The Dutch Wife (17 page)

He also acted as curator of a little museum in which the Maharajah’s ancestors had gathered the usual oddities: a stuffed, three-headed cobra, a hill tribesman’s hand with seven fingers (including two juxtaposed thumbs) and so on.

The centrepiece of the collection, however, was a ten-foot-high, one-thousand-year-old pyramid built from the preserved heads of the Maharajah’s male ancestors. Their expressions were exactly as they looked at the moment of death, and the family likeness (especially the huge ears) over a millennium was remarkable.

But from Rowland’s standpoint as an anthropologist, what made the job most valuable was the proximity of the library to the territory of a remarkable tribe in the foothills—the Kori. According to all reports, they had, over the course of time, reversed the normal behaviour of the sexes. Among the Kori, it was the women who were the swaggering, hard-drinking warriors. The Kori men, on the other hand, cleaned house, cooked and reared the children. Observers said the men were not happy with their lot. Their major complaint (when they were washing linens down at the riverbank with the other house-men) was that only when their wives were drunk did they show any affection.

Rowland had never heard of anything so odd and was looking forward to doing some definitive research on the Kori.

But before he could, a problem arose.

The problem took the shape of the Maharahnee of Bakhstan, who had personally interviewed Rowland for the library position. She had studied at Oxford and wrote poetry in the traditional Bakhstan forms. She was an enticing woman with a throaty voice and heavy, dark eyelids. One day, not long after Rowland’s arrival, in the midst of a discussion about new acquisitions, she told him—as though it were part of the job description she’d forgotten to mention at the interview—that she would expect him, like the preceding librarian, to be her lover. She was quite beautiful, and Rowland was not averse to that prospect. Till she added, as an afterthought, that in a palace with five hundred servants, their love affair would inevitably be discovered. Her husband, the Maharajah, in turn, would be duty bound to have Rowland decapitated.

From the way she said this, Rowland could see that, to the Maharanee, it should be an honour for any man to sacrifice himself in this way. He thought it better to inform her immediately that he’d forgo the honour.

The Maharanee’s heavy eyes now bulged with anger. Didn’t he understand, she said, that it was impossible to refuse? That she herself would be obliged to inform the Maharajah of the insult? That her husband would certainly have him beheaded for refusing his wife? Hadn’t anyone told him that this had been the fate of the previous occupant of his job? She’d give him just twenty-four hours to come to his senses.

Rowland didn’t need twenty-four hours. That night, in the darkness, he slipped out of the palace, carrying only his notebooks in a backpack, and braved swamps, jungles and the ubiquitous spoor of the Maharajah’s guard-tigers to escape to the relative safety of a neighbouring state.

IN THE TRAIN,
Rowland shook his head at the memory and smiled at Thomas. “Not the kind of predicament you’d expect a librarian to get into!” he said.

Thomas might have said he wasn’t all that surprised when the librarian was Rowland Vanderlinden. But instead he just smiled back.

THE TRAIN LEFT THE ROCKIES
far behind. It steamed across the flatlands of the western provinces like an ocean liner, its bow throwing up a great wave of snow. On an afternoon of low clouds, Rowland, sitting by the window, sipping a cup of coffee, put down his notebook.

“I’ve just been reading over my notes on my visit to the Institute for the Lost,” he said. “I went there not long after I left India. I must say, the Institute was a very interesting place. I wonder if it’s still in existence.”

“The Institute for the Lost?” Thomas said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it.”

“It was located on a island off the Great Barrier Reef,” said Rowland. “I went there to interview the founder. Doctor Yerdeli was her name—Hungarian, I think. She was one of the most famous psychologists of that time. She’d come up with the idea of manufacturing pasts for those who suffered from some irreversible amnesia.”

“Please tell me about her,” said Thomas.

“With pleasure,” said Rowland.

DOCTOR YERDELI WAS A TINY, DYNAMIC WOMAN
with an odd kind of stutter in her speech. She’d had such great success in her therapy that she’d begun to expand her scope. Now she offered the service not just to amnesiacs but to
all
who were dissatisfied with their personal histories. For a modest sum, she and her team of experts would invent a new, guaranteed original past, tailored to each client’s needs.

