The Nichan Smile

by C. J. Merwild

  The wound was small and shallow, but brown dust was sticking to the blood crystals.

  Domino let Gus wipe the wound with his wet thumb, smiling slyly. But a slight blur had time to harden his features. “The war wounds of a nichan returning from hunting,” Domino joked. “I escaped death, you know. It was a merciless struggle between the beast and me.”

  Gus smiled, but the tirade—though of the purest intentions—couldn’t hide the nichan’s discomfort.

  The wound is so clean. Who did this to him?

  Domino had never transformed. A shameful reality from which he’d escaped with varying degrees of success. Domino spent an hour every night repeating the concentration exercises Mora had advised him to practice. To no avail.

  “If I really can’t do it, I could still become Orator,” he had once joked.

  Domino, to become a man of the Gods, renouncing his beastly form for good? Never in a million years.

  Gus didn’t have to close his eyes or focus. It was nothing but a scratch. He ran his thumb three times over the wound that cut through the corner of his friend’s chin. After the third pass, it was gone. Not even a scar.

  Gus lowered his hand. “That’s it.”

  “Thank you.” Domino smiled and beckoned his friend to the sanctuary for dinner.

  Natso, Mora’s son, came into the world during the following suffocating and stormy night. As everyone dreamed of it, the storm thundered in the distance. Under a sky darker than the bottom of a grave, nichans gathered among the vegetable plants in the stepped gardens to watch the lightning illuminate the clouds through which the Corruption’s spasms recalled the beating of a heart. Barely refreshed by fans crafted out of water lily leaves, everyone waited for the storm that had been announced that morning, but the wind was playing hard to get and nothing was pushing the rain towards Surhok. Not yet.

  Domino collapsed onto the dry earth sown with sunroofs and rutabagas, lengthened his long legs, and contemplated the nothingness stretched above their heads. It was said that before the Gods had disappeared, the night sky had been freckled with stars, like the ones dancing before his eyes when he ran out of breath. The stories of the Orator and the elders of the clan hinted at a bright and colorful past.

  The veiled skies. Yet another effect of the Corruption.

  Near Domino, sitting cross-legged, eyes in a haze, Gus blew a cloud of smoke. The taste of kesek reminded him of morning breath. Like shit, plain and simple. If the dried leaves hadn’t had the gift of relaxing muscles and mind, the two boys wouldn’t have pilfered the cigar from Muran’s belongings. The woman wouldn’t notice anyway. Only the disappearance of one of her precious jars of liquor would scratch her attention.

  Gus swallowed another puff of kesek, kept it for a while in the warmth of his lungs, then shared his little cigar with Domino.

  Half-naked, they sat at a fair distance from the others. Most of the men and women of the clan were bare in the gardens. Nichans didn’t care about their nudity; it was a natural state, the state in which all were born, and in which they would join the Gods after death. Once the chores were done, nothing relieved them more than getting rid of the clothes they wore for the sake of convenience. Summers became more and more uncomfortable as the skies darkened and the nights grew longer. At some point, undressing wouldn’t be enough anymore to survive the heat.

  Gus was startled. A finger had just landed in the hollow of his back to divert the fall of a drop of sweat rolling off his fair skin. The teenager looked over his shoulder.

  Cigar wedged in the corner of his lips, hand under his disheveled head, Domino raised his gaze burdened with heavy eyelids to Gus. “You’re melting,” he said, his voice sluggish.

  “Stop it,” Gus sighed, pushing his friend’s hand away.

  But Domino’s finger remained on his back, bouncing against the flesh. “You’re not ticklish.”

  “You know I’m not.”

  “What about now?”

  “No.”

  “No?” His fingertip poked out right under Gus’s ribs. “And here?”

  The outline of a smile appeared on Gus’s thin lips, lit by the torches framing the gardens. Tiny dimples hollowed out his cheeks. “You’re going to lose a finger if you keep this up.”

  “I’ll risk it,” Domino said.

  The next moment he burst out laughing when Gus’s hand found his, bending it, forcing it away from his side. Then Gus lay flat on his stomach in the dry earth (dust immediately got stuck against his skin) and retrieved the cigar from Domino’s mouth before carrying it to his own.

