Jane (27 page)

I chanced a look at him and found that he was staring openly at me. There seemed to be hope in his gaze, anticipation. Tarzan had, I now reflected, quite deliberately and purposely taken me to see the Mangani tribe and brought me here to Zu-dak-lul. To this hut strewn with the remains of his early life. He
wished
me to unlock the mystery for him. He could not have been more clear about his intentions.

I must be brave. As brave as he had been to survive these many years, survive and not devolve into feral depravity. To retain deep in his mind snatches of humanity and language and civilized behavior.

I grasped the locket he had hung around my neck.
Open it,
I thought,
and you will be opening the door to his memory.

“Tarzan,” I said, “come here.”

He padded over across the wooden boards to me. I knelt and, without being told, he did the same. I placed the open locket before Tarzan’s face and pointed to John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.

“This is Tarzan’s father,” I said. Then with my heart pounding hard in my chest, I swiveled slightly and touched the rib cage of the skeleton on the floor. “
This
is Tarzan’s father.” I watched his eyes as comprehension began to manifest itself. He looked many times from the handsome image of John Clayton to his broken remains. Tarzan’s breathing was even and his features stony.

“Do you understand?” I said, unsure he comprehended the question spoken in a language long forgotten.

Finally he whispered, “Tarzan fah-thah
bund.
”

“Yes, your father is dead.” I placed my hand over his, but he was still as a statue, and silent, trying to fathom the unfathomable.

I stood and walked with the greatest apprehension to the bed. I sat gingerly on the edge and called to Tarzan. He stood but refused to move from his place. My voice was gentle, but I felt like a trickster, for I knew that the invitation to my side was an ambush, anything but gentle or kind.

“Tarzan,” I said, “please come.” I held out my hand to him.
He knows,
I thought,
knows what is coming. Dreads it above all dreads.
But finally he came and sat by my side. He looked deep in my eyes and refused to look down. I held the locket before his face again and pointed to the woman’s photograph. The words when they came were bitter as bile.

“This is Tarzan’s mother.” I felt hot tears burning my eyes. It was impossible. I could not say these words. I could not hurt the dear man beside me. But when I chanced a look at Tarzan fixed on Alice Clayton’s image, I saw the faintest glimmer of recognition. His breathing came harder now as he beheld the portrait.
I must speak!
I reached out and put my hand on the dead woman’s skull.

“
This
is Tarzan’s mother.”

He remained more calm than I had expected, but he slowly shook his head no.

“This is Tarzan’s mother.” I held out the locket, which he took and snapped shut in the palm of his hand.

“No Tarzan muh-thah.” He shook his head from side to side, again and again, squeezing his eyes tight to blot out either image. “Here no Tarzan muh-thah. Kala Tarzan muh-thah.”

He wiped a hand across his face. His cheeks were wet.

I had begun this. I must finish it. I stood and walked to the tiny skeleton on the floor. Kneeling down, I touched the little bones. “This is a Mangani
balu.
”

His expression was blank.

“Try to remember, Tarzan,” I said, aware that I spoke in words of which he had no comprehension. “How did you go from being a
balu
of
tar-zans
to a
balu
of Mangani?”

Suddenly I saw him move, and his actions, macabre and repulsive in any other circumstance, choked a sob from me. He had pulled the skeleton of Alice Clayton into his lap. I did not dare move or speak, and I barely drew breath, for a great and terrible epiphany was unfolding before me. Tarzan tilted his head to one side to regard the remains in a different light. Carefully he closed the gaping jaw. But as he moved to pull the bony figure into a delicate embrace, the corpse, in the cruelest of all blows, crumbled suddenly into a pile of fragments and dust.

With a heartbreaking cry, Tarzan shrank back from the bed and bolted for the door.

“Wait!” I called after him, but he was gone.

I watched from the doorway as he leaped from the trees to the sand and, running pell-mell, dove headlong into the sea. He swam like a man possessed, slicing through the waves, farther and farther from shore.

My heart sank. I had done wrong in telling Tarzan the truth. My father always told me that while the truth might hurt, it would never harm. Now I saw that he was wrong. This truth had harmed Tarzan. He was a tiny speck in the ocean now, swimming farther from my sight.