Rowland, like many of his peers, was skeptical. As Doctor Yerdeli showed him around the Institute, he said that, as an anthropologist, he believed in the
natural evolution
over time of individual histories and cultures. He wondered how she could justify such artificial interventions.

She said it all began with the infamous case of the Mackenzie family: two brothers and two sisters. When they were very young, their father—a doctor—had murdered their mother, cut off parts of her body and implanted them in the abdomens of the four children. They survived the awful surgery. He was hanged in due course.

By the luckiest of chances, Doctor Yerdeli, who was working in Outer Borneo at the time, came across one of the children—the younger brother, Amos. He was in a jungle hospital, dying and convinced he was slowly being transformed into some kind of tropical plant.

Doctor Yerdeli was convinced that his delusion was the inevitable result of his past trauma. She was certain, if she’d had the opportunity, that she could have invented a plausible, alternative childhood for him to believe in and he would have survived quite happily.

It was too late for Amos Mackenzie, but that meeting had inspired her to found her Institute.

Rowland spent one entire day with her, meeting her staff and clients, listening to her views, discussing, debating.

At the end of the day, she invited him to stay on at the Institute. He was flattered by her offer but turned it down, saying he didn’t have the kind of training that would be of any use to her.

Doctor Yerdeli raised an eyebrow when he said that, and Rowland realized that he’d completely misunderstood. It was as a patient, not a colleague, that she wanted him to stay. He was quite shaken and was glad when the boat for the mainland arrived and took him away from the Institute.

ROWLAND VANDERLINDEN LOOKED OUT
the compartment window. The snow was now falling so thickly that the world outside was blotted out. Only the noise of the wheels on the rails indicated that the train was still hurtling eastwards along the track.

Rowland looked at Thomas. “I wonder if she was right, not only about me, but about all of us,” he said. “I mean, that we’re all constantly trying to adjust our pasts to account for what we’ve become, and that often our narratives aren’t satisfactory—we don’t have the imagination to do them properly. Maybe if we allowed someone highly skilled to invent them for us, we’d have a better chance of being happy.”

“I’m sure I’ve read about the Mackenzies somewhere,” Thomas said. “I assumed it was just a silly piece of fiction.”

Rowland frowned. “Well, Doctor Yerdeli certainly told me the story as if it were the truth,” he said. “And I assumed she wasn’t the kind of woman who was capable of lying.”

ON A MORNING
when the snow was brilliant under a killing blue sky, the train, fringed with icicles, made its way across Manitoba. The landscape was so flat that no matter how loud the engine’s whistle, it couldn’t find an echo. Thomas had been enjoying a book he’d picked up in Vancouver:
Purchas His Pilgrimage,
a seventeenth-century travel book. Rowland was bent over one of his notebooks. After a while Thomas noticed that he’d put it down and was staring out the window. But his eyes were looking inward, at something visible only to himself.

At that moment, the Porter came in with a tray and poured them each a cup of coffee. Rowland sipped, then talked. “At one point in those days,” he said, “I decided to spend some time in South America, so I got on a ship in Cape Town, bound for Rio. We’d been at sea for only a few days when everyone noticed a bad smell coming from the drinking water.”

Thomas closed his book and listened.

THE CAPTAIN HAD TO MAKE A DETOUR
to the Island of St. Jude to replenish the water. The island was volcanic in nature, with a single mountain in the middle, like a handle on a lid. It had once been a thriving penal colony, then had become a settlement. But during a catastrophic storm, the settlement and the entire population had been completely erased by a great tidal wave.

The island was of great interest to Rowland Vanderlinden, because in its heyday a number of important sociological and anthropological studies had been written about it. The Captain gave him permission to go ashore with the watering party.

The ship anchored a half mile offshore under a heavy sky.

When the boats landed on the rocky shore, Rowland, along with the rest of the crew, was assailed by mosquitoes and stinging flies. As far as the eye could see there was nothing but a sleek, black, rocky plain running to the mountain. The very soil that had once been used to plant gardens on the island had been imported from abroad. The tidal wave had swept away both the soil and all the plants that grew in it, leaving the rock bare once more. Only on the higher slopes of the mountain was a little greenery still visible.

