by Zoha Kazemi
“Not for drinking! Wait a bit… I’ll fetch you some drinking water soon,” Lealy replies. Dalia pours water all over her baldhead and her body. She also splashes some water on her mother’s face and sits beside her.
“It’s not that hot… The nights will be cool in here!” Lealy says with a surprise in her voice.
“I need to keep my skin moist… Especially my head. Otherwise my skin will crack,” Dalia replies, relieved by the cool moist of the water. She notices how Lealy is staring at her hairless head. She wants to explain but doesn’t know what to say. Lealy takes out a few more dried leaves from different jars and tins, puts some turmeric powder into the bowl and stirs the oil and the powders. She points to Dalia to take out some cloths from the basket by the door. But Dalia needs her metal plate finger tips to be able to pick things up. Lealy takes them out from a sack that hangs down her waist. The leather bands have tangled into one another. Dalia looks at the silver shine of her metal nails and picks them up with difficulty; she can’t tie them around her fingers. Lealy nags and sits in front of Dalia, untangles the leather bands and carefully ties them around Dalia’s fingers. Dalia is amazed by the fine and delicate motion of Lealy’s short, fat fingers.
“Were you born this way?” Lealy asks. Dalia nods.
“Why have you really come here? You know that I haven’t believed a word you said…You were lucky that Master Tirad came to give the ruling! If it was anyone else, they would have thrown you in to the sea,” Lealy continues. Dalia thanks her and Master Tirad and assures her that she hasn’t lied.
Healy checks the washed cloths and takes out three napkins that seem to have fewer stains on them. Asin has a cut on her side and there is still fresh blood around the wound. She washes the cut again, spreads some powdered leaves over it, puts some of her handmade poultice on the wound and covers it with a cloth. As she attends to Asin’s wounds one by one, she continues her questioning.
“Is this your first time on the land?” she asks. Dalia nods again.
“Why didn’t you go to Oxan? No one comes here looking for their lost people!” she continues. Dalia explains that because they don’t have the Saviour tattoo, they could never get through the Oxan gates. They had come to the Saviour Island so that her mother would officially convert to the Saviour Rules and to get their tattoos and then go to Oxan. Lealy accepts her explanation but keeps asking more questions.
“Where is your boatman? Don’t you have anything with you? Coins?” she asks. Dalia pauses. She hadn’t prepared an answer to this question. She better tell the truth; they might have already seen them swimming to the shore. She says they don’t have anything with them. The boatman had taken away all their money and belongings and threw them in to the water a few miles to the Island harbour. But this time, Lealy doesn’t seem to have accepted her words. Probably most people, who enter the island without authorisation, tell a similar story. Lealy starts working on the bruises on Asin’s arms and legs. She puts more of her poultice on the swollen areas and covers them with napkins. She stands beside Dalia.
“Tell me about the baby! And tell the truth!” Lealy orders her to speak. Dalia is scared and cuddles up her naked knees. She doesn’t know where to start and what to say. Anything she says may put her mother and herself in more trouble.
“When did the baby die? When was it born?” Lealy asks, breaking Dalia’s silence. But Dalia still refuses to speak. She needs to gather her thoughts and decide which parts she should reveal and which parts to hide. She has to be careful of the wording she uses, for the sake of her mother’s life. Lealy rolls her finger in the copper bowl and puts some poultice on Asin’s forehead wound and places the bowl by her head.
“There is still some poultice left… You can reapply on her bruises,” Lealy says and stands up to go out of the cabin. Dalia thanks her.
“What should I do here?” Dalia asks. Lealy shrugs.
“I will be back shortly… I’m just going to fetch you something to eat. How long has it been since you’ve last eaten?” Lealy asks. Dalia says it has been two days since their last meal.
“Don’t worry! There should be some grilled fish left from today’s lunch…” she says. But Dalia hesitates. She doesn’t know how to say this to Lealy but if she doesn’t say it, she will stay hungry.
“Actually…” she says, stopping Lealy on the doorway.
“We eat raw fish… If it’s no trouble?” Dalia continues. Lealy grins mockingly to Dalia’s surprise. She expected any reply but to be sneered at for asking for raw fish was not one of them.
