Memory Wall. Anthony Doerr
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He asks, “Is she sleeping?”
“Finally.”
They file downstairs. Memories twist slowly through Luvo’s thoughts: Alma as a six-year-old, a dining room, linen tablecloths, the laughter of grown-ups, the soft hush of servants in white shirts bringing in food. Alma sheathing the body of an earthworm over the point of a fishhook. A faintly glowing churchyard, and Alma’s mother’s bony fingers wrapped around a steering wheel. Bulldozers and rattling buses and gaps in the security fences around the suburbs where she grew up. Buying a backlot brandy called white lightning from Xhosa kids half her age.
By the time he reaches the living room, Luvo is close to fainting. The two armchairs and the lamp and the glass balcony doors and the massive grandfather clock with its scrollwork and brass pendulum and heavy mahogany feet all seem to pulse in the dimness. His headache is advancing, irrepressible; it is an orange flame licking at the edges of everything. Each beat of his heart sends his brain reverberating off the walls of his skull. Any moment his field of vision will ignite.
Roger tugs the boy’s wool cap over his head for him, loops a long arm under his armpit, and helps Luvo out the door as the first strands of daylight break over Table Mountain.
TUESDAY MORNING
Pheko arrives just after dawn to the faint odor of tobacco in the house. Three fewer eggs in the refrigerator. He stands a minute, puzzling over it. Nothing else seems disturbed. Alma sleeps a deep sleep.
The estate agent is coming this morning. Pheko vacuums, washes the balcony windows, polishes the countertops until they shine a foot deep. Pure white light, rinsed by last night’s rain, pours through the windows. The ocean is a gleaming plate of pewter.
At ten Pheko drinks a cup of coffee in the kitchen. Two tea towels, crisp and white, are folded over the oven handle. The floors are scrubbed, the dishwasher empty, the grandfather clock wound. Everything in its place.
It occurs to Pheko that he could steal things. He could take the kitchen television and some of Harold’s books and Alma’s music player. Jewelry. Coats. The matching pea-green bicycles in the garage—how many times has Alma ridden hers? Once? Who even knows those bicycles are here? Pheko could call a taxi right now and load it with suitcases and take them into Khayelitsha and before nightfall a hundred things Alma didn’t know she had could be turned into cash.
Who would know? Not the accountant. Not Alma. Only Pheko. Only God.
Alma wakes at ten thirty, groggy, muddled. He dresses her, escorts her to the breakfast table. She sits in her chair, tea untouched, hands quivering, strands of her wig stuck in her eyelashes. “I used to come here,” Alma mutters. “Before.”
“You don’t want your tea, Mrs. Alma?”
Alma gives him a bewildered look.
Upstairs the memory wall ruffles in the wind. The estate agent’s sedan glides into the driveway at 11:00, precisely on time.
THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM
Luvo wakes in the afternoon in Roger’s one-room apartment in the Cape Flats. Beside him is a table and two chairs. Pans in a cupboard, a paraffin stove, a row of books on a shelf. Not much more than a prison cell. Roger’s one window reveals the bottom corner of a billboard, perhaps twenty feet away. On the billboard a white woman in a whiter bikini reclines on a beach holding a bottle of Crown Beer. From where he lies Luvo can see the lower half of her legs, her ankles crossed, the pale bottoms of her bare feet flecked with sand.
Through the walls and ceiling ride the racket of the Cape Flats, laughter, babies, squabbles, sex, the rumbles of engines and fans. Six or seven times, in the month or so Luvo can remember sleeping here, he has heard the drumbeat of gunfire. Women with glossy nails and chokers around their throats drift through the open hallways; every evening someone comes past the door whispering, “Mandrax, Mandrax.”
Roger is out. Probably following around Alma. Luvo sits at the table and eats a stack of saltines and reads one of Roger’s books. It is an adventure novel about men in the Arctic. The adventurers are out of food and hunting seals and the ice is thin and it seems any moment someone will break through and fall into freezing water.
After an hour or so Roger is still not back. Luvo takes two coins from a drawer and scrubs his face and hands in the sink and runs a wet paper towel over the toe of each sneaker. He fixes his watchcap over the ports in his head and rides a bus to the Company Gardens.
He enters the South African Museum around 4 p.m. and steps past the distrustful looks of two warders and into the paleontology gallery. Hundreds of fossils are locked in glass cases, specimens from all over southern Africa: shells and worms and nautiluses and seed ferns and trilobites, and minerals, too; yellow-green crystals and gleaming clusters of quartz; mosquitoes in drops of amber; scheelite, wulfenite.
In the reflections in the glass it is as if Luvo can see the papers and cartridges pinned to Alma’s wall floating in the dimness above the stones. Bones, teeth, footprints, fishes, the warped ribs of ancient reptiles—in Alma’s memories Luvo has watched Harold return from the Karoo boiling with ardor, enthusing about dolerite and siltstone, bonebeds and trackways. The big man would chisel away at rocks in the garage, show Alma whole amphibians, a footlong dragonfly embedded in limestone, little worm tracks in hardened mud. He’d come into the kitchen, flushed, animated, smelling of dust and heat and rocks, safety goggles pushed up over his forehead, waving a walking stick he’d picked up somewhere, nearly as tall as he was, made of ebony, wrapped with red beads on the handle and with an elephant carved on the top.
The whole thing infuriated Alma: the safari-tourist’s walking stick, the goggles, Harold’s boyish avidity. Forty-five years of marriage, Alma would announce, and now he had decided to become a lunatic rockhound? What about their friends, what about going for walks together, what about joining the Mediterranean Cruise Club? Retirees, Alma would yell, were supposed to move toward comforts, not away from them.
Here is what Luvo knows: Inside Roger’s frayed, beaten wallet is a four-year-old newspaper obituary. The headline reads Real Estate Ace Turned Dinosaur Hunter. Below it is a grainy black-and-white of Harold Konachek.
Luvo has asked to see the obituary enough times that he has memorized it. A sixty-eight-year-old Cape Town retiree, driving with his wife on backveld roads in the Karoo, had stopped to look for fossils at a roadcut when he had a fatal heart attack. According to the man’s wife, just before he died he had made a significant find, a rare Permian fossil. Extensive searches in the area turned up nothing.
Roger, with his straw hat and white beard and tombstone teeth, has told Luvo he went out to the desert with dozens of other fossil hunters, even with a group from the university. He says several paleontologists went to Alma’s house and asked her what she’d seen. “She said she couldn’t remember. Said the Karoo was huge and all the hills looked the same.”
Interest slackened. People assumed the fossil was unrecoverable. Then, several years later, Roger saw Alma Konachek leaving a memory clinic in Green Point with her houseboy. And he started following them around town.
“Gorgonops longifrons,” Roger told Luvo a month ago, on the first night he brought the boy to Alma’s house. Luvo has engraved the name into his memory.
“A big, nasty predator from the Permian. If it’s a complete skeleton, it’s worth forty or fifty million rand. World’s gone crazy for this stuff. Movie stars, financiers. Last year a triceratops skull sold to some Chinaman at an auction for thirty-four million American dollars.”
Luvo looks up from the display case. Footfalls echo through the gallery. Knots of tourists mill here and there. The gorgon skeleton the museum has on a granite pedestal is the same one Harold showed Alma fifty years before. Its head is flat-sided; its jaw brims with teeth. Its claws look capable of great violence.
The plaque below the gorgon reads Great Karoo, Upper Permian, 260 million years ago. Luvo stands in front of the skeleton a long time. He