I Am the Clay

by Chaim Potok

  “I had a dog.”

  The old man looked startled.

  “A dog with three colors. Badooki was his name, because of his spots. Three Four I called him sometimes, a bad name, to tease him. Three colors, four legs.” The boy paused a moment, his eyes swollen with memory. “Badooki ran away when the noise began and and I was afraid to run after him because I thought they would see me and he ran across the pond into the forest and and and …”

  The boy stopped. His breath came tremulously from the exertion of speaking.

  There was a pause.

  The old man looked intently at the boy. “Tell me again your name.”

  “Kim Sin Gyu.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I am eleven years old.”

  “What do you want us to do with you?”

  The boy was quiet. He saw clearly the malice in the old man’s dark eyes and was frightened and bewildered.

  “You do not belong to us,” the old man said.

  The boy began to cry.

  The old man looked away.

  From the direction of the hills in the east came a flurry of rifle fire. The old man saw the woman hurrying toward them. Her face greenish, drained of life. Others had begun scurrying from the beach. The old man and woman took up the shafts of the cart.

  The sea, driven by winds, foamed upon the shore. The old man and woman, together with others, walked with their backs to the sea toward a region of ice-covered mountains.

  In the early afternoon they reached a small valley. The noise of the war came only faintly there.

  With what remained of his waning strength the old man gathered wood and lit a fire. The woman prepared a soup of melted snow and winter grass and the remains of a frozen jackdaw she had found earlier on the beach. Wild dogs circled in the darkness just beyond the light of the fire. The boy sat up and ate, holding the bowl tightly in his shaking hands. His eyes kept darting about and he would not look directly at the old man. The woman watched him eating and spoke silently to the tree of her childhood and to the spirits of her father and grandfather.

  The next morning they continued south along cart paths, away from the fading sounds of the war.

  During the early hours of the day they came to a narrow valley and the boy was able to walk awhile, leaning on the side of the cart. The woman, overjoyed, refrained from speaking lest she cause him undue fatigue. The old man was glad they did not have to drag the cart with the boy in it along the stony floor of the valley. Tall steep walls of boulder-strewn granite rose on both sides of the valley, darkening it with spectral shadows. The wind blew a wall of stiff cold air through the valley and soon the boy could no longer walk and the woman helped him into the cart and covered him with the quilts and sleeping bag.

  “Hungry,” he pleaded.

  “Soon.”

  “Hungry,” he said again.

  She turned away and took up the second shaft and walked alongside the old man.

  “How far?” she asked.

  “We will stay with the others.”

  “There are some who are not continuing.”

  “They will not live long.”

  “The boy needs to eat.”

  “The boy. The boy.”

  “I cannot go on.”

  “When we stop I will make a fire, catch a rabbit.”

  She knew he had no strength to hunt rabbits. “I am ill and will never again see our village.”

  “Stop!” he ordered her, glancing fearfully around. “When the spirits hear such talk they know immediately where to go.”

  “I am an old woman and with me they have known a long time where to go.”

  “If they come to you they will notice me.”

  “Are you afraid? How many times have you told me you are not afraid?”

  “They will notice the boy.”

  That silenced her.

  “Climb into the cart,” the old man said.

  “Ah, no.” She was ashamed.

  “Climb in, woman.”

  “I will not.”

  “What can I do for the boy if you are ill?”

  She considered that and a moment later climbed in. The old man pulled the cart along the narrow path through the valley.

  She lay shivering next to the boy. The pain in her stomach frightened her. She trembled violently and felt the boy move close against her, giving her of his warmth. He drew the top of the sleeping bag over their heads and they lay in the darkness.

  The war was now far behind them and they could no longer hear it.

  In the evening the old man made a fire and tried to cook a soup of snow and grass. There was a taste in it of earth and stone. The woman could not eat and sat bent over outside the rim of firelight, vomiting. The old man sat in the heat of the fire. The boy squatted on the other side of the fire, away from the man, and listened to the sounds the woman made. What will I do if the woman dies and the man sends me away?

