Chapter 27: The Photograph

The photograph was behind the waterproof sleeve in his kitbag, in the mesh pocket that he used for the things that could not be replaced — the dive ticket, the offshore medical certificate, the welding certifications, the photographs. The sleeve was clear plastic, heat-sealed at the edges, the kind of sleeve that the offshore supply shops in Aberdeen sold for documents that had to survive the conditions of the North Sea — the spray, the rain, the humidity of the vessel, the condensation of the chamber. The sleeve protected the photographs the way the chamber protected the divers — by enclosure, by sealing, by the maintenance of a barrier between the thing inside and the conditions outside that would, without the barrier, destroy the thing.

He took the photograph out on day twenty. He did not take it out often. He did not display it on his bunk or prop it against the chamber wall or tape it to the ceiling above his head the way some divers displayed their photographs — wives, children, girlfriends, dogs, houses, the images of the lives that the divers had left on the surface and that the photographs represented, the photographs standing in for the people the way the letters stood in for the voice, the image a compression of the person into two dimensions and a rectangle of paper, the person reduced, encoded, made portable.

Kwame did not display the photograph because displaying it would have made it a decoration, a feature of the chamber, a thing that the eye passed over with the diminishing attention that familiarity produced. He kept it in the sleeve, in the kitbag, in the mesh pocket, and he took it out when he needed to see it, when the need was specific rather than general, when the looking required the deliberateness of a man opening a sealed container rather than the casualness of a man glancing at a wall.

The photograph was of Akosua. His niece. Yaw's daughter. She was five in the photograph — the photograph taken by Yaw on Akosua's fifth birthday, the image sent to Kwame in one of his mother's letters, the photograph folded into the blue aerogramme, the image arriving in Aberdeen creased at the centre where the aerogramme's fold had compressed it, the crease running across the middle of the photograph, across Akosua's waist, the girl bisected by the postal system's geometry, the top half and the bottom half separated by a line of white where the emulsion had cracked.

She was standing in the compound in Osu, in front of the mango tree, the tree visible behind her as a column of dark bark and a canopy of green leaves, the tree providing the shade in which she stood, the shade dappled on her face, the light and the shadow making a pattern on her skin that the camera had captured and the printer had reproduced and the postal system had delivered and the waterproof sleeve had preserved. She was wearing a dress — yellow, with small flowers printed on the fabric, the dress the kind of dress that girls in Accra wore for birthdays and church and the occasions that required something brighter than the everyday, the yellow bright against the green of the tree and the grey of the compound wall and the blue of the sky above, the colours the colours of Ghana, the palette of West Africa, the spectrum of the equatorial light.

She was smiling. The smile was wide, unguarded, the smile of a child who had not yet learned to compose her face for the camera, who did not yet understand that a photograph was a record and that a record was permanent and that the expression captured would be the expression preserved, the smile frozen, the moment fixed. She was smiling because it was her birthday and because her father was holding the camera and because the mango tree was behind her and because the day was bright and because she was five, and five was the age at which the world was still a thing that could be smiled at without reservation, without the editing that the later years would impose.

Kwame studied the smile. He studied it the way he studied a weld — with the close, sustained attention of a man looking for the thing that the casual glance would miss, the detail beneath the surface, the information encoded in the structure. The smile was Yaw's smile. The teeth were Efua's teeth — straight, slightly small, the teeth of the Asante family, the genetic inheritance that had passed from grandmother to mother to daughter, the dental architecture a line of continuity that connected the girl in the photograph to the woman in the kitchen in Osu, the connection visible in the mouth, in the smile, in the enamel.

Her eyes were different. The eyes were her own — not Yaw's, not Abena's, not Efua's. The eyes belonged to Akosua alone, and they were the thing that Kwame studied most carefully, the thing that he could not assess through the photograph, the thing that required presence, proximity, the three-dimensional reality of a face rather than the two-dimensional reduction of an image. The eyes in the photograph were dark and bright and looking at the camera, looking at her father, looking through the camera and the envelope and the postal system and the waterproof sleeve at the uncle she had never met, the uncle who existed for her as a name and a source of gifts and a figure in her grandmother's stories, the uncle who lived in a place called Aberdeen that she could not locate on a map, the uncle who worked in a place called the sea that she could not imagine, the uncle who was, for Akosua, not a person but a concept, an abstract, a word that her family used and that corresponded to something real but that she had no experience of, no memory of, no sensory data to attach to the word, the uncle a sound without a referent.

