Three Views of Crystal Water

The snow in the pictures was so sad, cold and exquisite. The difficulties were borne lightly, gaily, as if everyone knew it would melt tomorrow. As if everyone knew that the tea house was around the next bend. The cherry blossoms would soon be out. The people would be flying their kites, which they did all together, an entire street of people. Or standing on a shore with a picnic basket looking expectantly to a nearby island.

There was snow sometimes in Vancouver, but it rarely stayed more than overnight. Vera’s mother had had the same delighted attitude to snow, an attitude that was also a denial. She could just as easily have said, ‘Let’s go for a walk with our bare-toed shoes and our thin umbrellas and the little white split-toed socks!’ That would have been on her gay days. Other days she was a sleepwalker.

And the pasty faces, the swollen cheeks, the lost features of these women were her mother’s.

But this was a thought Vera did not like to have, and she pushed it away.

The devils – or men – in the ukiyo-e world simpered and hunched their shoulders and curled their toes. Their eyes were black marbles in wild open Os. They had huge dog faces with curled-back snarling lips and mad, crossed eyes, and eyebrows that make an angry V in the middle of their foreheads. Their hair was tied up in knots on the top of their head, and they often had a rope over one shoulder. One had a blue bow at his waist, the tassels dancing at his knees. His five fat fingers spread out in astonishment as he looked down and off to the right: something was there. He too had bare feet and carried two curved swords.

Once, her grandfather came out of his office and stood beside her. He smiled as she looked from one print to the other.

‘Why do you have so many?’ Vera asked.

‘They used to be easy to find. No one put any value on them,’ he said. ‘I sent them home over the years. I don’t know if your mother ever looked at them. And now – I look. There’s always something new to see.’

‘Do people buy them?’

‘Oh they’re not for sale, not for sale, Vera,’ he said. And he laid his finger alongside his nose making a joke of the secret. ‘If anyone knew they were worth money, my creditors would have them in a flash. We’ll just keep them here, where only you and I can look.’

This day, when she got past Hinchcliffe, her grandfather was tapping on his typewriter. He asked her to wait in the hallway. She knew that when he let her in, the typewriter would be back on the floor and any evidence of paper would have vanished. Once in a while he spoke of a book. Vera hoped he would write it. She wanted to know all about his adventures. Sometimes at night in the house on Ivy Street he told stories. But, he said, any book would put him in a conflict between truth and loyalty. ‘That be very interesting,’ said Keiko, who was learning English.

Vera went to the measuring table and stared for a long time at a print where a child with a net was out in the darkness with a woman, her mother or a nanny. There appeared to be an official nature to the relationship, but then this was true of nearly all the pictures and nearly all the relationships. The little girl reached with her net trying to catch the little lights that were in the air, like stars come down to dance over the tips of the grasses.

‘Fireflies,’ said James Lowinger. He placed his hand on her shoulder. It was heavy but it was gentle. ‘They’re catching fireflies. The Japanese love fireflies. Do you see how the artist has tried to make them shine? It is a very fine print.’

She saw that there was a round hole in the darkness and then little sparks of yellow that radiated from this white spot. She leaned back against her chair and the back of her head rested somewhere in the middle of his chest.

‘Did you ever see them catching fireflies?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said. He laughed. She loved the way he laughed. It was uncomplicated, amused. ‘Even I’m not that old. This was a long time ago. Before I ever went to Japan.’

Her grandfather shifted the paper, and found another. His fingers touched the dry, stiff yellowed paper with care.

‘Look,’ he said.

Water was everywhere, everywhere in this land of extremes, of cloud-like blossoms floating in the dry arms of trees, of shores littered with shells and crabs, of people standing on a shore looking out to an island, carrying what she took to be picnic baskets. She grimaced over the working men, their loincloths high over knotted thighs, who poled the boats upstream in a gale.

Tiny, almost comic figures engaged in Herculean tasks amongst giant waves, in deep gorges among mountains with white and black gashes down their pyramidal sides. Small, determined, they fought on.

‘Is Japan still like that?’ Vera asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ he chuckled. ‘Not the last time I checked.’

But he didn’t sound very convinced.

The world of these pictures, which Vera took to be the world of her grandfather’s business, and of his romance, was far away in the distance, but at an unspecified place in time. Perhaps it still existed. It was like the world of fairy tales. It was like a performance. Vera wondered who had made the pictures, which were like records of all that went on. She thought the picture world was his secret world, the one he might be writing about.

