eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Will and Kate Haslin have barely begun their relationship when they journey to Central Africa, hoping to chase down family secrets. Kate's willful and distant Uncle Pers is dying, and she sees one last chance to uncover his shadowy past.
and After reaching Ngemba with only the most vague idea about what life in Africa requiresnd with a concrete goal: to uncover the shadowy past of Kate's willful-and dying-Uncle Pers.
After reaching Ngemba with only vague ideas about what life in Africa requires, the young Americans must reshape themselves inside a culture without expectation. And when they learn that Uncle Pers may be The Road Builder, a mysterious figure with a colonial connection, the dangers they face turn personal.
In the tense and hazy village, history merges with myth, fable, and even gossip to create unusual new truths. It's an isolated world of realists and visionaries, and will test every belief that Kate and Will hold dear.
With the seductive prose of a gifted storyteller, The Road Builder weaves sophisticated questions about the nature of truth into an epic yet personal story about romance and exploration.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781101202982 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/07/2001 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 528 |
| File size: | 717 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
Deathbed, Tea, Wife
This morning Uncle Pers rose out of his deathbed to join us for tea.
We hear him shuffling out of the dark cluttered recesses of his house. We hear the slow thumping of his walker in the hallway, and when the thumping pauses we hear his rattling breaths. Then he emerges into the sitting room, blinking and squinting like some pale wrinkled creature of the underground, stopping to shade his eyes against the light reflected off the pastel buildings and the bay and the arid blue sky.
"His will to live is phenomenal!" Aunt Mavis says emotionally, though exactly what emotion she is expressing is hard to say.
I should clarify "deathbed." He has been lying there for weeks, but it became clear some time ago that he was not about to die in it. And now he is up and coming to tea. But no one is fooled into thinking that the deathwatch is over. Uncle Pers is old and very sick, and any recovery he makes will be short-lived; within days, weeks at best, he'll be having tea in bed again, and it can't be long before he dies there.
Pers stops, leaning hard on the walker and glaring at Mavis. "And why do you assume that my will has anything to do with it?"
"Because you have reason to live. Because you have work to finish!" She glares back, nods shortly, smooths his shock of thin white hair, and gives him a pat, or a slap, on his unshaven cheek. Mavis is old too but you have to look closer to see it. She's fit and ruddy, and always dressed as if for some special occasion, if only a costume party. Today she's wearing a slithering kimono thing and a sort of headdress streaming silk and ribbons, and the scent of some exotic woodsap hangs in the air in her wake. She helps Pers into his chair and joins Kate in the kitchen preparing the things for tea.
I should clarify "tea." We have tea twice a day, at ten o'clock and three o'clock, but in fact we never actually have tea. We have coffee, mineral water, juice, wine, beer, gin, brandy - almost anything except tea. But tea is what we call it. With tea we also have food, though not the kind that satisfies hunger, that nourishes bodies and sustains life. We eat delicate things, the foodstuffs of ritual and illusion: tiny sculptures and still lifes that crunch once or twice, then disappear in the mouth like vapors and resonate in the stomach like dreams.
The old man stares out the window toward the brown hills of Marin, the hazy refineries of Richmond.
"Well, it's all still in place, I see. And it still hasn't rained, has it?"
He seems to be addressing me, but Mavis, coming into the living room with the tea tray, answers instead. "Not a drop! One gorgeous day after another, drying us up. It's so gorgeous out, that Kate and Will and I are planning a sail."
"Good for you. Of course, there isn't any wind, is there?"
"The wind will come up."
"It could. And if it does, you may have a gale by afternoon."
"Katy will captain. She's very competent. After all, she was taught by one of the world's finest sailors."
Pers has gin, Mavis sherry, and they argue about the wind. Kate and I sip coffee and wait for the argument to run its course. Such arguments also are part of the rhythm of life in this house, as ritualized as tea, as impossible for an outsider to comprehend.
I wonder if the tea thing comes from Mavis' side of the family - people with old money, is my impression, and plenty of time on their hands. Or maybe it's a Flemish tradition from Pers' childhood, or one of his Anglicisms, acquired in his youth along with his mastery of the English tongue. In the years before he began to make his way in the colonies he studied in England - prep school, university, reform school, I'm not sure exactly, though I ought to know. It's my job to know. I'm paid well to get such details in order. And I'm not bad at it, actually. I can be systematic and analytic and efficient. I can click my way through a few icons on Pers' computer, and the screen will light up with lists of folders and files, diagrams, indexes, outlines: essential organizational tools, because there are an awful lot of details.
