by Téa Obreht
“Well?” Dolan had shouted, tossing all four papers down on the kitchen table, one after the other. “Are you satisfied now? Has anything been helped? Are we apprised of all the facts?”
“Don’t raise your voice to me.” Nora pinned her hands on the chair beneath her and made a show of reading what was before her again. “What nonsense,” was all she could think to say. “Surely nobody believes this can be true?”
“It don’t matter. That it was raised will make it true for half our citizenry, Mama. They will never doubt it.” He stood with his face in his hands for a very long time. “I don’t know how you ever intend to face Desma again.”
In his corner, Rob was sanding the edges off a small wooden buffalo.
“All the same,” he said. “I’m glad of Missus Ellen Francis. Fuck Merrion Crace and the Stock Association both.”
THE SAN ANTONIO
AS FOR THE GIRL, WELL—THAT’S a goddamn misery, Burke. She meant no harm. That’s plain enough. You’d know it, too, were you a little less pain-blind. I wish it were within my power to give you some relief. But you seem to be improving on your own—so until we leave this place you must try to get calm again. Rest, and take me at my word. She meant no harm. Of all her kin, she was the gentlest.
You reckon I must be wrong. You want to tell me I have been before. Well, that may be. Perhaps the years have softened me a little too much toward the young and their little well-meaning ways. Or perhaps I’d rather have spared her the sight of you! No, Burke, my affections have not inured me to the frightening wretchedness of your face. Those teeth. The stink. Forgive me, but unlike yourself, I have the benefit of remembering what it’s like to be scared to death of you.
For it was you gave me the fright of my life that night on the Supply. Had it not been for your hollering, I would have stolen from the ship with the blue nazar in my pocket and drifted on, town to town, until some noose found me. I wouldn’t have cried out in fear, nor fallen backwards over a tangle of rope, and there certainly wouldn’t have been three or four fellas all standing around waiting for me when I got outside.
Nor would I have been grabbed from all flanks and swung onto the deck, while everyone shouted at once “Who goes there?” and “Give it back, give it back!”—though, of course, I realize that’s impossible, for they would have been shouting in Turkish or Arabic. They were only shadows, but their gist was clear enough: I was a thieving little interloper, and outnumbered four to one. They began to search me. All Hobb’s loot sang in my pockets. Things looked bleak. But then I threw my head into the nearest man and when the shock of his fall loosened the others’ grip, I broke free and went over the gunwale and didn’t quit swimming till I reached the lower harbor.
My clothes were still drying on me when an afternoon downpour brought three of my harriers into the saloon the following day. To the delight of all present, they wore pantaloons and fezzes, but I recognized them right off by the bruise staining one of their noses. My own was its twin, save for being set a little higher—a difference too insubstantial to make us anything but the two people who’d wounded each other. The men came inside and got themselves round a table overlooking the beach. Thus I found myself in a bind. I’d only come in out of the rain intending to get warm and steal a bit of breakfast. But now I was forced to wait. Back in the darkness of the ship, my captors had seemed hulking. But I could see now that even my bruise-mate was young and slight. It took him a long while to notice me. When he did, he didn’t tell the others what he was smiling about.
After a while he advanced to the counter where I sat. “Thief,” he said under all the noise.
I told him I was no such thing, and furthermore would be called no such thing by anybody, especially not some son of a bitch in his choice of headwear. He went on standing there with his hands at his sides, not looking at me. “You stole something of great value,” he said. “Not to the world in all its workings, perhaps—but certainly to me.”
And yes, Burke, I realize my embellishment here. He could barely line up three whole phrases of English in them days, which wrought some tension between his constitutional stillness and the need to wave his arms around in order to make his meaning known. But we understood one another—that is to say, I understood he knew I had the nazar, and he understood I was denying this. “You know,” he said, “in my mother’s house, a wrongdoer was always given three chances to set matters right before punishment. So, seeing’s how it’s her mati now burning a hole in your pocket, I propose to give you three chances to right the wrong you’ve done me.”
