Arturo Serrano - To Climates Unknown - An Alternate History of a World Without America

“Excuse me,” said the clerk. “Either I stamp the señorita’s papers or you need to leave the queue.”

Rukkamma took her papers from her father’s hands, walked to the desk, and presented them.

The clerk made the necessary notes in his ledger. “I’m giving you provisional booking on an airship to Mozambique. Routes via the Philippines are not the safest these days. You’ll be departing tonight, and once you’ve landed, you can decide where you want to go from there.”

“What’s the colonial language in Mozambique?” asked Sagunabai.

The clerk closed his eyes to remember. “The current governor is Catalan, so that’ll be the preferred one. But the locals still use Portuguese.”

Sagunabai nodded. “Rukkamma, can you speak Catalan?”

“I’ll manage.”

Finally, they left the queue and sought a quiet place to calm down. The professor was surprised at the ease with which his wife had jumped to accept Sagunabai’s proposal, and while he could see the sense in that plan, he also felt as if an essential organ were being removed from him. “Rukkamma, take this suitcase. Read the books. That’s the only weapon we have. We must be smarter than them.”

She accepted the suitcase with hesitation. “I know these books are important to you, but if they’re in Sanskrit, I won’t be able to make much use of them.”

“I know, and I’m sorry that we didn’t start with that. I wish we’d had more time. But you’ll have Sagunabai to teach you.”

The old woman smiled. “Professor, we have helped each other in numerous ways for many years. While we await the end of the colony, it will be my pleasure and my honor to take care of Rukkamma.”

Lakshmi embraced her daughter and held her in her gaze, refusing to blink until the image of each was burned in the other’s eyes. “You are a good girl. Be a good woman.”

“I wish,” said the professor, embracing Rukkamma in turn, “that I could make these things not happen. I wish I could make all this not be real. But you know me. I’m a worshiper of truth. I can’t betray it, and I won’t make promises that are easy to say but shall vanish. I wish I could assure you that we’ll meet again. But there is much to do here, and the things I need to do are going to drag me farther from you. What I can give you is this: be loyal to truth. If you do that, I won’t lose you.” He looked with tears at Sagunabai and said, “All our hopes go with you.”

“Don’t be afraid. I spent my young years, and the years that came after, learning to teach girls. This is the thing I’m good at. Rukkamma’s going to make you proud.”

Night, August 10 (Gregorian), 1938

Likasi

Once she was certain that her mother was busy downstairs, Neema ran back to her bedroom, uncovered the pinhole on the wooden box her father had given her on her last birthday, and stood in front of the candleholder with her arms raised in front of her and her hands tied in a shape she’d practiced all week long and which when seen from a certain angle resembled the shape of an elephant. She held her breath and tensed her arms to keep them from making the smallest movement; the most important part of shadow picturing was avoiding a blurred projection. She had trained herself to last an entire minute with her lungs full, but she knew she’d need to stay still for ten times that long to produce a good shadow image. Her father had warned her that Chinese silver paper was very expensive and she must not use it up all at once, but he was away on a work trip, and she was bored.

As her lungs neared their endurance limit, she decided to start releasing tiny puffs of air to relieve the growing urge to breathe again and maintain her posture. Of the many things her mother had taught her, the most vivid in her mind was that problems were solvable for those who learned enough about them, and she’d learned about respiration and gases in her mother’s books. Only last year, she’d learned the word vitálico , the name for the invisible substance in air all living creatures needed. To distract herself from the discomfort that threatened to break her stillness, she tried reciting in her head the lesson she’d memorized that time: first distilled and isolated in China, but reported of in the western world by Iberian Jesuits, vitálico was colorless, odorless, and tasteless. Pure vitálico made oils explode and left scorching marks on wood, but was useful as a remedy for respiratory ailments.

The sound of the front door of the house opening and her mother’s voice distracted her from these recollections, but she managed to not flinch. She let out some more air, careful to not let the movement in her torso extend to her shoulders. There was a cheerful tone in her mother’s conversation, but she resisted the curiosity to see what that was about. She wanted to get this shape right. Not even the unmistakable tearing of gift wrapping was going to ruin her effort. A dozen previous attempts had resulted in unsightly blemishes because she’d sneezed, or she’d gradually slid into slumber, or her hands’ grip on each other had slipped, or a draft from an open window had made the candle flicker, changing the angle of her shadow and thus the borders of her projection. Too many things had to be just right for a proper image to form. It had occurred to her to simply cut a paper in the desired shape and hang it between the candle and the box, but some impulse inside her that she couldn’t name revolted against that easy solution. For her it was important that the extraneous silhouette of an elephant in the middle of an otherwise ordinary picture of her bedroom came from her own hands.

Her lungs couldn’t wait any longer and she finished releasing the rest of her air before taking a badly needed gulp in a less controlled manner than she would have preferred. It seemed to her that her arms hadn’t shifted much, and she decided against trying to overcorrect the movement by making a contrary one that might take her even farther from her original position.

While she was debating with herself whether she ought to declare this attempt failed as the others, someone knocked at her door.

“I’m busy!”

“Neema, open the door. It’s me.”

That voice untied the knot of her hands and drew her running to the door to welcome her father.

“Come here, little one. Did you miss me? Look what I’ve brought for you.”

She felt silly for not having deduced that the lively sounds from downstairs had been his arrival, but the thought vanished from her mind and her eyes opened in delight at the size of the book he was holding. She took it carefully, amazed at its weight. “This book is larger than my face!”

“Let’s hear you read the title.”

She opened the leather cover and found the title page. “It’s in German!”

“It is. Your mother promised me she’d start teaching you some German while I was out. Can you tell me what this book is about?”

She concentrated on the words until they finally came to mind. “It says, Rocks of Germany . It’s a book about rocks.”

“I wish I could’ve found a book about the rocks of Zaire, but it appears few people want to write about us. Maybe you’ll write that book when you’re older.”

“I don’t know how to write a book in German!”

“Then write it in Kiswahili. We could use more books of our own.” He kneeled next to her and pointed at the name under the title. “Look at that mouthful! Imagine that instead of all those weird names, like,” and he read, “Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt, this had something closer to home, like Neema Sagunabai Farnana Hiriyanna. Would you like that?”

Her face was one big smile. “How do I write a book?”

“First, read a lot.” He stood up. “I’ll let you have a look at those rocks; I need to tell your mother all about my trip.” Then he noticed the wooden box. “Oh, I’m sorry. I interrupted your shadow puppets.”