Easter Island (24 page)

“They look like birds,” says Alice. “Angry birds. And trees. My drawings are better, don’t you think?”

“Much better,” says Elsa.

Alice’s renditions allow Elsa to examine each image individually. She sorts Alice’s copies, and assigns a number to each character. Soon she has almost one thousand unique figures, which suggests the script is not alphabetic. But it is difficult—some figures look very similar. Day after day Elsa stares at them; at night they dance across her dreams. So many seem to be birds and plants and animals—the very things lacking on the island. If the script is indigenous, it should use representations the islanders would have known. But perhaps the figures are not what they seem—perhaps she is seeing only what
she
has seen before.

As Alice begins copying the larger tablets, the task seems to bother her. Occasionally she hurls her notebook down and stomps off across the grass. She chucks pebbles at her pony, tugs at her own hair.

“What’s wrong, Allie?”

“They’re ugly. That tablet is ugly. All the faces are angry. I don’t want to look at it anymore.”

“Then we’ll just tuck it aside. You don’t have to look at it.” Elsa wraps the tablet in canvas. “Why don’t you take a break from all that and do some nice portraits? That always makes you happy. How about a drawing of Biscuit Tin?”

So for several days Alice makes a portrait of Biscuit Tin, though he can’t stop giggling for more than a few seconds at a time, and this only when Alice looks away to grab a new charcoal or a rubbing cloth. As soon as she studies him, he plants his palms on his cheeks and laughs. Then Alice scolds him, tosses grass at his face. It is only in the brief moments when Alice seems to disappear, when her eyes retreat, when the motion of her charcoal suddenly stops, that the boy’s face becomes still and solemn. He composes himself and sits patiently, as though in the presence of one who is sick. And when she returns to the world, to him, her feet kicking at the sand, he is clearly relieved. After a week, when the portrait is finished, she presents it to him. He has not been permitted to see the work in progress, and when finally he does see it, Biscuit Tin nearly bursts into tears. It has, thinks Elsa, captured his spirit: the disarray of his hair, the loyal eyes, the mischievous grin, the narrow neck suspending the full moon of his face. Snatching it from her, Biscuit Tin darts off across the sand, then through the tall grass, the paper flapping beside him.

The next day Alice draws a picture of their father’s house in spring, surrounded by thick hibiscus and wild roses, the trees shading the front path, the hills in the distance blanketed with clover and thyme. But the likeness is too good, and Elsa cannot bear to look at it—this reminder of home, of the past.

When Alice hands the picture to the boy, his eyes widen.

“Home,” Alice tells him. “That is where Pudding and Father and Elsa and I live. I share a room with Elsa.”

The boy’s finger traces the flowers, the bushes, the tall trees.

“That is home. Far from here. In Europe.”

Gesturing at the tree, the boy hands Alice a blank sheet of paper.

“Just a tree?”

The boy squints, as though trying to figure out what she has said. As she draws two sweeping lines of trunk, he nods.

“I’m going to put birds in it. A tree without birds is no good.”

Elsa is happy that Alice is enjoying drawing, but when Alice returns to work on the tablets, they again upset her. One afternoon, returning from a visit with Edward, Elsa finds Alice crying over her notebook.

“I don’t like them,” Alice shrieks. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“Very well, Allie. You can do whatever you like. Do you want to go for a ride with me? We can go fetch Biscuit Tin for you.”

“I miss the boat,” Alice huffs. “I liked the water, going fast on the water. Beazley was funny on the boat.”

“I know.” Elsa rubs Alice’s back. “I promised you that if you were unhappy, we would go home. Didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“And we don’t have to stay here. We can go back on the water, back to London, whenever you like. . . . Do you want me to braid your hair? Here. Turn around. Let’s give you some braids.”