  This was his seventh summer in the service of the Ueto Clan.

  Seven years since he had been given a new name. Gus. Time flew by.

  Next to him Domino was still smiling. His black hair stuck to his temples, his shiny chest rising at a gentle pace in this furnace. Gus unfolded his wing and waved it up and down. A slight gust of wind passed over Domino’s extended body.

  The boy groaned with relief. “Again,” he begged as Gus stopped, bothered by the amount of effort necessary to raise the limb.

  Yet he flapped his wing again, closing his eyes, enjoying the momentary effects of kesek in his veins.

  Soon, the wind picked up and thunder rumbled through the valley below. In the vegetable garden, the excitement mounted in the shape of singing and heavy laughter.

  Thunder responded in the distance, still too far away.

  Then the labor began. The baby was coming, but no one in the gardens heard the news. Until they called for Gus. While the child had not yet come out, Belma had started to lose a lot of blood. He went up to the baths, the only decent place for a birth.

  Mora had been born here. Twenty-five years later, his child would carry on the tradition.

  Men were only allowed in the baths during childbirth with the mother-to-be’s consent. Mora waited outside. Gus was inside. Despite the extensive medical care he had administered over the years, he’d never attended a delivery before. He’d never seen the details of a woman’s genitals, either. He discovered both the same night in a vision disturbed by the flickering flames of grease lamps and the groans of pain Belma tried to suppress behind her shut lips.

  Face burning but unreadable, not allowing the sight of her naked body and exposed sex intimidate him, Gus knelt in front of the woman’s wide-open thighs.

  Apart from Belma and the herbalist, there was an old nichan woman tattooed from clavicle to ankle sitting near the hot water basin. She rested her ink-blackened hands on her knobby knees. She kept her eyes closed and mumbled into her moustache. It was Belma’s great-grandmother, Dadou. Gus ignored her and went to work.

  He put both hands on the woman’s hard, swollen belly and closed his eyes. The rest was done instinctively, without the need to think about it. Since his arrival at Surhok, he had treated hundreds of wounds. He cared for this one as he had for the many others: with attention.

  But he’d barely begun before he was interrupted to let Belma push. With controlled breathing, she wiped her forehead and continued the task she had begun before Gus’s arrival. She pushed, again and again, her hands flat on her belly, without anyone’s help, master of her own body.

  “I’m waiting for you,” she panted toward her child, the top of whose head finally appeared between her stretched out flesh. “I will take care of you. I will never leave you alone . . .”

  As a tear rolled down her face, Dadou placed a bony hand on her great-granddaughter’s round belly.

  More efforts, more tears. Then the child arrived. Muran picked up the baby and turned him over before slapping him firmly on the bottom. As if in a trance, Gus rested his palms on the mother’s belly once more. He had spotted the damage inside her, the lesion lost between the flesh and the mucous membranes. He had to complete his healing for the blood to remain where it belonged.

  As thunder roared louder over the village, as rain finally poured down on the vegetable gardens and on more than relieved nichans, the baby gave his first cry in Muran�
��s hands. Gus came back to his senses. He opened his eyes and noticed his fingers partly inserted into Belma’s burning private parts. Delicately but without delay, he pulled them out before retreating to the back of the room. He hadn’t felt his hand move while he was giving his care. He’d probably needed to get as close to the wound as possible.

  But Belma didn’t mind, for she only had eyes for her son, who was still connected to her by the whitish, deformed cord coming out of her womb. She seemed to have forgotten Gus’s—or anyone else’s—presence and gave into tears as she kissed the infant’s forehead.

  It was over.

  Gus took a deep breath to get rid of the dizziness that plagued him. As always, his discomfort lasted a while. Drenched with sweat, he closed his eyes. He could feel it; there wasn’t just blood on his hands. The smell, heat, and fatigue made his heart pound.

  Air. He needed it.

  With a flick of his shoulder, the door slammed open in front of him. A powerful thunderbolt tore the sky and clouds. Gus took a few steps and found himself standing in the rain. Behind him, the baby’s cries defied the din of the storm.