Someone was always watching this world. The artists who made these pictures peered through timbers, branches, and windows to frame a view; they hid behind fence poles and horses’ back ends. They stood in corners so that they could encompass a whole line of warehouse roofs descending a hill, or let the bent branch of a tree swirl over and under the scene to frame it. And the people knew they were being watched. They were like actors in a play. They knew they were exquisite. They made processions and fought battles. They toyed with the idea of removing their costumes, but they never actually did. There were a few pictures where the women let the kimono slip off one shoulder or even off both. They raised their hems in certain cases to do unspeakable things. She liked them even more for that. Those prints she looked at furtively, blushing.

Of course she knew her grandfather had been a pearl merchant. But as closely as she scanned the pictures, Vera could see nothing to do with pearls. Water pictures she examined carefully for clues. But then – in a special bottom drawer – she found the seashore prints. The diving girls in their fire circle by the beach. Bare-breasted, with fabric looped over their hips, long-haired and long-bodied. Like sloops, an easy curve from chin to hip.

Then one day, Vera stumbled across the octopus. Good grief, what an idea, what they might do with those tentacles. She was horrified, put down the pictures and leaped out of the room with her face blazing.

More often than not, when Vera arrived after school, her grandfather was waiting for her. He stood up in his courtly way and they went out, telling Miss Hinchcliffe they’d only be a few minutes. He took his umbrella from the stand and opened the wooden door with the frosted top half, paused on the top step to see if it was raining (it was), took Vera’s arm and descended to the street. On the pavement, they turned right. The flatiron building filled the end of a block where two streets angled together, which was why it was called a flatiron: it was triangular. At the bottom of it, just below street level, was a triangular coffee shop. There were windows on either side, one looking on to Homer Street and the other on to Water Street: the café was only ten feet wide at its widest. At the narrow end it came to a point in two windows. At the wide end was a curtain.

As soon as they stepped in from the rain, Roberta appeared from behind the curtain.

‘Captain Lowinger,’ she said, gravely, as if he’d come to church, ‘and Miss Vera.’

‘Hello, love,’ Captain Lowinger said. ‘We’ll have coffee and a Danish, sliced flat and toasted and then buttered.’

They sat. Their faces looked out on to the pavement just at the level of people’s feet. Now Vera had the tall, rumbling figure all to herself.

Vera’s mother had raised her on tales of James Lowinger’s adventures. It was as if Belle had been planning all along to abdicate and leave the girl in his hands, as if she had guessed that the fact, and possibly only the fact, of Vera’s existence would be powerful enough to draw in James Lowinger from his perennial sailings around the South Seas, to rein him in just as his great strength was waning, so that he would be safe at last and seated, facing her, pouring milk in his coffee and muttering that he needed a spoon.

‘My grandfather needs a spoon,’ Vera said, raising her voice to hail the waitress. Roberta was a capable woman past thirty with a dreamy streak, often discovered, as now, with her gaze out of the window into the ankles of the passersby.

‘Where’s my Danish and where’s my sweetheart?’ he said, looking up plaintively for Roberta, his hand on the tabletop, his neck curling forward from rounded shoulders. ‘I might die waiting.’

‘We can’t have that, can we?’ said Roberta, plunking the plate down in front of him.

‘Cut or pick!’ he said to Vera.

It was his game. The first time they played it she’d been small enough to sit on his lap, and he was visiting the house on Ivy Street. Belle had cooked an uneven number of breakfast sausages.

‘We’ll divide them.’

Hamilton was travelling but that wasn’t unusual. In fact it was preferable. Her grandfather wanted to pass on tricks of the trade, and he never wanted to pass them on to Vera’s father. ‘That’s what the pearl traders do.’

‘What do you mean?’ Vera had asked that first time.

‘Cut means you divide them, and let me pick which portion. Pick means you pick, so I cut.’

Vera couldn’t decide. She had gnawed at her pyjama sleeve. She had quivered. He had watched her and smiled as she stared at the prized sausages. If she cut, she could make sure the halves were exactly even. But if she let him cut, he’d have to try to make them even too. But he might make a mistake. Then one half would be bigger, and she could have it.

‘Pick!’ she had said.

‘Smart girl!’ he had roared, and laughed so that his moustache ends wobbled, which made her laugh. ‘The picking price is always higher than cutting price.’ He had divided the sausages meticulously, leaving one end of the extra longer than the other. ‘Now which do you want?’