All at once the air of the tree house felt filthy and choking. I escaped, climbing down the rope ladder to the beach. I walked slowly to the edge of the ocean. There was no sight of Tarzan. Shuddering with guilt and unutterable remorse, I sat down hard on the sand. If ever there had been a time to pray, certainly it was now.
But what savage god would have conceived of a punishment such as this for an innocent young family like the Claytons?
None that I would wish to worship, I thought angrily, nor one who would listen to my most fervent prayers. No, it was useless to pray.

The best I could do was wait.

*   *   *

I have no idea of how long I sat on the shore, knees pulled up to my chest, head sunk between them, mourning. All of my losses, mistakes, and this cruel fate. I had driven Tarzan into the sea with my well-intentioned ignorance. Why had I not left well enough alone? He’d been beautiful just as he was. Wild. Fierce. Untrammeled by his English lineage, a heredity no more valid than his Mangani roots. Now he was gone. Drowned in the sea. Drowned by his sorrows. The mutineers had been kinder to the Claytons, putting them ashore, than I had been to Tarzan, tossing him onto the shoals of unwanted memory. Shipwrecked. How could I have been so unfeeling?

“Jane.”

I startled at the sound. My heart leaped at the single syllable of my name spoken by a someone I thought lost. I looked up. Tarzan towered above me, a mountain of a man. Then he fell to his knees before me, his expression suffused with equal measures of pain and joy. In the long silence that followed, his face twitched with fervid emotion. I was terrified to utter a word. To damage him further. And then he opened his mouth and spoke. Chillingly. In the voices of a woman. A man. A child.

“Give me my shawl, will you, dear?

“Are you ill, my darling?

“Look at him, Alice. He’s so strong.

“A B C D E F G.

“Tickle me, Mummy!

“Let me help you, Papa.”

He looked at me then, directly, piercingly, and in the voice of a four-year-old demanded, “Sing to me.”

I was struck dumb, my limbs paralyzed. I could remember nothing of the songs my mother had sung me in the nursery. In the void of my silence, with only the waves as accompaniment, Tarzan obeyed his own command and began to sing in a sweet, wavering voice.

“Sleep, my baby on my bosom.

Warm and cozy will it prove.

Round thee mother’s arms are folding,

In her heart a mother’s love.

“There shall no one come to harm thee.

Naught shall ever break thy rest.

Sleep, my darling babe, in quiet.

Sleep on mother’s gentle breast.”

Now I remembered the lullaby. The words flowed back to me as though I myself were nestled in my mother’s arms. My voice rose together with the little Clayton boy’s.

“Do not fear the sound of a breeze

Brushing leaves against the door.

Do not dread the murmuring seas,

Lonely waves that wash the shore.

“Sleep serenely, baby, slumber.

Lovely baby, gently sleep;

Tell me wherefore art thou smiling,

Smiling sweetly in thy sleep?”

*   *   *

We buried the three skeletons with somber dignity far back from the highest level of the tide. There being no stones, we sank heavy pieces of driftwood deep in the sand over the graves. I had retrieved Alice Clayton’s wedding band from her crumbled remains and, lost for words, placed the ring in Tarzan’s hand. He stared uncomprehendingly at it.

“Here,” I said, taking it and fitting it on the first joint of his little finger, the only digit on which it would fit.
She would want you to have it,
I thought but did not say. But I had no wish to dwell on remains and heartbreaking mementos. I had pried open the door to Tarzan’s past, but the deep vault of his mind was yet untouched and needed the tenderest mining. He had begun parroting words and phrases he remembered, as he had recalled the lullaby, sung by rote. When we spoke now, English words were more liberally mixed with Mangani, and I encouraged him at every turn to use proper grammar, something he took to like a fish to water. I taught him the use of verbs and adjectives, as nouns were so easily learned.

Still, it was elemental communication.

