Three Views of Crystal Water

She was reduced to silence.

‘There, I fooled you. But you got me going. What did you want to know? What were you asking about?’

‘Ceylon. You went to Ceylon.’

‘Oh, everyone went to Ceylon. My father too. Way back in the 1860s. That’s a long time ago, you can’t imagine how long, my dear.’

‘Of course I can. Seventy years ago.’ She was better at arithmetic now.

‘Give or take a decade, that’s how old your grandfather is. My father was away with the pearling ships when I was born.’

‘Just like my father was away when I was born,’ Vera offered this as a bond.

‘But I came to see you, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, you did.’

Captain Lowinger banged his thick cup on the table. It bounced. The windowpanes seemed to rock in their frames. ‘Consider yourself lucky. My father never came to see me. I am sure I remember being born. I looked around and he wasn’t there. I had to wait years to see him, as far as I can remember. When he saw me, he was not really satisfied. Later, he took me along to make a man of me.’

He rubbed the tips of his forefinger and thumb together. The good eye steadily gazed into Vera’s face. The other one saw her too, but she must have had a white cloud over her head. ‘It’s the way of men in our family. Seafaring men. Go off and leave the woman at home, minding things. It’s a good deal if you’re the man. Mind you, it never worked for me. I tried it with your grandmother, but she was not the type of woman who’d wait around. For that, I lost her and I lost your mother too.’

He looked sad. Roberta brought fresh coffee and he took a long slurp. ‘But we were talking about fathers.’

10 February 1860

Night was falling as they landed at the British garrison in the Strait of Manaar. Before they left the deck of their little vessel, Papa Lowinger took the boy to one side, looking away from the streaky red of the setting sun. That was his first memory.

‘Do you see that land there?’ Papa said to James, pointing into the darkness. The white waving beach and dark hills above were two miles away. ‘That is the island of Ceylon. The people here believe that it was Paradise, the Garden of Eden. Up in the hills lives the King of Candy.’

That impressed James, and he focused his sleepy eyes on it. The small base they had come to was separated from Ceylon only by a shallow arm of the sea, full of sandbars. Candy looked remote. Paradise was closer.

‘At low tide you can nearly walk there,’ Papa said. ‘There’s a string of sandbars called Adam’s Bridge. The people say it was the very spot Adam crossed over when he was expelled from Paradise.’

The bridge was a series of white sand circles and they gleamed under the moon as the water surrounding them went darker and darker. It glistened and seemed to beckon him. James knew that Papa was laying on an enchantment. He did that to people. His voice became like a swallow: it rose and dipped and winged its way into your heart, and then it took fright and flapped upwards and was gone.

The sand fleas were biting. Soldiers stood at the water’s edge, swinging their storm lamps by the handle, luring their boat in. James was bundled up and put in to bed. Through the wall he heard one of those tight-lipped voices. He didn’t know how men got them – at Sandhurst he supposed. His mother wanted him to go there when he grew up. But his father wanted to teach him the pearling business. He was still in the larval stage, white as a fish and squeaky-voiced.

The leader of the garrison talked on.

‘Time and again Ceylon’s conquerors have exhausted the great pearling grounds. First the Portuguese, then the Dutch. We’ve let the banks rest now for four years. Each year we’ve made a survey to see if the oysters were ready,’ the barking voice went on. ‘Some years they are invisible, some years too small. We can’t wait much longer; at seven years of age, an oyster is too old: it will have vomited its pearl.’

Seven was James’s age. Too old!

‘We mean to auction off leases on the pearl fishery.’ That was a different English voice, also clipped, but lower.

The roar of laughter came from his father. He was European in origin, Papa. You could hear a husky German or Austrian in there if you listened. He was a man who left country and religion behind to journey after the pearl. He spoke in his peculiar way, hearty and learned, but rough-edged until he wanted to persuade you; then he was smooth as satin ‘The manner of getting pearls has always been a mad amalgam of religious rituals and native cunning. Now the British Army believes it can apply science to the problem?’

‘This year the fishery will again be great,’ continued the clipped voice in an unhurried way. ‘This is why we have invited you. I tell you, everyone has come to see.’

