I hear the rings fall onto the hot oil of Nayra’s pan. My eyes are closed now, but I hear them. They sizzle at first. Then they hiss. Then they sigh as they sag. They are gentle and soft and translucent, caramelizing to brown.
Into the softness I think, war has damaged Khalem. It is not the city of your youth. But Nayra’s eyes are closed. She is inhaling: the soft, yielding flesh is releasing the sun.
She says, Do you have that dry bread? I have eaten it all, but I manage to beg a few more pieces off a new rations-person. Nayra softens the bread with some oil and fries it, then heaps golden onion on top. Cuts it in half. She eats like a bird, in small pecks, her eyes closed and her whole body rigid, attuned to some inner vision. A trickle of tears runs down from the corner of her right eye; her left is dry.
I watch for a bit, and then I have to look away. There’s the uneaten piece, heaped high with translucent brown onion. No longer my onion, the shining carved Khalem of gold. No, this is disemboweled. Dead.
As if I never received it as gift from the jeweler at his stall, as if it never gave me the strength to leave, as if I never made of it a beacon for the sea, as if it never held the city and its streets and memories and light.
Just a cooked vegetable.
I take a step back. Another.
Nayra opens an eye. That’s for you, she says. The second half. You should eat it.
I turn away and run, all the way to my berth and the dark.
Silence
At night I am on the deck. The weather is still and pleasant, and hosts of stars litter the sky. I stare out into the sea, but there’s nothing. Not even a shadow of wings.
The next night I cup my hands like an onion and lift them, empty, to my chest. I have not gone to see Nayra. I have not eaten.
The sea is still.
A storm in the smallest space
The maid of Murur comes to my berth in the dead of the night. The ray-skin in her hand is dripping salt.
What happened, Belezal? Where is your beacon?
I shake my head. I gave it away. I shouldn’t have, but—maybe I should have? The moment was clear and translucent like an onion gently softened by heat for a brief moment before wilting.
You gave it away? The maid of Murur’s voice is thin, sharp.
I thought—I thought somebody else needed it more. Someone who cannot go home.
I, too, cannot go home. I thought—I thought you cared? Her lips tremble; her hair is seaweed trembling like a forest in the small space of my berth.
Nobody cares about me, she says. My family, caring only for the shape they gave me, the order they imposed on me, the people who wanted the body but did not see me—the friends who turned away—the summons of war—the bitter embrace of the sea—
And all the boys you did not want. I do not know what made me say that, and I do. Because she, too, would not see me unless I made clear that I’m not a boy, or at least neither this nor that.
She rises, wrapping herself tight in the slithery ray-skin, and I know I will lose her, and I do not want to lose her, and I have to lose her; I do not understand how this happened so fast.
It’s not about you being a boy, Belezal. You should have asked me first about the onion—you should have asked me first about everything— Her voice is like a storm on the sea, carrying all the weight and anguish of water.
I want to hug her to me, but I can’t. No, I say. I shouldn’t have asked you about the onion. It does not belong to you, or to me. It belongs to Khalem.
I listen to the rapid beating of footsteps, then a splash, far away. In my hectic dreams later, an enormous shadow ray encircles the ship, and tightens; then lets go.
Leavetaking
A day before landing, I go to speak to Nayra once more.
I’m sorry about your lover, she says when I tell her.
I shake my head. She did not want me. Not everything I am.
Don’t be so sure about that, Nayra says. In her hand, the ladle is all silver vines creeping up to a blossoming rose. Sometimes it takes more time and more words than youth can afford. You have to exchange many words; they will lead you deep into each other’s truths. You are not born with all the perfect words, especially if where you’re born the words were not allowed. You need to make the words. Words and memories and food and touch. You have to be patient.
I shrug. I cannot be patient now. She is gone. And then, bitter, She just wanted the onion.
Nayra smiles. I have never seen her smile before: like a tired window cracking open into a seascape of purest azure.
No, child. It is I who wanted the onion. She only wanted your light.
The words sink into me, glowing and golden; too painful to hold.
I change course. You have the documents. Come ashore with me to Islingar.
I cannot. She shakes her head. Even though I cannot return, I must stay true to Khalem.
I say, I lived in Khalem for a decade, but I did not truly know it before I met you. Did not love it before we spoke. You’ll carry Khalem with you ashore. Its spices and markets and truths. And its love.
Nayra shakes her head. Then she pats mine. Not yet.
Islingar
In Islingar I settle in the seashore town of Luga, home of the university. Excelling is easier now that they give me a stipend to cover my lodgings and food. I eat the tasteless fruits of Islingar, great slabs of bread cut thin and toasted to dryness.
I sit with my books by the window overlooking the sea. I nibble on dry bread and daydream of a great ancient ship made of wood and barnacle-covered; made in the isle of Selei before it sunk underwave, made when Belezal forged the streets and the chains of Khalem. In my vision the ship is enormous, larger than water and land. As it grows in my vision I hear, deep within it, the sound of Nayra’s ladle making circles in the pot of soup.
I buy a blue pot and put empty water to boil on my electric stove. It is plugged in, and the low humming of it comforts me. I buy overpriced sumac and coriander, turmeric and cumin, and I stir the empty soup with a ladle made of wood. The spices here are not as potent as Nayra’s; they hardly taste of anything. I add more and stir, always keeping an eye on the horizon. There is no ship I see, and no gigantic ray.
I begin to add lentils and vegetables to the pot. The zucchini and onions are waterlogged here, barely tasting of earth, but I can afford them.
In time, I buy larger clothing and marvel at how easy it is both to find and to buy these sizes. When strangers ask me where I’m from, I say Khalem.
They were jewelers of everyday
My father sends me a package over the sea. It is his own carving knife, thin and sharp, made from my grandfather’s shaving razor. My father cannot hold it anymore, much less carve.