Elsa runs her fingers through Alice’s heavy hair. Yes. She
has
promised Alice they would go home the moment she wanted to. But what good will come of leaving now? Before they’ve even made a full survey of the
moai
? They can’t just abandon the expedition. The voyage took nearly a year, and now that they are here and have finally grown accustomed to the wind and the rocks and the strange language, they are making real progress. This isn’t, after all, just a honeymoon. Their work—the measurements, the copying of the tablets—is unprecedented. Besides, returning to England will take at the very least eleven months, and in that time Alice will likely change her mind. Elsa’s promise to Alice was made before they reached the island, before they even left England. At that point she had imagined the worst; she feared being stranded, friendless, in the farthest reaches of civilization. She had wanted the trip, but had also imagined it as a necessary part of her arrangement with Edward, something she would endure for the sake of Alice, perhaps for her benefit—was it wrong to imagine Alice would flourish away from the scorn of Europeans? But the promise, she now realizes, was really meant for herself. She made sure she could escape if
she
needed to. How could she know this sacrifice would become her greatest pleasure?

Of course, her hands still blister from washing their bloomers and blouses each morning, Edward’s shirts and socks; her face warms uncomfortably as she stirs chowder over the fire, though she is learning to make the Kanaka-style earth oven; she still hikes down to the shore in the moonlight to plunge greasy pots into the surf. And, as always, she has to look after Alice, and now Edward. She is still pinned like a butterfly to the frame of her circumstances, but here she can, for a few hours each day, at least imagine herself free.

Riding her pony up the slope of the quarry, she likes to gaze at the
moai
, the vast stone spirits, the work of strangers who lived centuries before. She remembers reading about the Egyptian pyramids, that tens of thousands were conscripted to build the great limestone tombs. Well, the
moai
, too, must have been the work of hundreds of men, carving and chiseling in the sun day after day. And the scale of it all—the ages of labor, the tons of stone, the decay of abandon—astounds her. She feels small, irrelevant, and utterly safe. What comfort there is knowing she is a part of something old, something larger than herself. Elsa, when she looks in the quarry, thinks to herself:
God
. It is the only name she can think of for the feeling the place gives her. Is God, she wonders, simply a sense of history? A sense of others having stood on the exact same patch of earth, years before, of strangers filled with the same fears and regrets?

Being on the island gives Elsa a sense of peace she has never before known, and with this comes purpose. The past lurks around her like a mystery demanding to be unraveled. Why shouldn’t they unravel some of the mysteries? Perhaps they will decipher the native script, and they will—
she
will—be a part of something important. Her life, despite the compromises, might at least have larger meaning.

“Ouuch!”

“Sorry, Allie.” She has pulled Alice’s braid too tightly. “Let me loosen it. You know what, Allie? I think we should give the island time.”

Alice clutches at her braid, feeling the uneven bumps and ridges.

“Do you love Beazley?”

“Allie, you know Edward and I are married. We’re husband and wife. Just like Father was with Mother. But I don’t love him as much as I love you. You know that. Don’t you, Allie? You are my true and absolute love.”

“Does Beazley love you?”

“Of course he does. But not as much as our little Mr. Biscuit Tin adores you! Allie, just think how it would break Biscuit Tin’s heart if you left. You must stay for him. And for now, you don’t have to look at another tablet, ever. I’ll put my poor artistry to work.”

For the time being, Elsa is busy learning the native language, since fluency seems the natural step toward unraveling the script. Gertrude Bell knew Arabic well before making her journey through Mesopotamia. Elsa’s initial phrase book can get them directions to fresh water and fig trees, but she wants to talk to the islanders about their culture. Where did they come from? What kind of a society did they create? What might they have wanted, or needed, to write on the wood? And now that sheep shearing has ended, the islanders are taking an interest in the expedition. Several children come by the quarry one day to watch as Elsa helps Edward measure the
moai.
On their ponies, the children laugh and sway, hollering in a fusion of Rapa Nui and Spanish, “
Amor los moai?
” But when they see Biscuit Tin emerging from behind a
moai,
they begin to hiss. With his chubby forefinger, one boy smashes his own nose and emits a series of grunts. Another tugs wildly at his own cheeks. A freckled girl with red hair flips back her eyelids and juts out her tongue. Then a dirt-smeared boy jumps from his pony and lobs a large stone at Biscuit Tin, who ducks behind the statues. In a flash Alice lunges forward with her parasol, shrieking wildly. As though it is some mystical weapon, she rhythmically opens and closes the parasol. Alarm spreads among the children and they scream,
“Tatane! Tatane!”
The boy who lobbed the stone fumbles back onto his pony as Alice continues her charge up the grassy slope. He trots off, his small body convulsing with sobs, just as Alice reaches the rise. Edward says to Elsa, shaking his head, “My goodness, I’ll have to be careful never to incite her wrath.” When Alice comes back down the slope, Biscuit Tin finally emerges from behind the
moai
. For the rest of the day, he does not leave her side.

