arms until Marina understood that this was an instruction and not a game. She held up her arms as well. It was the girl’s clear intention to drop a shift dress over Marina’s head but the height discrepancy between them did not allow for it and so Marina pulled it on herself. No sooner was it covering her head and somewhat twisted than one of them pulled down her pants and began to rub her legs with the cloth as well. She stepped up obediently, one foot and then the other, and the pants were taken away. Marina stood there like the others now in her loose trapeze dress full enough to take her through an entire pregnancy because among the female Lakashi all clothes were maternity clothes. Without zippers or buttons, Marina saw the way in which they looked like candidates for a rustic insane asylum. The outfit was considerably shorter on her and the women poked at her knees and laughed as if there was something vaguely scandalous about knees. The women sat down on the floor and Marina sat with them and put her hands back on the woman’s stomach, waiting for the baby to move again while the one who made shingles pulled back Marina’s hair with a carved comb and braided it more tightly than her own mother had ever managed to braid it when she was a child. The teenage girl bit off a single piece of the palm frond with her teeth and tied off the end of her braid while the baby swam beneath Marina’s hands. She would say six months along. Marina realized then she had not touched a single pregnant woman since it stopped being her business to touch them. How could that be possible? After all the countless bellies she had run her hands over in her training, how had she let them all go?
“You knew, didn’t you, about the Lakashi, about why Dr. Swenson is here? Anders told you?” Dr. Nkomo asked, the little girl in his lap, playing with his glasses. She was gentle as she folded the arms in and out.
“I’d been told, but I can’t say I necessarily believed it. It’s something altogether different to see things for myself.”
“It’s true,” Dr. Nkomo said nodding. “I had read Dr. Swenson’s papers but I was still very surprised. I have thought too much about the fertility and reproduction of mosquitoes and not enough about the fertility and reproduction of women. That’s what my wife would say. She says if we wait much longer for a baby she will have to come and live among the Lakashi in order to get pregnant.”
Marina reached back and moved the base of her braid back and forth, trying to loosen it up before it gave her a headache. “I thought your research was in fertility with Dr. Swenson.”
“Ah,” Dr. Nkomo said, taking his glasses back from the little girl and in doing so breaking her heart all over again. “We work together. We are colleagues, but we do not share the same field of study. Our fields overlap.”
Their hosts followed the conversation intently, their faces turning from speaker to speaker as if they were watching a tennis match. “What is your field of study, Dr. Nkomo?”
“Please,” he said, “call me Thomas. I suppose you would say I focus on the drug’s off-target toxicity, except in this case it isn’t toxic. The drug has exhibited benefits unrelated to fertility.”
There were questions to ask, namely what the benefits were and who was paying for his research, but at that moment Easter appeared over the top of the ladder, every bit as wet as he had been coming up out of the river and over the side of the boat. Marina understood the look of panic on his face. He was sure she was dead as she had been sure he was dead. His eyes went quickly around the room, passing over her and stopping only briefly on Thomas Nkomo. He started to go down the ladder again but she stood up quickly and when he realized it was her in that dress with her hair braided he bounded up the last few rungs of the ladder, his T-shirt stretched out by the rain, the mud making a solid cake up to his knees. He began slapping his open hands against her arms, her hips, her back. He could not stop himself. She was his responsibility and he had lost her.
The Lakashi nodded and clucked their tongues and pointed at him but Easter would not look in their direction and so they gave up. There was no teasing the deaf if they refused to look at you.
“The rain is letting up,” Thomas said, craning his head to look beyond the edges of the roof. “Or maybe it’s stopped now and the trees are just dripping. It’s very difficult for me to tell the difference between the current rain and the continued falling of the rain we’ve already had.”
“I don’t mind getting wet again.” Marina put her arm around Easter’s shoulders. She was thinking about his box, the pens and feathers, Anders’ open letter to the world on his behalf.
“Then we should go.” Thomas began a series of deep nods around the room.
“How do you say thank you?”
“To the best of my knowledge the word doesn’t exist in Lakashi. I’ve asked other people that question and no one comes up with anything.”
Marina looked at her hosts, who stared expectantly as if they were hoping she would figure it out. “What about in Portuguese?”
“Obrigado.”
“Obrigado,” Marina said to the pregnant woman but there was no change in expression. She put her hand on the woman’s belly again but the baby was quiet.
Easter tugged at the cloth of Marina’s dress, then he held out his shirt, pointed at his shirt, and then pointed at her. Marina looked around the room. There were a few hammocks strung between poles, some piles of blankets and clothes on the floor, some baskets with roots and some baskets with twigs, but she did not see her shirt and pants. In truth, if he hadn’t mentioned her clothes she probably would have gone right down the ladder without them, she was so distracted by what she had seen. She shook her head. Easter then went to the pregnant woman and held out his shirt to her between two fingers and pointed to Marina. The woman seemed to have no idea what he was getting at. Marina did a pantomime of unbuttoning her shirt, taking her fingers down the front of her dress where the buttons would have been, but again the woman shrugged.
Thomas then said a word,
“I believe you’ve been scammed,” Thomas said.
“Out of my clothes?” Marina couldn’t quite imagine such a thing was possible even as she stood there in a smock. Easter crossed the room and started digging through a pile on the floor and one of the men came over and smacked him on the side of the head with the flat of his hand.
“This isn’t good,” Marina said. “I don’t know where my luggage is.”
“The bag you came with from Manaus?” Thomas said. “Wasn’t it on the boat with you?”
She turned to him. Suddenly the dress felt very small. “Of course it was on the boat with me but, my God, coming into all that fire and screaming, all these men climbing on board from the water, and then the next thing I knew Dr. Swenson was going up the dock. I wasn’t going to stay there and find my luggage.”
“Of course,” Thomas said. He did not offer her a single word of encouragement. He did not tell her as anyone would that this was a very small village and surely there was no place for her bag to go. The teenage girl was up now, slapping at Easter’s hands, and then the littlest girl, the toddler, came over and she hit him as well. “We should go now, Dr. Singh,” Thomas said.
“Please,” she said, surprisingly heartbroken over such a small loss. “Call me Marina.”
Eight
Marina had been in the jungle for a week before Dr. Alan Saturn, whom she thought of as the first Dr. Saturn, said he would borrow Easter and the boat and make a trip to the trading post two hours away to mail some letters. (The trading post was not a trading post at all but a larger village down river where the more advanced Jinta Indians had their camp. They were, for a small price, willing to hold letters and money until a trader passed through from Manaus, which they did with some frequency. For a larger price, the traders would then take the letters back with them to mail — no small request as the mail was going to Java and Dakar and Michigan and they themselves were not men born with a natural inclination to stand in long post office lines.) Once the trip was established, everyone save Dr. Swenson broke from work to sit down for some time after lunch to commit themselves to paper. Dr. Budi gave Marina three blue tissue Aerograms from her considerable stack and Alan