Vera had giggled and giggled, picking the bigger portion.

He had set her back down on her own chair.

‘Last time I did that I was sitting on the ground in Bombay in one of those low little shops the Indians have. There was some oily meat involved as I recall, that I sopped up with a piece of delicious bread hot from a stove. The merchant laid out his pearls on the back of his hand.’

‘Did you cut or pick, Grandpa?’

‘I picked. I always picked. And then you know what I did? To bargain with him on the price, I covered my hand with a handkerchief and put out my fingers to say how many hundred rupees I’d pay. Five fingers, five hundred. Whole hand, one thousand. Half a finger—’ he made as if to chop off the end of his finger ‘—What do you think?’

‘She doesn’t like arithmetic, Father,’ Belle had said. She was formal with him.

‘Well I do!’ he had said, spearing his sausages and wolfing them down whole. ‘I like arithmetic these days because I’m making money.’

Today, Vera looked at the four quarters of the Danish.

‘It’s cut already,’ she said.

‘You’re right. I’ll have to let you pick then.’

He smiled. His ruddy skin was growing whiter, and beginning to shine like the inside of a shell. His face was clearing of the weather burns and tobacco stains of decades; he was being tamed. Was it his nearness to an end that made him flirt with girls and waitresses? A growing lightness in his life, that was really an acceptance of death that made him so attractive? They were all in love with him – Hinchcliffe, Vera, Roberta. He was powerful but childlike, immense, and visibly incompetent: he trembled and knocked over the cream pitcher. His body leaked and crumpled. He burped and gagged, laughed gently at himself.

‘And by the way,’ Vera said. ‘You won’t die. Not if I can help it.’ She did not think it would happen, ever. Perhaps because her mother had fretted about it so much: he’ll be lost at sea, he’ll catch beriberi, and he’ll come home to die. But he had proven very durable.

‘Today in school we talked about pearls, Grandfather.’

‘I don’t know why you would. There are no more pearls in the sea. They’ve all been snapped up, every last one of them. Every self-respecting wild oyster has cashed in his chips,’ said Lowinger.

‘I don’t believe that there are no more pearls,’ she teased.

‘You have to believe me, I’m your grandfather.’

She pouted. ‘Then tell me about them.’

‘Pearls are not my favourite topic, Vera dear.’

‘But they are mine.’

‘Are they, my dear?’ Busy with his Danish. ‘Are you catching the disease then?’

Vera crossed her narrow feet and took a strand of her white-blonde hair to curl around a fingertip; her stubborn adolescent expression gave way to the blank, childish look of she who expects a story.

‘Is it catching?’

‘Oh, highly contagious, my dear. You want to stay away.’

‘But don’t you think I’ve already been exposed?’ Her mother had sent her around to the neighbours to sit in the rooms of the children who had scarlet fever and rubella, so that she would catch them and get them over with. So that if she got them later in life they would not kill her.

‘Is that your excuse? Well, it was mine too.’

There was silence for a few minutes while he tore off ragged pieces of his Danish, piece by piece, unrolling it, and popped them in his mouth.

Then, ‘Do you even know what a pearl is?’

‘I do.’

‘You don’t.’

‘I do.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘Pearls are formed inside the shell of an oyster when it is irritated by a grain of sand. That’s what they told me at school.’

‘It is not that simple. There are as many explanations put forth for that, my girl, as would take me all day to tell.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘A pearl is nothing but the tomb of a parasitic worm.’ He declaimed with a half smile that made the handlebars of his moustache twitch:

Know you, perchance how that poor formless wretch

The oyster gems his shallow moonlit chalice?

Where the shell irks him or the sea sand frets

He sheds this lovely lustre

On his grief.

‘Who wrote that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do they teach you at school? No proper poetry either I see. It was Sir Edwin Arnold. And do they tell you that a pearl is the result of a morbid condition?’

‘No.’ She knew she had got him going.

‘They don’t. All right. Do they tell you then what Pliny said about the pearl?’

‘No, Grandfather.’

‘Well, they should then. Pliny thought, you see, that pearls were the eggs of the shellfish. That when it came time for these oysters to bring forth young, that their two shells, which are normally closed up tight, only a little gap there for the eyes to look out, you know, that the shells would part and open wide and a little dew would come in. And that this dew was a seed that would swell and grow big and become a pearl, and that the oyster would then labour to deliver this pearl, at which time it would be born, as another oyster.’