“I like the boy,” Elsa whispers to Edward in the tent one night. “Very much. But I wonder why he’s alone.”

“Alice likes him too. I think you’ll have to let Alice have him. She seems to have won his heart.”

“I know.”

“Do you want . . . Elsa? I didn’t think you wanted children. . . .”

“No. Of course. I can’t.”

“You have Alice to take care of,” he says. “And you think of her . . . as your child.”

“No,” she says. “But I think of myself as her mother. It isn’t quite the same.”

Elsa closes her eyes. It is true. She cannot imagine looking after Alice
and
a child of her own. But it is more than that. It is the memory of the midwife clutching Alice to her chest, of her father forbidding Elsa to open her mother’s door. “Your mother gave her life for our little Alice,” he had said, trying to mask his despair. “She sacrificed herself for a new child.” But this version of events wasn’t shared by Elsa. Behind that door Alice had
done
something to their mother, and for this Elsa felt hate. For an entire year she cursed her sister, whispered angry words when her father was asleep. So when they began to notice the strange roaming of Alice’s eyes, the tantrums and the silences, Elsa believed her hate was the cause. That the curses, the prayers, and the whispered accusations had harmed her.

“Are you asleep?” she whispers.

“Not yet,” says Edward.

“Sometimes, I’ve thought, well, that Alice was my fault. I’m sure it sounds mad. But why should a thing like that happen to a child? To anyone? There must be . . . a reason.”

“Elsa.”

“My whole life I’ve wondered if . . .”

“Alice is a blessing.”

“I know that.”

“You mustn’t ever let yourself think it would be better if she were different.”

“Sometimes, Edward, you sound so very much like my father.”

“Your father,” says Edward, “was a wise man.”

For weeks afterward, there are no visitors to the quarry, and Elsa suspects that the story of the English
tatane
with her parasol has been tearfully recounted and embellished. But soon a man on horseback arrives on the crater’s rim. Elsa recognizes him as the man who led the islanders in song that first night on the schooner, his arms thickly tattooed, wearing the same hat he did then: a faded red velvet tricorn with a row of brass buttons. He looks to be in his forties. Thin brown curls, with a few streaks of gray, fall to his shoulder. He introduces himself as Te Haha Huke.

It appears he wants to make his services available, but what exactly these are it is difficult to discern. At first he seats himself atop a
moai,
his bony legs crossed, and begins to sing. His curls shift in the breeze; his eyes close as he loses himself in his song. But his voice, an unsteady flux of gravelly bass and bursts of soprano, distracts Edward. “Really, Elsa, I shouldn’t like him to think I’m declining his kind offering. However, I’ve a suspicion he’s inebriated. I should hope nobody would sing like that if he were sober enough to hear himself.”

Sensing their disappointment, the next day Te Haha returns with a guitar, strumming pleasantly atop the
moai.
They enjoy this, and attempt to show their gratitude by stopping work and sitting in the grass below his perch, but Te Haha soon tires of his own performance, shaking his head and muttering what seem to be admonishments.

“Nota bene,” Edward whispers to Elsa, “the so-called artistic temperament is not restricted to the European continent.”

When Te Haha next returns he sits for hours carving their likenesses in wood, a craft at which he is exceptionally skilled. Edward suggests to Te Haha that he could be of great use in other ways—could he help bring a bucket of water up the hill? Could he help move this pile of rocks? Could he hold this end of the measuring tape? Te Haha assists with a few of these tasks, but he is clearly bored—and Elsa can’t blame him. He sets his finger on his forehead to indicate for Elsa and Edward the source of his real strength—he is not a physical laborer; he is a man of the mind.

Well, thinks Elsa, perhaps he can help with my project. She tries to explain that she wants to learn the language.