Tahmima Anam - The Bones of Grace

The professor pulled at his scalp. ‘Got the greys to prove it.’ He chewed in silence for a minute, then said, ‘You have to keep everything in balance.’

I waited to see if he would explain. ‘You describe Ambulocetus beautifully,’ Zamzam said to me.

My eyes started tearing again and I rubbed them roughly, wishing I’d never taken liberties with the whale’s story. ‘My parents didn’t want me to come,’ I said, my voice unnecessarily loud. ‘They said it was too dangerous.’

‘Danger is relative,’ Jimmy said.

‘No one wants their kid to grow up and hunt fossils,’ Bart said.

‘Your parents have nothing to worry about,’ Zamzam said. ‘I can assure you.’

‘Anyway,’ Bart said, ‘we have our secret weapon.’ He fanned out his fingers behind his head and gave me a broad smile, displaying his betel-stained teeth. Then he closed his eyes and appeared to dismiss us. I didn’t ask him again how he’d received all the right permits and approvals, how he’d gotten the blessing of the local tribesmen, and he wouldn’t have told me anyway, that he had made a set of agreements that were held in place through a careful balance of bets and payments. He would have considered it an acceptable procedure; after all, according to him, in countries like these, some transfer of human life would be unsurprising, a kind of ransom to which we would all be subject, and lines had to be crossed to get at the treasure beneath our feet.

Jimmy showed me around the rest of camp. The tents were arranged in a semicircle around a central area that served as an open kitchen. Bart and I were each given our own tent, and Jimmy and Zamzam were sharing. There was a cook, a driver, a pair of guards, and a few local men who had been recruited to help us to break through the dense red shale. When our predecessors had mined this area, the bones they had found were encased in layers of red-bed sequence that were as hard as cement. If we wanted to get a complete specimen out of the ground, we would have to first quarry the area with our tools and then blast through the rock with explosives. Zamzam was in charge of the dynamite, which he kept buried in a tin trunk on the southern edge of the site.

Later, after I’d eaten another round of curry and stone bread, I ran into Zamzam outside the makeshift toilet. He was holding an empty can of water. The evening was cool and quiet. I had taken an antihistamine and I was feeling slightly better.

‘Have you seen Stupendemys geographicus ?’ he asked.

I felt myself light up. ‘Just a few days ago. You know it?’

‘Only photographs. How fortunate you are to have seen it for yourself.’

He was right, I was lucky: I had walked the hallways of Wilson and Gould, seen Kronosaurus and Stupendemys and the Glass Flowers. Held hands with you. I wondered what had motivated him. ‘What made you come?’ I asked.

‘My father thought it was a terrible idea.’

I smiled. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘Some other time, perhaps.’

He darted away and I looked back to see him walking at a fast pace towards his tent, the night sky above us lit up with a fraction of moon and a dense scatter of stars.

We started at dawn, driving west in a pair of jeeps with a tiny pink sun at our backs. I noticed our guard was wearing something of a uniform this morning, a half-sleeved shirt and a pair of light khaki trousers. The gun tucked into his belt was visible when he turned his back and adjusted his turban against the wind. The hills were jagged, softened occasionally by plumes of wild shrubs. Against the horizon we could see a thin scattering of acacia trees. The Suleiman range appeared to retreat into the distance, though we were actually approaching it — a trick of the savannah — and finally we stopped at a site about two hundred yards across, marked off by Jimmy and Bart as they had prepared the location.

Jimmy was a sedimentologist — he would examine the bed of the Tethys for the environmental context of Ambulocetus and try to re-create the landscape from which the shale had been formed. The hired men would use sledgehammers to bring down large chunks of red rock and then Zamzam, Bart, and I would sift through each one, examining the broken stone with bits of bone and teeth scattered within it like flecks of white confetti. From the first moment the physical exertion was soothing in its simplicity. We baked in the heat, fierce even at this early hour, and, though it seemed there was no movement in the air, soon our skins were dusted red with the powder of the dried sea. That first morning went by very quickly, and we returned to camp for a late lunch, remaining inside as the afternoon blazed, cleaning, sorting, and setting up a rudimentary system of cataloguing what we had found.

I lasted a week. On the second Monday, Bart found me leaning against a rock with my head between my knees and ordered me off site. I was dehydrated, and the sunburn behind my neck had blistered. One of the guards offered to drive me, and I sat next to him in the front as he raced the jeep back to camp, speaking to me only once, to ask if I needed a ride to the hospital in Multan. I said no and spent the afternoon on top of my sleeping bag, angry at myself for succumbing to the environment. I had a lot to prove — not just to the others, because I was the only woman there, but also to myself, to my sheltered childhood, to my parents and even to you, Elijah.

I had decided that my week with you was the start of a new me. I would use it to turn myself into the sort of person who knew exactly what to expect from the world. I would no longer be the pampered only child of two doting parents. When I died the invitation to my funeral would say ‘Palaeontologist. Adventurer. Rock-Slayer. Amphibian. Ninja’. I would be difficult to surprise, intractable. Even funny. Yes: I would develop a sense of humour, a dry, intimidating one. I kept repeating the word ‘Ninja’ to myself, smiling until my lips cracked.

I turned on my phone and of course there was no signal. The battery was almost dead, but I scrolled through my song list and chose the Nina Simone version of ‘Here Comes the Sun’. I felt a strong desire to hear your voice, to tell you about this place, the searing pain at the base of my neck where the desert had pierced my skin, the aniseed scent that followed Zamzam around everywhere as he chewed on stalks of wild fennel, and the packed crimson rock that held its secrets so close. You realise, don’t you, Elijah, that this is the way you worked your way into my heart? Not just in those days together in Cambridge, but in the aftermath, when I couldn’t stop talking to you, when every turn of my story included a footnote of conversation as I pictured how you might respond, the way the desert light would catch your hair, the effect of the parched, history-heavy air on your voice. What would you have made of all of this, the green flags of our tents on the lunar surface of this ancient place, our little argument with time? That is, I know now, how people fall in love — in the words they recite to each other, the images they weld out of their abbreviated encounters, narrating themselves into the sort of connection that they will later refer to as fated.

In the evening, Zamzam and Jimmy brought me dinner and some sachets of oral rehydration salts. Zamzam put a sachet on the ground next to my sleeping bag, and I thought I heard his footsteps retreating, but he was rummaging around in my backpack, looking for water. He tore the sachet open and poured the contents into my flask.

‘Did you find anything?’

‘Only the murmurings of ghosts,’ Zamzam said.

I opened my eyes and noticed that his face was leavened by pale-green eyes. ‘I’ll be back on site tomorrow,’ I said.