  But the woman did not die. In the morning she walked on trembling legs alongside the cart and in the afternoon they reached a broad plain and the man, gathering brushwood, stumbled upon a small rabbit, which the woman skinned and roasted that night. The three of them sat around the fire, eating.

  Hundreds were scattered throughout the plain in the frozen night. There were fires all through the plain and no sound of the war. No one seemed to know with certainty where they were going. It was rumored there was a huge refugee camp with food and warm tents somewhere beyond the next range of hills.

  In the morning the old man was sick with cramps and fever. He pulled the cart together with the woman until his arms and legs grew numb. They were on a cart path in a narrow valley. Caves pocked the sides of the hills.

  The old man lay in the cart, pulled by the woman and the boy. I will die here in this cart behind this woman I no longer know and this boy who is a stranger. This cart will be my deathbed and this valley my grave. For this all the offerings to the spirits. For this all the festivals to the ancestors. For this all the gifts to the ghosts.

  After a while the woman and the boy could no longer pull the cart with the old man. They stood alongside the cart, bent and trembling with exhaustion. Then they dragged the cart to the side of the path and squatted beside it.

  All the rest of the day refugees flowed past them without stopping. So many. The woman had not thought the war had undone so many. Each with eyes fixed upon the ground. Men beneath A-frames. Women with children strapped to their backs and bundles on their heads. Sighs, moans, a cry from a child. Carts, wagons, a few oxen. No one spoke to the woman or the boy. The old man raised his head from time to time and watched them going by.

  The air was clear and bitter cold. The sky, a deep icy blue, faded slowly into evening.

  The old man was barely conscious when the last of the refugees straggled past. Stars began to appear. A partial moon glided across the jagged tops of distant mountains. By its ghostly light the old man saw the shadowy figures of the woman and the boy as they stood alongside the cart looking at him.

  BOOK TWO

  3

  Slowly, by the light of the climbing moon, the woman and the boy dragged the cart with the old man still on it across a length of craggy ground to the nearest cave.

  Fearful, they stood at the mouth of the cave staring into a darkness that would not open itself to their eyes. The dank fungus smell of sun-starved stones and earth brushed against their faces and filled their nostrils.

  Perhaps spirits live here, the woman thought. Will we disturb them?

  The boy had never before seen a cave. Its dark gaping mouth, a little wider than the cart and a few inches taller than the woman and set at the base of the towering granite wall, frightened him.

  They left the cart just inside the mouth of the cave, where it was sheltered from the tundra wind blowing across the valley, promising snow.

  The woman went behind a clump of bushes by the side of the cave to relieve herself. Then she called softly to the boy and the two of them gathere
d winter grass and brushwood and she lit a fire directly outside the mouth of the cave. She boiled snow into which she placed various kinds of winter grass and weeds. She offered the soup to the spirits of the cave. Then she turned to the boy.

  “Do not eat the grass,” she reminded him. “Drink only the soup.”

  The boy stared ravenously into the bowl but did as she ordered.

  She went to the cart and gently pulled down the top of the sleeping bag from the face of the old man. She was startled by the fever heat that rose from him. He stirred and moaned. His eyes glimmered darkly in the light of the fire. “Drink slowly,” she told him, but he could not keep down the food and after a while she left him and returned to the fire.

  She took some fresh brambles and lit their ends in the fire. Holding them over her head like a torch, she went past the cart into the cave. The boy came and stood beside her.

  The cave was about twelve feet deep, its granite walls black, fissured, craggy. Its curved ceiling rose from its mouth to a height of about ten feet at the far wall. A layer of frozen moisture covered the walls with a black glistening sheen. The floor of the cave was of hard clay. Over its center, where they now stood, hovered the noxious stench of stagnant pools and pestilential marshes. At the foot of the far wall was another opening, about the height of the boy and twice his width. When the woman saw the second cave she began to tremble. Cave leading to cave to the very bowels of the world. Surely spirits live here. What will happen to us?

