lying with a shirt over his head, blood spattered on his pants. She knew him immediately and stiffened in Finn’s arms. Finn held her tighter. She turned her head away and looked back to where they’d come from. Finn laid her down on the sand and leaned her against a stump, kneeling next to her as if for protection.
“Templeton,” Finn said. “Come to—you’ve got a visitor.”
Templeton pulled the shirt from his eyes and squinted. “Is that Ingrid?” he asked, working his way up onto his elbows. “Why, you’ve cut your hair!” He smiled sheepishly and gestured toward his leg. “Look what your old advisor’s done now. Got himself shot in the leg.”
Ingrid’s own wounded leg twitched involuntarily. She stared at it as if at some kind of animal and waited for it to twitch again.
Templeton glanced at Finn. “She’s taken some Fansidar and has been without food or water all night,” Finn explained quietly. “I imagine she’s in a bit of shock.” He left Ingrid’s side to prepare a syringe of morphine, which he plunged into Templeton’s arm. Templeton fell back to the ground and closed his eyes. A smile melted across his face. “Come closer, dear,” he said to Ingrid. “I want to see you.”
Ingrid didn’t move. She thought that if she didn’t move or speak, it was possible he would stop talking to her. She was not prepared to contend with his presence, his absence, or anything about him.
“If you have anything to say to him, now would be the time,” Finn advised.
“I would like some water,” she said.
“Ingrid,” Templeton said faintly. “Come let me look at you—it’s been a long time.”
Ingrid drank from a large container of water and curled up on the sand. Her chill was returning. Outside her sphere of stillness, she could hear their voices and knew they were arguing about her but she could not summon enough energy to sift through their words for meaning.
Then, sometime later, Templeton was at her side, telling her he had nothing to teach her now, that he had nothing more to give her. He offered her some whiskey to dull the pain. When the liquor had fortified her enough to look at him, she searched his face for changes. She pulled herself off the ground and moved toward him on her knees, propelled by the possibility that if she got closer, she might be able to see something that would return him to her. His face revealed nothing. Tears began to well up inside her but she shook her head in resistance. Don’t let him see you like this. “Why did you want me to leave the island?” she asked, forcing the words out.
Templeton’s features finally altered into an expression she recognized. He considered her solemnly. “Because I couldn’t take responsibility for what might happen to you.”
“It didn’t stop it from happening.”
Templeton smiled sadly. “So I gather,” he said, reaching for her hand.
Ingrid drew back and surveyed what she could see of her surroundings. “Is this where you’ve been?”
“Mostly,” he said.
“I want you to tell me about it,” Ingrid said. “All of it. You have to do that for me.”
“You make a good detective,” he granted. “I was right about that much. I didn’t want you wasting those skills on me.” Then, as if knowing she needed to hear his voice, Templeton began to talk. He described the difficulties posed by his object of research, the maddening uncertainties and ambiguities of Swahili culture and history. There were three versions of the same story, four different dates, five different centuries. And now, there was this new hybrid spin-off of Mohammad’s village, which Templeton had only just begun to observe. “Such a harmonious people,” he said. “A people who are both more and less evolved than those they left. But their success is fragile. It depends on isolation.” Templeton stared up at the trees, and Ingrid watched as his eyes began almost imperceptibly to fill with tears. “I have lost a friend,” he said faintly.
“Tell me,” Ingrid urged.
Templeton shook his head and wiped his eyes. “This island is one of the last places where the Swahili still exist in cultural purity. Imagine losing a people who have, over the centuries, managed to survive, keeping their world intact through so many interlopers and plunderings. Losing them will mean losing their wisdom, their spirits, their God. And we will lose them. Not suddenly. They will be gradually absorbed, seduced by the promise of prosperity. Because of Salama Hotel, it is happening quickly. Already much has died, more than Mohammad ever dared imagine.”
He continued with restrained passion to explain how the Swahili had maintained their identity through the successive influences of the Persian, Chinese, Portuguese and finally the British. Their history was a testimony not only to the engulfing vitality of mercantile society, but to the flexibility necessary to survive.
“This village—” He struggled for words. “I think I made what you could call a mistake of the intellect by assuming that if I could establish facts about the origins of this anomalous people, their place in the world would be solidified. But what are my tenets, my suppositions, my facts in the face of a disappearing God?” he burst out fervently. “We are here to live. To be
present for a short time, to witness the small disturbances and exhilarations, to feel them as they pass. It’s the simplest thing in the world, and most of us fail. I have failed. Out here I was rescued, rescued by a drowning people.”
