have been a melanoma. Buttons undone, she helped Marina out of her shirt and Marina let her take it. What was it that Anders had said? Lost Horizon for ovaries? How many children had this woman undressed and how many of the people in this tree house were her children? The toddler weeping for her knife? The woman weaving the roof? The men waiting to get back to carving their boat? The other woman came with a rag that was small and not particularly clean and rubbed down Marina’s arms and back, rubbed her stomach and neck. She touched Marina’s bra and said something to the older woman who leaned her nose between Marina’s breasts to inspect the lace edge of the white cups more closely. Dr. Nkomo busied himself with the toddler, his back decisively pointed in her direction, but the other two men folded their arms across their chests, watching the show with interest, and Marina was not bothered by any of this. She had been kicked by a fetus whose mother was at the very least sixty and could easily have been more than seventy. The teenage girl stood in front of Marina and held up her arms until Marina understood that this was an instruction and not a game. She held up her arms as well. It was the girl’s clear intention to drop a shift dress over Marina’s head but the height discrepancy between them did not allow for it and so Marina pulled it on herself. No sooner was it covering her head and somewhat twisted than one of them pulled down her pants and began to rub her legs with the cloth as well. She stepped up obediently, one foot and then the other, and the pants were taken away. Marina stood there like the others now in her loose trapeze dress full enough to take her through an entire pregnancy because among the female Lakashi all clothes were maternity clothes. Without zippers or buttons, Marina saw the way in which they looked like candidates for a rustic insane asylum. The outfit was considerably shorter on her and the women poked at her knees and laughed as if there was something vaguely scandalous about knees. The women sat down on the floor and Marina sat with them and put her hands back on the woman’s stomach, waiting for the baby to move again while the one who made shingles pulled back Marina’s hair with a carved comb and braided it more tightly than her own mother had ever managed to braid it when she was a child. The teenage girl bit off a single piece of the palm frond with her teeth and tied off the end of her braid while the baby swam beneath Marina’s hands. She would say six months along. Marina realized then she had not touched a single pregnant woman since it stopped being her business to touch them. How could that be possible? After all the countless bellies she had run her hands over in her training, how had she let them all go?
“You knew, didn’t you, about the Lakashi, about why Dr. Swenson is here? Anders told you?” Dr. Nkomo asked, the little girl in his lap, playing with his glasses. She was gentle as she folded the arms in and out.
“I’d been told, but I can’t say I necessarily believed it. It’s something altogether different to see things for myself.”
“It’s true,” Dr. Nkomo said nodding. “I had read Dr. Swenson’s papers but I was still very surprised. I have thought too much about the fertility and reproduction of mosquitoes and not enough about the fertility and reproduction of women. That’s what my wife would say. She says if we wait much longer for a baby she will have to come and live among the Lakashi in order to get pregnant.”
Marina reached back and moved the base of her braid back and forth, trying to loosen it up before it gave her a headache. “I thought your research was in fertility with Dr. Swenson.”
“Ah,” Dr. Nkomo said, taking his glasses back from the little girl and in doing so breaking her heart all over again. “We work together. We are colleagues, but we do not share the same field of study. Our fields overlap.”
Their hosts followed the conversation intently, their faces turning from speaker to speaker as if they were watching a tennis match. “What is your field of study, Dr. Nkomo?