Russell Hoban - Angelica's Grotto

‘Five thousand, two hundred and fifty,’ said Melissa, ‘from £470,000 leaves £464,750 which is still a nice little bundle to walk away with. Or are there more deductions?’

‘The insurance premium is one per cent of the hammer price.’

‘Five thousand! That leaves £459,750. Anything else?’

‘That’s it; Mr Duclos said they’re waiving the catalogue illustration fee, and according to my accountant the Inland Revenue doesn’t get any of this because the Indexation Allowance comes to more than one hundred per cent of the market value in 1982.’

‘That’s a mercy. So we’re talking about a final figure of £465,625.00. How much of that can you use to fund me?’

‘Funny — fund is a four-letter word.’

‘I love it when you talk dirty, Prof. Keep talking.’

‘Where were we?’

‘Funding me.’

‘I think I need to refresh my memory as to what I’m funding.’

‘How can I help you?’ she said, leaning back in the chair.

He knelt in front of her and slid his hands under her bare bottom. ‘I’ll think of something,’ he said with his face between her thighs.

Still the same evening. ‘Now, then,’ said Melissa. ‘We were going to talk numbers.’

‘“Ye shall not eat of any thing that dieth of itself,”’ said Klein.

‘What the hell’s that about?’

‘That’s from Deuteronomy, it comes after Numbers. It just popped into my head, I’ve no idea why.’

‘What you’ve been eating is still very much alive, Prof. What is it with you, post-cunnilingual depression?’

‘It’s not exactly depression — it’s just that every now and then I wonder how I came to be where I am.’

‘You mean where you are with me?’

‘With you, with everything.’

‘I notice that it happens after your treat rather than before.’

Watching her mouth and her steady blue eyes as she spoke, Klein thought that mercy was not a big part of her makeup. ‘Don’t you ever wonder about that?’ he said. ‘Don’t you ever wonder how you came to be where you are and doing what you’re doing?’

‘I know how I came to be where I am and doing what I’m doing. But for now I’m wondering if you intend to put your money where your mouth is — which might not be the best choice of words. Is you is or is you ain’t my sponsor? is what I’m trying to say.’

‘Hannelore and I had in mind to travel on some of the money from the sale of that painting.’

‘Who’s Hannelore?’

‘My wife. She’s been dead for a long time.’

‘Great. I’m deeply moved. I’m so moved that I think it’s time for me to go. Let me know when you’re ready to talk seriously about money. Otherwise stop rattling my cage.’

‘Are you in a cage, Melissa?’

‘I’m out of here, Prof.’ There was a rush of air as she picked up her shoulder bag and made her exit, slamming the door behind her. Klein listened to the sound of her heels receding into the night.

He looked again at the Sphinx drawing, the picture and the figure both divided diagonally into light and dark. From the obscurity of her face her hidden eyes looked back at him.

‘Dying sea skills cost islanders their lives,’ said the headline over an Associated Press report in The Times:

Suva, Fiji: Possibly hundreds of Pacific islanders die slow agonising deaths from sunstroke, thirst and starvation every year because they have lost the seamanship skills of their ancestors, it was claimed yesterday.

‘Today, about ninety-five per cent of Pacific islanders who fish at sea do so in small dinghies powered by poorly maintained outboard motors … They chase fish over the horizon, lose sight of their island and can’t find their way back,’ said Michael Blanc, who teaches basic sea safety skills in the South Pacific Commission’s fisheries programme.

Klein spent about an hour searching through his video collection until he found a documentary called The Last Navigator that he’d once taped from Channel 4. It had been filmed in Micronesia, which at the time had massage parlours and Burger Kings but no Disneyland. On the island of Satawal in the Carolines the navigator, Mau Piailug, was first seen with a circle of stones on a mat and a group of less-than-keen children whom he was attempting to teach the star-compass memorised by his ancestors. ‘I’ll continue to voyage,’ he said, ‘and if I’m not disabled, or too old or dead I will pass my knowledge to the next generation.’

As a demonstration of the traditional skills, Piailug had organised the building of a sailing canoe for a 500-mile voyage with an adult crew from Satawal to Saipan in the Marianas. Piailug was perhaps in his forties; his compact brown body was sea-tempered and ready, his face intense with the island-finding spirit. ‘We men should think only of our strength,’ he told his crew, ‘we are not children. When we’re on the canoe it is my role to tell you the talk of the sea. Remember the canoe is our mother and the navigator is our father.’

The vessel herself seemed as eager as Piailug; she was a creature of quickness and memory, a magic of wind and wood, winged with a landfall-hungry sail, rigged with ropes of nothing-forgotten, keeled with the shape of answer-the-sea. At the start of the voyage Piailug, at the helm of the outrigger canoe, sang to his crew:

I sing of this canoe, our canoe,

of the life of the spirits, the life of people.

Be with me, spirit,

on the small beach, on the wide beach,

on the beach of my island -

I sing of this canoe, our canoe.

Out of sight of land Piailug’s eyes were attentive day after day to the colours and shapes of clouds, to the winds that shifted or were steady, and to the swells. At night he steered by the stars that successively rose over the horizon on the chosen course, each night bringing the mother canoe and her children closer to the loom in the sky, the reflected light of the island landfall, and the tiny speck of land in the wide, wide sea. He had no instruments, only himself, his thousandfold memory and the dead who sailed with him, chanting the names of winds and swells and stars.

The outrigger canoe seemed less a man-made thing than a natural part of sea life, the sail as inconspicuous against the sky as the wing of a tern. Watching that swift and urgent vessel hissing through the blue water Klein was riveted. Saipan safely reached, he shook his head, then sat for a while whispering into his hand. He didn’t want to hear what he was saying.

‘I’m lost,’ said Klein.

‘In what sense?’ said Dr DeVere.

‘In the sense of I don’t know where I am.’

‘Can you elaborate?’

‘I am of a people who have always been fearless navigators of the mind. The dead sail with us as we make our way from idea to idea, steering by the stars and sea-marks named by those before us. Such a wide, wide ocean! But you always know where you are by the waves, by the swells, by the loomings and the stars. Then one dark night the waves change, and the swells; the winds blow from not the usual quarters. Black squalls come, and heavy seas, the stars are blotted out, the wind moans in the rigging. You suddenly realise that you might never make your landfall, you might drown. A great wave hits the boat and takes you with it, you feel yourself going down, down, down and then you don’t know any more which way is up and you can’t hold your breath a moment longer and the wild wide ocean fills your lungs and then you’re gone: down among the dead men.’