The Tattoo Artist (18 page)

The man lifted a camera and aimed it at us, while the woman slipped out of her red sandals, eased herself off the wing, stepped into the water, and waded toward the beach. When she got to the rocks, she put her sandals back on, stepped onto the pink sand, then shielded her eyes from the dizzying sun with a bare blond arm and asked for me by name. A sudden wind gust tore the chiffon kerchief off her hair, and she reeled around to catch it.

I hadn’t heard my full name in nearly three decades.

After securing the pink kerchief with a double knot under her chin, she hooded her eyes once again, with a hand this time, and swept her gaze over the tapestry, as you might inspect an unfurled bolt of silk for a snag.

“Mrs. Ehrenreich? Sara Ehrenreich?” she asked again, all the while searching our faces, one after the other, all the way down the line. “I’ve brought news of home and a few mementos that might interest you.” She opened a purse slung from her shoulder and took out what looked like a couple of photographs. “I’ve also brought gifts for the Ta’un’uuans.” She waved to the photographer. He lowered his camera just long enough to unlatch the cargo hatch near the plane’s tail.

I could make out bright-colored boxes in the dark underbelly. I couldn’t see what the packages contained, but I certainly recognized the palette of the modern world.

She smiled at the fisherboys and they shyly smiled back. “If one of you gentlemen will volunteer his canoe, we can bring the gifts ashore right now.”

The right half of the tapestry was quaking to come undone and see what the whites had brought them. I could almost feel sparks running down the line of young bodies, whereas on my end, the faded fringe, we watched with deep skepticism.

One of the fisherboys couldn’t hold himself back any longer. He sprinted for his canoe. Then the whole right side began coming apart. It advanced toward the woman, encircling her. She looked as if she were being rolled up in a Persian rug. Easing herself free of the fisherboys and young mothers, she approached us elders, two old men and twelve old ladies, one of them me.

“I’m from
Life
magazine. You must remember
Life,
Mrs. Ehrenreich.” Her eyes never stopped scanning our old tattooed visages for something recognizable. She shuffled through her two photographs, picked one out, then held it up for each of us to study. The picture was taken at my debut exhibit at Gloria Vanderbilt Whitney’s salon. Philip and I posed in the main gallery. I recognized Philip’s hobnail boots and my boa, though our faces were somewhat out of focus. I also recognized the drawing of my
davening
father behind us,
City of Coffins.
“What makes you think she’s still alive?” I asked. I’ve never lost my accent.

A faint smile played at the corners of the young woman’s coral lips as she studied my face again, couldn’t take her eyes off it. Her own expression was a mix of fascination and revulsion. Untattooed faces are so easy to read.

“The scientists aboard the USS
Neptune
told us.”

A steel boat, about the size of a tugboat, had anchored offshore during our last dry season. The men on board had offered to trade us their cigarette lighters for fresh fruit and water. We then offered to trade our carvings for tobacco and canned fruit. They told us they were astronomers, men who study the heavens, and that they’d come to our island to witness a total eclipse of the sun. They explained what a total eclipse of the sun was, demonstrating with three coconuts. The Ta’un’uuans knew perfectly well what a solar eclipse was. It’s a shadow cast by the world of the dead on the world of the living. The scientists invited all the youngsters on board to look through their giant telescope. That night, I paddled out in a canoe, and I asked if I might look, too. The men were topside, sharing a bottle of Courvoisier. A bearded one helped me up the rope ladder and offered me a sip from his glass. He called me “auntie” and asked where I’d learned my excellent English. I told him at a missionary school. The cognac smelled medicinal and achingly familiar. I took a sip, then another, until I polished off the whole glass. I held it out for a refill. He exchanged looks with the others, then politely replenished my drink. On my fourth cognac, he jokingly asked, “Where did a nice old auntie like you learn to drink like that?”

