30
The plane leaves at oneP .M. and both Vicente and Mahina are there to see her off at the airport. Sven and Isabel helped load her bags and said their good-byes at theresidencial . Now there is a commotion at the cargo bay as her crates and cores are loaded, and they all watch as her work of eight months is sealed inside the plane.
Mahina is strangely silent as the other passengers line up beside the plane, as though Greer’s departure is an unexpected betrayal. She has dressed for the occasion, though—a dress of white cotton printed with small yellow flowers; flowers that, Greer thinks, don’t exist. Fashion flowers. Around her neck is a shell necklace.
“Thank you for the books,” Greer says, tapping her backpack.
That morning, as Greer was packing up her toiletries and sealing her duffels, Mahina came by with a stack of books. “For thedoctora ,” she said, and placed them, one by one, onto the mattress. They were leather-bound, a faded burgundy, titles lettered in gold along the spines. The collection from the glass armoire above the desk. Greer lifted one book and opened it. Charles Robert Darwin,The Voyage of the Beagle, London, 1839. The front page was embossed:
Ex Libris
E.P.B.
Greer ran her fingers along the pages, the binding.
“But, Mahina. You wanted to sell these. These are Darwin. First editions. They’re extremely valuable. I can’t take them.”
“They are your kind of books. What you like to read. And they are a present. If you refuse my present, well, I refuse yours.”
“You are a tough woman,” said Greer.
“Yes,” said Mahina. “I am a tough woman. And I have enough to try to read with your paper. I cannot be troubled with so much English in my lifetime.” And she left Greer to put the books in her pack, calling Ramon to help load the duffels into the Jeep.
But Greer doesn’t know how Mahina feels about her own gift. She’s said nothing yet of her plans to leave. Greer will have to wait for Vicente to let her know if Mahina used the ticket. Hopefully Mahina will climb onto the plane and wave good-bye to her island, at least for a little while.
Vicente begins pacing. “So, Germany,” he says. “I’m sure there is some good wet ground there for coring. Come visit. Call it a research trip.”
“Where’s your first stop?”
“The beginning. Strasbourg. Where von Spee lived.”
“Strasbourg? France?”
“Only after the war. It used to be German.”
“I have a friend in Strasbourg I’m thinking of visiting.”
“Then you’ll have two friends in Strasbourg.”
He unwraps a cone of tissue paper and hands her a single daisy. “For my favorite botanist.”
“Vicente.”
“And the daisy, I am certain, is the flower that means ‘I will see you soon.’ ”
“Precisely,” says Greer, saddened by this reminder of all their conversations. How quickly one forms a past, even while trying to escape another. She puts the flower behind her ear. “I’ll miss you, Vicente. You’ve been wonderful.”
“We will meet again. I am sure of it. The flower says so.”
“I never argue with flowers.”
She turns now to Mahina and opens her arms. “And you . . .”
“Iorana,” says Mahina. “I mean both now. You come back,Doctora .”
“Someday,” says Greer. In this good-bye she can hear the echo of every other good-bye she has ever said. “I’ll be back.”
“You will come back to see themoai standing,” says Mahina.
Just the day before, they have learned of a new “moairestoration project” through SAAS. A team of French archaeologists will spend a year restoring a row ofmoai on the coast to their upright positions. The islanders have mixed feelings—themoai have been down for over two hundred years, and everyone is used to them that way. Greer, too, is undecided—the toppled statues tell the island’s true story, of its tragic collapse, but perhaps this project will become part of the island’s story as well: rebirth.
“Yes,” says Greer. “I must see that.”
The Lan Chile stewardess at the base of the portable stairs now waves the passengers forward. Greer embraces Vicente, who kisses both her cheeks, and then her forehead, saying simply “Strasbourg.” Then Mahina takes off the shell necklace and places it over Greer’s head. “Doctora,” she says.
“This is me.” Greer picks up her backpack, heavy with her new books.
She approaches the stewardess. It is the woman from her flight here eight months ago. Still smiling.
“Iorana. Buenos días.Hello,” she says, taking Greer’s ticket. At the top of the steps, Greer turns to Mahina, points at herself climbing onto the plane. “See how easy?” she shouts, and with a last wave, she ducks into the plane.
She takes the pillow from her seat and props it behind her neck. She has a long day and night of travel ahead. Santiago. New York. London. Reykjavik. And then the small expedition plane to Surtsey, twenty miles south of Iceland.
She has reviewed the necessary materials for the project. The island is volcanic, like Easter, but new, unblemished—just barely ten years old. It has seen growth, with no corruption yet. Sightings have already been made of sea rockets decorating the island with purple and white flowers, and the small pink blooms of sea sandworts. Even as she sits here, new seeds are pressing toward it. She imagines thousands of fern spores floating on the wind. All the box beans and Mary’s beans and morning glories, all the seeds on all the creatures bobbing on driftwood, carried by the current, waiting to take hold, to root themselves, to push through the darkness, into light, where a new life awaits.
The propellers spin and the plane begins to trundle down the runway. Greer looks once more out the window, but now the tarmac is empty, the glass of the airport a blur. Her seat shudders as the engine pushes the plane into the air, onto the current, and soon she is looking down on the island as it fades from view.
Climbing through the clouds, above nothing but ocean, the plane steadies. She glances around the cabin: several American tourists, already sleeping; a young European couple, perhaps German, holding hands; an older woman, Chilean, with two small girls beside her.
