But deep in the night, Shay, a seasoned traveler who usually sleeps well even in bare-bones hostels, wakes up to the crash of the tide beyond the garden wall. Over the nocturnal chorus of frogs, it sounds annunciatory, as if a single solemn phrase were being repeated over and over again. She frees herself gently from Senna’s embrace and lies staring into darkness through the mosquito net of the huge four-poster bed. The disquiet she felt on the hillside this afternoon returns and becomes a wanderer’s desolation at waking in a strange place. The strangest of places, this Madagascar—whose very name, like Timbuktu or Samarkand, is used by Americans as shorthand for the very farthest away one can be. And suddenly Shay is homesick, but for where? For the shingled house in the Oakland Hills where she spent her happy childhood? For the assortment of East Coast student digs she occupied after that? For the Milan apartment where she has chosen to start a new life?
Certainly, this big barracks of a villa on the shore of the Indian Ocean could never offer such comfort. She pictures how the crested roof must look silhouetted against the night sky inscribed with Southern constellations. And then she imagines the dark island: cane fields whispering in the breeze, the forest alive with the glittering wakeful eyes of the small beasts; the villages sheltering the sleep of men and women like those she met today, all in mute dreaming conversation with ancestors. In those huts no one has to wonder where home is. From the ground under their dwellings their history rises and cradles them.
Lying there in the darkness beside her, Senna himself seems an unknown country. What does he feel about this house besides satisfied vanity? What does he find in this distant land, and in these people—and what of value is he bringing here?
And for herself she wonders: How the hell did I end up in this place? And: What do I owe? For something is owed, she feels certain.
For a long time she lies awake, listening to the waves and nervously twisting a lock of her short hair, until dawn comes with the clamor of cockcrow, a brief dogfight, and the call of a distant muezzin. All the time, she has been thinking. Thinking: I have a house in Africa…
Continue Reading…
Red Island House
Andrea Lee
About the Author
© Alexandra Muse Fallows
Andrea Lee is most recently the author of Red Island House, a novel about love, clashing cultures, and identity set on the tropical African island nation of Madagascar. She is also the author of the story collection Interesting Women, the novels Lost Hearts in Italy and Sarah Phillips, and the National Book Award–nominated memoir Russian Journal. A former staff writer for The New Yorker, she has written for The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, W, and The New York Times Book Review. Born in Philadelphia, she received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard University and now lives in Italy.
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Also by Andrea Lee
Russian Journal
Sarah Phillips
Lost Hearts in Italy
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2002 by Andrea N. Lee
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Some of the stories in this work were previously published in The New Yorker and Zoetrope.
“Anthropology” was originally published in The Oxford American.
This Scribner ebook edition March 2021
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2001048228
ISBN 978-1-9821-7950-2