“At the Savoy. Though I prefer Hennessy,” I said. The man’s expression was no less flabbergasted than if, say, the ship’s cat had quipped up that she preferred one brand of tuna over another. When the scientists finally recovered from their shock, they plied me with questions. The cognac had taken effect: I vaguely remember answering one or two. Then I asked to see the stars. They led me to the prow of the ship and sat me beside the giant telescope. A redhead showed me how to focus the eyepiece. I placed my eye against the cold glass. I could no more comprehend that I was witnessing the staggering beauty of the stars in close-up than I could accept that the sweet aftertaste on my tongue was really cognac. That’s when I got the inspiration to engrave the firmament on my tongue’s tip.

“The scientists said they’d met you last year, Mrs. Ehrenreich,” the young woman said.

I took the picture of Philip and me out of her hand and examined it closely—the yellowing paper, the frayed edge, the scratches. Philip was a tall blur with a white mane, and my boa was in sharper focus than my face, but I could make out every line in my drawing, every decision, every mistake.

“I’ve got others. All sorts of documents. Would you like to see them, Sara?”

“Where did you get this?”

“Do you mind if I call you Sara? I searched old archives. Rumors of your existence have circulated for years. Soldiers from the Second World War claimed they’d met a stranded American woman on a South Pacific island. There was even talk of you and Amelia Earhart being one and the same.”

She started to show me an old newspaper clipping, but I looked away. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see it.

The fisherboy had just finished loading the gifts into his canoe and was now paddling ashore. The photographer was crouching on the prow, taking pictures. By the time they reached land, the tapestry was in such tatters anyway that the elders abandoned their places to see what the canoe contained. I turned to join them.

“We just want to talk to you, Sara,” she shouted after me. “I’ve brought lots of pictures. I’ve brought copies of
Life
dating back to the year you disappeared. Men have walked on the moon. We’ve cured polio. Movies are in color. Aren’t you curious?”

The youngsters were holding themselves back until I joined the other elders for the blessing of the cargo, a row of boxes on the beach. The chief’s first wife, Laadah’s oldest daughter, picked up a small one and held it toward the sun, trying to see if the container was transparent enough for her to peer through the designs and see what was inside. She motioned for me to take counsel with her. She whispered that no one on Ta’un’uu had ever before seen the hard shell that the cargo gestated in. She was surprised to find that it was tattooed. She asked me if the shells themselves were the gifts, or if there was something more inside. I didn’t recognize any of the products pictured on the boxes. I didn’t recognize the trademarks emblazoned across the cardboard. I no longer recognized the words. Maybe it had been too many years. Or maybe a whole other language had been invented during my absence.

When the boxes were finally opened, the contents disappointed the islanders. Though the younger set found ways to use the wristwatches (the men wore them at the base of their penis gourds), the elders had no use for the walkie-talkies, or the bicycle, or the gadgetry I could no longer name. The steak knives, however, were prized by everyone. While the youngsters examined the cargo, the elders studied the broken shells. They remarked on the beauty of the shells’ colors, the precision of the tattooing, the simplicity of the designs, then tried to piece them back together again. They carefully aligned halved flaps that had been torn open in haste by the youngsters, then sealed shut the wounds with tree gum.

When the boxes were whole again, they called for their children to carry the beautiful shells to the village and hang them up in the meetinghouse next to the carvings.

I was sitting in front of my own shell, a plain cardboard box of old
Life
magazines, and a second photograph of Philip and me. The reporter was seated across from me, her photographer fifty feet away, as if to give me my privacy, but I recognized a telephoto lens.

“We couldn’t carry the whole library, Sara. There were more than fifteen hundred magazines. We brought mostly covers, as you can see, but I did go through the stacks to select a few issues I thought might interest you.”

I picked up the second photograph: Philip and me marching down Fifth Avenue, our mouths open in song, our fists raised, our stride so confident. It almost looks as if our side had won. It was taken during the Rockefeller protest. I recognized the placards. But when I looked more closely at Philip—I couldn’t tear my eyes off him—I noticed white dust from the plaster ruins of Rivera’s mural on his threadbare overcoat and a cast of exhaustion in his eyes.

