Servants of the Map. Andrea Barrett
sister, gave us as a wedding present—do you remember how, when it first flowered, we marveled at the fragrant, snowy blossoms with their secret gold insides? It was raised in a greenhouse in St. John’s Wood, from seeds sent back by Dr. Hooker. I wish I could have been with you this spring to watch it bloom.
I am drifting from my point, I see. Forgive me. The point, the reason I copy this passage, is not to teach you about leaves but to say these words brought tears to my eyes; they made me think of our marriage. When we were together our lives were shaped like our neighbors’, as simple as the open leaves of the maple. Now we are apart, trying to maintain our connection over this immense distance. Trying to stay in touch without touch; how that effort changes us. Perhaps even deforms us.
To an outsider we might now look like the thick seed leaves of the almond or the bean, or the scales of buds or bulbs; like spines or tendrils, sepals or petals, which are also altered leaves. Do you know that, in certain willows, pistils and stamens can sometimes change into each other? Or that pistils often turn into petals in cultivated flowers? Only now do I begin to grasp the principles of growth and change in the plants I learned to name in the woods, those we have grown at home—there is a science to this. Something that transcends mere identification.
I wander, I know. Try to follow me. The point, dear heart, is that through all these transformations one can still discern the original morphology; the original character is altered yet not lost. In our separation our lives are changing, our bond to each other is changing. Yet still we are essentially the same.
I love you. So much. Do you know this?
It is raining again, we are damp and cold. I miss you. All the time.
Max regards the last page of his letter doubtfully. That business about the alteration of leaves; before he sends it, he scratches out the line about the effects of his and Clara’s separation. Deform: such a frightening word.
His days pass in promiscuous chatter, men eating and drinking and working and snoring, men sick and wounded and snow-blind and wheezing; always worries about supplies and medicines and deadlines. He is never alone. He has never felt lonelier. There are quarrels everywhere: among the Indian chainmen, between the chainmen and the porters, the porters and his fellow plane-tablers; between the plane-tablers and the triangulators; even, within his own group, among the parties squatting on the separate peaks. Michaels, their leader, appears to enjoy setting one team against another. Michaels takes the youngest of the porters into his tent at night; Michaels has made advances toward Max and, since Max rebuffed him, startled and furious, has ceased speaking with him directly and communicates by sarcastic notes.
Wyatt has approached Max as well; and a man from another party—the only one as young as Max—with a shock of red hair as obtrusive as a kingfisher’s crest. Now all three are aligned against him. When the whole group meets he has seen, in the shadows just beyond the ring of light sent out by the campfire, men kneeling across from each other, britches unbuttoned, hands on each other … He closed his eyes and turned his back and blocked his ears to the roar of laughter following his hasty departure. Yet who is he to judge them? So starved for love and touch is he that he has, at different times, found himself attracted to the middle-aged, stiff-necked wife of an English official in Srinagar, a Kashmiri flower-seller, a Tibetan herdsman, the herdsman’s dog. He has felt such lust that his teeth throb, and the roots of his hair; the skin of his whole body itching as if about to explode in a giant sneeze.
In the act of writing to Clara, Max makes for himself the solitude he so desperately needs. He holds two strands of her life: one the set of letters she writes to him now—or not now, but as close to now as they can get, four months earlier, five, six—and the other the set of letters she wrote secretly in the months before he left, trying to imagine what he might need to hear. Occasionally he has allowed himself the strange pleasure of opening one letter from each set on the same day. A rounded image of Clara appears when he reads them side by side: she is with him. And this fills him with a desire to offer back to her, in his letters, his truest self. He wants to give her everything: what he is seeing, thinking, feeling; who he truly is. Yet these days he scarcely recognizes himself. How can he offer these aberrant knots of his character to Clara?
He tries to imagine himself into the last days of her pregnancy, into the events of Gillian’s birth, the fever after that. He tries to imagine his family’s daily life, moving on without him. Clara is nursing Gillian, teaching Elizabeth how to talk, tending the garden, watching the flowers unfold; at night, if she is not too weary, she is bending over her dictionary and her German texts, and then … He wonders what would happen if he wrote, Tell me what it feels like to lie in our bed, in the early morning light, naked and without me. Tell me what you do when you think of me. What your hands do, what you imagine me doing.
He doesn’t write that; he doesn’t write about what he does to himself on a narrow cot, in a tent made from a blanket strung over a tree limb, the wind whistling as he stifles his groans with a handkerchief. Even then he doesn’t feel alone. Close by, so near, his companions stifle noises of their own. His only truly private moments are these: bent over a blank page, dreaming with his pen.
3
June 11, 1863
Dearest, dearest Clara:
The packet containing this letter will follow a very zigzag course on its way to you; a miracle that my words reach you at all. Or that yours reach me—how long it has been since the last! A ship that sailed from Bordeaux in March is rumored to have arrived at Bombay and will, I hope, have letters from you. Others from England have reached me—yet none from you—which is why I worry so. But already I hear your voice, reminding me that the fate of mail consigned to one ship may differ so from that consigned to another. I know you and the girls are well.
I am well too, although worried about you. I do what I can to keep busy. Did I tell you that I received, in response to some modest botanical observations I had sent to Dr. Hooker, a brief reply? He corrected my amateur mistakes, suggested I gather some specimens for him, and told me his great love of mosses dated from the time he was five or six. His mother claims that when he was very tiny he was found grubbing in a wall, and that when she asked what he was doing, he cried that he had found Bryam argenteum (not true, he notes now), a pretty moss he’d admired in his father’s collection. At any age, he says—even mine—the passion for botany may manifest itself.
I found this touching and thought you would too. And I’m honored that he would answer me at all. In the hope of being of further use to him, I plan to continue my observations. Where I am now—deep in the heart of the Karakoram—nothing grows but the tiny lichens and mosses that are Dr. Hooker’s greatest love. I can classify hardly any of them, they’re extremely difficult. Except for them the landscape is barren. No one lives here: how would they live? Yet people do pass through from the neighboring valleys, the glaciers serving as highways through the mountains: I have met Hunzakuts, Baltis, Ladakhis and Nagiris and Turkis. But so far no travelers from home, although I hear rumors of solitary wanderers, English and German and French. One elderly adventurer has apparently haunted these mountains for decades, staying at times in Askole and Skardu; traveling even on the Baltoro Glacier and its branches—can this be true? If he exists, no one will tell me his name.
Around me is a confused mass of rock and glacier and mist, peaks appearing then disappearing beyond the curtains of clouds. The glaciers, covered with rocks and striated like frozen rivers, you would never mistake for snowfields or for anything else; the porters fear them and have their own names for them, while the chainmen claim that, deep within them, are the bodies of men who died in the mountains and are now being slowly carried down the stream of ice. Some decades from now, at the foot of the glacier, a glove or a couple of bones may be spit out.
I have seen wild sheep the size of ponies. I have slept ten nights at a stretch above 15,000 feet; I have woken buried in snow, lost in clouds; days have passed when I could make no sightings