The Boatmaker (13 page)

After two hours the boatmaker is two-thirds of the way to the doors flanked by the burly policemen. He moves forward haltingly with the line, speaking to no one, wearing the only clothes he owns: blue overalls over longjohns, brown corduroy jacket, heavy boots. The same clothes he wore when he pushed off from Small Island, though by now somewhat the worse for wear. His landlady has offered to have her maid wash his clothes, a service she performs for Crow and White. The boatmaker always refuses.

Standing in the sun, he notices a man four places ahead of him in line. The man isn't drawing attention to himself, and yet he commands respect. It isn't his clothing that is noticeable: an ordinary brown tweed suit, like those worn by hundreds of others in the queue. Nor is it his body, lean and hard under his clothes, or his face, which shows the red of someone who has spent much time outdoors. What draws notice is the eyes. They are cold, clear and blue, like the water in a mountain stream running over spring ice. The boatmaker notes the man, the newspaper folded in the pocket of his jacket, the sausage he is finishing and washing down with a pull from a flask. His curiosity satisfied, the boatmaker turns his face up to the sun of the capital, which feels different from the sun of the northern islands.

The city, twenty miles inland on the brown flux named for Vashad, does not smell of the sea. Instead, rising into the air is the smell of horses, their droppings bursting green on the pavement, day after day and week after week. The droppings pile up and are ground into a dust that floats up in every season of the year and can be sensed even on a holiday, when the workshops and factories are closed and tramcars run infrequently. Beyond the dust and the smell, the sky is an infinite blue.

The man four places ahead takes the newspaper out of his pocket and spreads it open like the wings of a seabird. At the top of the page
The Brotherhood
is printed in the old-fashioned spiky lettering that not all residents of the Mainland can read, even those who can read the modern letters. The narrow columns below are set in round modern type. The newspaper gives the impression of seriousness, anger—and a message not meant for everyone. The lean man with the ruddy face is absorbed. When they reach the steps leading up to the Mint, he folds the newspaper and puts it back in the outside pocket of his jacket.

The line climbs the steps and eases between the twin policemen. Inside, the boatmaker is out of the heat in a hallway with a stone floor and ceilings so high they seem like another sky. Light comes down over a balustrade from windows on the floor above. In the hall everything
is shaded and cool; everyone keeps their voices down without needing to be told. As they enter, the boatmaker sees that the man reading
The Brotherhood
, the three who were in between them and the two who were behind the boatmaker, along with the boatmaker himself, make up a group of seven that is being guided to the right.

The seven of them go down the hall toward a lighted doorway on the left and turn into a room resembling a classroom, lit by bare electric bulbs. At the front is a heavy desk with wooden folding chairs set facing it in a semicircle. Behind the battered old desk is a chalkboard and two glass-fronted cases. In one case the boatmaker sees three shells he knows: whelks prized by the natives who long ago made their summer homes on Small Island.

As the men enter, a woman stands writing on the dusty chalkboard, her back to them. She is slight. Her hair, drawn up at the nape of her neck, escapes in unruly black curls. Her purple dress is high at the throat, long in the sleeve and skirt. In a clear, unfussy hand she is writing:
The Three Epochs of Money
. She finishes writing, sets the chalk in the tray at the bottom of the board and turns to face the seven men of the capital in a semicircle before her on folding chairs.

“Good morning,” she says, brushing her hands together to remove chalk dust. Although this woman carries the scent of wealth about her, the only jewelry she
wears is a cameo with a woman's profile, ivory on a black background. The profile on the cameo bears a striking resemblance to her own. She smooths the front of her close-fitting purple skirt.

“My name is Rachel Lippsted. I welcome all of you to the Royal Mint on this occasion of the king's birthday.” The boatmaker feels a subtle tremor go through the men at the name Lippsted spoken in this place. “We'll talk here awhile and then go for a tour of the Mint, on the one day of the year we're allowed here, a place that is normally closed and under the highest level of security in the kingdom—second only to the palace when the king is in residence, and of course the person of the king himself.

“Let's begin at the beginning,” she says, “or near the beginning.” She smiles, trying to put her audience at ease. She's small and trim, but there must be a boldness in her, the boatmaker thinks, to be here, giving a lecture to seven workingmen of the capital. Not many women could do that. He wonders how the others feel about being lectured by a woman. The boatmaker himself is both pleased and irritated.

Rachel Lippsted walks to one of the glass-fronted cases, the toes of her black boots showing beneath the skirt. She takes a key from a pocket in the front of her dress and opens the door, reaching in to remove two of the three whelks,
which are conical and delicately flecked in black and white. The boatmaker knows that these whelks need just the right conditions in order to thrive. They must be covered by the sea most, but not all, the time, living in water that is cold but not too cold, with the right amount of salt. If any of these conditions are not met, the whelks will disappear. On Small Island they grow in several places, holding tight to the rocks in clusters of three or four, always covered at high tide. To the natives these whelks and the places where they grow are sacred.

Rachel Lippsted holds up the pointed shells and asks: “Does anyone recognize these?”

The boatmaker does. But there is no reason for him—an anonymous carpenter from Small Island—to draw attention to himself in the Royal Mint on the king's birthday. He says nothing. None of the others speaks.

“It's not so surprising that no one knows these,” she says, brushing the curls from her eyes. As she holds the shells up for inspection the boatmaker notices that the first two fingers of her right hand are stained yellow-brown, like his.

“These shells are rare and precious, almost gone today, though still found on some of the remote islands of the kingdom. They have a fancy scientific name in Latin and a lovely one in the tongue of the native islanders. But
we needn't be concerned with all that. Our own Mainland speech will do just fine—and in our language they are called tidal whelks.”

