Harvest of Sighs

Chapter 1

Chapter One

RebeccaIt was an accident, the day I saw the gardens of Versailles.

In the hotel, my mother and father had argued—bitterly. To this day I don’t know what they argued about, but I do know that they fought incessantly in those years, the kind of fights that would end in slammed doors and my mother’s sobs. Back then, sometimes I’d catch my father crying too, yelling, shouting, matching my mother rage for rage and grief for grief, the pain written on his face for anyone to read.

She would move back to Accra from London two years after that day, but I didn’t know that then. I didn’t even know enough to see the fighting as a portent of a dying marriage. It was upsetting, but in the same way thunder was upsetting—it came, it went, it was a part of life.

And so while they’d fought, I’d sat in the window seat and played with the Barbie dolls Daddy had brought back from New York a few days ago. One came with a little tea set—plastic, incomplete to my eyes, because there were only two cups and two saucers and a teapot—but I made do. I pretended that she’d had a complete tea set at one point, but she’d taken in some of the items to get valued. Or perhaps they’d been chipped by a careless guest, and she was currently having them repaired by an expert in antique tea set repairs.

The other doll came wearing a striking red dress with a silk stole. Her hair was pulled up in a high bun on top of her head, exposing her throat and her shoulders. She had stars hanging from her ears, and I thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, so beautiful I hardly touched her, for fear of ruining her. Instead, she sat remote and barely interested on the windowsill while Incomplete Tea Set Barbie made her cup after cup of tea. Tea Set Barbie would tell her over and over again how beautiful she was, how pretty her red dress was, how she hoped they would be best friends forever. Sometimes Tea Set Barbie would kiss Red Dress Barbie because Red Dress Barbie was so perfect. Sometimes Tea Set Barbie would lay her head in the other doll’s lap and simply savor her untouchable beauty and cherish every second that she got to be near it. Every once in a while, Red Dress Barbie would pat Tea Set Barbie on the head, acknowledging her reverence and affection, and those were the moments Tea Set Barbie lived for.

“The only two black Barbies I could find, and they’re both in dresses,” her father had complained to her mother when he’d met them here in Paris. He’d been at a landscape architecture conference in New York, and now there was one here in Paris. There were times he lived conference to conference, one city to another, only coming home for short jaunts to sleep and repack.

“Why shouldn’t they have dresses?” Rebecca’s 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 that 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.

My father and I circled the site in silence. All around us was a landscape of olive and umber; the sun was relentless, the breeze was sparing. It felt impossible to believe that this was counted as part of the Fertile Crescent. After growing up in England, a place so damp and green that things just grew whether one wanted them to or not, this place seemed almost barren. Which made the temple all the more striking.

Why here?

Why this place?

“I feel God here,” my father said finally. The excavated site had been roofed and ringed with a walkway, and by this point we were leaning on the railings, staring down to where the pillars rested in their mess of stones and dirt.

I looked around then, at the stark, sloping hills and the dry valley below. It seemed like a godless place—and yet, strangely I could feel the thread of divinity as well. It was thin and distant, it was as dusty and unused as the buried temple structures themselves, but it was there.

A lone note from a forgotten song. A footprint baked into the earth.

“I think I feel it too,” I said, a bit eagerly, and then my father had smiled at me.

He had never become cold, my father, even after my mother finally made good on her ultimatums and moved back to Ghana, and even after our summer at Thornchapel, when I would sometimes find him dialing a number on his cell phone only to hang up before the call could connect. But even though he wasn’t cold, he was undoubtedly cool. He had begun to hold himself back, bit by bit, more and more each and every year, until he was a man of walls, a man of locked doors and drawn curtains. I no longer saw him angry or sad—when we went to visit Ma in Accra, he was unfailingly polite, he was kind, he would even be affectionate in a perfunctory sort of way. But I also no longer saw him happy; his happiness faded into pastel-tinted childhood memories, and the reality of living with him—of bringing my marks home to him, airing my petty grievances, bandaging my scraped knees, and later mumbling my requests for money to buy feminine hygiene products—was a reality shaped by his dispassion and reserve.

So to have seen him smile then . . . it felt like more of a birthday present than seeing the oldest known designed landscape in the world.

It wasn’t until later—much later, actually—as I was back home in England and preparing for uni, that I realized I’d felt that thin thread of the divine only one other place in my life. There was another place that was hidden and strange and holy.

I’d lived there for a summer.

It belonged to my best friend.

It practically called out for a gardener, a keeper, someone who would patiently unravel all its secrets, not as archeologists do, not through digging and scraping. But through tending. Through planting. Through growth.

And I knew then, as I know now, that I was always meant to come back to Thornchapel. Not because it was meant for me.

But because I was meant for it.