Sugar and Other Stories

by A. S. Byatt

  The house of a jinx is spotlessly clean and her eyes are red. There was an age when a woman might become a jinx, and she had perhaps arrived there. There were few men in the village. Many of the young ones had been taken by the army, which had taken A-Oa’s husband, to fight many months’ march away, on the frontier. Others had joined the bandits in their mountain-fortress. Those who were left no longer looked at A-Oa in the street in the way she had once feared and needed. Her breasts were small and soft and dry inside her shirt; the cloth was slack over slackness. A woman could not see herself in a man’s eye, that was simply what the old poems said, but she could read the firmness of her body in his attention, the spring of her step. When she combed her hair she caught up now long silver hairs, not many, among the dark ones. These hairs were thicker and livelier in texture than the dark ones, brighter. Were her eyes red?

  There was life in the village street, even in the dry afternoon heat. Cha-An’s two daughters and Bo-Me’s frog-agile son squatted and chattered in the dust. When they saw A-Oa they scattered, calling shrilly, the old woman, the old woman, not meeting her eye. A-Oa tightened dry lips: an old woman was what she was, or was about to be, but it was also a sweet way, a roundabout way, of saying something else, the other thing. She was not friendly to children. Before her husband went she had buried four, eggshell-skulls under fine hairless skin, stick arms strapped to blown bellies, dead trailing feet with their beautiful useless bones, parcels wrapped in banana leaves tucked gently into pits scooped in the dust and hard clay. One, a boy, had seen two summers, had had a few piping words, her name, a complaint of pain, a contented chuckle when he recognized the fat hen. His head had been huge, a wise head, a fool’s head, on a body that never swelled or wriggled. It was always known that he too would not last. He was the third: after the fourth, the army had taken his father.

  Kun was outside his shop. He was always to be seen, smiling his own smile, which was not happy, which crumpled his fat face into a shape as though it might be gently about to weep for its own hopelessness and helplessness. Kun had a cellar in the mountain, in which were stored pickled pork and pickled vegetables, linen and cotton thread, oil and quilting, baskets and jars: Kun was a necessary man, a man aware of others’ needs, a good, sharp dealer, respected for it. Kun knew everything that happened in the village before anyone else: he knew when births and deaths would be, and was ready with gifts and offerings, he knew that Bo-Me’s eldest son had run away to the bandits when she was still searching the fields for him, he knew when Ma-Tun’s young wife was alone with a visiting cousin and was able to tell Ma-Tun what had been spoken between them, not much, but enough; he knew, A-Oa was convinced, what had happened to her own young brother-in-law, Da-Shi, who had gone away one night, leaving no message, a year or so after his brother, A-Oa’s husband, had been taken by the army. Kun divulged such knowledge reluctantly and with many cautions. He advised against haste when there were crimes to be judged, or failings to be punished. Like A-Oa he had now no close family in the village: his mother, with whom he had lived, had died at a great age, lovingly tended by her son, mourned with howls and streams of tears. Kun had never been wanted by the army or coerced by the bandits. He was a fat man, with soft triangular breasts like a woman, resting on his smooth pale belly like overlapping mountain ledges. He wore the usual cotton loincloth, and over it a long cotton robe or coat in dark blue, embroidered at the neck and cuffs in red and yellow. He had soft pointed slippers, over which his fat ankles hung, and could come up behind you silently, if he chose, or if he chose, make an important flapping sound, that announced him for some distance. A-Oa felt that they were in some ways the same, she and Kun, singletons on the edge of the circle, not woven in by kin or obligation. But Kun had known how to make himself necessary and a little feared. A jinx was feared. A jinx could dry up a child, or cause crops to fail, or pigs to be barren. A jinx could cause a tree to burst into flames. A-Oa had never seen this happen, but it was known to be so, to be within the power of those who cast their minds, who made charms. The person who could most certainly have told her whether she had red eyes, whether a change had been effected in her, was Kun. But she did not want to hear it from him. She knew that Kun did not like her, that he wished her ill. She did not know why. It was even possible that Kun wished everybody ill, indiscriminately. She had no one with whom to discuss this.

  The next day she went up the valley to the Temple. She packed a little meal to offer to the carved Wise Ones: a small dish of chick peas, an oboe-fruit, ridged brownish green, pointed at both ends, which when pierced with a knife produced a flow of clear, thin red juice. Women desiring children offered these fruits at certain times of the year, carving them open, lavishly displaying their dimpled and pimpled concavity, the rows of fat white seeds on their thread-stalks in the moon-shaped cradle. She took too a few pods of the white beans that grew in her garden-strip, almost all of which were now gathered and heaped in the sun to dry. The beans were pale and waxy, flecked with crimson; their papery pods were whitish, splashed with purple-red.