There is a shifting in the room, a shuffling and creaking on the wooden chairs. It is not a comfortable sound. The boatmaker senses the discomfort but doesn't know where it comes from.

“Why do I bring them up?” the woman asks, putting the shells down on the desk and turning to face her audience. Unlike the dress of the woman of the town, Rachel Lippsted's dress is made to conceal rather than reveal; it cloaks her from wrist to neck. Nevertheless, the boatmaker can see that within the dark silk is a small, firm body.

“I show you these shells because for the natives who lived on our own northern islands and beyond, all the way to the Arctic, these shells
were
money. They were the carriers of value as well as a medium of exchange. To be sure, the natives had other forms of money: polar-bear pelts and teeth, and the wing bones of certain seabirds. But these shells were their most valuable form of money, real currency—every bit as much as our banknotes, printed on the remarkable presses you will shortly see.

“Now, can any of you gentlemen tell me why these shells should have become the medium of exchange for the natives of those remote islands?”

There is no answer. The boatmaker feels a resistance building in the little crowd, a resentment at being addressed in a lecture tone by this small woman, with her exotic name and deep confidence in her own intellect. This truculence comes to him along with the men's smell, mixing tweed, underwear changed once a month, heavy shoes, tobacco, drink, sausages and machine oil. There's something else in the smell, too, something like fear and anger, shared among them. It is a smell the boatmaker doesn't recognize; it doesn't exist on Small Island.

Receiving no answer, Rachel Lippsted leads the men through a history of money in three stages, pausing from time to time to make notes on the board in her clear, educated handwriting.

The first stage, she explains, exemplified by the tidal whelks with their mathematical markings, is the use of rare and beautiful natural objects as the medium of exchange among small groups over short distances. This is followed by the growing use of rare and precious metals—copper, silver and gold at first, later mostly gold—by great nations reaching across oceans to take, absorb and exchange. Then she comes to the final phase, their own: the era of banknotes, which stand for gold but have no value in themselves. In spite of their lack of intrinsic value, the ghostly abstractions bearing the long face of
the king can measure the value of any other thing: animal, vegetable or mineral, including the labor power of men. This is a remarkable capacity.

“After all,” she asks, holding up a Mainland banknote, a pale-green-and-pink rectangle only one of the men in the room has ever seen, in a denomination large enough to purchase a house, “what is the
value
of this note? Beautifully printed as it is, is it not simply a piece of paper?”

The smell in the room, of shared resentment, deepens. Rachel Lippsted pauses, hands clasped on the front of her purple skirt, then tries another tack.

“Can anyone tell me what is the same in all three phases of the history we have just covered? As different as they are?”

Her questions are met with more moving of feet and creaking of chairs.

“Let me tell you, then. The thing that provides continuity, the thing that is the same in all three periods is faith.”

“
What do you mean by that?
” demands the man in the tweed suit who was standing ahead of the boatmaker in the queue, reading his newspaper. His face is redder, his brown hair curly, electrified. He twists in his chair, obviously having difficulty remaining seated.

“This is what I mean,” the small woman says. Her voice is steady, but the boatmaker sees in her eyes and
clasped hands that she is, if not frightened, then alert to possible danger. “What I mean is that unless the people have faith in their money, it is worthless.”

“
Gold isn't worthless!
” the man in the tweed suit bellows, the folding chair trembling under his lean legs.

“Gold has value because we
believe
it does,” Rachel Lippsted says; keeping her voice steady clearly requires an effort. “Gold is beautiful, yes, and easily worked. It makes wonderful jewelry. But as currency it has nothing but the value we endow it with. And this has always been true: Money has the power we bestow upon it by putting our collective faith in it.”

The man in the tweed suit stares, his face raw.

Rachel Lippsted continues. Her voice wavers, but her logic is clear. “Faith is present in all three stages of money. In our stage, the final one, the true nature of money becomes clear. Banknotes have no value in themselves. Yet they are immensely valued. Men will do many things—both good and bad—for just one of these colored notes.”

She holds the pink-and-green bill up to the room. The man in the tweed suit can no longer hold himself back. He stands, the folding chair flattening and falling behind him with a bang.

“
The currency is worthless because the Jews have made it worthless!
” he yells. “The king is in debt to the bloodsuckers
up to his eyes. And you know that don't you, Miss Rachel Lippsted?
Because you're one of them.
”

His lips arch from his teeth in disgust. He takes a long stride toward the woman at the front of the room. The boatmaker wonders whether the ruddy-faced man will assault her. He wonders what the other men in the room would do if that happened. Surely they would not sit by while a woman was being beaten? Would they? He is far out of his depth.

Rather than raising her arms over her head to shield herself, as the boatmaker expects, Rachel Lippsted steps back and leans against the heavy desk. The boatmaker sees her feel behind her, finding something set in the wood. She must be signaling, he thinks.

Sure enough, a moment later, while the man in the tweed suit is still shouting about the Jews and the inflation that is sucking the life out of the kingdom's money, the door swings open. The twin policemen muscle in and grab the shouting man by his shoulders.

“
You Jews will get what's coming to you!
” he shouts over his shoulder as they flank him and march him out. He seems surprisingly unafraid. In fact, as he leaves, he looks as though he might break into laughter.

Outside the Mint, the stone steps are empty. The tours are at an end until the king's birthday next year. The
man who had been shouting stands chatting in a familiar way with the policemen who marched him out. A man in elegant civilian clothes approaches, chats briefly with the other three. Then he turns and walks off, arm in arm with the man in brown tweed. They are not in a hurry, but not wasting time either, one a little taller, a little leaner, than the other, both carrying themselves in a manner that suggests marches, parade rest, attention and conversation in the field over cigarettes cupped against the wind.