Sixteen
Dead Sun
Each morning, as Heinz and Harry cleared the ground around the caves, hacking at bushes and trees with machetes, Margret sewed clothing for the baby, due at the end of the year. She cursed her knitting needles for rusting and wished for her sewing machine, one of many modern comforts she regretted leaving back in Germany. Why not, she thought, write a letter to her sister asking her to mail the machine to the island. It would take some time to arrive, of course, but the convenience would be worth the wait.
She shared her idea with Friedrich, who had come to ask for more meat. In Margret’s recollection, he started to laugh; it could take as long as six months for her sister even to receive the letter, let alone for a sewing machine to arrive on Floreana.
“But I’ve read about Post Office Bay,” Margret said. “Surely mail arrives there pretty regularly.”
Friedrich laughed again. “My dear Frau Wittmer, it’s not as regular as that. You ask your husband.”
When Heinz returned to the caves, he confirmed Friedrich’s warning. “I suppose mail isn’t quite such a long-term business as it was in the days of the whalers, but even these days ships don’t come here that often in the winter, I imagine.”
Without her machine, Margret sewed six vests for the baby and a pillowcase; Heinz promised to shoot one of the seabirds to collect its feathers for stuffing. Weeks passed, and although she kept busy, sewing and cleaning and teaching Harry about the history of the island, a dull, persistent fear drummed inside her. Was her decision to give birth on a remote island foolish? Had she really considered the risks? What would happen if something went wrong?
“We’ve at least got a qualified doctor on the island,” Heinz said. “So nothing much can go wrong.”
The next time Friedrich visited, dropping off seeds and vegetables in exchange for more meat, Margret asked if he would help her when the time came.
“I’m afraid not,” he said. She noted that his tone was flat, matter of fact. “I didn’t come to Floreana to practice as a doctor.”
Margret said nothing.
“You mustn’t take it all so seriously,” he said. “Children are born every minute of the day—it’s nothing to be frightened of. As you work hard and keep moving all the time, you’ll find everything will go off smoothly.”
His attempt at comforting Margret only sharpened her anxiety.
She and Heinz began seeing Friedrich and Dore more often, perhaps in the hope of changing the doctor’s mind. Together they hiked to Post Office Bay, checking for mail, discussing all the aspiring settlers who had come before them and failed. Dore always had something to say about philosophy; her latest obsession centered on the ideal relationship between man and woman. The husband, she argued, should never assist or relieve the wife of a task.
They let Friedrich expound without interruption on Nietzsche and architecture and nutrition. One could live a long and healthy life, the doctor insisted, eating only papayas and oranges for breakfast, two beaten eggs and six bananas at noon, and a few papayas at night. (His previous declaration that figs alone made a sufficient diet was apparently forgotten.) Then Friedrich would invariably ask Heinz for another cut of freshly killed boar.
Margret did, however, take comfort in the progress Heinz and Harry had made on the house. The design was simple but solid: a log cabin measuring twenty-two by twelve feet, made from the wood of lechosa trees—nicknamed Milky Way in English for the color and consistency of its sap. It would be a tiny patch of Germany in South America, neat and orderly, everything serving a purpose, everything in its place.
To celebrate Harry’s birthday, Margret made his favorite island meal, banana foam egg, squashing bananas with raw eggs and whisking it into a pudding. “One would have to watch Harry’s face while eating it,” Margret wrote, “to truly appreciate the creation.” The tropical climate and salty air seemed to be doing the boy some good.
They were simple people, stoic and proud. They did not feel alone in their solitude. “Our day, the short tropical day,” Margret wrote, “was so full we had no time for brooding.” They did not miss theater or film. Who needed it when they had a sky and land and sea teeming with exotic magic? And, on the night of September 18, an unexpected and exquisite sight from somewhere northwest of Floreana—a cluster of bright, bold flames shooting up and licking the sky, turning it red. All three of them held their breath as they realized what it was: a massive volcanic eruption, so powerful it seemed fire and ashes would rain on their cave.
Dore sensed the eruption before it even happened. All the signs were there: the sky had been suffused with an otherworldly blood-orange glow, obscuring the sun. She waited for the tremors beneath her feet and felt sure that Friedo would be swept away. In that moment she felt a renewed closeness with Friedrich: “If fate willed that we go down thus in the midst of our experiment, then we were willing and ready to do so, and to bow to a greater wisdom than our own.”
In that moment, Friedrich’s main thought was not of his everlasting bond with Dore but of the donkeys: “The asses were undisturbed in their disgusting braying by the unwonted light in the heavens.”
For the next three days, Dore watched the clouds thrash and roil, covering the sky like a black velvet curtain. When the sun was visible, it reflected a strange and pallid glow—a “dead sun,” she thought, too sickly to even cast a shadow.