  She led the boy back to the mouth of the cave and tossed the burning brambles into the fire. She spread pads and quilts on the earth alongside the cart and motioned to the boy, who lay down beneath the quilts.

  The old man moaned loudly and called to her from the cart. She helped him down from the cart—how hot his gaunt flesh was!—and held him as he squatted near the brush outside the cave and turned her head away as foul-smelling waste poured from him. She led him back to the cart and piled quilts on him and he lay helpless and shivering.

  If he dies I will be left alone with the boy and we may both die. If he lives he will send the boy away.

  She felt pressing upon her all the vast mountain above the cave: a world freighted with cold malevolence. Squatting close to the fire, she gazed at the faces that appeared to her in the leaping flames. Father would smoke his pipe staring into the flames. The children never permitted to go near him when he sat that way. Especially the girls. Smoke in his narrow eyes and wispy beard. How he disliked the girls. A weight upon him, a dark shame. Five girls, one boy, from the first wife. After the fifth girl a second wife and three boys. Then my sisters sold off to an arranger of marriages, a fat perfumed lady in billowing skirts who came and went with a servant in a curtain of hushed voices. Outrageous to sell them! Mother would not let him sell me. Stubborn woman! he shouted at her. But I was not sold. Dancing leaping vaulting flames: faces of the dead.

  The boy lay beneath the quilts listening to the hot crackling of the flames. The same noises: the flame-sounds of wooden walls and grass roofs burning. The very air on fire. Mother, he thought he heard himself cry out, there was earth in your mouth. And Father looked strange with his head bent back that way. Grandfather, if the old man dies the woman will not send me away. But can we survive without the old man? Will I die in this cave with these strangers? And what of your wish that I become a scholar and a poet? The fire crackled loudly as the woman placed more brushwood on the flames. Burning wood and straw and the ox bellowing in the shed and the pigs squealing and the frenzied dogs running back and forth and Badooki vanishing into the forest and the air swollen with reddish smoke.

  The woman rose from her place by the fire and slipped beneath the quilts beside the boy. He smelled on her the smoke and heat of the flames, and cringed. The wound in his chest had begun to throb again.

  Outside the cave the moon was long gone and the fire began to die. Creatures edged toward the cave but did not enter. The wind blew through the starlit darkness and before dawn brought with it a fall of thick dry snow that quickly covered the valley.

  In the early morning the snow ended and the wind died away. A platoon of South Korean infantry entered the valley from the south. The soldiers approached the cave in which lay the old man and the woman and the boy but did not stop to look inside. They passed on through the valley toward the destroyed city on the sea, leaving behind their tracks in the snow.