  The valley mounted steeply amid rustling yellow bamboos, harbouring insects with scraping monotonous songs and the occasional rush of sooty wings. The Temple was at the head of the valley and higher still, up four hundred steps, carved in the rock, in whose natural and carved niches sat perhaps four hundred carved sages and petty gods, staring with blind intelligence. It was built on a plateau, within a high wall, painted blood colour, on which charms were written in soot black characters against evil ones, sorcerers and demons. Round the foot of this wall crouched and wandered a collection of the rootless and the lost, the homeless and the holy, black-veiled women huddled like clustering bats, naked holy men, still as stone, or rhythmically prostrating themselves and rising. There was a smell of sour cooking, the smell of burning pats of dung, a weaker smell of hot flour on griddles, a tinge of spice. In the past they had crowded to put out their hands to A-Oa, displaying huge sores, or running wasted fingers in the channels of their children’s bowed ribs. Today they wailed a little but did not hurry, as though she appeared to offer no hope. There was a well out here, deep under a conical canopy. A-Oa stopped and hauled up bucket and dipper to assuage the dryness. She sipped, turned the cold water in her dry mouth, feeling it run over, not soak into, the shiny-dry flesh, catch, as it went down, on the sore dryness of her throat.

  The courtyards were busy and chattering: worshippers moved between greater and lesser temples, brown-robed monks carried baskets of grain and vegetables, families squatted in the dust and argued. In the greater Temple were the huge figures of the Wise Ones, three and awful, taller and wider than the eye could ever see at once, so that it was as much as you could do to focus on a heavy knee, or monstrous, mountainous hand, or far away the three faces, up in the dark of the roofspace, staring quietly out over the heads of the worshipping ants, wonderfully, characteristically blank, bearing a family resemblance in their perfect stillness. The brass lamps were all at the level of the altars, which were themselves below the level of the vast feet, which were dusty but not travel-stained. This gave the illusion that the Wise Ones towered away for ever, out of sight, out of apprehension, out of form. A-Oa bought an incense stick from a monk, lit it, and stood it with the others on one of the smaller altars; she bowed repeatedly, and set out her dishes of beans and fruit before kneeling to pray, her black and silver hair in the dust. It seemed to her that she did not know how to pray or what to ask for. In the past she had asked for sons: or to be forgiven for whatever had caused the sons she had to sicken and fail. To one side of her, standing beside the altar, was a small squat brass boy, a fat and polished child, not dusty like everything else in the huge, smoky and rattling place, but gleaming where countless soft dark hands had touched and caressed him. He wore a small scarlet cloth on a string, just large enough to cover whatever he had between his legs. It was known that his touch brought luck, brought boy-children. On every previous visit A-Oa had touched him. When she was young and humorous she h
ad tickled him like a lover, laughing back quietly at her husband; after the loss of the first child she had touched the warm metal with fearful fingertips. Once she had come with Da-Shin and had touched the boy furtively, laying her fingers over his metal ones, asking friendship, complicity. He had a smile that took up his whole face, curling both mouth and eyebrow corners. She tried to tell the Wise Ones that she was afraid, that she was not herself, that there were changes she couldn’t describe. All she was conscious of was the presence of the grinning boy, the sheen of countless handlings, gratified or denied, the dangling red cloth that was never lifted. She thought: when I am dead, this will be over, meaning by “this” the boy and all his works. The Wise Ones vouchsafed no relief, perhaps because she expected so little, was closed to their silent lines of life as her tongue and palate were to water.

  Outside again, she embarked on the real business she had come on. There was an old woman from whom she had once had a charm to keep yellow worms from the bitter melon roots, and from whom Da-Shin had had something else, he later confessed. An old woman who knew about certain things. She had lived then in a minimal shelter of canes and flat leaves, with a wooden dish in front of her for offerings and various skin bags and linen bags propped against her squatting haunches, containing her secrets. In those days which now seemed far off, like a fairy tale, the days of Da-Shin and the running blood, A-Oa had looked at this woman with a mixture of repugnance, fear, and something approaching pity. A-Oa was a good housewife: she loved the things she had, her solid stone walls, her perfectly bright cooking pot, the blade of the hoe with which she cleared her ridges of plants so that nothing noxious should poke its head above the soil, or spread leaves or tendrils out of place. The old woman, in her flimsy hutment and her dry black cloths seemed unnecessary, waste, fragile as the fine black disintegrating films left when paper or cloth had been burned. She walked round the outer wall of the Temple, expecting mostly not to find her. But there she was, shelter, begging bowl, skin and linen bags, resting lightly on the earth almost exactly where she had been in the days of Da-Shin.