“Fine! Easier for me… But you have to tell me the truth when I get back! That’s your final chance! The truth! Not more of these nonsense stories!” Lealy frowns. Dalia watches her leave. If she hadn’t seen her frown right now, she could say from her dance-like steps that Lealy was joyously walking towards her lover. She doesn’t understand her? Believe her mocking and frowning or her compassionate caring of Asin’s wounds?
Dalia whispers in her mother’s ears, but she still doesn’t respond. She bends and kisses Asin’s stubble head. She has to tell the truth, but she is not sure what the truth is anymore. Where should she start? From her own childhood? From her mother? Her father? Or the stillborn babies? Should she start from their long and frustrating journey from Avij? Or the rough night she had spent on the stillness of the Island? She hasn’t eaten for two days and hadn’t slept properly the previous night. Hunger and tiredness won’t allow her to focus. Perhaps Lealy noticed that and gave her the chance to speak up after she ate. Right now, everything seems mixed up in her thoughts; her memory is not aiding her. All the scenes, noises, colours and smells have intertwined within her mind. She can’t recall the exact sequence of the events. She needs to find the important events and line them up as milestones and fill in the gaps with the happenings of the last few weeks. Perhaps she should go further back and start from her mother; everything falls back on her past.
Asin moans and opens her eyes. She wants to sit up but Dalia stops her. She asks what has happened with a shaky voice. She barely leans on her arms and raises her head to look around the cabin and at her poultice-covered body. She puckers her face with pain and moans again. Dalia tries to calm her down and explains how they got in the cabin with a few short sentences. She assures her that they are safe now. Asin lies down again. Dalia tells her that she should give up the baby’s grave and that its body is to be burnt. But Asin replies with her swollen lips telling her she would never allow such a thing. Dalia won’t argue with her. She knows where the baby is buried; at least she knows the whereabouts. And she will give it up for the sake of their lives. Perhaps she should have done so sooner and avoided all the beating and the hurt.
They had reached the shores around midnight after swimming for the whole day. Her mother had carried the dead baby with her, teething its buttocks and dragging it through water. The Island gates were closed and they had to swim to the narrow eastern coast of the island. It was dark but Asin had no trouble finding her way. Dalia had to keep her eyes on her mother’s dark figure and follow her pace. It was Dalia’s first steps on land. Feeling the cool, soft sand with her feet had made her shiver and her toes itch. But Asin felt comfortable on the beach and unlike Dalia who could hardly keep her balance walking on the loose sand, she took light and steady steps. They had reached the Island walls and her mother had told her that they would spend the night there.
But Dalia knew what her mother wanted to do and she was going to stop her. She had begged her mother to let go of the baby and throw it in to the sea while they were still in deep waters. Asin wouldn’t listen, she had pretended as if though she was deaf. She had carried the baby in her mouth so that she wouldn’t argue with Dalia, even though she could have tied the baby to her back and swim more easily. She didn’t pay attention to Dalia’s warnings about the Saviour Rules and what it was believed as forbidden.
Dalia had sat beside her mother and the dead baby on the sands and cleared her toes from the pebbles that
had stuck to them. Asin seemed as if she had fallen asleep. The moist wind of the sea had filled Dalia’s ears. She didn’t want to sleep; she wanted to stay awake and throw the little body into the sea after she became sure her mother’s sleep had deepened. She knew it was no use and the waves would carry the body back to shore. She needed to attach something heavy to the body to sink and keep it under the water. She had felt strange, the surface beneath her was completely still and the sound of the waves came to her from a space that she had never experienced before. The sea was in a distance! Even if it was only for fifty or so paces, it was a new phenomenon to her. She wasn’t used to the stillness of the land and to being away from the sea. She had always thought that islands like ships were floating on the waves and this absolute motionless felt unbearable. She could hardly breathe, but even though, the tiredness of a day’s swimming had made her eyelids drop.
Dalia had opened her eyes in time to see her mother’s shadow a few steps away. She had already done what she shouldn’t have. Dalia was not sure if she could have stopped her even if she was awake. Asin never listened to anyone. Dalia felt the heavy burden of her mother’s grief and despair. It was once more just the two of them. Perhaps that was the reason she hadn’t stopped her. She had allowed Asin to bury with her little baby, all the pains and sorrows she carried with her since she was exiled. Maybe she could finally find some peace.