  The woman thought: How silent the boy is. A sealed room. Mouth always tight, eyes always averted. Slender hands. Like the hands of one of my sisters bought by the fat arranger of marriages. Soft delicate movements of his shoulders and neck. A dancer. Is there a girl inside this boy? His penis and testicles are well formed, no question there. He will not speak unless spoken to first. Often when he is alone he inclines his head as if listening for something. He is a carrier of too much memory. His eyes are like the big mirrors in the marketplace: I see in them his burning village. What is happening to me in this madness of war? Can a stranger’s child be so quickly loved by an old woman? Are the spirits playing with me? Have they nothing better to do than torture again an old woman already scarred by their previous attentions? Turn away from me, spirits. Leave me in peace. How many more years have I? Will each year be a time for your sporting? Is my life a playing field for your games and laughter? Why have you sent me this boy? He said to me earlier in answer to my question, I am eleven years old, and I said, I am told your father and grandfather were scholars, and he said with pride coloring his face, Great scholars and famous poets to ten generations, famous in the North and in the lands of the Chinese and known to emperors and kings, writers of poetry and lovers of Chinese characters and teachers to the sons of ambassadors and landowners, and Grandfather and Great-Grandfather once in the service of the government in Seoul. I said, Tell me if you wish what happened to your mother, and he said, tears in his eyes, My mother has earth in her mouth and sings when she sews or prepares the most delicate of foods, my mother tells tales of tigers and birds and swinging contests, my mother lies in the burning village in a grave so shallow it was not even to her ears but earth was in her mouth, I saw it after they left and all around the air was on fire and and there was a rain of burning ash and I ran into the forest but could not find Badooki Three Four and I ran through the forest and into the valley and and and.… Calm yourself, calm yourself, I said to the boy. The old man tells me you are called Kim Sin Gyu. We were many generations in our village, the boy said with great agitation. Why did they burn it? We were like the rocks of the earth, the hills of the valley, generation upon generation to the time of the Chosen dynasty and perhaps earlier. Grandfather told me. How do they come like a raging river, like a swarm of locusts, like an army of madmen, and kill us and burn us so that not one not one not one remains and if I had not earlier disobeyed my mother, if I had not gone to the pond to watch the fish gliding in their winter sleep beneath the ice, if I had not gone with my dog Badooki whom I sometimes tease with the name Three Four to the pond near the forest outside the village, I would have earth in my mouth and be in that shallow grave because they killed all the children too the friends of my age and even younger and spared only the babies they left the babies crying on the ground amid the flames. How he trembled as he spoke! His fingers scraping at the sores on his face and I took hold of his hands to restrain him because he was making the sores bleed and he cried and then was still and I heard strange sounds inside the cave which I tried desperately to ignore. The spirits stirring in their sleep? I thought the boy had fallen asleep but after a moment he said, Don’t I know how the man feels about me? What have I done that he should hate me even before I have spoken a word? I know he will send me away or give me over to an orphanage. And he cried and I said, Calm yourself, calm yourself, you know nothing of this yet, it has not happened therefore how can you know it, the man is not the only one here with you, there is a woman here too, who cared for you when you were with the piece of metal in your flesh and helped to heal you and will not so quickly let yo
u be abandoned or given over to strangers, calm yourself or you will again be ill. He grew silent and I said after a long moment, If you wish, only if you wish, you may call me Mother. And he said, No, with respect, you are not my mother, how may I call you Amuni?

  The boy woke and remembered his name and where he was. Raising his head and looking about, he felt immediately the pulsing in his chest and chose to disregard it. The wound has healed. How can what has healed become not healed?

  He then realized that the woman was not beside him and, feeling a flutter of alarm, rose from the quilts.

  The cave was bright with sunlight reflected off the snow. On the cart lay the old man, asleep, his face reddish brown from the fever, his lips and eyelids quivering. The boy saw the black craggy walls of the cave and the opening at the far end and the small furry winged creatures clinging to the ceiling and the walls. He shivered at the sight of them and hurried from the cave.

  Where was the woman?

  Snow covered the valley and the mountains; a hushed landscape of gleaming white beneath a morning sun in a brilliant blue sky. The valley, about half a mile in width, ran in length for about three miles until it reached the far range of mountains. With a shock the boy noticed the tracks less than thirty feet from the mouth of the cave. Then he saw other tracks. A dog has been here too. Where is the old woman?

  Nearby sounds startled him and he jumped back into the cave and poked his head out cautiously and saw the woman emerge from behind a clump of tall brush, the A-frame on her back half laden with brushwood. He rushed forward to help her and felt again the odd throbbing of the healed wound in his chest.

  They piled the brushwood near the firepit she had dug the night before outside the mouth of the cave. He asked, “Who made the tracks in the snow?”

  “Soldiers. Can’t you see? Those are tracks made not by rubber shoes but by boots.”

  “And a dog was here too.”

  “Do not let wild dogs come near you.”