Greer pulls her backpack from beneath the seat and removes one of Mahina’s books, a copy ofOn the Origin of Species . She sets it in her lap, and falls asleep.
Hours later, on another plane, above another ocean, Greer awakens from a deep sleep and realizes she is almost there. To calm her nerves, she opens the old, weathered copy of Darwin and begins to read. The leather binding is soft, bleached at the corners. The pages are crinkled. There is some faded pencil underlining in the book, which no doubt compromises its value as a first edition, but then again, she has no intention of selling it. She finds the simple statement that has always made her pause:
No one ought to feel surprise at much remaining as yet unexplained in regard to the origin of species and varieties, if he makes due allowance for our profound ignorance in regard to the mutual relations of all the beings which live around us.
And beside the passage, this other reader, this invisible friend, has written in a neat and unmistakably feminine script—letters long and curled—the simple word:Lovely.
Greer looks out the window, at the island emerging. There, below her, is the emerald shimmer of newly sprouted plants, a broad-winged bird gracefully circling the shore, a white flower winking amid a thick blanket of green. Everything glistens with the urge to live.
Her hands rest gently on the book.
It is lovely, isn’t it?
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction, although several characters were inspired by historical figures:
The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European voyagers mentioned were all real people. Excerpts of their accounts of Easter Island are from the translations in John Dos Passos’s compilation of travelogues, Easter Island: Island of Enigmas.
The legend of Hau Maka’s dream presented in the book’s epigraph is a compilation of legends from various sources, particularly Thomas Barthel’s The Eighth Land: The Polynesian Discovery and Settlement of Easter Island.
Graf von Spee was the real vice admiral of Germany’s World War I East Asiatic Squadron, which did anchor at Easter Island before the battle of the Falklands. Von Spee’s actions on the island, however, were entirely invented for the purposes of this story. Graf Spee’s Raiders by Keith Yates, Coronel and the Falklands by Geoffrey Bennett, and The Long Pursuit by Richard Hough provided information about the movements of von Spee’s fleet. The scene in Tsingtao, in which von Spee learns of the outbreak of war, is a fictional synthesis of several incidents.
The expedition undertaken by Elsa and her family was inspired by the 1914 expedition of Katherine Scoresby Routledge and her husband, wonderfully described in her book The Mystery of Easter Island. It is worth noting that the Routledge expedition did not go missing from the island, but returned safely to England.
The ecological history of Easter Island presented is factual. The first thorough examination of the Easter Island pollen record was started in 1977 by Dr. John Flenley. In 1984 John Flenley and Sarah King were the first to publish evidence that Easter Island was once forested by palm trees.
Two books pertaining to island biogeography were of particular importance in my research: The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen, a remarkable volume, and Island Life by Sherwin Carlquist, published two years before MacArthur and Wilson published their monograph formalizing the field.
Thomas’s angiosperm research is based on the work of several people who searched for magnolia pollen in that era. The Enigma of Angiosperm Origins by Norman F. Hughes was helpful to me in understanding Thomas’s process. As I write this, however, the magnolia is no longer considered the first flower. Through genetic analysis done in the 1990s, Amborellacaea, Nymphaeacaea, and Illiciacaea are now considered the first angiosperms.
In 1955, the first Easter Island moai was re-erected by Thor Heyerdahl at Ahu Aturi Huke, near Anakena. Ahu Akivi was restored in 1960, and subsequently Ahu Tahai, in 1967, both by Dr. William Mulloy. Ahu Nau Nau at Anakena was restored in 1978 by Sergio Rapu Haoa. Between 1992 and 1995, the fifteen moai at Ahu Tongariki were restored to their upright position by a joint team from the University of Chile and from Japan, with the Japanese TADANO corporation funding the project. Currently, only about seventeen percent of the statues that once stood upright have been re-erected, and most are still in danger of erosion. To protect the statues, an ongoing effort is under way through the Easter Island Foundation and other organizations to raise funds for preservation.
The rongorongo, where it originated and what it means, still remains one of the great mysteries of Easter Island.
Acknowledgments
For their invaluable comments on this manuscript I would like to thank Dr. Margaret Davis, Dr. Sara Hotchkiss, and Dr. Patricia Sanford. Dr. John Flenley, whose work on the Easter Island pollen was the inspiration for Greer’s work, was of great assistance, as was his paper The Late Quaternary vegetational and climatic history of Easter Island. And a special thank-you to Dr. Georgia Lee, Easter Island expert, for lightning-speed answers to my endless questions.
Maururu to Maria Huke Rapahango and family for their great hospitality and kindness, and to Ramon Edmunds Pacomio, Rapa Nui guide peti etahi and friend.
For the time to write this book, I am deeply indebted to the James McCreight Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the Colgate University Creative Writing Fellowship. Particular thanks to Peter Balakian, Frederick Busch, Linck Johnson, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Leila Philip, and Ron Wallace.
I was blessed with several extraordinary teachers along the way: Robert Stone, Caroline Rody, Barry Hannah, Stuart Dybek, and Ethan Canin.
For friendship, feedback, patience, and all else: Emilie Baratta (who read this book more times than a friend should have to), Justin Cronin, Leila Hatch, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Richard Powers. For their perpetual good cheer, energy, and time: Margo Lipschultz, Patrick Merla, and Johanna Tani.
A million thanks to my spectacular editor, Susan Kamil. And thanks to Irwyn Applebaum, Nita Taublib, and the wonderful team at Bantam Dell.
And last, but far from least, this book would not exist without Maxine Groffsky, agent extraordinaire and so much more.