‘Hallo the house!’ I’d heard this in an American frontier film once.
I waited for someone to emerge but no one did, so I climbed up and stood on the narrow porch and knocked on one of the posts. The sound was absorbed by the voices inside, quiet, nearly whispery, but insistent, like the drone of a circling aeroplane. I stepped closer and pulled the curtain aside a few inches. I was struck first by the heat, then the smell. There were at least thirty Tam in the front room, on the floor or perched oddly on chairs, in little groups or even alone, everyone with a project in front of them. Many were children and adolescents, but there were men, too, and a few nursing mothers and elderly women. People moved across the room with purpose, as if they were in a bank or a newsroom, yet in a distinctly Tam style, weight back and bare feet making a sort of smooth slide forward. Every few minutes I had to turn my head to the side to take in cooler, less fetidly human outdoor air, like a swimmer turning for breath. The smell of humanity—without soaps, without washing, without doctors to remove the rot of teeth or limbs—is pungent even outdoors at a ceremony, but inside, with the blinds down and the fire lit to keep away the bugs, it’s nearly asphyxiating. Slowly I became aware, as I did my peering in and sipping of the air behind me, of all their belongings. I’d thought the two hundred porters to get up to the Anapa had been an exaggeration, but now I understood it had to be true.
They had brought bookshelves and a Dutch cabinet and a little sofa. At least a thousand books lined the shelves and spilled onto the floor in great piles. Oil lamps rested on end tables. Two writing desks in the large mosquito room. Boxes and boxes of paper and carbon. Photography equipment. Dolls, blocks, toy trains and rails, a wooden barn with animals, molding clay, and art supplies. And great coffers of things still unpacked. In the smaller mosquito room I could see a mattress, a real mattress, though it did not seem to have a box spring or frame, and sat on the floor looking swollen and out of place. I didn’t understand how it was that the Tam weren’t pawing over their things, pressing the typewriter keys and tearing pages out of books, as the few Kiona children I’d ever let in my house had done. Nell and Fen had established an order—and a trust—I’d never even aimed for.
Just when I thought I should stop spying and return to the center of the village to find them, a little boy in the corner shifted on his hip and I saw her. She was sitting cross-legged, a little girl in her lap and another brushing her hair. She held up a card to a woman facing her. The woman, whose son was nursing vehemently on a breast that looked tapped out, said something and they both laughed. Nell made a few notes then lifted another card. The Tam had a way of holding their chin out, as if someone were holding a buttercup beneath it, and Nell was holding her chin out this way, too. After she had gone through a small stack of cards, a man came and took the woman’s place. When Nell got up to get something on her desk, I saw she’d picked up their smooth glide as well.
The boy who’d moved was the one who saw me first. He hollered and she looked up.
She quieted down her guests and came to the doorway. ‘You’re here,’ she said, as if she’d expected never to see me again. I’d hoped for something a bit warmer. She was wearing Martin’s specs.
‘You’re working.’
‘I’m always working.’
‘All your things came. And they’ve built you a house,’ I said stupidly.
She was so small, Tam-sized, and I hung over her like a lamppost. Her hair had been brushed out by the little girl into a wild airy froth. Her wrists were too thin, but she looked rested and the color had come back to her face. I felt overwhelmed by the presence of her, which was even stronger in actuality than in memory. It was usually the reverse with me and women. I was aware now of how hard I’d tried six weeks ago not to find her attractive. I hadn’t remembered her lips and how the lower one dipped in the middle, brimming over. She wore a blouse I hadn’t seen, light blue with white spots. It made her grey eyes glow. She felt mine somehow, wearing my brother’s glasses. But she was formidable now, with her health and her work. She looked like she did not know quite what to do with me.
‘I didn’t want to miss the euphoria. I haven’t, have I? You said it happened at the second-month mark.’
She seemed to stop herself from smiling. ‘No, you haven’t.’ She looked back to the man to whom she’d been showing the cards. ‘We’d given up on you.’