He chuckled, and his whitened eye lost a little of its haze. ‘People believed all sorts of things of the pearl. That it was born as a result of a flash of lightning. I rather like that one. And in years when there were very few pearls, that was because there were not very many storms.’

‘That’s stupid,’ she pronounced.

‘Stupid?’ he said, his breath whistling through his moustache. ‘You don’t say that about people’s beliefs. You say that it is magic. That’s what we’re talking about. I suppose because it is difficult to explain, isn’t it, how a small, perfect, beautiful thing can be found in the slime at the bottom of the sea. The Persians believed that pearls came from the sun. The Indians believed they came from clouds. If you listened to the poets, you’d think that pearls were tears cried by the gods, or by angels.

‘The natives in the Malay Archipelago and on the coast of Borneo are convinced that pearls themselves breed. They say—’ and here he leaned toward Vera and adopted a stage whisper as if he were imparting a secret of the greatest importance ‘—if a few pearls are locked in a small box with some grains of rice and a little cotton wool for several months, that when the box is opened – abracadabra!’ His eyes widened and his great furtrimmed mouth gaped ‘—that there are several new pearls in the box! And,’ he added, ‘the ends have been nibbled off the grains of rice! Do you believe it?’

She did not know whether to answer yes or no, so she kept quiet.

Captain James Lowinger flat out laughed here, heartily and in a way not exactly mirthful. And as he laughed, water spurted from the corners of his eyes and he picked up the thin paper napkin that Roberta had dispensed with the Danish pastry, and wiped the water from his cheeks.

‘And there are a lot of men who wished that was true!’

He laughed down into his chest, and picked at the remaining bits of Danish on his plate.

‘Mind you,’ he said again, settling back, ‘these breeder pearls are just as tiny as a pinhead. So—’ His hands fell flat on the tabletop ‘—what’s the use of that? The Chinese grind them for medicine.’

They drank their coffee then. Roberta leaned on her cash register and stared gloomily out of the window into the Vancouver rain. But she was only pretending to stare; Vera could tell she was actually listening.

‘Well, do you believe it?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said.

‘So, you don’t believe it?’ He peered at her.

‘Well,’ she began to doubt herself. ‘Maybe a little—’

‘When Columbus came to America, you know, he found that the natives on this continent believed it too. They had pearls galore, so many pearls, do you know? Pearls were not just in the Orient. No, not at all. When Fernando de Soto got to Florida he found the dead embalmed in wooden coffins with baskets of pearls beside them. In Montezuma’s temple, the walls were all laden with pearls. The Temple of Tolomecco had walls and roof of mother-of-pearl and strings of pearls hung from the walls.’

‘Where did they come from?’

‘Quite literally, they grew on trees. You didn’t know that, did you, Vera?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Yes. In the Gulf of Paria, Columbus found oysters clinging to the branches of trees, their shells gaping open. Do you believe that?’

‘No,’ she breathed. This time she had to have guessed right.

‘Wrong!’ he roared. Roberta looked back at them, her reverie interrupted, and grinned to see the old man teasing his granddaughter, and Vera’s pale face heating up again to the roots of her nearly white hair.

‘Oysters really did grow on trees.’ He went all scientific on her then. ‘The oyster in question is Dendrostrea, or Tree Oyster, a mollusc that is to be found upon roots or branches of mangrove trees overhanging the water.’

She was reduced to silence.

‘There, I fooled you. But you got me going. What did you want to know? What were you asking about?’

‘Ceylon. You went to Ceylon.’

‘Oh, everyone went to Ceylon. My father too. Way back in the 1860s. That’s a long time ago, you can’t imagine how long, my dear.’

‘Of course I can. Seventy years ago.’ She was better at arithmetic now.

‘Give or take a decade, that’s how old your grandfather is. My father was away with the pearling ships when I was born.’

‘Just like my father was away when I was born,’ Vera offered this as a bond.

‘But I came to see you, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, you did.’

Captain Lowinger banged his thick cup on the table. It bounced. The windowpanes seemed to rock in their frames. ‘Consider yourself lucky. My father never came to see me. I am sure I remember being born. I looked around and he wasn’t there. I had to wait years to see him, as far as I can remember. When he saw me, he was not really satisfied. Later, he took me along to make a man of me.’

