Walking between his two mums from cage to cage, from the bears on the rocks to the crocodiles behind the glass, Patrick Boris felt that the tiring spell of good memory wouldn’t bind him for much longer. Moreover, he wasn’t in the least allergic to parrots, whether violet and yellow, or yellow and blue, which was very interesting, and he longed to hear that ‘very interesting’ straight from the upper lip of Sindra. He didn’t mind that she believed he was Patrick the spotty Ginger as well; it would be even more fun to have Sindra next to Vera or Dolly-mum, trotting with her crocodile bag just to say hello to a live crocodile.
The croc had his eyelids lowered and looked around without looking. Sly and sleepy, pretending he didn’t really care about those handbags.
‘The croc snoozes away, just like daddy,’ said Patrick, very pleased with his sudden observation.
‘Boris, caro mio! Che intelligente ragazzo!’ Vera covered his newly washed hair with violent kisses and said he smelt nice, which made him enormously proud of himself, of his first mum, of his private lady doctor and of the croc who had dad’s eyelids.
‘I like when you speak Bulgarian, mummy,’ he complimented her, brushing his hair back into position.
‘Call it Dalmatian, and we both will be happy,’ Vera laughed. She enjoyed herself and said so repeatedly to Dolly-mum, who said very little in return. She only squeezed Patrick’s hand from time to time, and he thought it was because of the big apes. They frightened Dolly, the orang-outang most of all: he had no cage manners and kept showing his armpits and his rude scarlet arse to the ladies outside.
‘He should hide himself in the trees,’ said Patrick and squeezed Dolly-mum’s hand, to which she replied with a scarlet blush. ‘Vera-mum,’ he turned on his heel smartly, ‘tell me which of these men in the crowd are descended from the apes?’ His good memory hadn’t as yet left him: he could almost risk spelling ‘descended’, if Vera the Bulgarian wanted to know. She knew only one man descended from a monkey, she said, and winked at Dolly. This time Patrick guessed the intended meaning at once.
‘Well, in this case I must be the son of a monkey too.’
Vera’s nose became narrow with surprise. ‘Retarded!’ she cried to Dolly. ‘What nonsense.’
The conversation over tea at Dolly-mum’s house didn’t go at all well. Both ladies seemed nervous and powdered their faces over cups of tea. Vera unpacked her American birthday present for Patrick which she had forgotten to bring in the morning. It was a space-gun, the latest model, emitting a dustless spray of atomic dust. Patrick adored the changing lights at either end, green to red, red to green, and violet at zero point for instantaneous death. While kisses of life were being exchanged over the weapon, Patrick managed to gasp out one question:
‘. . . would kill well!’
‘Ten times over, Boris. It’s the overkill type, you see.’
‘Do the Bulgars have such weapons, mummy!’
‘I hope not. But a true Bulgarian gentleman, Boris, carries arms to defend his lady’s honour.’
After this and another returnable kiss, Patrick played with the space-gun in the back garden. He wanted to spray Nicky to see what would happen to his crinkles and the mop, but the poodle was probably on his last walk before the Overkill. Then he heard loud voices coming through the glass door. How peculiar, he thought, that his first mum should sound through the glass so very foreign and full of ice-cubes in the mouth.
Perhaps Doctor Patho was back in the house, raping them both, with a cup of tea in his wicked hand.
He felt brave when he pushed the door in. A sly, croc-like, sideways glance. No Patho. The blue tea-pot stood undisturbed on the table. Only Vera looked different. Her slender nose was red, her blue hair bluer. She was holding a handkerchief under her left eye. As for the second mummy, she burnt with terrible colours on top and under her powder. And how she screamed: Patrick never imagined Dolly-mum had that much noise inside her.
He went to bed late and couldn’t sleep. Crying was no use. Besides, he wanted to hold the tears in. Just like not going to the loo when one ought to.
His wrist-watch showed three. He went to Dolly’s bedroom, made sure that she was asleep, and then, very quickly, sprayed her with the dustless death-dust. Dolly-mum jumped up and sneezed. It sounded at first like an overkill sneeze, atomic and final. After that, however, she spoke:
‘Patrick, really! This isn’t funny in the least!’
Patrick didn’t apologize, but sneaked out to look for the potato knife.
Sky
1
I was hanging from a tree, and below, at either side, two men stood: my seventh son and my husband. Amo had strapped me with binds of twisted hair to the bough of an oak-tree, and dug out, according to my wish, a hollow under the tree. And the hollow he had softened with green and yellow moss, so that the fall would be soft, from my womb into the soil.
‘Curse me, husband! Why are you afraid to curse me?’ I cried from above, while the muscles of my arms laboured with the muscles of my suspended belly. ‘I am giving birth to his child, not yours. Why are you here, Adam?’ I weighed two lives, and the earth under the oak was opened to receive one of them: this readiness meant more to me than his presence and his law in the likeness of the law.
‘Eve, Eve, don’t speak. It swells your pain.’ Only this voice had fingers that could touch, and cool the skin, and wipe off the oozing of shame. My second husband, my seventh son, born ten children ago, he now stood waiting for this birth, the first of a new breed.
‘Why are you frightened to curse Amo?’ But Adam kept silent. My first husband guarded his strength with silences.
He had arrived in the night, unannounced by animals, and before the treeman’s parrot had come with a message and a warning.
What could any of them do to me? What could the sky do, when the earth was prepared and my arms were tied to the arm of a strong tree? After this birth we should be in another beginning, free at last from the weakness of our original innocence. Surely the skies between them had no greater strength than the double bond between mother and son?