There was in the tree hut on the handmade bookshelf of deck planking a fine and varied collection of titles, less blackened with mildew than I might have expected. It had, I thought, been planned by the Claytons to serve them during their years in the South African colony. Aside from the obvious—the classics from Pliny to Shakespeare—there were entertainments from the Brontë sisters, Austen, and Doyle. What looked to be a centuries-old family Bible had recorded on the pages of the front and back covers the marriages, births, and deaths of generations of Claytons, and the proud passage of the title of the lords of Greystoke. All twenty-four volumes of the 1880 edition of the
Encyclopædia Britannica
stood in neat alphabetical order on the top shelf. But it was the bottom shelf that most captured my attention. Here were books that had been brought along for the edification and enjoyment of the expected child (or children). Hans Christian Andersen’s
Fairy Tales, Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland, The Adventures of Pinocchio, Treasure Island.
There was a primer for spelling and grammar, worn and grimy from tiny hands fingering and turning the pages. It explained Tarzan’s quickness of learning. And it was with this primer that I began his reeducation.

We would sit for hours in the shade of a palm with the primer between us, and I did my best to move him through the lessons. At first the letters were
eta go nene,
little black bugs to him. But Alice, I thought, must have been a gifted teacher, for her little Johnnie, by leaps and bounds, mastered and relearned his letters and numbers in days, even writing in a childish but steady penmanship. When I began to read the Andersen fairy tales, my friend grew dewy-eyed and enraptured, and though I could not be sure he understood every word (for as yet he could not speak in complex sentences), his responses to the stories were most appropriate. When the Ugly Duckling was bitten and pushed and made fun of, Tarzan grew sad. When in
The Snow Queen
the hobgoblin with his evil mirror froze people’s hearts, he trembled. Clearly they had been read to him over and over again, and if the words themselves made no sense, then the memory of the stories came back to him by heart.

I thought it a leap but decided to graduate to the encyclopedia. Starting with
A–B,
we began. I had never been so appreciative of the many finely wrought illustrations in the volumes as I now was, for much of the text was in language far beyond the young man’s comprehension. I was forced to translate into simpler concepts, for example, what a locomotive engine was. To Tarzan it was a huge creature the size of three elephants. I explained it was not a living creature at all, rather made of the same material as his blade. Though not alive, it was able to move along a “track,” ate a hard black soil called “coal,” and made a loud noise as it came, spouting from its top a thick cloud of “steam.” It was, I discovered to my chagrin, impossible to explain the new technology of “moving pictures.”

*   *   *

I had been suddenly thrown into the role of teacher, something quite unknown to me, and I did the best I could. But I soon discovered I was doing all the guiding and decided that Tarzan himself should choose the direction of his education, and to that end I taught him, along with the questions “why?” “where?” “how?” “when?” and “who?” the phrases “Do you remember?” “Now imagine,” and “Tell me about.” This served me in two ways. First, I was spared the constant responsibility of the fledgling tutor for choosing subject matter and, happily, it provided a window into the workings of Tarzan’s mind—the ways he perceived his experiences and the world he knew. What fascinated him and the gaps in his understanding that wanted filling.

I spread out a map of the world on his father’s writing table, and we stood over it together. I had enjoyed geography as a schoolgirl, but explaining the entirety of the planet was overwhelming. I began by pointing out the continents and seas, the great mountain ranges and rivers, countries, cities, and towns.

Almost at once he asked, “Where are we?” It was a simple enough question, but his comprehension thrilled me nevertheless. I pointed at Africa and more specifically to the coast of Gabon, explaining that Zu-dak-lul was known to me as the “Atlantic Ocean.” I moved my finger slightly inland, eastward, and pointed to my best estimation of the Mangani encampment, his own nest in Eden, Waziriland, and the hills of Sumbula.

Once Tarzan understood what the map represented, it became his obsession and he reveled in pointing to a place and demanding that I describe it. Not simply the location but all the details I could manage.

There were huge mountain ranges that made Sumbula look like anthills. Peaks so high they were freezing cold and covered with “snow” and “ice.” People crossed the Atlantic Ocean in great “ocean liners.” Men like him, wearing “suits of clothes,” drove “automobiles” in “New York City,” a place that had as many “buildings,
wallas,
as the forest had trees,” some of the
wallas
as tall as mountains.