He rubbed the tips of his forefinger and thumb together. The good eye steadily gazed into Vera’s face. The other one saw her too, but she must have had a white cloud over her head. ‘It’s the way of men in our family. Seafaring men. Go off and leave the woman at home, minding things. It’s a good deal if you’re the man. Mind you, it never worked for me. I tried it with your grandmother, but she was not the type of woman who’d wait around. For that, I lost her and I lost your mother too.’

He looked sad. Roberta brought fresh coffee and he took a long slurp. ‘But we were talking about fathers.’

10 February 1860

Night was falling as they landed at the British garrison in the Strait of Manaar. Before they left the deck of their little vessel, Papa Lowinger took the boy to one side, looking away from the streaky red of the setting sun. That was his first memory.

‘Do you see that land there?’ Papa said to James, pointing into the darkness. The white waving beach and dark hills above were two miles away. ‘That is the island of Ceylon. The people here believe that it was Paradise, the Garden of Eden. Up in the hills lives the King of Candy.’

That impressed James, and he focused his sleepy eyes on it. The small base they had come to was separated from Ceylon only by a shallow arm of the sea, full of sandbars. Candy looked remote. Paradise was closer.

‘At low tide you can nearly walk there,’ Papa said. ‘There’s a string of sandbars called Adam’s Bridge. The people say it was the very spot Adam crossed over when he was expelled from Paradise.’

The bridge was a series of white sand circles and they gleamed under the moon as the water surrounding them went darker and darker. It glistened and seemed to beckon him. James knew that Papa was laying on an enchantment. He did that to people. His voice became like a swallow: it rose and dipped and winged its way into your heart, and then it took fright and flapped upwards and was gone.

The sand fleas were biting. Soldiers stood at the water’s edge, swinging their storm lamps by the handle, luring their boat in. James was bundled up and put in to bed. Through the wall he heard one of those tight-lipped voices. He didn’t know how men got them – at Sandhurst he supposed. His mother wanted him to go there when he grew up. But his father wanted to teach him the pearling business. He was still in the larval stage, white as a fish and squeaky-voiced.

The leader of the garrison talked on.

‘Time and again Ceylon’s conquerors have exhausted the great pearling grounds. First the Portuguese, then the Dutch. We’ve let the banks rest now for four years. Each year we’ve made a survey to see if the oysters were ready,’ the barking voice went on. ‘Some years they are invisible, some years too small. We can’t wait much longer; at seven years of age, an oyster is too old: it will have vomited its pearl.’

Seven was James’s age. Too old!

‘We mean to auction off leases on the pearl fishery.’ That was a different English voice, also clipped, but lower.

The roar of laughter came from his father. He was European in origin, Papa. You could hear a husky German or Austrian in there if you listened. He was a man who left country and religion behind to journey after the pearl. He spoke in his peculiar way, hearty and learned, but rough-edged until he wanted to persuade you; then he was smooth as satin ‘The manner of getting pearls has always been a mad amalgam of religious rituals and native cunning. Now the British Army believes it can apply science to the problem?’

‘This year the fishery will again be great,’ continued the clipped voice in an unhurried way. ‘This is why we have invited you. I tell you, everyone has come to see.’

In the morning they set out in a native boat, pulled by a government steamer. It was all sand, and difficult going; water sometimes disappeared altogether. When this happened, native men with long bare legs jumped into the surf and attached ropes to the boat, and pulled it. They had to be pulled a long way around to find deep water again. It was only twelve miles down to the Bay of Candatchey, but it took for ever, the boat running aground and being pushed off. The soldiers were flaming hot in their red coats, and got a lecture from their leader about how they shouldn’t complain. But the man on the oars told James about the buffaloes that lived in the jungle beyond the beaches and frequented the roads like highwaymen; he said they were known to go quite mad at the sight of red. If a scrap of scarlet cloth flapped to the ground, the creature would run at it and trample it, then get down on its knees as if to pray, and gore it.

‘But your jackets!’ James cried, ‘they’re red as berries!’ The soldier rolled his eyes at James and went on to say there were elephants in this jungle, (‘pests’, he called them) and wild boars and even small tigers.

They made their slow way over the crystal sea toward the morning sun. They looked off to the Indian side and saw nothing but blue salt water divided into amusing little mazes. They looked to the Ceylon side and saw nothing but a huge reflecting collar of sand around a dim, green layer of trees. But something vertical stood out, wavering in the sun, a stick moving along the sand. It was a man running in a solitary manner along the beach. He had a most determined, yet peaceful expression, as if he were in a trance. Bearing in mind that they were passing through Adam’s Bridge, James asked his father if it was the first man himself.