Templeton groped for his pipe. “This is the kind of talk that has made Finn loathe my company,” he said, settling back finally. Finn glanced at him and almost smiled. “I know I’ve disappointed you, Ingrid. Forgive me. I know how strong you are. You may not, but I have seen it in you from the beginning. Now, come, you’re an intelligent girl, can’t you forgive me? Speak to me, Ingrid—we’re all running out of time.”
Ingrid was tired. The whiskey had relaxed her and she knew Templeton had already won. He had won years ago, before she had ever thought of coming to Africa, when he had taught a young student to imagine a different world. “Forgiveness,” she said numbly. “I have no choice but to forgive you.”
Finn began to unwrap the swatch of kikoi from her foot. “It’s abscessed,” he said. “We’ll have to drain it. Give her another drink.”
Templeton handed her the bottle of whiskey. “Now we must talk about you,” he said. “What’s all this about Stanley Wicks?”
Ingrid glanced at Finn, whose eyes dropped to the ground. “He’s my friend,” she said.
“Nothing more?”
“He’s been kind to me. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. I’m just curious.”
Finn prepared a second syringe and took Ingrid’s arm in his hand. After a tiny prick, Ingrid was flooded with a warmth that shamed the whiskey. She hugged her arms around herself to keep it in and began to rock gently back and forth. Templeton slid around before her as she tried to focus on his words. “It’s unlikely they’ll be able to reattach the hand,” he was saying. “Too much time has passed.”
Finn loosened Ingrid’s hold on herself and laid her on the sand. “The worst is over,” he told her. “This will hardly hurt.”
“What hand?” Ingrid asked in confusion. Words and their meaning were once again beginning to zigzag in her mind.
Finn sunk the knife in three times; three short cuts, two on either side of her ankle, the third near the original wound. It didn’t hurt exactly. Instead of the dull, throbbing pulse there was a sharp, quick pain and then relief as the infection rushed out, soaking into the gauze Finn pressed to the incisions. Ingrid watched the tops of the mangrove trees, looking for the occasional sunlit gull.
“Now, when this finishes, I’m going to put more gauze in there to keep the cut open so that the rest of the infection can escape.” Finn filled an empty syringe with water tinctured with iodine and irrigated each incision. “You’ve got to keep it clean. It’s very important to keep it clean, do you understand?”
“I understand,” Ingrid said, and then lost consciousness.
When she came to, several hours later, she had regained a modicum of focus. She turned immediately to Templeton and asked him to explain what he had found. “Your king,” she pressed. “Did he exist? Did the amulet?”
Templeton smiled. “What do you think?”
Ingrid pointed at the sky. “I think if the amulet existed it came from the desert up north, where Arab traders used amulets to find water in the desert. The stars I saw in your office.”
“And?”
“And if this was where your king lived, maybe he brought it here. It may have been a gift. Someone he traveled with.”
“Suppositions. What else?”
“There are suras and ayats etched onto it,” Ingrid said. “The verses you transcribed in your notebook.”
She closed her eyes and recited. “ ‘In the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of night and day; in the ships that sail the ocean with cargoes beneficial to man; in the water which God sends down from the sky . . .’ These are signposts—but for what? There are two hands. The writing is more crude than the inscription surrounding it. Maybe the king added the sura himself. Below it are three lines, possibly a symbol for water. I don’t know where it comes from. It’s not Arabic.”
“Ah,” Templeton said. “That is a Bantu symbol.”
Ingrid sat up. “Bantu?”
“Etched sometime in the ninth century.”
“So the king carved it.”
“Or had it carved.”
“Where is the amulet?”
“Well, there we run into some difficulty,” he said evasively. “I know it exists. Do I need to prove it? To have others believe as I do? I don’t think I really care anymore.”
Ingrid pounded the ground in frustration. “Where is it, goddamnit?” Templeton reached for the bottle of whiskey and took a long swig. He watched Ingrid and wiped his mouth. She was on her knees. “I want to see it.”
“The amulet itself proves nothing,” he said slowly. “That’s been my problem all along. If you feel well enough, Finn can show you the other piece of the puzzle.”
“Of course I feel well enough.”
“Take her to the inland pond,” Templeton said to Finn. “Follow the stream. Proceed in the direction the Agulhas would have gone, had it not been interrupted.”