The watering party went past the area where the settlement had once stood. All that remained were a number of huge blocks of stone lying around, like parts of a game abandoned by gigantic children. These stones had been the foundations of the settlement’s battlements. Other small, geometrically shaped excavations in the bare rock were postholes indicating the location of houses and assorted structures.

The watering party now arrived at an excision the size of a football field and six feet deep. This had been the settlement’s cemetery, also filled with imported soil. The great tidal wave had scoured it clean.

For months after the disaster, ships had come across floating coffins, hundreds of miles from the island, with bones still inside some of them.

This massive indentation was now deep with rain-water. From it the crew began filling their barrels.

They had no sooner started than the sky, which had been very overcast, became even blacker, and flashes of lightning were seen around the top of the mountain. The crew were superstitious, so it didn’t take much urging for them to finish their work quickly. They trundled the barrels back to shore and loaded them into the boats in a swelling sea. As they rowed back to the
Cumner,
the only living inhabitants of St. Jude—those mosquitoes and stinging flies—escorted them all the way.

“I’LL NEVER FORGET THAT EXPERIENCE,”
said Rowland. “St. Jude was a symbol, if ever there was one, of just how flimsy is our grip on this earth.”

Thomas was silent. The prairies outside were flat and brilliant, stretching forever.

“It was an awful place,” said Rowland. “It was hard to believe anyone had lived there.”

This, from an expert in awful places, Thomas thought.

– 16 –

ROWLAND HAD ALLUDED, SEVERAL TIMES
on their journey, to one devastating matter he’d never before spoken about. Now, apparently, the moment had arrived. The train had passed along the shore of Lake Superior and was heading south through interminable spruce forests cloaked in snow. It was dusk, and Rowland’s thin face seemed even thinner than usual in the harsh overhead light of the compartment.

“I’d been doing some work along the Pacific Coast of South America at the time,” he said. “How often I wish I’d never gone there.” He took a deep breath and composed himself.

Thomas sensed what was coming. He made himself comfortable, but alert—the perfect listener, ready for anything.

ROWLAND HAD WORKED
at a variety of jobs—anything that intensified his knowledge of the Andean culture. One of the things he’d most enjoyed was assisting archaeological teams to explore Inca ruins in remote, high mountain valleys. He was on such an expedition when, on the very day of his thirty-fifth birthday, he came down with yet another bout of malaria. This time it was complicated by a pulmonary oedema brought on by the altitude—the ruins were in a hidden valley at ten thousand feet. The team’s medical doctor told him he might soon die if he didn’t get back down to Quibo, the regional capital, and rest up.

So, unexpectedly, Rowland found himself in Quibo, confined to a hospital bed for a week. When his breathing and blood pressure became normal, he left the hospital and checked into a cheap hotel in the Old Quarter. He had time on his hands and took the opportunity to explore the city. Three worlds collided in its architecture: the labyrinthine walls of the Incas, the colonial palaces of the sixteenth-century invaders, the tawdry barrios of the oppressed. Rowland found the mixture intoxicating.

During his convalescence, the position of Assistant Curator at the Quibo Museum of Andean Culture came open. He applied and was interviewed by the Head Curator, John Forrestal, an American who seemed to be in his sixties—a gangly man with greyish-ginger hair and a tall man’s stoop. The interview went well; they were comfortable with each other.

Forrestal told Rowland that the previous Assistant Curator had left for a better-paying civil service job. “But you,” he said, “seem to me the kind of man who has other interests in life than acquiring wealth.”

Rowland understood this to be both a compliment and an oblique hint that the salary wouldn’t be very high. “Thank you,” he said.

Forrestal stood up. “Welcome aboard,” he said. Through his office window, the brilliant Quiboan sunshine glinted on the fine ginger hair on the back of the hand he stretched out.

FORRESTAL HAD SPENT THE LAST TWENTY YEARS
trying to preserve ancient Quiboan artifacts. He was more dedicated than were many native Quiboans. Some of the Museum’s Board members actually had a hand in the pillaging of ancient graves and archaeological sites for the international black market.