Continent by Jim Crace Page A

a long time, she said, and she had no continuous memories of my father now, just snapshots from the family album.
    While mother slept, I sat at my father’s desk with those three disquieting snapshots – the beach, the women, the veranda – and searched for a better ending to my mother’s story. His journal spoke of his ‘dear wife’, his ‘loyal companion in research’, ‘the angel whois mother to my girls’. But, otherwise, the notes were obsessively academic and dry. His dedication to the natural sciences seemed unbroken, humourless, without restraint. ‘I have been asked to prepare a pamphlet on the forest phenomenon,’ he wrote finally in his diary for 1926, ‘but I am not happy to proceed. It seems to me that the evidence is thin and that the absence for a year or more of menstruation and estrus in P. was possibly contingent on late puberty or the disruptions of weight loss, anxiety and digestive complications brought about by her hasty relocation in the town. Moreover, travellers from the Institute have not been able to establish the whereabouts of P.’s village. The plantation has been abandoned and, no doubt, her people have either descended like so many others to work on farms or to offer themselves in service in the towns, or they have withdrawn further into the trees, where, perhaps, it would be a kindness to leave them. At some later time all this would warrant an amusing memoir of conclusions rashly reached by a natural scientist too eager and ambitious. I smile at my younger self, but, for the moment,
Uca felix
calls and we – my wife, my three girls – are repairing to the coast.’ And nothing more.
    I stood before the peeling mirror on the wall of his study and smiled at my older self. Thin and dry and squeamish. I looked again at that family photograph and wondered at the girl encountered there, in hertorn and spermy dress, the slight and bony exception of the beach. My mother and my sisters were broad and tall with heavy hips and wide-set, comfortable eyes. Even the
Uca felix
were wide and swollen for the solstice.
    Then the bulbous women and the girl in the cotton dress and the service gloves, that slight, pale teenager with the empty tray and the smile and the fessandra blooms, looked out at me from the other fading prints. Who – in my position, with my dismay – would not hurry now to unearth those charts again, to match her dates and mine, to sit lifeless in that chair (where she had sat, her face flushed, her breasts swollen, her acids flowing), to shut both eyes and hear those doves take wing, vabap-vabap, the shingle and the crabs, the baying of the donkeys left alone and tethered in the ardour of the night, the closing of a study door?

FIVE
     
Sins and Virtues
    I USED ONCE to have a calligrapher’s booth in the marketplace. Bridegrooms came and I blessed their marriage certificates with the name of God in gold-leaf. I provided decorative alphabets for elementary schools and delicate pillow-prayers on silk for the superstitious. The old came to my booth and detailed their sins and virtues. I inscribed them into a list on parchment soaked in ambergris and sealed them into a tube of bamboo. So when the old were dead, their Sins and Virtues were burned with them.
    I was the only calligrapher in the city who possessed the franchise to profit from Sins and Virtues. It provided great business but precluded me from marriage and fornication. That was the custom and the regulation. The sin-lister must be free from sin.
    Later, when business superseded religion as the preoccupation of our people, I decorated shop fronts and designed letterheads for ambitious greengrocers and ice-vendors. I prepared boastful posters for the first cinema, ornamental scrolls for lofty institutionsand fancy gate-plates for embassies. My work on parchment was etched and woven and carved into more durable materials by craftsmen in Europe. I extended my booth and employed an apprentice to mix my inks and to