In the morning they set out in a native boat, pulled by a government steamer. It was all sand, and difficult going; water sometimes disappeared altogether. When this happened, native men with long bare legs jumped into the surf and attached ropes to the boat, and pulled it. They had to be pulled a long way around to find deep water again. It was only twelve miles down to the Bay of Candatchey, but it took for ever, the boat running aground and being pushed off. The soldiers were flaming hot in their red coats, and got a lecture from their leader about how they shouldn’t complain. But the man on the oars told James about the buffaloes that lived in the jungle beyond the beaches and frequented the roads like highwaymen; he said they were known to go quite mad at the sight of red. If a scrap of scarlet cloth flapped to the ground, the creature would run at it and trample it, then get down on its knees as if to pray, and gore it.

‘But your jackets!’ James cried, ‘they’re red as berries!’ The soldier rolled his eyes at James and went on to say there were elephants in this jungle, (‘pests’, he called them) and wild boars and even small tigers.

They made their slow way over the crystal sea toward the morning sun. They looked off to the Indian side and saw nothing but blue salt water divided into amusing little mazes. They looked to the Ceylon side and saw nothing but a huge reflecting collar of sand around a dim, green layer of trees. But something vertical stood out, wavering in the sun, a stick moving along the sand. It was a man running in a solitary manner along the beach. He had a most determined, yet peaceful expression, as if he were in a trance. Bearing in mind that they were passing through Adam’s Bridge, James asked his father if it was the first man himself.

‘Papa, is it Adam?’

‘Where?’ he said, absently. He was often that way.

‘There, Papa. Running.’ His image arrested James.

‘Adam?’ His father laughed. ‘Well, son, perhaps it is,’ he said.

And if it were, where was Eve? The boy wanted to know.

Now his father laughed long. ‘I suppose Eve will be along soon. Isn’t it for her sake he’s running?’

James supposed Eve had got behind. He looked long and hard on that shore, but he never saw her.

Papa eventually took pity on James. He squeezed his hand and then he said, ‘No, that man is called a peon. He is running from Colombo, Ceylon, to Madras, India, with the post,’ his father said. ‘It is five hundred miles and he will do it in ten days.’

James never forgot the sight of him.

How ridiculous he must have been, in the schoolboy grey flannels and blazer that his father had made him wear. His straw boater tried to lift off his head at every minute, so he was kept busy jamming it back down. His skin – so pink in contrast to the skin of every other human they met – prickled, stung with sweat, burned, and peeled until it bled. It took him many more years to supply himself with the bark he had as an old man, seasoned and lined and impervious to insult.

At last they drew in to the large, half-moon-shaped bay. There were hundreds of boats pulled up on the shore. The wind was blowing away from them: sand flew, and in amongst the gusts of it he could see figures swirling in purple and black and burned orange, green and indigo.

He was so short he had to stand on the thwart to jump down out of the boat. He landed, squinting despite the shade of his straw hat, in hard wet sand. This grew lighter in colour, and dried, as they walked inland. But it was still sand, hot, and slippery underfoot. So this was Paradise.

There was nothing built on it, only a few fragile open-sided sheds, straw roofed with skinny crooked poles at the sides to hold them up. And hundreds of tents, which flapped in the wind and hissed with the onslaught of sand that came on the gusts. Papa explained that the fleet had gone out with the land breeze at the firing of the guns at ten o’clock the evening before. It would have reached the banks at daybreak and the divers would set to work. At noon they would stop as the air began to stir to warn them to come back. They were due back, on the sea breeze, in a few hours.

James could see, emerging out of the sand clouds, people. People of every kind he could imagine, hundreds and hundreds of them. He and his Papa had arrived at a giant, seething fair which was all the more astonishing for having appeared on a sand spit, out of nowhere. There were black men, yellow and brown men too, men in long robes, men with pigtails and satin hats, nearly naked and squatting in loincloths, long-haired, turbaned, wrapped in shawls and crowned with fez. There were Malay soldiers with their curved blades called kreese; his father said to watch out. Once drawn, a kreese was bound to draw blood.

