We returned to Umatac, this time stopping at the old graveyard on the hillside above the village. One of John’s neighbors, Benny, who tends the graveyard – he cuts the grass, acts as a sexton in the little church, and as grave digger when needed – showed us around. Benny’s family, John told me, is one of the most afflicted in Umatac and one of the three families which especially caught Kurland’s attention when he came here forty years ago. It was one of his forebears, in fact, at the end of the eighteenth century, who was cursed after stealing some mangoes from the local priest, and told that his family would contract fatal paralyses generation after generation, until the end of time. This, at least, is the story, the myth, in Umatac.
We walked slowly with Benny among the limestone grave markers, the older ones crooked and sunken with time, the newer ones in the shape of simple white crosses, often embellished by plastic statues of the Virgin Mary or photographs of the deceased, some with fresh flowers on them. As Benny led the way, he pointed out individual stones: ‘Here’s Herman, he passed away from it…and my cousin, that one here…another cousin is the one down here. And one of the couple here, the wife, passed away from that…yeah, they all passed away from the lytico-bodig. And up here – my sister’s father-in-law passed from the same disease…my cousin and her dad and mom, the same thing…the mayor’s sister, same problem…got a cousin here passed away too. Yes, here’s another cousin, Juanita, and her dad, they both had it. My uncle Simon, right here – he was the oldest in the family who passed away from the lytico-bodig…and another cousin, he just passed away a couple of months ago. Another uncle, same problem – and the wife, same disease; I forget his first name. I didn’t really know him, he just passed away before I got to know him.’
Benny went on, leading us from one grave to another, continuing his endless, tragic litany – here’s my uncle, here’s my cousin, and his wife; here’s my sister, and here’s my brother…and here (one seemed to hear, intimated in his voice, necessitated by the tragic logic of it all), here too I will lie, among all my family, my community of Umatac, dead of the lytico-bodig, in this graveyard by the sea. Seeing the same names again and again, I felt that the entire graveyard was devoted to lytico-bodig, and that everyone here belonged to a single family, or perhaps two or three interrelated families, which all shared the same curse.
As we walked slowly among the stones, I remembered another graveyard, also by the sea, which I had visited in up-island Martha’s Vineyard. It was a very old one, going back to the end of the seventeenth century, and there I also saw the same names again and again. In Martha’s Vineyard, this was a graveyard of the congenitally deaf; here in Umatac, it was a graveyard of the lytico-bodig.
When I visited Martha’s Vineyard, there were no longer any deaf people left – the last had died in 1952 – and with this, the strange deaf culture which had been such a part of the island’s history and community for more than two hundred years had come to an end, as such isolates do. So it was with Fuur, the little Danish island of the colorblind; so, most probably, it will be with Pingelap; and so, perhaps, it will be with Guam – odd genetic anomalies, swirls, transients, given a brief possibility, existence, by the nature of islands and isolation. But islands open up, people die or intermarry; genetic attenuation sets in, and the condition disappears. The life of such a genetic disease in an isolate tends to be six or eight generations, two hundred years perhaps, and then it vanishes, as do its memories and traces, lost in the ongoing stream of time.
Rota
When I was five, our garden in London was full of ferns, a great jungle of them rising high above my head (though these were all uprooted at the start of the Second World War to make room for Jerusalem artichokes, which we were encouraged to grow for the war effort). My mother and a favorite aunt adored gardening, and were botanically inclined, and some of my earliest memories are of seeing them working side by side in the garden, often pausing to look at the young fronds, the baby fiddle-heads, with great tenderness and delight. The memory of these ferns and of a quiet, idyllic botanizing became associated for me with the sense of childhood, of innocence, of a time before the war.
One of my mother’s heroines, Marie Stopes (a lecturer in fossil botany before she turned to crusading for contraception), had written a book called Ancient Plants, which excited me strangely.[74] For it was here, when she spoke of ‘the seven ages’ of plant life, that I got my first glimpse of deep time, of the millions of years, the hundreds of millions, which separated the most ancient plants from our own. ‘The human mind,’ Stopes wrote, ‘cannot comprehend the significance of vast numbers, of immense space, or of aeons of time’; but her book, illustrating the enormous range of plants which had once lived on the earth – the vast majority long extinct – gave me my first intimation of such eons.[75] I would gaze at the book for hours, skipping over the flowering plants and going straight to the earliest ones – ginkgos, cycads, ferns, lycopods, horsetails. Their very names held magic for me: Bennettitales, Sphenophyllales, I would say to myself, and the words would repeat themselves internally, like a spell, like a mantra.
During the war years, my aunt was headmistress of a school in Cheshire, a ‘fresh-air school,’ as it was called, in the depths of Delamere Forest. It was she who first showed me living horsetails in the woods, growing a foot or two high in the wet ground by the sides of streams. She had me feel their stiff, jointed stems, and told me that they were among the most ancient of living plants – and that their ancestors had grown to gigantic size, forming dense thickets of huge, bamboolike trees, twice as tall as the trees which now surrounded us. They had once covered the earth, hundreds of millions of years ago, when giant amphibians ploshed through the primordial swamps. She would show me how the horsetails were anchored by a network of roots, the pliant rhizomes which sent out runners to each stalk.[76]
Then she would find tiny lycopods to show me – club mosses or tassel ferns with their scaly leaves; these too, she told me, once took the form of immensely tall trees, more than a hundred feet high, with huge scaly trunks supporting tasselled foliage, and cones at their summits. At night I dreamed of these silent, towering giant horsetails and club mosses, the peaceful, swampy landscapes of 350 million years ago, a Paleozoic Eden – and I would wake with a sense of exhilaration, and loss.
I think these dreams, this passion to regain the past, had something to do with being separated from my family and evacuated from London (like thousands of other children) during the war years. But the Eden of lost childhood, childhood imagined, became transformed by some legerdemain of the unconscious to an Eden of the remote past, a magical ‘once,’ rendered wholly benign by the omission, the editing out, of all change, all movement. For there was a peculiar static, pictorial quality in these dreams, with at most a slight wind rustling the trees or rippling the water. They neither evolved nor changed, nothing ever happened in them; they were encapsulated as in amber. Nor was I myself, I think, ever present in these scenes, but gazed on them as one gazes at a diorama. I longed to enter them, to touch the trees, to be part of their world – but they allowed no access, were as shut off as the past.