She was six now. The photograph was a year old. In the year since the photograph was taken, she had grown — Yaw mentioned it in the phone calls, the growth described in the units that parents used, the centimetres and the shoe sizes and the school uniform that had to be replaced because the old one no longer fit, the growth a process that Kwame had not witnessed, that he could not witness from inside the chamber or from the flat in Aberdeen or from anywhere other than the compound in Osu where the growing was occurring, the growing as continuous and as invisible as the decompression, the change happening below the threshold of perception, detectable only by comparison, the photograph of the five-year-old compared to the six-year-old who existed somewhere beyond the waterproof sleeve, somewhere in the world, somewhere in Accra.

He had sent gifts. For every birthday, for every Christmas, he had sent gifts through Yaw — the parcels posted from Aberdeen, the contents chosen in the shops on Union Street, the gifts selected by a man who did not know the child's preferences, the selections made on the basis of age and gender and the general knowledge of what children liked, the gifts generic in the way that gifts from absent relatives were always generic, the gesture correct, the specificity missing, the specificity available only to the people who were present, who saw the child's face when she opened the wrapping, who knew that she preferred the blue one to the red one, who understood that the doll was not interesting but the cardboard box the doll came in was, the knowledge of preference a knowledge that required presence and that absence could not provide.

Yaw had never said anything about the gifts. Yaw had said: She liked it. She said thank you. She is wearing it. The reports were brief, the way Yaw's reports were always brief, the brevity a compression that might have been tact or might have been resentment or might have been the brother's understanding that the detail the uncle wanted was the detail that the distance made impossible to provide, the detail of the child's face, the child's reaction, the child's understanding of who had sent the thing and why.

Mac looked up from his Tom Clancy. He saw the photograph in Kwame's hands. He said: Your niece?

Kwame said: Yes.

Mac said: She's bonnie.

Kwame said nothing. Bonnie was Mac's word for the things that stirred him — children, dogs, sunsets seen from the vessel's deck, the rare clear day in the North Sea when the water turned from grey to something approaching blue. Bonnie was the word Mac used when the emotion was too large for the Scottish reserve to accommodate and the word had to carry the weight of the feeling without naming the feeling, the word a container, a vessel, a bell that held the thing inside.

Mac returned to his book. He did not ask further. He did not ask whether Kwame had met the niece, whether Kwame planned to meet the niece, whether the photograph was a comfort or a reproach. Mac understood that a photograph in the chamber was a private object, a piece of the surface carried to the depth, a fragment of the life above held in the hands of a man who was below, and that the relationship between the man and the photograph was the man's own business.

Kwame held the photograph. He traced the crease with his thumb — the line that the aerogramme's fold had made, the line that ran across Akosua's middle, the damage that the delivery had inflicted, the image marked by the mechanism of its transit, the photograph carrying the evidence of its journey from Accra to Aberdeen the way the pipeline carried the evidence of its journey from the fabrication yard to the sea floor, the scratches and the dents and the compression marks that were the record of handling, of transportation, of the distance between where the thing was made and where the thing ended up.

The crease would not come out. He had tried, on previous rotations, to flatten the photograph, pressing it under the weight of a book, leaving it between the pages of the Achebe overnight, the book's pressure applied to the photograph the way the sea's pressure was applied to the bell, the force distributed across the surface, the paper compressed. The crease remained. The crease was permanent, the emulsion cracked, the image disrupted at the fold line, the damage structural rather than superficial, the photograph carrying its scar the way the pipeline carried its repair weld, the mark of the thing that had happened to it, the record that could not be erased.

He thought about the next photograph. Yaw would take one, Kwame knew — Akosua at six, the birthday coming up in three months, the photograph taken in the compound or the house or the school, the image showing a girl who was taller than the girl in this photograph, a girl whose face was changing, the childhood proportions shifting toward the proportions of the older child, the forehead smaller relative to the jaw, the eyes the same but the face around them different, the face growing to accommodate the features that had been, at five, still gathered in the centre, the face opening, expanding, the child becoming the person she would be.

He would receive the photograph in a letter. He would extract it from the blue aerogramme. He would place it in the waterproof sleeve, behind this photograph, the two images stacked, the chronology of a child's growth preserved in the order of the photographs, the first behind the second, the second behind the third, the series a flipbook of a life observed from a distance, the movement visible only when the photographs were compared, the change apparent only in the aggregate, the growth measurable only by the gap between images.

This was how he knew Akosua. Through photographs. Through Yaw's reports. Through his mother's letters, which mentioned the girl frequently — Akosua's school report, Akosua's loose tooth, Akosua's question about the uncle in Aberdeen, the question that Efua had reported in the letter and that had sat in Kwame's chest with the weight of a thing he did not know how to answer.

The question, as Efua had transcribed it, was: Why does Uncle Kwame live in the water?