“That’s mighty of you,” I said.
“Will you take this, your second chance?”
That got me going. “Second?” I said. “By my count, this is the first.”
“Oh?” Finally he turned my way and counted off on his fingers. “Last night when you were caught, you had ample chance to return it, and you did not. That’s one. Here I am again, giving you another opportunity. Will you take it?”
“Take what? I don’t know what you mean. All this trouble began with you thinking I took something off you. I’d be crazy to take anything else—chance or otherwise.”
A second finger sank into his fist. “Well then, that leaves us one last chance. If, when next I see you, you do not return my mati, I will take it and cut your whole chin off besides.”
“God’s heaven, mister. Was that how your mother punished you?”
This did nothing to alter his smile, which the wide-set eyes made look both affable and murdersome. “Of course not,” said he. “But then—she was my mother, after all.”
* * *
—
His name, I would later learn, was Hadji Ali—though the sailors who brought him here from the Levant had given up trying to pronounce it and taken to calling him Hi Jolly instead. Jolly for short. The joke, of course, being that he was anything but: a brooding, handsome, steadfast Syrian Turk whose smile was constant but almost never sincere. The name stuck—sometimes to men who bore him no resemblance, which contributed to his being the only soul I ever knew who could be seen in two places at once. People liked the way the moniker sat on the tongue, I think, better than they liked the man who bore it.
Even in them days he gave the impression that his kinship was impossible to earn, and thus perhaps worth everything. What else could explain why I found myself, by way of this errand and that, still unmoved from Indianola when evening came? I’d managed to lay eyes on him twice during that time: first at the stockyards, where he was undertaking some sort of inspection; and then again at the hostler’s, arguing with Hans Wertz about the price of hay. My bruise-mate did not see me—which ran against my aim to show him I was unafraid. Hobb, of course, was eager to have me steal from him again. We fought it out all night, Hobb and I: he wanting after my bruise-mate’s fez, buttons, the very shoes on his feet; I rejoining that we knew nothing of this red-hatted stranger or his ways, and perhaps ought not tempt our third chance, having already spent two.
By dawn I had talked myself into making tracks. I did not want to admit my wrongdoing. But neither did I want my chin lopped off, which seemed a threat just absurd enough to be possible. I would go south to the border. And I might have done it—who knows? just imagine!—had some odd sentimentality for Indianola’s sleeping falsefronts not drawn me crosswise through town one last time, along the empty stretch of main street where I found the only other living soul awake at this hour: a rangy little old-timer interrupted in his homeward journey by some vision out at sea. As I passed, he turned my way.
“Son,” he said. “Look there. Can you tell me what that is, coming ashore?”
Well, Burke, I’ve never claimed full clarity on all the turns that threw us together. This is the strangeness of memory: in recalling a moment, I am instantly reminded of all the details that elude me, and feel myself making them up even as I say “this is certainly true; and this, and this.” But my fi
rst sighting of you has never been vulnerable to such corruption. I remember everything. The diluted moon hanging in the pink confluence of sea and sky. The dock pilings bared by low tide, tower after tower of stone reef mirrored up and down in the perfect stillness of Matagorda Bay. The little fishing boats dragging their wakes home, and among them a tiny skiff, thinly manned and light on the waves, inbound from the grim offshore hulk of the Supply. Unremarkable—save for its cargo.
“That’s a horse,” I told the old-timer.
“Is it?”
But no—not a horse after all. As those oarsmen pulled for the beach, a strange silhouette began to firm up: a snake neck and frowsy mane. A huge periscope head turning slowly this way and that. A tent-peg underbite. A drumlin back from which the morning wind raised a constant and ethereal fog, the dust of six months at sea.
