Page 8 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
“Why shouldn’t they have dresses?” my mother had said. “Girls like dolls with dresses. Anyway, the white Barbies have pretty dresses too.”
“The white Barbies are also paratroopers, presidents, and surgeons,” Samson Quartey had replied, but he’d dropped the subject, probably wary of another fight.
I was playing with the dolls when my mother shut herself in the bedroom that morning, tearfully telling Daddy that he’d given her a migraine, that he’d known she got them while traveling and then he’d callously gone and argued with her anyway and now her head hurt so badly she couldn’t even stand up. It was proof he’d never loved her, she said, proof that he wanted her to be unhappy.
My father stood outside the bedroom door for a few minutes after that diatribe,
a single hand braced against the wood, as if he wanted to reach through it to touch her. As if he wanted to see through every opaque and brittle thing in the world to the truth behind it.
When he finally came to my window seat, the wet tracks on his cheeks glittered in the sun.
“I was going to leave you with your mother, but I think . . . I think you should come with me,” he said. His voice was thick. I didn’t understand all the ways he was unhappy then, and I certainly didn’t understand the small, irremediable ways that two people could sow unhappiness in each other. But I did know my daddy needed a hug, and I’d slid off the window seat to wrap my arms around his legs.
“Sweet girl,” my father said. He was crying again. “We should get your shoes on.”
And then I’d asked the only question I cared about. “Can I bring my Barbies?”
I was six, and so I had only the shakiest idea of what my father did for a living. He told me it had to do with flowers and soil, but all I ever saw at home were rolls of paper and neatly sharpened pencils. Computer screens with flat, colorless drawings.
I didn’t know then that not every father propped his daughter on his shoulder and made her find the horizon. Made her identify which was bigger, this tree here or that tree there. Made her identify which was closer, which was planted to hide something, which would blossom in the spring and which would be a collection of stark branches in the winter. And in Accra: which leaves were taro and which were caladium? And there, that tulip tree crowned with blossoms so orange and so red they looked like blossoms made of fire? Was that an invasive species? Wasn’t it true that sometimes the most beautiful things in life were the most destructive, the most grasping?
It didn’t seem remarkable to me that my father wanted me to understand proportion, unity, form. Repetition, color, and texture. When one is a child, one only knows the tiny perimeters of their own world, and so I must have assumed this was how every child was raised. I couldn’t know then that my father’s appointment with the head gardener at Versailles was an unusual privilege, something not every father got to do.
But there was a moment, there must have been a moment, when I started to see. When I stood at the head of all that majestic symmetry, and I finally understood what my father was trying to explain to me about balance and about vision. About horizons, about light and dark, about transitions. About harmonies. Before me was not just an imprint of a design—tidy, ordered, controlled—but an assertion of human will over nature.
I did not know yet that Versailles had required villages to be moved, earth to be leveled, rich wetlands drained. I did not know then that there was a cost to correcting irregularities, to valuing geometry over tumult, that flattening and diverting and carving and scraping could give one something less than the sum of its parts.
I only saw the wide, curlicued parterres, the Grand Canal stretching into the distance. The marches of orange and oleander trees. The four seasonal fountains—Flora, Ceres, Bacchus, and Neptune. The straight paths of fine gravel, and the regimented oaks, and the mathematical little yews, clipped into cubes and cones and spheres.
I only saw perfection.
I turned to the keeper of the gardens and asked in my halting French if he had built the gardens.
“Non, chouchou,” the gardener had said, eyes crinkling with an amused smile. “Il a été construit par un homme nommé Le Nôtre.”
Le Nôtre.
I was silent the rest of the day, thinking of this man. Thinking of what he must have felt to have built this place. He must have felt like a god.
By the time Incomplete Tea Set Barbie and Red Dress Barbie were dust-covered relics on a shelf, I’d become the foremost pre-adolescent biographer of André Le Nôtre. I had a poster of Versailles on my wall—a reprint of an antique map—and stacks of books about the man himself and jardins à la française. But then my father took me with him on a trip to Italy, and there we saw the statue-lined parterres of Villa Farnese, its lush enclosures and mossy staircases with splashing streams running down the middle of the steps themselves. There we went to the Sacro Bosco, following in the footsteps of Salvador Dalí himself to peer at moss-covered monsters made of stone, at elephants and grottos and crooked houses and Greek Furies and virgin temples.
Thus came my Mannerist phase, which coincided nicely with the quirks and sulks of puberty, and after that came my Baroque stage. At some point I put up a poster of Capability Brown; The 1993 adaptation of The Secret Garden was background noise for years of schoolwork. One Christmas in Accra I was so bored that I built an Archimedes screw from plastic bottles and a dowel I harvested from a clothes hanger, and then I arranged all the potted plants into a facsimile of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Once I made a Zen garden in my room with a baking tray and aquarium sand, and had a gritty floor for years after, no matter how many times I swept.
I went through a potager phase, a ferme ornée phase, some time each obsessed with arboretums, alpinums, and palmetums. When I was a teenager, I truly believed I was the first person ever to appreciate the ecological sense of a bog garden, the mystery of a hedge maze, or the dark seduction of a poison garden.
I became something of a garden hipster; some of my schoolmates drew Twilight fan art, instead I sketched out what I imagined King Solomon’s ecclesiastical garden of despair would have looked like. I asked people if they’d even heard of Assyrian hunting parks or Egyptian funeral gardens. I asked them if they knew the word paradise came from Old Persian for “walled garden.” Had they heard of Sennacherib? Olmstead? Gertrude Jekyll? Did they understand how different Giverny was from other gardens? Like really understand? Did they even understand the difference between a garden and a park? Between a park and a landscape? Did they even look at the spaces they moved through? Were they oblivious? Heartless? Dull?
The year I went to uni, Daddy took me with him to Istanbul for a conference. He had a birthday present for me after, and I spent the entire conference guessing what it was. Would we go home to Ghana after the conference and see Ma? Would I come home to a car of my own? Perhaps he was finally going to offer me a job at Quartey Workshop—something I’d been craving for the last three years—even if it was only getting coffee and manning the plotter printer?
But it was none of these things.
Instead, after the conference ended, we boarded a plane that took us to a city called Urfa. It was the ancient home of Job and King Nimrod, and also home to the oldest life-sized statue of a human ever found, but we didn’t stay in the city long enough to explore any of its history. We took a taxi through it until we were thoroughly in the countryside. And there we found Göbekli Tepe.
Rings of concentric standing stones were scattered around the site. They were carved in the shapes of vultures, scorpions, lions; there were human and animal remains found all over the hill it was perched on and yet no houses. No one had ever lived here. No one had even tried.
The entire site was a strange honeycomb of stone. It was built six thousand years before the invention of writing, it predates the agricultural revolution, it predates metal tools and even pottery. Wheat was domesticated near here. Some might even say the idea of a temple itself was born here, the idea of a holy place built by human hands.
Carved right out of the living rock, the limestone pillars were planted like trees in a sacred grove, the butchered bones from humans and gazelles sown into the earth like seeds. It had been built to be open to the wind and the stars—a garden for gods and men to walk through together, and yet, at some point, it had been buried. The spaces between the stones filled with rubble and dirt and broken tools, never to be gardened again.
