Servants of the Map. Andrea Barrett

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СКАЧАТЬ the complexities and politics, the secrets underlying everything. Until he left England, he thinks now, he had lived in a state of remarkable innocence. Never, not even as a boy, had he been able to fit himself into the world. But he had thought, until recently, that he might turn his back on what he didn’t understand and make his own solitary path. Have his own heroes, pursue his own goals. But if his heroes are spies; if his work is in service of men whose goals led to bloodstained rooms and raining flesh—nothing is left of the world as he once envisioned it.

      He wanders the city and its outskirts, keeping an eye out, as he walks, for Dr. Chouteau. He must be here; where else would he spend the winter? Stories of that irascible old man, or of someone like him, surface now and then; often Max has a sense that Dr. Chouteau hides down the next alley, across the next bridge. He hears tales of other travelers as well—Jacquemont and Moorcroft, the Schlagintweit brothers, Thomas Thomson, and the Baron von Hugel. The tales contradict each other, as do those about Dr. Chouteau himself. In one story he is said to be an Irish mercenary, in another an American businessman. Through these distorted lenses Max sees himself as if for the first time, and something happens to him.

      That lost man, whose skull he found when he first arrived in the mountains—is this what befell him? As an experiment, Max stops eating. He fasts for three days and confirms what the lost man wrote in his diary: his spirit soars free, everything looks different. His mother is with him often, during that airy, delirious time. Dr. Chouteau strolls through his imagination as well. In a brief break in the flow of Dr. Chouteau’s endless, self-regarding narrative, Max had offered an account of his own experiences up on the glacier. His cold entombment, his lucky escape; he’d been humiliated when Dr. Chouteau laughed and patted his shoulder. A few hours, he said. You barely tasted the truth. I was caught for a week on the Stachen Glacier, in a giant blizzard. There is no harsher place on this earth; it belongs to no one. Which won’t keep people from squabbling over it someday. The men I traveled with died.

      When Max hallucinates Dr. Chouteau’s voice emerging from the mouth of a boatwoman arguing with her neighbor, he starts eating again, moving again. The old maps he’s been asked to revise are astonishingly inaccurate. He wanders through narrow lanes overhung by balconies, in and out of a maze of courtyards. The air smells of stale cooking oil, burning charcoal, human excrement. He makes his way back and forth across the seven bridges of Srinagar so often he might be weaving a web. Temples, mosques, the churches of the missionaries; women carrying earthenware pots on their heads; barges and bakeshops and markets piled with rock salt and lentils, bottles of ghee—his wanderings he justifies as being in service to the map, although he also understands that part of what drives him into the biting air is a search for Dr. Chouteau. If Max could find him, if he could ask him some questions, perhaps this unease that has settled over him might lift.

      As winter turns into early spring, as he does what he can with his map of the valley and, in response to letters from Dehra Dun, begins preparations for another season up in the mountains, his life spirals within him like the tendril of a climbing plant. One day he sits down, finally, with Laurence’s gift to him and begins working slowly through the lines of Mr. Darwin’s argument. The ideas aren’t unfamiliar to him; as with the news of Cawnpore and the Mutiny, he has heard them summarized, read accounts in the newspapers, discussed the outlines of the theory of descent with modification with Laurence and others. But when he confronts the details and grasps all the strands of the theory, it hits him like the knowledge of the use made of Dr. Hooker’s maps, or the uses that will be made of his own. He scribbles all over the margins. At first he writes to Laurence simply to say: I am reading it. Have you read it? It is marvelous. The world is other than we thought. But a different, more complicated letter begins to unfurl in his mind.

      A mountain, he reads, is an island on the land. The identity of many plants and animals, on mountain-summits, separated from each other by hundreds of miles of lowlands, where the alpine species could not possibly exist, is one of the most striking cases known of the same species living at distant points, without the apparent possibility of their having migrated from one to another … the glacial period affords a simple explanation of these facts.

      He closes his eyes and sees the cold sweeping south and covering the land with snow and ice, arctic plants and animals migrating into the temperate regions. Then, centuries later, the warmth returning and the arctic forms retreating northward with the glaciers, leaving isolated representatives stranded on the icy summits. Along the Himalaya, Mr. Darwin writes, at points 900 miles apart, glaciers have left the marks of their former low descent; and in Sikkim, Dr. Hooker saw maize growing on gigantic ancient moraines. The point of Dr. Hooker’s work, Max sees, is not just to map the geographical distribution of plants but to use that map in service of a broader theory. Not just, The same genus of lichen appears in Baltistan and in Sikkim. But, The lichens of the far ends of the Himalaya are related, descending from a common ancestor.

      It is while his head is spinning with these notions that, on the far side of the great lake called the Dal, near a place where, if it was summer, the lotus flowers would be nodding their heads above their enormous circular leaves, by a chenar tree in which herons have nested for generations, he meets at last not Dr. Chouteau, but a woman. Dark-haired, dark-eyed: Dima. At first he speaks to her simply to be polite, and to conceal his surprise that she’d address him without being introduced. Then he notices, in her capable hands, a sheaf of reeds someone else might not consider handsome, but which she praises for the symmetry of their softly drooping heads. Although she wears no wedding ring, she is here by the lake without a chaperone.

      The afternoon passes swiftly as they examine other reeds, the withered remains of ferns, lichens clustered on the rocks. Her education has come, Max learns, from a series of tutors and travelers and missionaries; botanizing is her favorite diversion. He eyes her dress, which is well cut although not elaborate; her boots, which are sturdy and look expensive. From what is she seeking diversion? She speaks of plants and trees and gardens, a stream of conversation that feels intimate yet reveals nothing personal. In return he tells her a bit about his work. When they part, and she invites him to call on her a few days later, he accepts. Such a long time since he has spoken with anyone congenial.

      Within the week, she lets him know that he’d be welcome in her bed; and, gently, that he’d be a fool to refuse her. Max doesn’t hide from her the fact that he’s married, nor that he must leave this place soon. But the relief he finds with her—not just her body, the comforts of her bed, but her intelligence, her hands on his neck, the sympathy with which she listens to his hopes and longings—the relief is so great that sometimes, after she falls asleep, he weeps.

      “I have been lonely,” she tells him. “I have been without company for a while.” She strokes his thighs and his sturdy smooth chest and slips down the sheets until their hipbones are aligned. Compactly built, she is several inches shorter than him but points out that their legs are the same length; his extra height is in his torso. Swiftly he pushes away a memory of his wedding night with long-waisted Clara. The silvery filaments etched across Dima’s stomach he tries not to recognize as being like those that appeared on Clara, after Elizabeth’s birth.

      He doesn’t insult her by paying her for their time together; she isn’t a prostitute, simply a woman grown used, of necessity, to being kept by men. Each time he arrives at her bungalow he brings gifts: little carved boxes and bangles and lengths of cloth; for her daughter, who is nearly Elizabeth’s age, toy elephants and camels. Otherwise he tries to ignore the little girl. Who is her father, what is her name? He can’t think about that, he can’t look at her. Dima, seeming somehow to understand, sends her daughter off to play with the children of her servants when he arrives. Through the open window over her bed he sometimes hears them laughing.

      Dima has lived with her father in Leh and Gilgit and here, in a quarter of Srinagar seldom visited by Europeans; she claims to be the daughter of a Russian explorer and a woman, now dead, from Skardu. For some years she was the mistress of a Scotsman who fled his job with the East India Company, explored in Ladakh, СКАЧАТЬ