* * *
—
By the time Jolly and his boys got the thirty-three of you ashore, all of Indianola had taken to the roofs and balconies. The crowd was twenty deep around the corral, and every soul there had gone giddy-mad—you camels in particular, for imagine all that time in a ship’s hold! You rejoiced in the fresh air and open sky, roaring, jostling, belching incredibly, dust-rolling, butting necks along wild laterals. All about the corral there rang a song of awed denigrations—what in hell were these jangling monstrosities; these big, toothy, snooded goats? What was their purpose? Nobody dared put one finger past the fence, where Jolly paced with the vigor of a man guarding some dark and delightful charge. It came to drift back to the multitude that these camels were the stock of Henry Constantine Wayne, that handsome devil, gathered from all parts of the Orient by the small handful of Levantine boys who had lately been harried around town, and imminently bound for San Antonio, there to serve as pack animals for the cavalry. The thought of our brave boys mounted up on these clownish monsters incited a fresh round of insults, with special ire now directed toward your smaller, two-humped cousins. Where, exactly, would our illustrious horsemen sit? Between the humps? Imagine the bold Lee on one of these! Didn’t matter how far they’d journeyed, didn’t matter if they could fly, they still didn’t look right—like lions uddered the wrong way up! Wouldn’t this just tickle the Indians!
Right around then, Jolly folded to his pride and sprang up onto the shoulder of your huge white cousin, kneeling patiently there in the middle of the corral. Despite all the epithets now flying about the place, he managed to announce, the beast on which he stood—name of Seid!—could carry more than fifteen hundred pounds for nine days without touching water. And if the present company could assemble a freight heavy enough to keep the camel from standing up, he, Hadji Ali, formerly of Izmir, would gift this, his own mount, to the city.
Well, nothing in memory had moved the people of Indianola to such frenzy. Out they came from every doorway, first with their kettles and pans; and then, as their kitchens emptied, with whiskey kegs and fireirons and gunnysacks of grain; their chamberpots and oil lamps and petticoats. Bales of hay based the load. Laundry carts were commandeered and bags of linen run up to Jolly, who stood on Seid’s shoulder, snatching boots and jackets from midair, shouting encouragement to those below—yes hand me that fiddle, yes sir that bucket will fit nicely here—smiling all the while, working out the puzzle of weight and space while the load bloated like a sail.
In due course, an ancient cannonball was brought up from the beach and dropped into one of the linen sacks that dangled from the teetering hummock of Seid’s saddle, with a tiny child counterweighted on the opposite side. Seid just went on lying there like a clenched fist. Each new burden slowed his breathing, but the overladen ribs continued to rise and fall. Jolly circled him, fussing, cinching, pulling, chucking the camel’s whiskered chin when it began to foam.
Then at last the storehouses and pantries of Indianola were empty, and Jolly bade the camel stand. It unfolded like a dream making itself up as it went. Falteringly, it rocked forward and up and back, strutted one set of legs, one set of leathery thumbprint knees, and then the other, scaffolding itself, tilting its rider around as though he were just another protrusion of its own damnable anatomy. Up it went, with its mouth foaming and all the bloodcourses beneath its skin bulging. The load listed a little to the left, a little to the right. Then Seid gave a mighty sigh, of strain or triumph, and took one step forward, and then another. Breathless Indianola watched this improbable brute, manifestation of a want they had not known until it had drifted within reach, shuffle away under the weight of all their possessions. A few steps more brought the camel past where I stood at the fence. My heart was guttering. As they went by, Jolly looked down at me—and, Burke, I took that nazar right out of my pocket and dropped it into his hand. Unsurprisingly, this did not topple the camel, which only sighed again at the touch of Jolly’s hand, shifted forward, and set off down the thoroughfare, rolling steady, like some great four-legged peddler’s wagon under all those pots and pans and trumpets and boots, fifteen hundred or fifteen thousand pounds of cotton and flour and hay and linen, while in its wake silence fastened over the rooftops of Indianola.