‘Papa, is it Adam?’

‘Where?’ he said, absently. He was often that way.

‘There, Papa. Running.’ His image arrested James.

‘Adam?’ His father laughed. ‘Well, son, perhaps it is,’ he said.

And if it were, where was Eve? The boy wanted to know.

Now his father laughed long. ‘I suppose Eve will be along soon. Isn’t it for her sake he’s running?’

James supposed Eve had got behind. He looked long and hard on that shore, but he never saw her.

Papa eventually took pity on James. He squeezed his hand and then he said, ‘No, that man is called a peon. He is running from Colombo, Ceylon, to Madras, India, with the post,’ his father said. ‘It is five hundred miles and he will do it in ten days.’

James never forgot the sight of him.

How ridiculous he must have been, in the schoolboy grey flannels and blazer that his father had made him wear. His straw boater tried to lift off his head at every minute, so he was kept busy jamming it back down. His skin – so pink in contrast to the skin of every other human they met – prickled, stung with sweat, burned, and peeled until it bled. It took him many more years to supply himself with the bark he had as an old man, seasoned and lined and impervious to insult.

At last they drew in to the large, half-moon-shaped bay. There were hundreds of boats pulled up on the shore. The wind was blowing away from them: sand flew, and in amongst the gusts of it he could see figures swirling in purple and black and burned orange, green and indigo.

He was so short he had to stand on the thwart to jump down out of the boat. He landed, squinting despite the shade of his straw hat, in hard wet sand. This grew lighter in colour, and dried, as they walked inland. But it was still sand, hot, and slippery underfoot. So this was Paradise.

There was nothing built on it, only a few fragile open-sided sheds, straw roofed with skinny crooked poles at the sides to hold them up. And hundreds of tents, which flapped in the wind and hissed with the onslaught of sand that came on the gusts. Papa explained that the fleet had gone out with the land breeze at the firing of the guns at ten o’clock the evening before. It would have reached the banks at daybreak and the divers would set to work. At noon they would stop as the air began to stir to warn them to come back. They were due back, on the sea breeze, in a few hours.

James could see, emerging out of the sand clouds, people. People of every kind he could imagine, hundreds and hundreds of them. He and his Papa had arrived at a giant, seething fair which was all the more astonishing for having appeared on a sand spit, out of nowhere. There were black men, yellow and brown men too, men in long robes, men with pigtails and satin hats, nearly naked and squatting in loincloths, long-haired, turbaned, wrapped in shawls and crowned with fez. There were Malay soldiers with their curved blades called kreese; his father said to watch out. Once drawn, a kreese was bound to draw blood.

It was all impermanent, an encampment, and better than a circus. They passed men with rings through their lips, and women so freighted with jewellery and hardware they had to be supported as they walked. Others were shrouded so that they appeared as only a pair of large wary eyes, in a black triangle. The sun-burned laughing girls who flipped their tambourines at him were sea-gypsies. And there were dancing boys with hips as narrow as a dog’s, who insinuated themselves between the soldiers as they walked.

It was hot, huge and festive. Pigs squealed, donkeys brayed and people shouted in tongues. James stopped before a shy graceful animal like a small deer, in a cage. A gazelle, his Papa said, waiting to be sold. A worldly-looking monkey with a white beard made its way without touching ground, by climbing over the shoulders and heads of whole rows of people.

Papa kept him by the hand. Maybe he thought he’d be stolen. Maybe he would have been. He dragged behind, caught up by a snake charmer playing on a flageolet who coaxed his cobra halfway up out of the basket only to let him drop again. A scribe sat cross-legged on a straw mat on the sand with a little crowd waiting for him to put some message on paper. He crooked his finger at James, but Papa pulled him past. They ducked under the flaps of a tent draped with coloured carpets. An Arab with a long white headdress and a massive black beard greeted his father with open arms; he looked on James kindly and the boy shrank behind his father’s leg. Papa prised James off and showed him the scales, and the tongs, with which the trader handled the pearls, and weighed them. There were big brass sieves for sizing, a whole set of them, each with a different sized hole for the pearls to slip through, and the corn tongs he knew well because his Papa used them himself.