It was all impermanent, an encampment, and better than a circus. They passed men with rings through their lips, and women so freighted with jewellery and hardware they had to be supported as they walked. Others were shrouded so that they appeared as only a pair of large wary eyes, in a black triangle. The sun-burned laughing girls who flipped their tambourines at him were sea-gypsies. And there were dancing boys with hips as narrow as a dog’s, who insinuated themselves between the soldiers as they walked.

It was hot, huge and festive. Pigs squealed, donkeys brayed and people shouted in tongues. James stopped before a shy graceful animal like a small deer, in a cage. A gazelle, his Papa said, waiting to be sold. A worldly-looking monkey with a white beard made its way without touching ground, by climbing over the shoulders and heads of whole rows of people.

Papa kept him by the hand. Maybe he thought he’d be stolen. Maybe he would have been. He dragged behind, caught up by a snake charmer playing on a flageolet who coaxed his cobra halfway up out of the basket only to let him drop again. A scribe sat cross-legged on a straw mat on the sand with a little crowd waiting for him to put some message on paper. He crooked his finger at James, but Papa pulled him past. They ducked under the flaps of a tent draped with coloured carpets. An Arab with a long white headdress and a massive black beard greeted his father with open arms; he looked on James kindly and the boy shrank behind his father’s leg. Papa prised James off and showed him the scales, and the tongs, with which the trader handled the pearls, and weighed them. There were big brass sieves for sizing, a whole set of them, each with a different sized hole for the pearls to slip through, and the corn tongs he knew well because his Papa used them himself.

The men in line had pearls to sell. As for buyers, the richest of the rich were there, his father said. James was very impressed by how many of these exotic individuals his father knew by name. This one bought for the Sultan of Sarawak and that one represented the rulers of an Indian province. This man bought for the markets of Paris and London, for opera singers, and famous French courtesans. All this Papa told James. He waited while his father spoke to them and watched a man at a spindle, making holes in pearls. He had a half coconut sitting beside him, full of water, in which he dipped each pearl before he set to work on it. The pearls gleamed in the dim tent.

When they went out again, Papa took the boy to where, under the open sheds, rows of half-naked men were prising open the scabrous shells of oysters. They had white cloth wrapped around their heads and sat cross-legged. Only their hands moved, and if one moved too quickly or too far, one of the Malay soldiers came down on him with knife drawn. In front of them were little trays. A man circled briskly around the openers, and as soon as a few pearls appeared in the tray, he carried it off.

‘There’s the second best job you can have in the pearling game,’ said Papa. ‘If you’ve got nimble fingers and luck you might get away with a pearl or two.’

‘What is the best?’ James asked. He was anxious to impress him, the Papa newly in his life.

‘You’ll see.’

As the afternoon grew hot the breeze died. Papa pointed at a group of naked men behind a fence. ‘Those are divers who were caught swallowing pearls. They’ve been given a herb, and they’ll sit there until they’ve emptied themselves out. Some lucky fellow will have the job of looking for the stolen merchandise.’

The boy stared at the men. They were sullen and defiant as if determined to hold the contents of their stomachs in for ever. He half hoped they would succeed. The place stank of shit.

‘Who thinks of it?’ Papa said. ‘A pearl in a princess’s tiara may have been regurgitated – or worse—’ he said, rolling his eyes significantly ‘—under extreme pressure from that lot—’

James thought about that. It was ugly to contemplate, but not for Papa. He went on. ‘Isn’t it odd, isn’t it marvellous? A pearl may go from sinking in the most foul-smelling mass of dead matter you can imagine, straight to the most beautiful neck in the world. It will wash clean and look as innocent as a newborn babe. That is the beauty of pearls. They come up fresh again and again.’

His father was educating him, you see, as they strode in that sand, and hard work it was. He was a feeble boy and he whined, a mother’s boy, he had been until then. But Papa kept on, determined that the boy should know, and follow him in his way of life. James ate some roasted meat – goat, judging from the upset displayed by the goat’s relatives who were tied up outside. He thought he might be sick. Sweet-smelling smoke came from certain tents along the side of the crowd; this was where the men were smoking ‘bang’, his father said.