Right at that time, a blinding light had shined into Dalia’s eyes. It was harder to see than when it was completely dark. She was finally able to distinguish three figures that came close to her. The guard had rolled down his torch and Dalia saw her mother with two guards standing beside her. The guards had tied Asin’s hands from behind. They had picked up Dalia and forced her to go with them. Dalia had asked her mother what she had done and her mother had replied in Atlan language, “What she had to do!” But the guards were uncomfortable hearing a strange language. One of them had kicked Dalia in her legs to stop her from talking.
They had entered the surrounding wall of the Saviour Island through the eastern gate with the guards. Dalia had seen many ships before, even greater ships, but never like this one. The ships she had seen always floated on the sea. Those parts of the ship that usually stayed out of the water, was now out of the sands. Between the surrounding wall of the Island and the stranded ship, there were many cabins with wooden roofs. The cabins were disordered like the guts of a large fish that were cut out; they seemed like a ship torn out from the inside. Most of them had a dim light that came out of their small windows. The smell of fish oil had caught her nose and had reminded her of how hungry she was. The lights were not just the ones from the oil lamps. The guards had stronger lights from their torches and some cabin houses had motor generated electricity. They must have been quite rich, Dalia had thought to herself. The guards had put them in a tin cabin that had no roof or windows. One of the guards had stayed in front of the door with his torch on. They had asked them some questions and Dalia had given them the same story that she later on had told Lealy and Tirad. The guards didn’t react to her story and just said that they will be dealt with the next morning. Asin had fallen asleep as soon as she reached the cabin. But Dalia was too tired and too hungry to be able to sleep. She needed water. Her skin had dried up and she could already feel the stretches on her head’s skin. She had begged the guards for water and had soaked her skin from head to toe as soon as she was given a bucket of seawater. Her head had soothed but she had felt suffocated in the four rusty, tin walls. All that came to her eyes was the picture of her mother swimming with the dead baby instead of sweet dreams.
The next morning, Dalia and her mother were questioned again by the guards. Dalia had tried to avoid giving any answers and even pretended that she didn’t speak their language. But her skin felt stretched and dry again and she needed more water and had to ask them for it. She had told them that she wouldn’t say a word until she was given more water. The guards waiting to hear Dalia’s confession had watched her soaking herself. They had become restless and frenzied by Asin’s muteness and Dalia’s resistance to talk. One of them had seen Asin roaming around the wall outside. He started beating Asin in front of Dalia to make her break her silence and tell them what Asin had been doing in the beach. The women of the Saviour Island were behind the tin walls, listening to their harsh conversation and awaiting a chance to get in and take over the confession. Their ruckus sound had made Dalia nervous and she could no longer watch her mother being beaten by the men. She had finally spoken the forbidden words and as soon as her sentence about burying a dead baby came out of her mouth, the women broke the door and got to them. They beat them even more and had dragged them to the ship deck to show them the punishment of the Saviour.
Healy comes in with two dishes of raw fish and puts them in front of Dalia. Lealy and Dalia carefully help Asin to sit down. Ignorant of her mother or Lealy’s presence, Dalia starts teething the fish. She eats from the head to the tail, swallowing even the fish’s bone. Lealy turns her head away, disgusted by the way she eats the fish-like a peculiar animal. She doesn’t want to watch Asin eat as well. She faces the cabin window. Dalia knows she has to start talking as soon as she finishes her food. But she is too hungry to be able to control her eating pace and postpone her explanations a little longer.
Chapter 8
Asin was found by the Avij Ship divers over the drowned city of Karaj. It was a rich but dangerous diving area and both divers from Oxan and Atlan would dive out concrete blocks, brigs and metals from the ruins of the underwater city. Asin was passed out on a dugout. If they had found her a little later, she would have drowned by the waves. She had nothing with her – no food or water. It wasn’t clear how long she had been on the water, but the divers had thought she had been abandoned to be punished by the sea. A year before Dalia was born, Asin was brought back by the divers to Avij ship. She couldn’t speak their language and explain what had happened to her. Later on, when Dalia was her only translator and they could finally ask her about her past, no one cared to know anymore. A long time had passed and the ship residents had forgotten all about it.
