Three Views of Crystal Water. Katherine Govier

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      ‘Don’t look,’ his father said when James screamed. ‘He’s doing penance.’

      The hour stretched on and the sun inched its way over to the west, where India lay. The boy wanted to see the divers.

      ‘The best are called Malawas and are from the Tutacoreen shore,’ said his father, speaking of them as if they were dumb animals, although James was certain they understood. ‘They’re Roman Catholics. A long time ago St Francis Xavier went to the coast of India and baptised the people. Because they’re Christian, they don’t work on Sundays but they also observe any festival, Hindu or Mohammedan. They want protection of all the gods, and you would too if you had to earn your living under a ton of water.’

      James wanted to see them go down, so his father contrived for them to go out in one of the diving boats. They set sail for the banks at ten that same evening with the landward breeze. James lay on a wooden seat under a robe with his head on Papa’s lap. The sky overhead was a whirl of southern stars, brighter than any he had ever seen. The divers sat on the bottom of the boat, silent, dark, strangely passive shapes. There were ten of them, and several sailors on each boat. His mind went to where theirs was–he saw a shimmering heat, foul smells, salt, and wonderment. Then darkness. Tomorrow might bring their death.

      He must have slept. The dawn was a miracle of gold and pink, with clouds shaped like a funnel through which the daylight poured. He watched the divers oil their bodies, and talk amongst themselves. Each had his set of equipment, ropes, and a large red stone shaped like a pyramid with a hole through the top. Each man picked up the rope and the stone with the toes of his right foot, and the net bag with the toes of his left. He held another rope with his right hand, and, keeping his nostrils shut with the left, jumped into the water and, riding on the stone, sank, rapidly toward the bottom.

      James rushed to the edge of the boat. The water was so clear that, by hanging over the thwart, he could see to the bottom. Plunging, the divers became blurred black figures with wavy appendages. When the stones hit bottom they threw themselves flat on the sand and began to swim like insects. They were picking up oysters which lay on the sandy slope and thrusting them into the bags. After a minute, they pulled on the rope and the rowers, who now held the other ends, pulled hand over hand to raise them back to the surface.

      And so it went, for hours. When they came to the surface, the divers spewed water from their mouths and nostrils. Sometimes their ears were bleeding. They unloaded, took deep breaths, and picked up their stones with their toes, then they threw them overboard again. They went down fifty times, and each time returned with a bag holding easily a hundred oysters. The boat was filling up with the thorny, grey shells; as they lay in the sun the two halves began to gape. James saw one man slip a wooden wedge in the gap. He watched without letting on as the man ran his finger inside the half opened shell, feeling for pearls. And once at least, James thought the man found what he was looking for.

      He had few places to hide a pearl, this diver. He put his hand up and casually wiped his eye. James realised that the pearl was gone–into his eye. He did not tell Papa for fear the man would be punished. If sharks were near they were not biting. James sat in dread and fascination, watching the shining black men who shot in a stream of bubbles straight down into the crystal blue that extended to murk. They were down for what seemed like for ever, then they began to reappear, raised majestically like statues that had been buried.

      This was his indoctrination to the pearl hunt. ‘I would like to be a diver for pearls,’ he said solemnly then. But his father said no. ‘No white man could ever go to those depths.’

      At noon, the wind changed to blow them back to Ceylon. They sailed in, slowly, and when they neared the beach the oars came out. The gun fired and all the trading and singing stopped. The tied elephants brayed. The tambourines rattled to a climax; the crowd began to run toward the shore. Everyone stared out to sea. Owners and investors, fakirs, traders all, in their eyes a look James was to see more than he ever imagined–a look that was avid and fearful. These men had gambled everything on the find of pearls.

      He had listened to his papa well, and understood that no one knew how good the oyster fishery would be. Perhaps the starfish had wormed their way in and eaten the flesh, or the seaweed growing on the shells had killed the animal. The anticipation became a murmur. The murmur became a roar. The sea wind with its sting of salt and sand blew in the waiting faces. Finally the boats were within calling distance. Then everyone–jewellers and boat-owners and officials with sticks in their hands, entertainers with monkeys on their shoulders, with skirts flying and veils lifting, robes flapping against legs–began to move toward the shore.

      First James and his father’s boat landed, and then another and another. Amidst the shouting and embracing, the boy understood that there was a huge haul. A great cheer and a roaring began. The soldiers stamped about, excited for their chance to bid and make a fortune. The horses whinnied.

      The divers sat, bent over at the chest as if all the air had been pushed out of them. They were shivering, even though it was very hot in the sun, cold inside their dark, oiled skin. Their thin extended ribs made their chests look like birdcages. They alone were silent. James could not take his eyes off them. These men consumed him; those who descend. He remembered a poem from school, Keats’s ‘Endymion’: ‘a moon-beam to the deep, deep water-world’. If they spoke and we listened, what would we learn, the boy wondered

      But the divers were herded off to be searched.

      James made his way in the pearling business, though not as his father would have had it. He was known neither for acuity nor gambler’s instinct, or skill at selling. He’d be remembered as the one with the gift of the gab, a man of words, armed with a poem when a dirkin or a kreese might do better. Some thought they could get the better of him because of this tendency, but it rarely happened. John Keats and his fellow poets were good company, better, he judged, than his country folk, the English, with their lordly manner.

      The next day James and his father stayed on shore with the traders. Late in the day there was a commotion as one of the boats came in. He thought at first they’d taken on a log and laid it out on the nets between the divers’ feet. Then he understood that this burden was a man. He could see the black head and arms. It was a diver, his lower body wrapped in a sail. The sail was soaked in blood. The man had lost his leg to a shark.

      The boy saw his face; his eyes were closed, his mouth open, as if he had looked on something of awe and had retreated inward. The leg was with him at the moment although James understood it was discarded later. He and it were a strange colour of grey.

      There was an outcry, then, about the shark binder. Right on the spot the military Poo-Bah brought him up to account. The Superintendent was high on his horse. He bellowed and the conjuror ought to have quaked, but he was consummate in his act of defiance.

      ‘A man has been attacked by a shark? Shark binder, it is your task to keep the sharks away. How can you explain the failure of your charms?’

      The man stood firm, if you could call his fantastical gesturing firm, undulating his torso and sniffing the breeze for a message, or an excuse. The whole affair was understood as theatre, amongst the Europeans, and the conjurors, too, but not amongst the divers. They stood wide-eyed with terror, but obdurate. It was in their power to shut down the entire fishery; they need merely refuse to sink. It was a lesson to James. The naked ones, because they risk death, had the power.

      A crowd gathered around these two men. Papa and he moved in to hear. The shark binder defended himself, waving his arms weirdly and impressively and calling out explanations that surely made no sense even to him.

      ‘What does he say, what does he say?’ the English asked.

      ‘He СКАЧАТЬ