The air was alive with hailing and haggling, and Papa was joyous. He pointed out a weird solitary figure at the fringe of the water, facing out in the direction of the pearl banks. They called him the shark binder. Pullul Karras. His job was to keep the sharks from eating the divers. He did this by casting spells. Papa said that the man was a charlatan, but the divers would not go near the sea if he were not there.

‘His is the best job in pearling,’ Papa grinned.

‘Why?’

‘Why don’t you see? He has fantastic opportunities for snitching.’

Apparently everyone snitched.

The conjuror kept up a tranced dancing, his voice rising into a wail, and dropping to a polite appeasing manner, and his body curling and snapping up, arms flung high, repeatedly, like a whip. His eyes were glassy and his lips were black. Papa said that he was supposed to abstain from both food and drink. But, as they watched, he regularly hailed a young boy in a filmy fabric skirt, who had a brass tray with drinks on it. This was ‘toddy’ from the palm wine tree. The shark binder drank one and ordered another. Then another. Now his song came and went without its former conviction, and his arms lost their former height.

‘Papa,’ James said, ‘I don’t think he’s saying the chant right.’

‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I’m sure the sharks will get the point.’

There were fortune tellers and charm setters and religious fanatics. He watched an Indian with matted hair put hooks into the flesh of his breast. Then he was hoisted on ropes and swung around a post, his skin tearing.

‘Don’t look,’ his father said when James screamed. ‘He’s doing penance.’

The hour stretched on and the sun inched its way over to the west, where India lay. The boy wanted to see the divers.

‘The best are called Malawas and are from the Tutacoreen shore,’ said his father, speaking of them as if they were dumb animals, although James was certain they understood. ‘They’re Roman Catholics. A long time ago St Francis Xavier went to the coast of India and baptised the people. Because they’re Christian, they don’t work on Sundays but they also observe any festival, Hindu or Mohammedan. They want protection of all the gods, and you would too if you had to earn your living under a ton of water.’

James wanted to see them go down, so his father contrived for them to go out in one of the diving boats. They set sail for the banks at ten that same evening with the landward breeze. James lay on a wooden seat under a robe with his head on Papa’s lap. The sky overhead was a whirl of southern stars, brighter than any he had ever seen. The divers sat on the bottom of the boat, silent, dark, strangely passive shapes. There were ten of them, and several sailors on each boat. His mind went to where theirs was – he saw a shimmering heat, foul smells, salt, and wonderment. Then darkness. Tomorrow might bring their death.

He must have slept. The dawn was a miracle of gold and pink, with clouds shaped like a funnel through which the daylight poured. He watched the divers oil their bodies, and talk amongst themselves. Each had his set of equipment, ropes, and a large red stone shaped like a pyramid with a hole through the top. Each man picked up the rope and the stone with the toes of his right foot, and the net bag with the toes of his left. He held another rope with his right hand, and, keeping his nostrils shut with the left, jumped into the water and, riding on the stone, sank, rapidly toward the bottom.

James rushed to the edge of the boat. The water was so clear that, by hanging over the thwart, he could see to the bottom. Plunging, the divers became blurred black figures with wavy appendages. When the stones hit bottom they threw themselves flat on the sand and began to swim like insects. They were picking up oysters which lay on the sandy slope and thrusting them into the bags. After a minute, they pulled on the rope and the rowers, who now held the other ends, pulled hand over hand to raise them back to the surface.

And so it went, for hours. When they came to the surface, the divers spewed water from their mouths and nostrils. Sometimes their ears were bleeding. They unloaded, took deep breaths, and picked up their stones with their toes, then they threw them overboard again. They went down fifty times, and each time returned with a bag holding easily a hundred oysters. The boat was filling up with the thorny, grey shells; as they lay in the sun the two halves began to gape. James saw one man slip a wooden wedge in the gap. He watched without letting on as the man ran his finger inside the half opened shell, feeling for pearls. And once at least, James thought the man found what he was looking for.

He had few places to hide a pearl, this diver. He put his hand up and casually wiped his eye. James realised that the pearl was gone – into his eye. He did not tell Papa for fear the man would be punished. If sharks were near they were not biting. James sat in dread and fascination, watching the shining black men who shot in a stream of bubbles straight down into the crystal blue that extended to murk. They were down for what seemed like for ever, then they began to reappear, raised majestically like statues that had been buried.