  A-Oa squatted in front of her and put a handful of seeds into the bowl. Be well, Mother, she said, and, the years have spared you in well-being. The old woman rustled and shifted a little, creaking. Her face was fine dark skin stretched over bare bone, working its way out, mapped with finest lines, delicate as veiling, with no flesh or fat to thicken. Her eyes were gone into her head, black and reddened, the stubby row of lashes white ghosts on mahogany. I remember you, she said to A-Oa in a thin voice. You wanted the possible and the impossible. You wanted a secret thing and also the death of the yellow worms. I hope the worms do not trouble you. A-Oa said that the worms had vanished as though they had never been. The old woman sucked her lips and said, “And now you want other knowledge.”

  “I want a charm against dryness, mother,” said A-Oa. “I am dry through my whole body, like a smoked fish.”

  The old woman fumbled in her clothes and produced a limp lemon and a triangular blade. The skeletal dark hands sliced into the fruit flesh on the wooden bowl: the old mouth twisted and fumbled and spat on the segments. She turned and turned the segments in the bowl, and then handed one to A-Oa.

  “Bite,” she said. “This will tell if the juice of your body has dried up, like a failed spring, or been sucked out by a witch, to have power over you. Bite and tell me exactly what happens.”

  A-Oa bit, inhaling the warm rind: under her tongue saliva welled, not much, but some, not as she remembered from her youth, the gush of human water at the very sight of the sharp yellow shining globules. Even the thought of a lemon on a dry day could once bring such a rush of liquid. Now the thing itself alleviated, no more.

  “There is water, but not much.”

  “As I thought. If there was true water, the charmed lemon would have it running out over your chin. You have lost your true water. Your blood also is dried up?”

  “For many months.”

  “Bring your face nearer. My sight is poor.”

  A-Oa leaned forward, so that her head was under the shelter, her brow under the canopy of the black hood. She could smell the other’s breath as it curled from her nostrils, an incorrupt smell, dusty, spicy, airy. She could see the lines cut in brow and lip, the purple-black sunk curves of the eye-sockets. She cast her eyes down and did not meet those others, whose whites were yellow, whose huge iris was coal-black, whose rims were reddened.

  “You have red eyes,” said the old woman. “A jinx has ways of replacing juices: there are magics you could learn, if you are willing, if that is what you want.”

  “I have always lived quietly and properly. I have had four sons, whose life was sucked out of them before it was theirs. I have kept my garden well and my house is clean. My husband is gone and I have no one to live for; also no one who would be unhappy if tomorrow I fell and died, or began to rave as She-At did some years ago, until the village cast her out and stoned her. I have no respect in the village. I have no sons to care for me when I am old and weak. Every year will be a little worse. To know your knowledge, Mother, that would be some help against what took my sons, against my state.”

  “Knowledge must be paid for,” said the old one. She put out no hand, and may have been talking about life, not money. A-Oa, however, brought out three coins from her waistband and laid them beside the pool of lemon juice in the wooden trough, from where, in the deft flicker of a long hand and the twitch of a fold, they vanished into the old woman’s clothing.

  “These things are necessary,” said the old woman. “You must set up an altar and put on it some things I shall tell you, that you must find, and some things I shall give you. You must wait until all moisture has parted from the things that have moisture, and the dried things are plumped out. Then you will have power over wet and dry, to heal or, if need be, to harm. You will be respected and feared. Unless you come against some more powerful magic.”

  Various people watched her come back through the village, in silence, in the simmering heat. Kun stood in the shadow of his house, with a crescent of glistening sweat on the curve of his belly. His eyes moved with her passage; his lips were pursed in his peevish frown. The children scattered. Everyone in the village knows almost everything about everyone else. She had the pieces of root and fibre, the dusty dried beans, black and crimson, tucked away in her long skirts. In her own house the kitchen was dark and earth-warm, cooler than the street outside. The fat hen ran in importantly to greet her, chucking quietly, shaking dusty wattles. Its bright golden eye peered at her out of the tipped side of its face; its red flabby comb nodded. She put on water for tea, and lit the candle in front of the little altar behind the stove, the house-spirit’s own altar: the other altar must stand invisible from the window, behind the vegetable jar, the other side of the stove. In the roof, in the mouths of sacks and jars were various other charms, tied bunches of quills and twigs, fur and seed pods, to propitiate nameless little demons or wandering spirits.