  In between, Belma called out to her partner. “Come and meet your son, Mora.”

  The man’s eyes opened wide. Domino embraced his brother before grabbing his shoulders and shaking him affectionately, his face brightened by a grin. Soaking wet, Mora ran a hand across his face. Anguish had given way to a contagious relief. A wave of friendly pats slapped the new father’s back. Laying a grateful hand on Gus’s shoulder as he passed by, Mora disappeared into the baths.

  Domino stood in the rain, his skin glistening, intermittently lit by the lightning flashing across the sky. “Is she all right?”

  “Yes,” Gus said. “I think so.”

  “And you?”

  “Never better.”

  “You want to sit down?” An even brighter smile appeared on Domino’s lips and he walked to Gus, who shook his head to refuse. “In that case, don’t get mad,” Domino said.

  Before Gus could grasp the meaning of the words, his friend lifted him up in the air, shouting with joy, laughing like a madman, arms wrapped under Gus’s ass. Gus was caught unawares and tried as hard as he could not to touch Domino with his blood-covered hands. He failed and caught the nichan’s shoulders. The world whirled, with laughter, fresh rain, and the smell of wet grass and dirt.

  “Put me down before you scare the storm,” Gus ordered, struggling to hold his own laughter.

  Domino complied and took his friend’s face in his hands before pressing a smashing kiss on his wet forehead. As he stepped back, Gus sighed and looked up at the nichan’s black eyes. The last time Domino had seemed so happy was when he and Gus had first played their own version of the Flight of the Chickens in the hen house when they were little. Domino had screamed with joy, unable to take his smile off his face, out of breath with incessant laughter. And just like last time, the teenager blushed and his tears mingled with the rain streaming down his cheeks.

  “Mora is a dad,” he said and cried. “Damn it! I’m an uncle.”

  “Looks like it,” Gus confirmed without breaking eye contact, batting his eyelashes to chase away the drops clumping together.

  Mora had waited many years before daring to become a father. Raising his brothers and a human child had never been part of his plans. Domino had always encouraged his brother to pursue his own happiness. It was now a done deal.

  Nothing was worth the expression on Domino’s face. That smile, that look, that joy of breathtaking sincerity. Gus suppressed his desire to take Domino in his arms and tilted his head back, sighing deeply as rain finally cooled him down. In front of him, Domino did the same.

  X

  Domino’s smile had never disappeared this fast.

  “What? Why?” He got up, the movement unintentionally menacing.

  Facing him, Mora sighed through his nose, long and firm. In the adjacent room, only separated by a wooden screen decorated with dried plants, the baby had finally calmed down after several exhausting hours of relentless shouting.

  Mora’s eyes almost begged Domino to lower his voice. “Hey, not so loud. Do you want Natso to scream again? Belma needs her rest.”

  But Domino was somewhere else. “Why?” he repeated, lower this time.

  “They’re the clan’s Stones. He was never allowed to go up there. This occasion isn’t reason enough to change the rules.”

  Tomorrow morning would be the baptism of Mora’s son. The family would go to the Prayer Stones to introduce Natso to the Gods and receive their favor. Domino had never attended such an event and excitement had been building up in him for days like a bubble charging toward the surface of the water. He’d thought that at last Gus would be allowed to climb up to the Prayer Stones, that the two friends would contemplate the view of the village and the whole hunting territory together. The subject had been recurrent over the years. Domino had convinced himself that one day Gus would see it with his own eyes.

  Of course he wouldn’t. It didn’t matter that Gus was family. Only one man had a say when it came to their sacred place, or anything related to the clan, in fact.

  “Did Ero say that?” Domino guessed as Mora gestured for silence again. “Of course it’s him. It’s always him. It’s not just a Calling; it’s your son’s baptism. It won’t happen twice. It’s not the rules, it’s a punishment. Ero knows that.”

  Domino refrained from spitting his uncle’s name.

  “Believe me, I insisted, Domino,” Mora said. “You know the man’s nature.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” he said, bypassing his elder brother.

