with a short a instead of the long a with which her own name was pronounced. That way it sounded less feminine. She did not want him to be teased at school. She had thought of including her father's last name, her maiden surname, Sharma, but could find no way of slotting it in without destroying the rhythm of the sentence which the name was becoming, unless she placed it before Gid'on, her mother's surname, which she was not prepared to do. In the end, her son's name was a whole sentence, of which the meaning was, Drawn out of water, he was a small axe, ready to cut you down, but in the end he brought the comfort of fish for the hungry, 2 Kings 6: 5–6.
This you must understand, if you are to understand how Moshe grew up, and how he died: a strong believer in signs, kabbalah, and cryptograms, forms of meaning that traditional Yahwehists regard with suspicion because such meanings begin in folk talk, not written holy words, Rachel was the kind of person who studied the license plates of vehicles to discern patterns of meanings in the arrangement of the numbers. A license plate with AM 5439, for example, to her mind was meant to show the sequential relationship among 3, 4, and 5, the fact that 9 is a multiple of 3, that 5 plus 4 equals 9, and that 5 plus 3 equals 8, which immediately precedes 9. In other words, although the creator of the license number thought he or she was choosing the numbers at random, there was always an occult logic at work that caused them to fall into predestined patterns, a logic beyond human control or comprehension, and it was this same logic of the universe (which Rachel called faith) that had caused her to find this child when she thought she would have no daughter or son, and at the precise moment when she had determined in her heart to leave her husband.
By this logic, Moshe was predestined to become a superstitious man, following in the footsteps of his mother. Moreover, he was destined to remain so, because he traveled and lived in many places all over the world.
(I cannot say what Rachel made of the fact that she found Moshe four years before Jamaica's independence. The number 4 was not significant in any system of signs that she espoused.)
In addition to carrying the weight of new translations on his birth certificate, Moshe carried in his body outlandish signs of illegitimacy, the peculiar transgressions from which rumor had it he was made. Please understand. In that country illegitimate did not mean what it means to you, not born out of wedlock, which most of the people were, but born from terrible occasions that placed their mark on you. If you were born out of wedlock you were simply a bastard. Nearly everyone there was a bastard. Illegitimate was something else altogether. A curse.
With his pale skin, one sky-blue and one dark-brown eye, his hair long, wavy, and bleached blond in front, and short, black, and pepper-grainy in back, the kind of pepper-grainy that people called "bad hair," or "nayga head," the child seemed to represent some kind of perverse alchemy that had taken place in the deep earth, between tectonic plates, where he was fashioned. People said the boy just looked like sin. Big sin at work when he was made.
For why else had the crossing come out in him not as a judicious mixture of yellow-gold skin, in-between hair ("pretty hair"), and a singular eye color either black or brown or the two blended for hazel ("puss eye"), or even sea-green blue, which sometimes happened even in children with black skin, as it did in the boy Brendan, the Wells's son from Tumela?
Furthermore, what a skin! The color of milk that had been watered, so pale and thin it gave off a sheen of translucent blue, like certain types of coral or small swimming fish, the kind we called gray angelfish, though they were not gray but grayish blue.
Only one of the male teachers from Britain who worked at the school had hair the color of Moshe's bleached blond. His was the name that call, meaning that people whispered the child was his. He was a married man and had brought his wife to Jamaica with him, but he fooled around with the black little girls in the school. The pepper-grain hair was more commonly distributed—it could have come from any one of many of the schoolgirls, except that the owners of that type of hair were not in the group that frolicked with the white man-teachers. The white man-teachers preferred brown girls with long hair and black women's bodies (breast, buttock, and hip), or very black girls who had hot-combed their hair to straight.
The mayor of Ora's daughter was black as sin but with beautiful long tresses, almost as if she had been high brown. At first her name call too, as the mother who was unable to throw away the belly before the baby came and had thrown away the baby instead. (Some babies are stubborn, resisting all boil-bush, guzzu, enema, heavy load, jump-up, exorbitant exercise, beat-belly-wid-bat, and other efforts to dislodge them from the womb.) But rumor stuttered somewhat on that score because of the mayor's daughter's hair, which had nothing pepper-grain about it, and then rumor zipped its mouth, prrrrrrps!, because the noise of it came to the mayor's ears just as he was about to give out Christmas work on the roads, and Christmas work came by favors. You didn't badmouth the mayor's daughter and hope to get on the list for Christmas work.
But as you can imagine, rumor didn't die, it only went underground for a while. Stumped momentarily by the problem of hair and the advent of Christmas, rumor would surface again in the coming years and go on its way, loquacious, malicious, and unrelenting, without any sense of trespass, and without any self-doubt at all. The clairvoyance of the poor regarding the secrets of their betters is fundamentally secure, and confident. But it (rumor) would start to kill Moshe, though it also started to set him free.
Skin. Hair. Eyes. Enigmas. Only in Moshe's infant face was there no equivocation. It was, uncompromisingly, a nigger face.
But what people did not know, even the most clairvoyant, was the face that Rachel saw the first time she picked up her son. This was something that she pondered in her heart, and kept secret, even from her own husband, until the day of her death.
It had not been a nigger face.
iii
There is only one other thing I need to tell you before the story begins.
The day Moshe was found was my first birthday. It isn't that I am superstitious. I am not; I am no Rachel Fisher, but experience teaches you to read itself, and somehow that coincidence, that we were born on the same day though one year apart, seemed a sign of everything that was to come, the way we belonged to each other and the way we kept missing and missing and missing each other, in one-step two-step, one step at a time. When he died, I was almost not even there, and we had been together all our lives.
I returned and found him slipping into sleep, the day after I lost my fear of him leaving me for America. Only it wasn't the sleep you wake up from, but the long one where you say goodbye.
iv
One last last thing. In parentheses.
You see that thing I tell you about how people say Moshe came to be born? I have to tell you that though what happened to Moshe touched me near and deep because I was his twin, not witness and bystander to his life, I cannot shake the feeling that the thing affect not just me or others like me who it touch that close and personal, but all of us—all of us get deeply affected. I mean to say I believe none of us who went to that school ever recovered from this practice of big man abusing little girl. None of us, even those who were only witness and bystander to that particular wickedness.
I feel it have a whole heap to do with how Mosh turn out in the end, meaning how it turn out in the end between him and me, why we never did anything that gave us children together. I feel that maybe if something in me never damage by it (even the rumor of it), I could have approached him more bold. But maybe deep down I have a shame or a terror that is more than the shame and the terror I absorb from him because of his mother—I mean not his mother Rachel but his birth mother. Maybe is the shame and terror of girlness in the face of that unspeakable initiation of the body, so premature and so soon. Maybe is this denuding