“I found them in the archive at the Museum of Modern Art. Did you know the museum has one of your paintings hanging in its collection?” She checked her notes. “
Self-Portrait
Without Vanishing Point,
1923
.
”

So they prefer my early work.

I put the photograph back in the box, under the magazines. I had no intention of weathering the deluge of memories that image was about to unleash with that camera pointed at my face. When the reporter saw her photographer wasn’t going to get a picture of the old castaway breaking down, she lifted out one of the magazines and placed it in my hands.

“We thought it might be easier on you to begin at the beginning. Isn’t that the month you and Philip disappeared?”

Rosalind Russell was on the cover. The price was 10 cents. The date read September 4, 1939.

“I found records of your passage, old copies of Philip’s and your passport applications, a bank draft in Philip’s name from the Swiss banker, Richter. Weren’t you traveling on a Japanese ocean liner?”

I lifted out a handful of covers and caught the scent of old paper. I hadn’t smelled that particular must in so long. I laid them in my lap. They were very fragile. The paper had aged even faster than my skin. Gingerly, I begin leafing through them. A tiny submarine. German U-boat, the title read. Mus
solini. Summer Fashions. The Military Look. Claudette Colbert
in a sailor cap. I turned over
Claudette Colbert.
A Viceroy cigarette ad was on the back. It featured a tuxedoed man and a woman in furs smoking Viceroys in a hansom cab on Fifth Avenue. For a moment, this silly ad almost unleashed what the photograph of Philip and me hadn’t, but I held myself in check.

“How did you end up here, Sara? Why did you stay?”

Betty Grable. Skating Fashions for Winter. Kids’ Football. German Plane. French Sentry.

“When did the war begin?” I asked.

“For us?” She leaned over the box and grabbed another handful of images. She hadn’t even been born. The war was ancient history to her. I noticed this stack included pages. An American flag was on the top cover. The caption read, U.S. Goes
to War.
The date,
December 10, 1941.

One by one the elders came over to see what my shell contained. They squatted behind me at a respectful distance, peering over my shoulder, careful not to let their shadows be cast on the images. It was impolite for someone’s shadow to darken a tattoo before it was completely healed, and they didn’t know how fresh these images were.

Sunken Battleships. Nursing Shortage. Coastal Defense. U.S.
Warplanes. USO Singer. Barrage Balloons. Ginger Rogers.

When the elders saw that the ink wasn’t coming off on my hands, that there was no blood on my fingertips, they moved closer and formed a half circle around me, picking through the magazine covers themselves, careful not to tear the friable paper. They didn’t know there was an order to the covers, and even if I’d told them, I’m not sure Western dates would have made much sense to them. Besides, they weren’t interested in the latest movie star, they were studying images of the war.
Torpedoed
Ship. War Glider. Soldier in the Snow. Captured Nazis.
Bombs exploding. A soldier making a victory sign in front of a giant marble swastika. And photographs of skeletons. Skeletons staring through barbwire. Skeletons looking out from dark shelves. Skeletons watching the machinations of the living with dazed, sunken eyes. A burly American soldier, spade in hand, kneeling before an enormous pit of charred human remains that he and his unit had just unearthed.

The elders asked me whose death was being avenged, and why did so many lives need to be sacrificed for it? And who would treat the human dead like this? And how did the bones at the bottom of the pile make it to the sanctuary of their ancestors? Is this the world you come from, Sara?

One by one, they pressed their foreheads against mine and walked back to the village, leaving me alone with my dead. A Ta’un’uuan never wants to be alone, especially in times of grief, but they knew me so well.

The reporter placed her hand lightly on mine. “You don’t have to go through them all now,” she said. “They’re yours to keep, Sara. You must have so many questions. You must feel so . . .
overwhelmed.
”

I wasn’t sure what I was experiencing at that moment, but I certainly didn’t want this young lady with her blank, unmarked face to name it for me.