the locked box

My uncle had a locked box which nobody had ever seen opened - not until the winter he went away for the second time. There wasn't any key hole in the box so all of us assumed that the simple, unpainted curiosity he had picked up on his stay in Madagascar had a trick to opening it and must have been designed by a genius craftsman. Two details of the plain-looking, mysterious object did give a small clue: an L-shaped chisel mark on one of its corners, and if you tipped it away from you, it gave out an odd echo of a knocking sound like there were living marbles inside. The box was as mysterious as our uncle.

I remember that ever since his return from that distant island, our father's brother had acquired an inexplicable air of tiredness about him. Whether it was winter or summer, he sweated and seemed withered. Strange because on the mantle piece in the living room, we had a photo, from a long time before, of him holding me up in a group shot of all of us and he looked altogether a different person, robust and healthy, standing beaming next to my parents. My mother asked him if he were ill, he shrugged off the question and bent back over the sewing machine, looking drained and hopeless. Our family made a living as tailors, you see.

I loved that uncle a great deal even though he was a consummate bachelor of a quiet disposition, in contrast to the raucousness of the rest of our family. He'd come back from Africa with a tanned papery quality to his skin, and a soft voice (inflected by another native language he'd learned) that became him. I often asked him to tell me about his journey to that remote place and in the right mood he would describe fabulous bazaars of riches and animals that I had maybe read or dreamed about. He was prone to wearing loose brown silk. Also, he couldn't use one eye, its vision lost in a shooting accident with my father that neither of them ever talked about.

His trip had originally been undertaken as a scouting operation for business. Having convinced my father to part with a chunk of the family's savings, the mission was treated as exploratory. He was away for a much longer time than expected and only relayed one letter to us in that period. It was a cryptic note saying that he had been detained there and that more news was forthcoming. 

One day in June, he crossed our threshold unannounced with a hessian bag over his shoulder. He didn't say much. Despite my father's interrogations, uncle only muttered that there was nothing to be gained from pursuing ventures in Africa and we should forget about it. In his bag, he had brought some trinkets for us little ones and a single bolt of second rate fabric. We were stunned. The locked box was at the bottom; he didn't refer to it initially and tried to hide it away. Father was furious and in the heat of the moment, seized it and flung it across the room as though to smash it. Uncle looked pained but not surprised, slouched to pick it up, and then disappeared into his chamber, his one good eye darting at us. From that time onward we noticed his diminished stature, his stooped gait - like a bird with clipped wings.

A few weeks after his return, I heard him humming in the backyard and went out to sit with him. He was whittling, as was his pastime. It was a crude version of one of the beasts he had told me about. 

"Chameleon's eyes move independently from each other." he said. He let me slide next to him on the bench as he worked, detailing the curve of the creature's back.

"How do they see then? Isn't it scrambled up?" I asked.

His face betrayed concentration as he turned out another ribbon of wood.

"One eye on the past and one eye on the future"

He squinted. I thought for a moment he was focusing directly on something, which didn't make sense because of his monocular vision. Handing the creature to me gently, he got up to brush the little chips off his shirt. It was a simple yet marvelous study. I marveled at the frontwards and backwards facing toes he had conjured with his penknife. I've read  that chameleons rock back and forth before each step they take. Perhaps it's to imitate the movement of their surroundings. 

Carving was a typical solitary preoccupation of my father's brother. I often felt that in some way he had become so Madagascan, so foreign,  that his returning to us is what led to what happened, as though he didn't belong in our house anymore and was as out of place an animal there as a chameleon would be. 

The end of the year was coming and mother had been doing the bookkeeping. The business was doing poorly. Everybody knew it. In the evening, there was a pall over our dinners. There should have been a buzz around the coming winter - my cousins and I usually expected full stockings and a pile of gifts. If it wasn't a train set for Jacob, it was a gun for me or one of the others. I loved the sight of the groaning table of food and the adults shedding inhibitions and putting the year behind them while we kids got away with unsupervised fun, hiding from each other, playing make-believe. This year was very different, I didn't have the courage to ask to go and play; I just sat eating quietly, waiting for my bed and privacy.

A sound started innocuously. It was like someone next door beating a carpet and it came and went. We might not have noticed anything if we hadn't been so sombre. My mother, who had been busy going over numbers on a spreadsheet while we ate, looked up. 

"Is that one of your windows left open, kids?" 

We all stopped and listened.

"I don't think so." I said.

"Go run and check."

I didn't need much provocation to leave the table and scampered out of my chair.

The thudding got louder as I reached the upstairs floor. At first, I had no idea what I was looking for, so I checked my room. The window was shut and the chameleon my uncle had carved sat there on the window ledge looking out at the blizzardy world. No, the beating noise was coming from across the hall. It had a hollowness that reminded me of the tok-tok of a piece of bamboo being hit with a hammer. I felt heart reach up in my throat. 

Crossing over to my uncle's door, I could hear voices from downstairs now in alarm. The beating was quite loud. As I laid a hand on the door handle, there was a sudden crack and then a smash and the drumming had ceased. Mustering my childish strength and courage I twisted the handle and leaned on the door swinging it open. Inside, the unusual box was lying broken in fragments on the floor with no obvious contents anywhere. The window was shattered and cold air was raging in with flecks of snow out of the grey. No sign of my uncle could be seen apart from his few things. A gust of cold thrust its fingers in my cheeks but I didn't move for a moment and just stared out the jagged window.

Later that same day, a couple of the neighbourhood boys reported seeing a small kingfisher flying around town and had tried to throw a snowball at it but it had flown away and wasn't seen again. I connected the event with my uncle's disappearance, but no one else did at the time. His name was Elazar, Lazar for short.