* * *
—
It wasn’t some great purpose kept me following your packtrain for so many days after Jolly and his men took you inland. I suppose I was curious about the camels and their boys, and the soldiers who led you all across the marshes, and pleased to see the little black line of your silhouettes flickering ahead of me while I walked. And it was a thrill to watch you groomed and watered at the close of each day, and a thrill again to watch Jolly fit Seid each morning with his saddle—a thin, leather-wrapped chair, brilliantly chevroned in green and white, that fit snug at the shoulder, with its pommel trident protruding from the beadwork like the reaching arm of some petrified beast.
And it felt like getting away with something to lie up in the trees at night, unmarked yet close enough to hear the cameleers’ campfire snap, and discern from their muted talk a few of the old words that still tugged at my memory—fellow, father, God—all spoken in a rhythm so familiar it felt like trying to remember a dream.
And certainly I was getting away with something that first time I crept into camp and sat the fence—a feat of only modest courage because I was convinced the Levantine night-watchman, being old, couldn’t see me. You came to look me over and stretched straightaway for the carrots in my hand and I sat very still and tolerated the coarse prodding of your nose while you pried your supper from me. Having got away with this once, I naturally tried it again, misunderstanding that it was neither the watchman nor the soldiers I should fear, but your own kin—for camels are liable to notice being excluded from a feeding and start bellowing like hell, which was how I found myself running blind through the scrub with shouts and gunfire behind me, grateful that the moon had yet to rise.
Well, every night thereafter, Jolly came out and stood at the edge of his camp and called out: “Misafir, are you there?”
And I would press myself into the parched ground, drawing not one breath, and after a while he would return to the fire and the talk would start up again.
Four or five nights out, a few luckless rustlers tried for the corral. By their screams, it was clear that they had failed to properly scout what manner of stock they were robbing, and their poor attempt succeeded only in scattering you camels. Crouching under my tree in the dark, I counted the subsiding rifleshots and urged myself to get up and throw in with the defenders—it’ll be a long while, I told myself, before you hear this kind of fellow, father, God talk from anyone again. This all went on for a good while. I was still only halfway out of my bedroll when the raid quieted into the thin shouts of recovery—a camel found here, another there—and after a while what should come sighing through the grass toward me but you? Thud thud thud came your soft and heavy feet, all the way to my shameful bedside. You put your face in amidst my bags as though you’d done so a thousand times before and nosed around until you found what yo
u wanted and dispatched what was left of my supper.
“Well, misafir,” Jolly said when he came to retrieve you. “I think you will find this a little more difficult to hide than my mother’s mati.”
After that, I slept at the edge of their fire and did not run again until I had to.
* * *
—
Donovan once told me the world is home to two kinds of folk: those who name their horses and those who don’t. Having made off with one or two mounts in my day, I counted myself among the latter. But this obviously proved as untrue of me as it did of Jolly’s other cameleers.
Eight feet at the shoulder, Seid was the foul-tempered pilot of the train, the biggest of the dromedaries. He scowled disdainfully down at his lesser cousins. To make matters worse, he had to be hobbled at night—for the score of his contempt was reserved for other males of his species, and Tulli, the Great Red, in particular, whom he kept deferent with constant biting, bumping, and frothing. His fellowship with Jolly went way back to when they rode together against the Germans in Algiers. “Don’t let them two get around a German, especially together—they go crazy, hey,” the night-watchman told me.
This was Yiorgios—George, with his old-timer’s face and wistful smile, forever striking fire into a crooked pipe. Nobody seemed to know if George was really as ancient as he looked or if his harrowed wincing was the result of some affliction, but it gave him the aspect of a patriarch, which drew people to him. Women especially. Half that trip he was lurching on his feet. Drink was not to blame, nor was the uneven length of his legs. Every few minutes he probed his ear and sighed in bliss. “Mal due débarquement. Tu comprends?”