Euphoria

30

On my ship, the SS Vedic, I walked the decks, stood at the rails, spoke to no one except the sea. There were times when I thought I saw her out there on the water, sitting cross-legged, surprised and grinning as if I’d just walked into the room. There were other times when the water was black as space, sinister in its enormity. She was out there. I did not know where. Fen had dumped her in the sea. She couldn’t even swim. Facts I still only half believed. I leaned over the rail and hollered out at the emptiness. I didn’t mind who heard. I’d hoped John and Martin, whose voices had always come to me when I was cracking up, would chime in but they were silent, too sorry for me, or too appalled, to make their usual fun.

We crossed into the Java Sea. The moon swelled to full.

Once, Nell had told me, there was a Mumbanyo man who wanted to kill the moon. He had discovered his wife bled each month and accused her of having another husband. She laughed and told him all women were married to the moon. I will kill this moon, the man said, and he got in his canoe and after many days he came to the tree from which the moon, tied to the highest branch by raffia string, jumped into the sky. Come down here so I can kill you, the man said to the moon, for you have stolen my wife. The moon laughed. Every woman is my wife first, he said. So in fact you stole this wife from me. This only made the man angrier and he climbed the tree to the highest branch and pulled at the raffia string. It would not move so he began to climb the string toward the moon. Soon his arms grew heavy and though he had climbed far from the tree he still was no closer to the moon. Let go now, the moon said. And the man, who had no more strength left, let go and fell directly into his canoe and paddled home to share his wife, as all men did, with the moon.

A tall brooding slightly unhinged Englishman is bound to capture the romantic imagination of some girl, and there was one from Shropshire who followed me around for a week or so, but she came to understand that my dark silences were never going to bloom into confessions of love, and took up with an Irish soldier.

My boat pulled in and out of Colombo, Bombay, Aden. A day out from Suez, I discovered the notes from our Grid stuffed into a corner of one of the suitcases. I had no memory of putting them there. In fact I was certain I hadn’t. I smoothed them all out on the walnut desk in my stateroom. It was the work of madness, the oily crumpled pages covered in three different scrawls, but I was mad still, and set to work. I wrote the monograph quickly, faster than I’ve ever written anything. They were both there with me as I wrote, both of them, advising me, heckling me, contradicting me, mocking me, and, finally, approving. I wrote with more conviction than I’d ever had in my life about anything. I wanted to get it right for her, wanted to hold on to those moments on Lake Tam in any way I could. I thought the writing would last the rest of the journey, but I was done by Genoa and posted it from there. I had signed all three of our names to it.

Oceania took it for their next issue, and it was included in several anthologies published the following year. The Grid, for a time, became a staple in classrooms in several countries. In 1941 though I learned that Eugen Fischer in Berlin had included its German translation in the reading lists he created for the Third Reich. He had added a coda, claiming Germans to be Northern, the unyielding Northern temperament to be superior, and our Grid to be further proof of the necessity of the Nazi racial hygiene program. That the monograph was in the company of works by Mendel and Darwin was cold comfort. If I had not known of this list, perhaps I would not have been so willing to offer up my knowledge of the Sepik for the purpose of war when the OSS contacted me, perhaps I would not have helped to rescue those three American spies in Kamindimimbut. And perhaps that entire Olimbi village would not have been slaughtered. So much, in the end, for all my attempts at amends.

After Genoa we stopped in Gibraltar and, finally, Liverpool.

Strange how you can pick out in a crowd, from a distance of eighty yards and two and a half years, the one familiar shape, the slant of white hair, the hands covering the mouth.

All those tough, no-nonsense letters, threats of disinheritance, lectures on the necessity of hard science, and my mother was heavy and sobbing in my arms.

‘She never thought you’d make it back,’ her friend who’d driven her up to Liverpool explained. ‘She had terrible dreams.’

I wasn’t much better than a pole, holding my mother up on that packed quai as all those passengers I never met bumped past us on their way into other arms. I had spoken only to the ocean for forty-seven days, hadn’t slept since Sydney. My mother took ahold of herself, told me I looked awful, and led me to her friend’s automobile, where she sat with me in the backseat and held my hand. I hadn’t written her a word of what had happened, yet she seemed to know it all. The tar and soot smell of England was back in my nostrils, the cold damp already settling in my bones. The SS Vedic was lit up now in the dusk. Morning after next it would begin its passage without me across another swath of emptiness to New York. Through the windscreen I had a last look at the sea, which was rumpled and agitated, a thick muscle that would hold on tight to everything it swallowed.