‘I—’ Every face was turned to us and to our strange way of talking. Teket told me it sounded to him like cracking nuts. ‘I didn’t want to get underfoot.’ She continued to look at me through Martin’s glasses, which made her eyes comically round. ‘Remind me how to say hello.’
‘Hello and goodbye are the same. Baya ban,’ she said. ‘As many times as you can stand it.’ Then she turned to face the room. She pointed to me and spoke a few brief staccato sentences, fast but with no ear for the rhythm of the language, which surprised me. She went round the room telling me every person’s name and I said baya ban and the person said baya ban and I said baya ban and Nell cut that person short with the next person’s name. After she had introduced them all, she called to someone back behind the screen in what I assumed was the kitchen area, and two boys came out, a stumpy naked one with a theatrical smile, and a more reluctant tall one in long shorts, clearly Fen’s, tied tight at the waist with thick rope, his razor-sharp shinbones below. I exchanged greetings with each of them. Several of the children were giggling at Bani’s outfit and he quickly retreated behind the screen, but Nell called him back.
‘What were you doing just now, with those cards?’ I asked.
‘Ink blots.’
‘Ink blots?’
My ignorance amused her.
She weaved, and I followed, through the tangle of legs and all her equipment to the large mosquito room. The desk closest to us was layered in papers and carbons, notebooks and file folders. There were a few books open near the typewriter, with sentences underlined and notes in the margins, a pencil resting in the crease of one of them. The other desk was empty save for a typewriter still in its case, and no chair to sit in. I would have liked to sit at the messy desk, read the notes and the underlinings, flip through the notebooks and read the typed-up pages in the folders. It was a shock to see someone else doing my work, in the midst of the very same process. As I looked at her desk, it seemed a deeply important endeavor to me, though when I looked at my own it seemed close to meaningless. I thought of how she had gone straight to my workroom in Nengai, how respectful, almost worshipful, how she’d wanted to help me solve the puzzle of the mango leaves.
She’d realized her hair was floating in the humid human air, and she hurried to plait it back behind her, tying it off with a rubber band in one quick gesture. I could now see the tall stalk of her neck. She handed me the top card in a small stack. It was exactly that, a blot of ink, a mirror image of nothing in particular on either side of the center, though it was not homemade and there was no crease down the middle.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘They’re Fen’s, from when he studied psychology.’ She smiled now at my confusion. ‘Sit.’
I sat on the floor and she sat beside me and pointed to the big black smudge with its identical sides. ‘What does this appear to be?’
I didn’t think ‘nothing’ would earn me high marks so I said, ‘Two foxes fighting over an urn?’
Without comment she flipped to the next one.
‘Elephants in large boots?’
And the next.
‘Aren’t you supposed to refrain from smirking at your patient?’ I said.
She forced her lips down. ‘Not smirking.’ She jiggled the card at me.
‘Hummingbirds?’
She put the cards down. ‘Holy crow. You can take the man out of biology but you sure can’t take the biology out of the man.’
‘That is your complete diagnosis, Herr Stone?’
‘That is my observation. The assessment is a bit more unsettling. Highly and disturbingly abnormal. Elephants in large boots?’ She laughed, hard. I laughed too, and a lightness came over me. I felt as if I could float up to the ceiling.
‘How could these possibly be useful here?’ I said.
‘I find that most anything can shed a little light on the psyche of a culture.’
The psyche of a culture. I nodded, but I wondered what she thought that meant. I wished we could sit alone with a cup of tea and discuss it, but her work was through the mosquito net and I didn’t want to disrupt her morning any more than I already had. ‘May I observe you with them?’