Chapter 10 #22
At the desk of the Ordnance Survey office, he gives his father’s name, the map sheets they worked on, the years of his father’s employment, his job title.
He is asked to sit on a bench, where he waits for several hours.
Eventually, towards the end of the afternoon, a harried man with wire spectacles comes to speak to him.
Liam tells him again about his father, Tomás, about the surveying they did together out in the west, in the north, in the far-flung island (he crosses his fingers behind his back, not mentioning that it was his sister who assisted there) and the man goes away to check.
A second man, dressed in a suit, appears and asks him to spell his family name, in both languages, please.
Liam is asked if he can read and write, and he demonstrates his skill in several tongues; he is given calculations to complete and he works them out in his head in a flash, before inscribing the answer with a neat flourish.
He is then ushered up the stairs into a room where, on a desk, lie a number of surveying instruments, including a theodolite and, yes, a surveying pole.
Liam picks them up with sure and steady hands; he demonstrates his knowledge, his experience, his ability to calculate and measure, then to translate this into first text and then cartographic runes.
The men nod, looking at him carefully, catching each other’s eye with an unspoken meaning.
Someone else comes in with a stack of ledgers and there, Liam sees, is his father’s handwriting, slanted and meticulous, filling the columns of field books, and how happy, Liam thinks, it would have made Tomás to know that his work has been kept like this, with such care, filed away so systematically.
Here are his listings of landforms, villages, lakes, boundaries, their names, explanations and histories.
Here are the courses of streams, the amount of water flowing from which escarpment, which side of a mountain, the size and depths of lakes, their geological formation.
The signature at the bottom of each page is not his father’s, of course, but that of the army officer in charge of the division, so Liam has to swallow a surge of fury and injustice to say: That’s him, that’s my father, we wrote these together, he and I.
Enda holds Anatole’s promise at the forefront of her mind, as a person entering a dark room will bear aloft a candle.
He will come back for her. They will be married.
When she feels downhearted, she tells herself to think about the house they will have together: a table, two chairs, a bed—what a thing!
—and a shelf where an accordion and a fiddle will sit.
Another week passes, then another. Enda clears the grate; she swishes her mop about the floor. She goes to the square and sees that all the leaves lie on the ground, desiccated and curled. They rattle against each other in the cold wind and collect against her boots.
Other thoughts are beginning to crowd her mind, seeking entry, but she will not permit them.
She finds it harder and harder to rise in the morning: she is so tired.
How relentless this life is, how repetitive; she is almost ill with it, a peculiar sour taste in her mouth, her nails splitting and cracked.
She blunders through her chores one day, then walks out to the timber merchants’ office, trying to ignore the fact that the air rings with cold, that she should have worn a shawl and mittens.
She knows where it is, a large, double-fronted building off the main street, with blue-painted gables and a cupola above the door.
Anatole pointed it out to her once, saying that his logging crew was part of this company, that all the trees they felled belonged to these merchants.
Inside, the place is hushed. Dark-wood panelling and opaque glass segment the large room into separate offices. Men in ties and jackets move between the partitions, their shoes clicking on the flooring.
Enda hesitates by the door, then sidles up to the nearest desk, where a clerk with a pince-nez stands, holding a piece of paper close to his face and simultaneously writing something in a ledger.
She places the tips of her fingers on the edge of the desk and clears her throat.
She has put on her best dress and clean cuffs.
The clerk makes her wait for a long moment before he glances up at her, eyebrows raised, apparently shocked to find her there.
Folding her hands together in an attitude of meekness, she says she is enquiring about an employee of the company.
She gives Anatole’s full name, and she begins to tell the clerk what she knows of the logging camp, its position in the deep forest, where the tallest trees grow, up a narrow and un-navigable tributary of the river, but the man shuts his eyes behind his spectacles, and tells her he knows nothing of this matter, and to please leave because she is taking up his valuable time.
He lifts his pen from its holder and continues with his work, as if she isn’t there.
When it is clear that the man isn’t going to address her again, Enda turns away.
She hurries along the river, with no clear idea of where she is going, her hair flicked into her eyes by an icy breeze, her stomach roiling, her arms half raised, as if to fend off an enemy.
Something must have happened: this is the only thought she will allow herself.
Something might have happened: the grammar of this is more comforting.
Something has happened: this conjugation frightens her very badly because she finds she knows it to be true.
Enda tilts her face to the sky, as if to calm herself, as if to find a different answer to the puzzle of what is occurring, both inside and outside herself.
Anatole hasn’t come back. He promised he would return, and his accordion is here, and he would never abandon her, abandon that, so something must have occurred—might have occurred—to delay him.
Some other work perhaps, some other opportunity; he will be back soon, she feels, very soon, and if he isn’t, if he never returns, she doesn’t know what she will do, because, because—
Here, she pauses, as if reluctant to take a further step, pressing the side of her fist to the smooth trunk of a tree growing beside the river; she doesn’t know its name but it has dark berries hanging in clusters, a few smooth shiny leaves still clinging to its branches.
What she has been refusing to think about, to admit to herself, all these long weeks, must now be faced.
She must name it. She must turn her attention to it.
She doesn’t know, cannot see, how she has got herself into this—she gropes for the right word, one that doesn’t alarm her too much, alighting eventually on “situation.” She doesn’t know how she got into this situation, but she cannot ignore it any longer.
He had said he was being careful. That was the word he used.
I will be careful, he said. Always careful with you.
I don’t want to give you trouble: he had also said this.
Don’t worry: this, too, was something he had said—no, breathed—to her, in the alleyway, before, well, before.
And she had trusted him. Like a fool, like an eejit, like so many before her.
She had said, she actually remembers herself saying—and she would like to strike herself about the face at the memory—I trust you.
She had said this. She had said: Don’t stop.
So she finds herself perplexed because she is sure he was careful—he is a man of his word, she is still so certain of this.
But how, then, has this happened? How is it she both sickens and hungers for food?
How is it she hasn’t had her monthly visitor since just before he left?
Whatever in God’s name is she to do now?
Blindly, Enda leans over, grapples for a stone and hurls it towards the water.
It falls with a meek plop into the shallows.
Furious now, she snatches up several more, throwing them in arcs, watching them fall with separate coronets of spray into the river.
Then, breathing hard, she turns and marches back the way she came, rounding the corner to the main street so quickly that the wind nearly lifts the hat from her head.
At the desk in the loggers’ office stands a different clerk.
This one is younger, with a fine smattering of acne over his cheeks, and long pale fingers.
Enda leans over and taps the top of the ledger to get his attention.
She repeats her enquiry. She spells the name “Anatole” again.
She says she isn’t leaving until they send a message to him.
The clerk stares at her in faint surprise.
Then he opens the very ledger in front of him.
He runs one of his ink-scarred thumbs down a list, turns a page.
He examines another column, turns another page, glances up at her again.
He shuts the ledger with force and places both of his hands upon its cover, as if hiding something from sight, and he swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat.
“Hmm,” he says. “Wait here.”
He walks across the room and behind a partition.
Through the blurred glass, she sees him leaning over the desk of another clerk.
They confer. The seated man peers around the partition at Enda, retreats, and the men confer again.
Then the second man reappears, rising from his chair and coming towards her, across the office, fastening the buttons on his jacket.
He says that he gathers she is enquiring about one of their employees, an axe-man, who was recently working for them upriver in an encampment, is that correct?
Enda says: “Yes.”
“May I ask,” the clerk says, spreading out his fingers across his lapel, “what is your connection to him?”
“You may not.”