This was his indoctrination to the pearl hunt. ‘I would like to be a diver for pearls,’ he said solemnly then. But his father said no. ‘No white man could ever go to those depths.’

At noon, the wind changed to blow them back to Ceylon. They sailed in, slowly, and when they neared the beach the oars came out. The gun fired and all the trading and singing stopped. The tied elephants brayed. The tambourines rattled to a climax; the crowd began to run toward the shore. Everyone stared out to sea. Owners and investors, fakirs, traders all, in their eyes a look James was to see more than he ever imagined – a look that was avid and fearful. These men had gambled everything on the find of pearls.

He had listened to his papa well, and understood that no one knew how good the oyster fishery would be. Perhaps the starfish had wormed their way in and eaten the flesh, or the seaweed growing on the shells had killed the animal. The anticipation became a murmur. The murmur became a roar. The sea wind with its sting of salt and sand blew in the waiting faces. Finally the boats were within calling distance. Then everyone – jewellers and boat-owners and officials with sticks in their hands, entertainers with monkeys on their shoulders, with skirts flying and veils lifting, robes flapping against legs – began to move toward the shore.

First James and his father’s boat landed, and then another and another. Amidst the shouting and embracing, the boy understood that there was a huge haul. A great cheer and a roaring began. The soldiers stamped about, excited for their chance to bid and make a fortune. The horses whinnied.

The divers sat, bent over at the chest as if all the air had been pushed out of them. They were shivering, even though it was very hot in the sun, cold inside their dark, oiled skin. Their thin extended ribs made their chests look like birdcages. They alone were silent. James could not take his eyes off them. These men consumed him; those who descend. He remembered a poem from school, Keats’s ‘Endymion’: ‘a moon-beam to the deep, deep water-world’. If they spoke and we listened, what would we learn, the boy wondered

But the divers were herded off to be searched.

James made his way in the pearling business, though not as his father would have had it. He was known neither for acuity nor gambler’s instinct, or skill at selling. He’d be remembered as the one with the gift of the gab, a man of words, armed with a poem when a dirkin or a kreese might do better. Some thought they could get the better of him because of this tendency, but it rarely happened. John Keats and his fellow poets were good company, better, he judged, than his country folk, the English, with their lordly manner.

The next day James and his father stayed on shore with the traders. Late in the day there was a commotion as one of the boats came in. He thought at first they’d taken on a log and laid it out on the nets between the divers’ feet. Then he understood that this burden was a man. He could see the black head and arms. It was a diver, his lower body wrapped in a sail. The sail was soaked in blood. The man had lost his leg to a shark.

The boy saw his face; his eyes were closed, his mouth open, as if he had looked on something of awe and had retreated inward. The leg was with him at the moment although James understood it was discarded later. He and it were a strange colour of grey.

There was an outcry, then, about the shark binder. Right on the spot the military Poo-Bah brought him up to account. The Superintendent was high on his horse. He bellowed and the conjuror ought to have quaked, but he was consummate in his act of defiance.

‘A man has been attacked by a shark? Shark binder, it is your task to keep the sharks away. How can you explain the failure of your charms?’

The man stood firm, if you could call his fantastical gesturing firm, undulating his torso and sniffing the breeze for a message, or an excuse. The whole affair was understood as theatre, amongst the Europeans, and the conjurors, too, but not amongst the divers. They stood wide-eyed with terror, but obdurate. It was in their power to shut down the entire fishery; they need merely refuse to sink. It was a lesson to James. The naked ones, because they risk death, had the power.

A crowd gathered around these two men. Papa and he moved in to hear. The shark binder defended himself, waving his arms weirdly and impressively and calling out explanations that surely made no sense even to him.

‘What does he say, what does he say?’ the English asked.

‘He says that a very great witch issued a counter-conjuration,’ explained the Superintendent disgustedly from his horse. ‘That was why the shark bit. He says he will prove he is stronger than she is by issuing an even greater charm to bind the sharks for the rest of the season. I suppose I shall have to pay him double.’

‘Do you see?’ whispered Papa. ‘He can’t lose, that conjuror. He’s got it covered either way.’