  She made tea, and broke up a sweet rice-cake, sitting on the ground with her back to the window, staring at her knives, her chopper, her strainer on the low table. The hen bustled round her, making a great business about the odd rice-crumb, rattling companionably in its throat. It was a good layer, the hen; it took care of its own visits to Bo-Me’s noisy cockerel. It was only infrequently broody — it tended to abandon its eggs in various places A-Oa knew about and rush back to the kitchen to supervise the chopping of the supper vegetables, to pick up strayed grains. A-Oa considered it: one of the old woman’s requirements was an egg about to hatch but unhatched, an egg with a chick curled inside it which must be left to rot and go beyond rotting to dryness. That was not so easy; she might be reduced to thieving other women’s unhatched clutches, she who had always kept herself to herself, correct and virtuous. It was a thin time for chicks, the height of the dry season. Also required was a lash-snake, a wiry poisonous, fast-moving pallid worm that struck from under stones in field pathways and was best avoided.
For that reason A-Oa knew where some of these were, or had been. Da-Shin had known how to trap them with a forked stick and a noose. He had showed her how, though she had never done it. They had sat shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the pumpkin-field, setting up the contraption and the bait, scarcely breathing. She remembered the quick twist of his wrists in the sun, the line of his spine above his squatting haunches, the smell of his male sweat drying quickly, the heat stirring between them. She would try to catch a lash-snake: it was safer than paying boys. The other things were not so bad to acquire: certain organs of a large desert rat still relatively easy to catch even in this sparse time, one which she could either catch or naturally buy from the boys for her supper. Certain combinations of seeds. She sipped her tea and considered ways and means, not as though she any longer had a choice, not, in a way, as though she herself were there any more with her passions and her irrelevant needs and hopes. She had a task, a place in the world again. She would have to steal the egg. She could wait months and months for the fat hen to decide capriciously to sit again. It might never do so. Even when it did sit, it was not notably successful in rearing chicks. It produced eggs in plenty, which was A-Oa’s reason, or excuse, for not snapping its neck and putting it into the pot.

  When the charms were assembled, neatly laid out in their little dishes, A-Oa had a bad time, a sultry, transitional time of terrible smells, corruption and deliquescence whilst the egg rotted, exploded and fell away, whilst the desert rat’s entrails pullulated and squirmed, whilst the stiff hoop of the lash-snake went puffy and pimply and then fell into desiccation. It was imperative, the old woman had said, that no one should touch, move, or disturb the relations of these components of the charm whilst the drying went on, and that no one but A-Oa should set eyes on them. That was easy enough: no one came into her house, no one was curious, except perhaps Kun, and Kun was a man, and, as such, prohibited from ever going into a woman’s part of the house. Male children until they were two years old could be with their mother in the kitchens. After that they were kept out, beyond the sliding door, or woven hanging carpet, or rush curtain, depending on the wealth of the house. So no one came into A-Oa’s kitchen during the days of rotting and drying, which were long and troublesome, in which she slept badly and had terrible dreams, of demons circling in the air, of Da-Shin lying smashed on the rocky foothills of the mountains, his belly blown in the sun, of fire crackling in the trees in the village meeting-place on the plain, where they came at certain seasons of the moon to dance, and drink, and sing and stumble, and lie where they fell, in the warm dark, a man freely feeling for his neighbour’s wife, an untouched girl for her sister’s husband, for at these times they were filled with spirits, not themselves, not the children of their house, nor the property of their men, nor prohibited from touching their men’s male relations, father or brother, under pain of death. The kitchen became full of the smell, it hung in the fine smoke and permeated the oil of A-Oa’s hair, it inhibited the hen, who stayed in the rest of the house, squawking crossly. And then after its time, it went, and there was quiet dryness. The egg was chalky shards of shell, burst by escaping gases, fallen away from fine bones and undeveloped quills and the curved beaked skull. The snake was papery dry scales over the fine humps of vertebrae in their curled chain, fragile eye-sockets, and needle fangs from which the palate and mouth had shrunk. The rat parts were a brown stain, no more. Whereas the wrinkled dried beans, crimson and black, had plumped out, were glossy and round, and the strange dried vegetable-flesh the woman had given her, spongy mushroom heads or hairy root-tangles were fat and soft and springy, resuscitated. The ghost of the smell hung over all, as for days the smell of burning may, in a kitchen where there has been an accident with the fat, a sheet of sudden flame and black fine cinders.