The package tarried for three months before reaching Islingar. There is no letter—confiscated in customs, perhaps. The binding is torn and the back address smudged, but the knife arrives safe in its wrappings, still holding a razor-sharp edge.
It takes me four days to find a good onion. The store onions of Islingar have no luster, but a middle-aged woman sells me a good one from a communal garden patch. It looks slightly tarnished and does not quite glow, but it smells like the dark and golden streets of Khalem’s sidewise market.
When I sit by the window to carve the onion, my hands shake. I lost the first knife in the dormitories, but the knife I hold is dearer even. Why did my father send it? Because he thought me his son, even though I said nothing; to inherit his knife and my grandfather’s, or because he thought I should inherit them as a daughter? What was I? Neither this nor that, a person who was brought to Khalem and left it, a person always looking back to the sea? Did it truly matter why my father sent me the knife? It is of Raigan make. I hold it, the handle warm with my touch and older than my life, older than all the wars I have known. It has traveled from Raiga to Khalem and then out of Khalem oversea, like I did.
I carve—hesitantly at first, then with abandon. I am a carver in the lineage of Khalem but I am also
a stranger to it. A stranger everywhere. I carve as my father would carve—birds and reindeer and trees; I carve as Nayra’s father would carve—streets too wide, imprecise, the bulbous roofs of Khalem’s inner quarters, the curve and sweep of the museum. I carve things of my own: a harbor, much like this one in Luga, which cannot be found in Khalem. A ship, which neither of our fathers have seen. And then I am out of onion.
My creation is dull and clumsy, uneven. The images I saw so vividly in my mind are shapeless gouges and slashes. If the maid of Murur only wanted my light then what I made is crude and feeble; it cannot compare to the great work of the carvers of Khalem or to my father’s craft. It cannot call anyone out of the sea. It cannot do anything.
A summons and a wave
When I sense her presence by my side, I think I am dreaming. But the maid of Murur is real, her blue skin glowing with pinpricks of light. Her ray-skin has transformed into a studded leather coat. She wears a white men’s collared shirt beneath it, and a pair of sharply pleated trousers, in the latest fashions of Islingar.
Did I call you?
You did. She smiles, and her mouth is lit by a row of small, sharp, white teeth. And I decided to be called.
I want to reach out to her, touch her tide-starry hand, but I cannot, not yet. The depth of words that Nayra spoke about is missing.
I tell her, I need to be—I need to be what I am, even if it’s a boy. I am neither—or both—and one day I may be entirely a boy, or not, but I cannot—I cannot have you tell me I’m special and different from other boys, so if you cannot have a boy, it will not work.
She puts her hand on mine, soft and heavy, breaching the boundary between wakefulness and dream. I’m sorry I said that. Thing is—it’s not about you or any other person, boy or not. It is because—of what they wanted me to be. I’m good with a boy and a girl and a person who is both or neither, a person of any shape, as long as they do not want me to change who I am.
Why would I want to change you? I blurt. You are perfect.
Her hair shadows my face, runs down my body in star-drops of water and light. Words, Nayra said, words to get to the deep still core of ourselves; but we touch and words scamper while our waves crush relentlessly, gently ashore.
A chain of words and soft onion
We talk in the night. How she came to the ship after I disembarked, her ray-skin draped over her arm and dripping tears in the third-class commons; how Nayra gave her my half of the old piece of bread and leftover onion. How she ate it, the ancient city and all its heart and its wars, its kindness and cruelty and its sacrifices.
A piece of Khalem is in her now as it is in me, a memory golden and sharp like a chain that balances both of us.
It is easier to find the right words now that I’ve lived for a while in Islingar, my lover says. I have even picked up my name again. Gabi. She waves her fist fiercely towards the sea and beyond it, Murur. They do not get to take it away from me, not anymore.
But I am here only provisionally. Even if I’m excellent in my studies, I cannot stay here forever.
I do not ask Gabi how she got her documents.
A morning in Luga
In the morning, she is still here, sprawled asleep in my bed. The onion I carved flickers on the kitchen table, barely there, but she found me. All what is needed is my light.
I slice up my clumsily carved onion into a pan with some oil and soften it gently with sumac and cumin. The jewelers of everyday in Khalem carved their unsold produce each night and cooked it for a big communal meal; tomorrow I will find another onion and practice until I am truly a carver.
Nobody’s watching, but I look around anyway, before unplugging my stove from the electrical outlet in the wall.
There is no change. The stove hums gently, the warmth of the heating element cooks the onion base. I add lentils and rice and water and set it all to a gentle simmer. My ladle is wood, but as I look, it sprouts a handle of silver. It is a chain. A chain of Khalem holding tight to a ship that forever travels between all the shores, a ship more ancient than wars, a ship that saves us and drowns us, a ship that traversed the waves a thousand times for those of us that do not have a place to go, so we must always be going places.
I know that one day we will see it again, my lover and I; see the ancient barnacled ship fill our vision and expand. We will run down to the harbor, Gabi in her jacket of ray skin and I in my big Islingar clothes. We will hold hands and run breathless beyond the customs tower, race barefoot to the pier. The air will be too bright and too green, full of smells of dry seaweed and wind.
We will climb the rusted, ancient chains of the ship, go down to third-class where the stove hums as softly as mine and an old woman of Khalem stands motionless by a big pot of water. We will ask our elder to come ashore with us, or maybe we’ll tell her we are ready to come on the ship once more. We might never be allowed to enter Khalem again, might never find home, but we’ll balance the weight of each other.
I will not stop carving until it is so.
© Copyright 2020 R.B. Lemberg
R B Lemberg - [BCS300 S04] Page 3