The room filled with the Ladies’ Auxiliary’s quiet, polite applause. Randolph stood, smiling, and clasped Mrs. Albert Steege’s hand in a gentle, two-handed embrace, somewhere between a bow and a proper handshake.
“Ladies,” Randolph began, taking his place at the podium. “I am honored by this opportunity to speak to you today. I hope you will be kind enough to indulge the stories and photos of an old adventurer long past his prime.”
Rose imagined a few of the women already falling in love at the sound of his voice, deep and velvety, his careful British English peppered here and there with a curious cadence acquired, they might guess, somewhere exotic. Looking out over the country club dining room from her seat, she thought of how the whole affair looked a bit like a wedding if not for the podium and projector screen set up beside it.
Rose looked out at the members of the Nicolet Ladies’ Auxiliary. These were the wives of farmers — or rather, former farmers, who, years earlier, when the Lab campus had been “acquired,” had sold (or, in some cases, had been forced to sell) their farmland. People who had expected to live their lives as members of a small rural town, consuming casseroles in church basements at golden anniversary parties, not with the hulking mass of the National Accelerator Research Lab’s twenty-story Research Tower looming over them, and — as she had so often heard her fellow townsfolk saying—God-only-knows-what zooming around in those tunnels under the soil.
Now, though, these ladies had arranged themselves around ten-top tables draped in white linen, peering over the centerpieces at Randolph, who stood at the front of the room in a tweed jacket, dress shirt open at the neck, his beard, which had grown wild during his recent travels, once again trim and distinguished.
“My first great adventure, years ago, led me on foot through the mountains of the Hindu Kush,” Randolph began, “and I remember distinctly how at home I felt, a sense that I might look forever at the wild world around me. I knew that before me lay a life of exploration and of wonder.”
Sarala, watching from her seat at the table, smiled at the rapt attention with which Lily watched her father. She tried to imagine herself and Meena in the audience as Abhijat delivered one of his papers, or sitting, attentive, in his office at the Lab as he explained the symbols and equations that decorated his chalkboard wall.
“I must begin by telling you that I do not think of myself first and foremost as a photographer,” Randolph continued. “The images I present today are merely a grasping — always futile, in the end — at capturing the experience. And of the peoples you will see represented here…” He paused a moment for dramatic effect. “It is useful to remember that they are as curious about us as we are about them.”
It was Randolph’s habit to begin his lectures with a favorite image, that of a man squatting before a campfire ringed with stakes upon which human heads had been impaled, empty eye sockets peering out through the smoke of the campfire and into the lecture venue. This image he projected onto the screen for a long moment before he began again to speak, waiting for the gasps and murmurs he could now, after years of experience, time almost exactly as they reached their crescendo.
“To begin, I must tell you that my work is rife with peril.” Randolph’s voice was low and serious, causing the ladies in the audience, Rose noticed, to lean forward a bit in their seats, ice tinkling as they set glasses of water with lemon down on the tables, the better to regard him with their uninterrupted attention. “Not the peril one might imagine at first — that of cannibals—” here Randolph gestured at the image on the screen “—or man-eating animals, but rather, the perils of inauthenticity.”
Sarala caught herself taking a reassured breath and she looked around to see how many in the audience were doing the same.
“It is my firm belief,” Randolph continued, “that the only worthwhile way to explore the world is to live among its people — to eat as they eat, to sleep where they sleep, to travel as they travel.”
He had come to understand that pictures of landscapes, buildings, and their surroundings held an audience’s interest for only so long. What they wanted to see were the people among whom he had lived. He gestured once more at the image on the screen.
“It is imperative that one photograph the natives in their natural setting, with as little disturbance to their way of life as one can effect. One must at all costs avoid posing a photo. Rather, one must watch patiently as the natives go about their daily tasks, performing their rituals.”
Here, Sarala thought back to her first months in Nicolet, how she had watched so carefully to learn and understand the ways of her new home.
“For some,” Randolph continued, “the only way to photograph them is to sneak up upon them in their sleep. They fear the camera as a kind of witchcraft.”
Meena, flanked by her mother on one side and Lily on the other, found herself thinking of the startled, frightened, and perplexed faces in the images from The Secret Museum. She could imagine the people in the photos wondering who this strange man was, and what he was pointing at them. She had read, once, about the superstition that the act of being photographed could steal one’s soul, and for a moment, she felt she could understand this fear.
Randolph projected the next image onto the screen.
“Here,” Randolph continued, “you will find women laboring in the fields, sleeping infants strapped to their backs. They are of a sturdy stock, not averse to hard work.”
Meena watched the Nicolet Ladies’ Auxiliary as Randolph spoke, pocketbooks hanging from the backs of their chairs, half-finished glasses of iced tea on the tables before them, every once in a while, one of the women quietly buttering a dinner roll and consuming it in a way she imagined to be unobtrusive, tiny bites like a bird.
“And here is shown a vigorous race.” Randolph projected onto the screen an image of barefoot natives, spears at their sides. “Theirs is a wild life, given to savagery and brutality meted out to surrounding tribes who encroach upon their territory or resources. One might well imagine their war chants,” Randolph continued, “drums thundering through the bush.” He moved closer to the screen, pointing. “These patterns of white chalk on the skin are seen by the native as a protective charm, a talisman against harm in warfare, and once thus ornamented, warriors seem to fear nothing. They are a violent people, bent on the destruction of their enemies, whether by murderous plots, cowardly sneak attacks in the dead of night, or by driving them into the inhospitable desert to certain death.”
Meena wondered how these same people might have described themselves to this curious audience, who peered up at their images on the screen from half a world away.
Randolph moved through the pictures, holding the audience in quiet, rapt attention as he spoke. He advanced the slide projector with a click. This was, Randolph explained, “a Nuer man,” who now stood before them, projected onto the screen, naked but for a string around his waist. The Nicolet Ladies’ Auxiliary seemed to draw a collective breath. Some looked away. Some held their linen napkins up to their mouths, looking, to Meena, like small children peeking out from behind a favorite and comforting blanket.
Randolph exchanged a barely detectable smile with Rose. It had always amused him how infrequently groups of ladies like these were shocked by the naked female body — in the course of his lectures, he’d shown plenty of the standard images of naked-to-the-waist women, breasts hanging flat against their ribcages, to no noticeable fanfare — and yet, conversely, how predictable were those same ladies’ responses to an image of a naked male.