  Gus wouldn’t be left out. Even after all these years, many nichans still refused to treat the boy as one of their own, or even to call him by his name. Gus did all his chores, took care of the gardens, the laundry, the village, and its people. He did as much as anyone else here. In the end, all his efforts were only meant to keep him within these walls, not to give him the respect he fully deserved. This injustice boiled in Domino’s chest.

  With a firm hand, Mora stopped his brother and forced him to face him. “What are you gonna do about it, eh?”

  “Reason with him. I will—”

  “Reason with him? Since when did this become an option? Do you think it’s a good idea to talk to him like this? You just go for it like you always do. That’s not an approach you can take with Ero, unless you’re looking for shit. We both know how he works.”

  They exchanged glances and a phantom pain tugged at Domino’s cheekbone, where only a hollow scar remained today. Yes, he knew perfectly well how Ero worked, taking it out on the first person within reach, preferably the weakest one. Even though Ero had been in mourning at the time he had mutilated his nephew, Domino had never been able to forgive him. Nothing had ever been the same between the two brothers and their uncle. As for Beïka, it was another story.

  Domino thought of Gus again, and his anger turned into sadness. Domino had been rambling about the baptism for days, repeating that his brothers had attended his own in the days following his birth. Anyone who attended the ceremony became an active part of the child’s life. Gus deserved to be there.

  “So it doesn’t matter that he saved Belma?” Domino said. “This baby still has his mother because of him.”

  “Tell me something I don’t already know. I don’t even want to imagine what would’ve happened if Gus hadn’t been there. I could never thank him enough for what he did.”

  “That’s not the only life he saved!”

  He was talking for himself now because he understood that nothing and no one would come to his aid. The problem was that Mora—everyone—didn’t understand what it cost Gus to use his gift. Domino had promised his friend to keep this to himself, not to reveal that Gus was exhausted and suffering when taking care of patients.

  “It’s like being squeezed on all sides,” Gus had tried to explain a few months earlier. “As if . . . as if I have to disappear or become insignificant so that all
that remains is my will and the wound. Sometimes, when it goes on too long, I feel like I’ve gone out of my body, like I’ve gone too far. When I come back, my body feels alien. It’s stupid, when you put it that way. Does it make sense?”

  Domino couldn’t stand that his friend had to go through this, that he talked about it as a side effect and not as a pain he’d been enduring for years.

  “I’m not going. I’m not going to the Stones. Not without him.”

  Disappointment marked Mora’s features. “He is your nephew, Domino. You just said it—it won’t happen twice. You . . . you have to be there for Natso. There’s nothing to even discuss.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. Gus is my best friend. He’s—” He paused, trying then failing to describe the bond he’d formed over the years with Gus. “I can’t turn my back on him and agree to Ero’s stupid rules.”

  Mora passed a hand over his forehead, and Domino felt his brother’s frustration grow. He knew words sometimes went beyond his thoughts. On one side there was Mora. On the other was Gus. Torn between the two of them, Domino lost track of what was right and what was foolish. Sometimes he felt so stupid, as if tangled up in his own mind. But he had to express himself before his nerves suppressed his ability to think for good.

  As whenever he felt on the edge, his hands tickled and invisible stings crept under his skin. He clenched his fists to chase the sensation.

  “For what it’s worth, I don’t think Gus expects to be invited,” Mora said. “He’s been at peace with that for a long time.”

  Domino clenched his fists harder. “That’s not the point!”

  On the other side of the screen, the baby began to cry.

  Domino took a step back. He’d screamed. Almost transformed.

  Almost.

  Not that he knew how to do it. He’d never been able to. But in that moment, he’d wanted to. He apologized immediately. It was forbidden for a nichan to use his bestial form to attack a nichan of his own clan. Domino had just narrowly avoided a disaster, but for a moment he’d stood on the edge of a precipice, ready to jump, driven by his anger and constant frustration. Even though the odds were close to nil, something had shifted in him, a purpose that he had been cultivating for almost three years in hope of transforming himself, like any other teenager his age could do.