But away from the computer the details of Pers' life blur; he is a frail figure now, in the long shadow of corporations, consortiums, cabals. Somewhere behind him there are sweatshops and plantations, venture capitalists, contracts and kickbacks, a legacy of transported earth, diverted water, engineered landscapes. Uncle Pers blurs, but behind him are solid things: the infallibility of Science, the harsh laws of Commerce, the power of Money, the unsentimental knowledge of how the world really works.
It's probably obvious to him by now that none of these things is anywhere behind me. He sips his gin, eyeing me over the top of the glass. He seems to find something humorous in the sight. But under the gaze of those pale and watery eyes I blink and look away. What is he seeing when he looks at me like that? Something that isn't there, I keep thinking.
"So. Where did you spend the morning, William?"
"Well, here in the house. Kate and I were in the study, working."
"Still working, eh? I thought you'd finished. Well, then. Your body was in my study, your fingers were flipping through my papers, you were reading. So, where did you spend the morning? Where were you transported?"
"Oh. Well, Indonesia mostly, I guess. After the war, when you were up on the Indragiri. We've still got some big gaps and discontinuities in the manuscript, and I went back through some journals to see what we might have missed."
"Well, that sounds tedious. And haven't you already done that? Incidentally, I finished reading that manuscript last night."
"What did you think?"
"Well, I wasn't transported anywhere. That's not your fault, of course. You and Katy have certainly improved on my organization. Which is what I asked you to do."
"I imagine your editors will have some more suggestions. But at least we've got the structure in place, we know when things happened. We've got things lined up in some kind of order."
Mavis looks up sharply from her conversation with Kate and wags a finger at me. "That can be a trap too, Will. Remember that time is circular. The present is woven into the past. That has been his trouble all along: this urge to impose linear structures. To impose arbitrary, man-made distinctions on things."
Pers nods, still looking at me. "The distinction between past and present, for example, eh? Between memory and imagination. Between symbols and the thing itself. Arbitrary, William, but nevertheless I keep imposing. A long habit, I suppose."
He and Mavis give each other one of their looks, while Kate and I give each other one of ours. The women renew their conversation. I eat a rusk draped with a paper-thin slice of cheese, a thing so insubstantial I might leave it floating in the air beside me while I flick the crumbs from my hand and sip my coffee.
"Do you have a passport, Will?"
"A passport? No. I haven't-"
"You'd better get one. Your, um, wife has one, you know. And you put yourself in a precarious position, if you are married to an impetuous girl with a passport and you haven't got one in hand yourself. Ha-ha!"
"Well, I think-"
"What about immunizations? Yellow fever, typhus, cholera... I don't know what's required anymore, but a young man in your position needs to be current on such things."
His gaze drifts past me and he falls silent, seemingly lost in a study of the wooden figurines on the windowsill - fertility or sex icons from somewhere like Cambodia or New Guinea, which Kate says have perched on that windowsill in the same position for at least twenty years: poised for copulation but perpetually distracted by the view. But what is the old man talking about, my position? I have no position. Though there's no point in reminding him of that, and certainly no point in contradicting him, arrogant and sardonic and knowledgeable as he is. Still, I think he's wrong about Kate. It's true she's full of surprises and prone to act on sudden impulses. But my wife is not the type to light out with no warning for Rio de Janeiro or Madagascar or someplace. My wife -
I should clarify "wife." Well, no. Wife is unequivocal, and wife is what she is to me, in the full meaning of the word. To love and to cherish, to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, et cetera, et cetera - though no one has ever said as much, in so many words. Nevertheless, my lawful wedded wife she is, or so she claims. And who am I to doubt her? I love her, and what do I care for the lawfulness of it, anyway?
Still, like Uncle Pers, I sometimes choke on the word. Not that Kate's an inadequate wife; far from it. She's a beautiful woman, though you might not notice that at first, because her beauty isn't conspicuous but rather part of a complex mix of female vitality. It's one of the qualities I might check off, in a stunned, disbelieving assessment of my good fortune: beauty, intelligence, grace, lust, kindness, humor, good education, good prospects, good family - good enough, anyway, to harbor serious reservations about her husband.
Or maybe I'm taking their reservations too personally. After all, they do seem to like me. Probably they're just disoriented, as I am, by the timing, the suddenness of this marriage. Wife and husband, husband and wife. Kate and I have no common history to support the solid weight and implications of these words. They are just difficult words to pronounce, when you haven't had a chance to get used to them, when there's no background behind them, no foundation beneath.
Even from his sickbed - that is, his deathbed - Pers saw this at once, and took advantage of it. It's as if he got one look at us, husband and wife, and said: "So - you have no history; I'll make you historians. You are living in the present; I'll transport you to the past. You have no story of your own; I'll give you mine."
—Reprinted from The Road Builder by Nicholas Hershenow by permission of Blue Hen, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright (c) 2001 by Nicholas Hershenow. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.