Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

“You were so humiliated, I thought you’d kill me on the spot!” laughed Ella.

The sound of a baby crying dried the conversation. Ella looked expectantly at Maud, who sat calmly drinking her tea and trying to quiet her heartbeat. She simply could not bring herself to go and check on her children. It was a stupid, unfounded fear, but she felt paralyzed in her chair. It took her a while to realize that she hadn’t completely ruled out the incredible idea of the babies speaking, and this troubled her. As the dry, plaintive cries resounded through the house, only to be magnified when the second twin began crying, Maud saw Ella smirk with the nervous delight of finding a new topic. For Ella was one of those women for whom it was never too late to betray old friends; great gossip was life to her, so that it was difficult to side with people when a decent story could be lost.

“Aren’t you going to tend to them?” Ella sounded baffled, but somewhere in those words lay a challenge.

Maud settled her saucer on the table. “If you pick up a child every time it cries, you will be picking that child up for the rest of its life.”

They drank without speaking as the cries intensified. Maud tried to talk casually, but it seemed absurd; they had to raise their voices to be heard, all the while pretending this was normal. Maud was so anxious to determine if she’d be hearing about herself on the street that she couldn’t respond thoughtfully to anything Ella said. Ella rose to leave, and putting on her coat, she grew serious and gave Maud a grave, searching look.

“Tell Samuel to take the twins off your hands and get yourself a good night’s rest,” said Ella and left.

Maud was mortified. By the time she reached the bassinet the babies were dozing just as she’d left them half an hour ago, so that the eternal crying seemed like another hallucination. But Ella had heard it, too. Maud grew humiliated, knowing Ella thought childbirth had weakened her reason, and she despised herself for caring more about appearances than her children. But she had done it for the good of the family name, after all. She spent the last hours of the afternoon watching the twins sleep, and resolved not to mention a word of what had happened to Samuel.

Yet, when Samuel came in, his rain-logged blazer slung fussily over a forearm, the twins were the first subject on her tongue. Samuel grew nervous as she followed him to their bedroom and helped him out of his frail, bitter-smelling clothes, tossing them across the rack to dry. She sighed, then sat on their sensitive bed without making it move. Strangely, the weight of carrying twins had almost left her body, and in lapses that betrayed just how deeply this new country had altered her thought, she bragged about having “good genes.” She was even thinner than before they had married, when just the sight of her awkward bones made him mournful for the destitute child she’d been. Now Samuel felt uneasy near that body. “What are you muttering about?” he asked.

Maud looked toilworn, as if she’d aged a year since morning. But her voice retained its vigour. “In less than a week you’ll have to drag me off to Ponoka,” she said. “You know I heard the twins talk today?”

Samuel placed his briefcase on the bed beside his wife. “It is much too early for such things.”

“I’m just saying what I heard.”

“What is it they said?”

“Only one spoke. She said her name was Annalia.”

Samuel felt a pang of self-consciousness and walked behind the closet door to dress. “A child must have a name before she herself can say it. Your conscience is telling you it has been too long.”

“It’s not like naming a cat or a recipe. Even God took his time.”

“He created the whole world in the time you have taken to choose a simple name.”

A gust of rain sprayed the house, and looking at the window, Maud collapsed into the sagging pillows. “It’s not like you’ve shown any genius in this business of names. Just use the Thursday name and ‘Ata’ for ‘twin,’ he says. A backyard ditch in a world of indoor plumbing.”

Samuel stepped from behind the closet door, his pantwaist wallowing mid-thigh. “After my mother.”

Maud continued to look out the window.

Samuel finished dressing, the rain making him melancholy. The noise of it hitting the foliage opened in him the memory of his uncle’s labourers in Gold Coast, who came in from the downpour to share their only meal of the day with his family. He smiled sadly as he stepped from behind the closet door, buttoning down his collar. “So what will you call them, then? Annalia?”

Maud addressed the window. “They say a child’s face will name itself, but … why did we complicate the world with names in the first place?”

But their angst over names was nothing when compared with their initial depression over Maud’s pregnancy. Samuel’s own father was virtually unknown to him, so he felt deeply perplexed by the role. Maud wandered the house repeating how impossible it was, absently patting her stomach. Her father’s parting words had killed all her ambitions, so that pregnancy seemed as likely as winning the Nobel Peace Prize. She had spent her childhood serving that father, who groomed his hatred like a favourite horse. Maud’s mother had died giving birth to her, and in a joke that became a promise, her father vowed to break one of his daughter’s bones for each year of his wife’s life. This seemed utterly strange and ironic to Maud, for her father was the village’s most accomplished polygamist, with a tedious hatred for the wife who’d just died. But he was also a man of his word, and Maud left school behind for ten bouts of bilious fever, two broken ribs, a fractured tailbone, a week-long blindness in one eye and hands worked so raw they were nailless.

After months of praying for salvation, it finally came. Maud was granted a nanny position with a missionary family returning to their lives on the Canadian prairie. Keeping her escape a secret was no easy chore, for the people of her compound, dragged down by the monotony of life, made other people’s business their household entertainment. But her luck held, and one day she gathered her meagre belongings into a fishnet and carried it to the dirt road. During the interminable wait she felt nostalgic for the home a few yards behind her. The air carried silt into her eyes, and when she set her bag down to rub them, her father stepped from the shadows of the compound where he’d been folding crude roots into his pipe and calmly walked over to pick it up.

“And where is it you are going?” he asked in their language. He took something from her bag. “And with this photograph of mother? Eih? You thieving? You thieving to sell this?”

Maud felt sick. If the escort car hadn’t arrived, the missionary father calling from a lowered window, she might have returned to the compound. Her father, always dignified under the eye of foreign strangers, affixed a smile to his face while slipping the picture of Maud’s mother into his robes. He handed Maud her bag with perverse decorum and, speaking under his breath, said, “Death comes soon to those who kill their parents. Abandon me and your mother’s spirit will fell your husband and dry your insides to stone.”

Distraught, she climbed into the car, watching her smiling father wave until he couldn’t be seen from the road.

It takes no great empathy to see why she never returned, or to explain her utter failure as a nanny, without the first knowledge of children’s needs or the instinct of love to compensate for her ignorance. Discharged within a few months, Maud received a sympathetic fistful of cash and was left to make a living in a country that had no need of her. Though plagued with menial jobs, and living in the basements of churches, during these years she learned to read, using homemaker magazines and a dog-eared copy of the New Testament. She sounded out the words, enunciating to shave her origins from her voice. By the time she met Samuel, only her tribal marks, still visible under face powder, gave her away.