Finn carried Ingrid and walked through the thick palms to the stream. The jostling regularity of his gait soothed her.
“Templeton whacked off Wicks’ hand,” Finn announced. “That’s what this is all about.”
Ingrid raised her head. “What do you mean?”
“Cut, chopped, severed. Took a knife in the middle of the night and hacked Wicks’ hand from his arm.”
Ingrid felt her stomach turn and thought she would be sick. “Why would he do that?”
“In Islamic law, it’s the punishment for stealing.”
“What did Wicks steal?” Ingrid asked. Finn didn’t answer. “That seems completely insane. Is that how he got himself shot?”
“Yes,” Finn said. “I guess Wicks carries a gun.”
“My God,” Ingrid said.
They had reached a circle of palms unlike those in the village, with clusters of small fruit. Finn put Ingrid down and stooped to pick up a fruit from the ground. He smelled it and then touched his tongue to it. “It’s a date,” Ingrid said.
“I have only heard about these,” Finn said. “I never knew this was here.” He carried her into the circle of date palms that stood like sentinels, protecting the inland pool at its center. Ingrid stopped him, wanting now to walk on her own.
They proceeded haltingly to the water. The pool was nearly circular, the water serene and a beautiful clear green. A fine trickle fell from a deep red outcrop, smooth as marble, at the edge of the pool. Flowering plants thrived around the pond’s periphery, sweetening the air with their blossoms. Finn left Ingrid to inspect this vegetation he had never seen before. “I do not know the names of these plants,” he said.
Ingrid could think only of the water. “I want to swim,” she told him.
She stood with her hands on Finn’s shoulders while he pulled her shirt off and retied the kikoi under her arms. “It will be easier if you let me carry you,” he said.
Finn released her when the water was deep enough for her to float, watching as it surrounded her, softening the stubborn tufts of her hair. “A king lived here,” she said. She closed her eyes and Finn allowed his hand to mingle in the bright hair. “Can you forgive him?” she asked without stirring.
“Who?”
“Templeton.”
“He has confused my life.”
“Love confuses. Almost always.”
Finn moved his arms beneath her body until it seemed he was holding her, supporting her without even touching her. Then he did touch her, raising his hands until they found her shoulder blades, her lower back, and he began to turn with her, rotating her around him. She found his eyes in this slow orbit. “If it were night,” she said, “we might look like a constellation from above. A wheel. Your arms are the spokes.” Finn removed one arm from under her and laid it over her, the way one might in sleep.
Ingrid closed her eyes
. “La illaha il Allah,” she whispered. “There is no God but God. Maybe this is all that matters.”
Finn rotated her once more, thinking that she looked like a mermaid with the kikoi floating over her feet. “I would like to matter to you,” he said.
Ingrid said nothing, letting his words fill the silence. For a moment, as she continued to spin lightly, she thought about the God she had felt dancing at the Riyadh Mosque. This God was easier than this man. This God was everywhere and this man was only a few places, and sometimes not even there. His arms pressed around her now from either side.
“And now?” she asked.
Finn didn’t answer. He was thinking of the sweetness her words could have and how he had come to desire them and how, when they were not there, the silence was not full but empty. His hands traveled up her body to her face to hold the source of the sweetness, to kiss it, to let it, finally, intoxicate him.
The drone of a small seaplane pulled them apart. To the east, two flares arced into the sky, trailing red sparks as their paths intersected. The plane angled toward their smoky trails and began to descend. They watched it drop from the sky.
“There’s Wicks’ help,” Finn said finally. “We should go now.”
Ingrid swam from his arms to the edge of the pond. There she struck a posture that made Finn stare. She turned to him. “There are steps here,” she said, kneeling in the water. She placed her hands on the raised surface, where worn stone steps sloped into the water. She ran her hands over the first step, bending to look at it more closely. “Look at this,” she said. Finn knelt next to her. Her fingers were outlining a shape. It looked like a child’s drawing of a flower. “What is it?” he said.
“I think it’s a star.” Ingrid swam around the circumference of the pool, pulling herself along by the rocks. “Here’s another one,” she said.
They found seven stars; some carved into the rough rock above the pond, others in the polished rock just above the waterline. “A map to find the water,” Ingrid murmured. “It’s a copy of the map on the amulet.” She made Finn stay a short while so she could listen to the breeze in the date palms, so that she could, for a moment, become part of the pond’s tranquil surface.
An Obvious Enchantment Page 33