Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

Like many lonely children, Inge retreated into a life of the mind. Her family still had a grand library, damp in the winter from the leaking roof but gloriously full of books. She read voraciously. She liked the plays best: the Greek tragedies, Shakespeare’s histories, Molière’s farces. Her tutor Mr. Trimble, a dapper little man straight from Dickens, taught her to read Latin and French, and she devoured the books of Hugo and Flaubert. She read Melville’s Typee and dreamed of adventures on the South Seas. And when she was quite old, perhaps twelve or thirteen, Mr. Trimble discovered she had read no faerie stories (for their library contained none) and brought her the whole of George MacDonald’s collected tales. The mustachioed governess disapproved. She did not believe little girls should be taught untrue things; that such lessons would take root in the mind and cause appalling flights of fancy. But Mr. Trimble kept the books in his rented room in town, and brought Inge a steady supply. She thought At the Back of the North Wind was the loveliest book she had ever read, and she vowed that someday she, too, would leave her lonely home and her small village and her cold, distant family, and that she, too, would ride the wind, right up to those little islands in the sun-soaked parts of the world. And she thought she might take Mr. Trimble with her — even though he was older than her father, and rather crumple-faced and pockmarked — because he understood that the most important things in the world were the kind you made up for yourself. And also because he wouldn’t take up very much room in the boat.

Photograph: Snapshot of a telegram, rain-smeared, ink-run, and largely illegible. Crumpled and torn and missing corners, yellowed not from age but from handling .

The first demon Inge buried was Albert, though he never would stay under for good. It was just like him; he was as stubborn and vain as she was. And so aside from books, floating over the sea and the rivers and the island streams, even under the great heart-eating love of Set — there was always and always Albert. She remembered trailing her older brother everywhere when he was home on holiday, begging him to teach her to shoot pheasant when she was just six. She remembered how she learned about their mother from him: that she was blond and fond of blue, like Inge; that she was beautiful and tone-deaf; that despite her brilliance, her English was always a little broken. Inge remembered Albert teaching her a mouthful of the German he’d learned from their mother. Bitte und danke. Gern geschehen .

She remembered how her older sisters, when home from school, would mock and mimic the way the youngest child trailed the oldest. She remembered their lace frocks and airs, the rich boys from Belfast they spoke of, the cold eyes they rolled at her as she sat with a book before the fire. Changeling, they called her, and they told her she was a faerie child, switched at birth for their real sister. But they never dared torment Inge in front of Albert. They knew he would, as he often threatened, slap the smirks off their silly faces.

Inge remembered agreeing to let Albert read her all of Kipling’s Jungle stories, even though she’d already read them many times by herself. She remembered sewing her own suffragette sash, greeting him at the door when the car brought him back from Trinity one gray winter day. He’d told her all about his pretty girlfriend, how she wouldn’t marry until women had the vote. Inge remembered being angry. How dare this woman deny her Bruder anything? She would be a better suffragette than his girlfriend; she would cook him dinner and bring him his slippers every evening, she told him. She remembered her shame when he laughed at her, and her relief, complicated and fierce, when he told her he would always love her best of all.

And she remembered when the family stood outside in the rain and waited as the boy on the bicycle pedaled slowly up the winding road through the fields from the village. They watched him with agonizing stillness, a boy growing from a pinprick to a person. She remembered how he finally stopped in front of the manor. How they held their breath and watched his hands, those terrible child’s hands, bringing them a piece of paper they could never be rid of. She remembered her father’s face, gone paler than the paper. And she remembered thinking, ashamed of the thought even as it surfaced: Now I have no one at all.

Curiosity #7: Adult American grizzly bear’s left incisor, circa 1904. Removed after death .

The first thing Set remembered in his own short life was the bear. Of course, “remember” is a tricky term; rather, he thought about the bear — the huge hungriness of it, the small black eyes, the limp, lank fur, the almost leisurely way it was loping toward him — in the kind of piled-up, fuzzy, impressionistic way the young mind has of cataloguing things. The bear, he was later told, was part of a visiting circus from Hamburg; its unfortunate name was Bumbles and it was trained to stand on its hind legs and eat dangled fish. But Set did not remember any of this: not the bright, garish colors of the circus tent, nor the off-key organ music, nor the screams of the other children as the bear, starved and beaten, tore its trainer’s arm off before turning to the plumper, less threatening residents of the surrounding stands. Set remembered only the bear itself emerging, a god from the void, and the scarlet pain of the huge jaws on his head, the clutch, the clamping, viselike; then the jet of red, the small black eye exploding backward, the furious roar, the heavy sudden slump of fur. He remembered, then, how Cedric holstered his gun and how he rose in the melee, throwing Set over his huge shoulder like a sack of flour. He remembered growing cold, and wondering why, and wondering also that any human, even Cedric, could stop a thing so large, and he remembered a sense of sadness, too, that a thing so large could be dead. He remembered Cedric’s frantic, half-mouthed exhortations to some god or other, layered over the low moans of horror from the circus crowds. He remembered nothing more, then, for a long while after.

Curiosity #17: Heavy cavalry officer’s saber, circa 1821. Used by British lieutenant during the Second Boer War; periodic sharpening, indicating a bloodied blade .

After the bear, Set sensed that everything had changed, though he didn’t know quite why. He woke gradually to these strange new days, feeling almost nothing at first, remembering almost nothing at all. There was a cave just behind his breastbone; it was a drafty, dark place he would come to think of as his hollow. And his family hovered. Other things, too, were different: people seemed smaller, and when they spoke their voices seemed to come from somewhere very far away. There seemed almost a hush hanging over his home. Set became slowly accustomed to these differences, and he learned to mask his feelings, his perceptions about the world. He learned a new kind of smile for when there was nothing to smile about. He became inwardly solemn and outwardly placid, by all appearances an ordinary little boy.

It was decided that Set needed a holiday, so Cedric took him on the train to the World’s Fair in St. Louis. It was a marvelous dream for a small boy, and Set was enchanted from the first glimpse of the plaster-of-Paris Roman baths. Everything was massive; everything was built to scale for the gods. There was an enormous birdcage, a temple carved of teak, a vast Ferris wheel, great iron and stone statues lining the boulevards, and — Set’s favorite wonder — a huge organ, the largest in the world, where the famous French organist Alexandre Guilmant played recitals every day from memory. There were hundreds of exotic animals: tiny elephants and limber orangutans, big cats with snow-white fur, and sinuous, deadly snakes. And there were exotic people, too: from new territories like Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, and native peoples from the wilder parts of the American West. There were whole South African villages, filled with men and ladies wearing nothing but underclothes. There were Alaskan tribes with their own icehouses, Pacific peoples with totem poles and canoes. Shamans from Africa made great displays of making the old young again. Some sold shrunken heads. There was even a real live pygmy from the Congo, and Set was enchanted at his acrobatics, though Cedric complained that they exploited him shamefully. Set was reminded of nothing so much as Oliver’s cabinet at home, each pavilion jammed full of mystery and riddle. Secret magic in every corner.