Dalia’s father was both deaf and mute, but a very competent diver. He didn’t mind that Asin couldn’t talk to him in their language. Asin had learnt to understand the Oxan language but couldn’t speak it, but as time passed, people had gotten used to knowing Asin as deaf and mute like her husband. After Dalia was born, their marriage had become official. Dalia had no hair or nails. They had to keep her skin moist at all times otherwise her skin would crack and the capillaries beneath her skin would bleed. But Asin was fine with all that, she was happy that her child was not born with conjoined fingers and toes. It was not a hard job to keep someone’s skin moist, especially when you live on a ship. And having no nails couldn’t make her child’s life miserable. But she couldn’t say this to her husband and the residents of the Avij ship who thought that the baby was deformed. The women of the ship wanted to throw the baby into the water to avoid the future misfortunes that the ominous baby would bring with her. They had taken their request to the ship’s chief, Ardaz. He had looked at the baby and her hands and had said this is not a major deformity and that her nails may grow when her teeth came out. This was enough to postpone the life threat of Asin’s child, and she knew that the women would forget all about her as time passed.
Dalia couldn’t pick things up or separate anything with her hands. She seemed clumsy and careless and her hands were weak. Asin knew that it was because she didn’t have nails. She had made her small and thin metal nails with leather bands and had trained her to use them. Although Dalia’s hands were clumsy and weak, she had strong arms and full volume lungs that made her capable of long hours of swimming and diving, better than most men and women of the ship.
Asin would go on diving trips with her husband. She too had strong and muscular arms and she was the fastest swimmer in the ship. She would find and dive out peculiar objects from the drowned cities, stones shaped like the creatu
res of pre-rain times, wooden frames, large glass panels etc. Once she had recovered a moss covered stone that looked like a man’s head with a scarf rolled around his head. Everyone had taken a guess of what the stone was about. Most of them believed that it was a man’s head but since the face of the statue was corroded, it was hard to say for sure. It was a valuable one-piece stone that had many uses and was sold for a good price in Oxan market to a blacksmith ship that needed it for anvil. Asin didn’t get pregnant for five years after Dalia’s birth and she always regretted that she had. Everyone knew that the sea brought amnesia, whether it was because of the salt water, the hot and humid weather of the dry season, the fog and storms of the rainy season or the fish they ate that had very short memories, no one knew for sure. The residents of the sea were forgetful of their past and memories meant nothing to them. Perhaps that was the reason they relied on the stranded Saviour Ship to keep their past memories for them. Not that they would forget everything, but what they remembered was always vague and ambiguous. They had no past or future. Time, like their ship, had been suspended. The vague memory of the ship residents that had put Asin in the safe side for some time had caused her trouble. Although Asin had not given them anything from her past, and she had an unusual girl, but the ship residents didn’t have a clearer past than she did. Asin was a member of the Avij diving team and this group was the income source of the ship. They all agreed to that, but as long as Asin was still a member of the team, before her diving career was forgotten.
Asin’s second baby was born with closed nostrils. She stayed alive out of her mother’s womb for a few seconds and suffocated. The ship women had blamed Asin for her diving activities during her pregnancy, something that was forbidden by Saviour Rules. They believed that the Saviour wouldn’t forbid something unless it was right and the water pressure during diving would harm the foetus’s formation. But Asin had never listened to them. She didn’t care for their sayings or the loss of her baby and was proud enough to think that she would have more babies whenever she wanted. She had preferred not to get pregnant for some time and continue her diving career. A diver’s life was short, everyone agreed to that. Anything could happen during a diving trip. They could become trapped in closed areas of the drowned cities, they could drown due to any failures in their oxygen masks – a small hole in the oxygen tank or a rupture in the hose – they could harm their backs, hearts, lungs and brains because of the water pressure and heavy lifting of the mined goods; an accident was always ahead of them. The divers would professionally work between ten to fifteen years. After that, their physical problems would surface and they would have to sit in the ship beside the old men and women and the children and entertain them with their vague memories of their previous diving trips. Those stories often accompanied many uncanny events that no one knew how true they were. If the divers were still in a good shape, they would join fishing teams and set out to sea again. Asin knew that her diving time would be up before she lost her fertility; she could have more children after she retired from diving. But diving age was more limited and she had no intention of letting go of her work.