Efua had written: She asked me this at dinner. I told her you do not live in the water. I told her you live in Aberdeen, which is a city in Scotland, and that you work in the water, which is the North Sea, and that the water is your workplace, the way Daddy's workplace is the houses where he fixes the wiring. She said, But Grandma, you said he is always in the water. And I said, Not always. Sometimes he is in Aberdeen and sometimes he is in the water. And she said, But when he is in the water, where does he sleep? And I said, He sleeps in a special room, like a room in a ship but smaller, and the room is under the sea. And she looked at me and she said, That sounds lonely, Grandma.

That sounds lonely.

Kwame had read the letter in his flat in Aberdeen, at the kitchen table, the blue aerogramme open on the surface, his mother's handwriting describing his niece's assessment of his life, the assessment delivered with the directness of a six-year-old, the words unedited by the tact and the circumlocution that adults used, the child's observation arriving at the truth by the shortest possible route, the route that bypassed the explanations and the justifications and the professional pride and the financial arguments and arrived at the thing itself.

That sounds lonely.

He had not answered the observation. He had not written to Efua about it. He had not called Yaw to discuss it. He had placed the letter in the pile of letters on the table and he had gone to the pub on Crown Street and he had drunk two pints of heavy and he had walked home in the Aberdeen rain and he had lain in his bed and he had thought about a girl in Accra who had looked at her grandmother across a dinner table and said the thing that the adults in the family had not said, the thing that the adults had translated into other languages — concern, responsibility, distance, money, career — the thing that had many names in the adults' vocabulary and only one name in the child's.

Lonely.

The chamber was quiet. The afternoon bell run was two hours away. The men were in their bunks or at the table, the routine of the off-shift hours proceeding with the regularity that the chamber demanded, the men occupying the time the way water occupied a container, filling every corner, every gap, the time used or endured or slept through, the hours between dives the hours in which the confinement was most felt, the hours in which the chamber was most clearly a chamber, a container, a sealed space in which six men waited for the next bell run.

Kwame put the photograph back in the waterproof sleeve. He put the sleeve back in the mesh pocket of his kitbag. He zipped the pocket. The photograph was stored, sealed, protected, the image of the girl behind the plastic, the girl behind the distance, the girl behind the years, the girl growing in the compound where the mango tree grew, the girl and the tree sharing the space that Kwame did not share, the space of the compound, the space of the house, the space of Osu and Accra and Ghana and the life that continued on the surface while he sat in a steel sphere at fifteen atmospheres and held a photograph and thought about the word lonely and did not know whether the word applied to the chamber or to the flat or to the distance or to all of these things, the word too accurate and too simple and too much the truth for a man who had spent twelve years constructing the elaborate architecture of reasons why the distance was necessary and the absence was justified and the money was important and the career was fulfilling, the architecture built carefully over the years, each rotation adding a layer, each return adding a buttress, the structure of justification as carefully engineered as the saturation system itself — designed to withstand the pressure, designed to maintain the conditions, designed to keep the man alive inside the explanation.

The explanation held. The explanation had always held. The explanation was sound, the way the weld was sound — technically, structurally, according to the specifications and the inspections and the criteria.

But the girl had said lonely, and the word had found the lack of fusion in the explanation, the dark line on the radiograph, the defect that the technical language could not name and that the child's language named immediately, without equipment, without inspection, without the elaborate apparatus of adult self-assessment.

Lonely.

Kwame lay in his bunk. The chamber hummed. The pressure held. And somewhere in Accra, in a compound in Osu, a girl who was now six stood in front of a mango tree and smiled at a camera and did not know that the photograph would travel four thousand miles and arrive in a flat where nobody was home and be placed in a waterproof sleeve and carried offshore and descended to fifteen atmospheres and studied in the white light of a saturation chamber by a man who was her uncle and who was not lonely and who was not not lonely and who was, in the precise and technical language of the diving industry, saturated — his tissues full, his body at equilibrium with the pressure, the gas dissolved into every cell, the saturation total, the word meaning, in its original sense, that a thing has absorbed all it can hold, that there is no capacity remaining, that the body is full.

Full, and somehow empty.

The bell waited on its handling frame. The next run would begin in two hours. Kwame would dive, or tend, or manage the umbilicals, and the work would proceed, and the rotation would continue, and the days would pass, and the photograph would remain in the waterproof sleeve, the girl behind the plastic, the smile behind the crease, the word behind the distance, the distance behind the explanation, the explanation behind the architecture, the architecture behind the man, the man behind the pressure, the pressure behind the steel, the steel behind the sea, the sea behind the sky, and somewhere above all of it, above the column of water and the column of distance and the column of years, a girl in a yellow dress standing in front of a tree, asking her grandmother why her uncle lived in the water, the question rising like a bubble from the depth, rising through the dark, rising through the pressure, rising toward the surface where the air was, where the light was, where the answer — if there was an answer — waited.