‘Our father who are in the sky . . . Our father in. . . .’ My first husband was mumbling under the oak-tree, his hands clasped, his knees ready to pull his body down into the dust. Didn’t he know that the law obeyed its own law, that the womb closed in conception had to open in birth? didn’t he know that sons could become fathers, that the mother of the first generation could be the mother of the second?
Suddenly, the pain inside me unlocked a deeper pain which wasn’t mine, but the child’s, crying out its own dread of the beginning. The whole weight of my body was cut in two, the suspended fruit detached itself from the stalk and dropped into the soil. The moss, the green and yellow moss, must have welcomed Eve’s fruit with the softness of a womb, for there was no echo thudding in the hollow, and then the crying stopped, as if swaddled by the hands of the earth.
Both Adam and Amo bent over the hollow. I waited, each muscle along my arms tightening again on a suspended expectation. No, it couldn’t be. I had never given birth to a dead life. Death was only to visit me once. This the law had been made into a law, and the laws obeyed themselves always.
‘It’s not a son, Eve,’ my first husband said.
‘Is the girl breathing? I can’t hear any crying.’
‘She’s speaking with eyes, Eve. They will grow as big as your eyes.’ This was Amo’s voice, happy and sad in turn, the voice of a son in the likeness of the father.
‘Unbind me from the tree, Amo. I am light. I have shed the weight of pain.’ He climbed up the oak-trunk, grasped the bough and in a moment hung next to me. Below, Adam was waiting with his hands outstretched to help me down. Together they carried me into the house, put me on the bed, and then brought the child. When I woke up after a brief sleep, they stood at either side again, both silent. It was for me to speak, and I told Adam.
‘Give her a name.’ He turned his eyes aside. ‘I only had a name ready for a boy.
Yes, yo
u give her one of your names.’ Adam looked at the sleeping child, but didn’t answer me. Then he looked at Amo, and Amo stepped back. Another glance and another step, then another, and he was leaning against the double circle on the wall. There he found courage to open his mouth:
‘I have thought and I have a name for her.’ He was waiting for a sign from Adam, but received neither permission nor a forbidding word. I didn’t want him to lose the strength he felt throbbing on his back, the strength from the circles.
‘Tell me the name you have made, Amo,’ I said.
‘I call her Irda.’
‘It has a happy bird sound, Amo. She is Irda.’ I touched the girl’s forehead and suddenly remembered the tree man’s message.
‘Has the listening bird been here since. . . .’ I couldn’t say more because inside a thought I saw myself hanging from the tree and the pain hung with me, its shadow at either side of the oak, divided. This time Adam answered.
‘We haven’t seen the parrot.’
‘No, we haven’t seen your bird,’ Amo echoed.
‘I must feed Irda,’ I said. ‘Then I shall sleep long. And after my long sleep I shall know what to say to the bird.’
I had no dreams. Perhaps Amo’s child dreamt them for us three in her new-born sleep, still lying between the skies. Rested, without pain, I could move about and do my daily work. Adam was gone. Not far, said Amo, not very far. Only to meet the Sky Man’s voice. One had to walk to that voice as to a place, Amo explained, thinking I didn’t know, and with a child’s insistence mentioned a rock, a lake, a clearing in the forest, an eagle’s nest. These were places one could walk to for a purpose. I didn’t tell him that the voice was a place between the skies, a circle turning upwards which drew the body in and kept it there engirdled by sound and light. No, my son, my husband, wouldn’t understand an explanation like this.
Amo seemed to me more like a child since Irda’s birth. Perhaps it was only my womb feeling their inner similarity. In the presence of Adam, however, he looked different, older almost than his age, as if putting on his face the wrinkled reflection of the begetter. It was a serious but excited boy who was now announcing the visitor I had twice asked about.
‘Eve, your bird is here! The listening parrot, Eve! Violet and yellow, with a red beak. Sitting on the stone.’
‘I know what he looks like, Amo. Let the bird wait. Come to me, Amo, kiss your Eve. You haven’t touched me since you untied my arms from the oak bough.’
‘It was a long sight of pain,’ he said quietly and lowered his head to kiss both my hands. His lips trembled on my skin, and they didn’t move nearer to meet my mouth.
I received the ape’s messenger in the doorway, alone. I sat on the stool stone and the bird hopped about the other stone with which we blocked the entrance against the rain and the hissing cats.
‘Parrot, I have my answer for your master.’
‘Call me Eeve birrd, call me treeman birrd. I carry your ssounds, I carry hiss ssilent sspeech.’
‘You speak better, listening bird, but you still hiss like the prowling cat.’
‘I birrd hate cats. My master kills tree cats for me. Treeman is strong, he wants Eeve strength, because treeman is stronger than all Adam men.’
‘Before your ape master talks peace with me, he must send back my daughters.’
‘Eeve, Eeve,’ the parrot jumped onto my knee, screeched angrily without making any words, then flapped his yellow feathers in front of my face. I tried to catch one of his eyes with a sideways glance to punish him for this impudence, but somehow he managed to hide them by unfolding a rim of violet. When he returned to the entrance stone his speech returned to his beak. ‘Eeve daughters are treewomen now and bear children better than Eeve.’
‘Did you watch?’ I was curious as though it mattered to have had witnesses at Irda’s birth among talking parrots and wordless beasts.
‘Watched with my master. Treeman ssaid Eeve cheated.’
‘Cheated, how!’ The bird surprised me.
‘Eeve not give standing birth. She Eeve was on tree.’
‘I always give birth in this way. My first-born dropped from the cedar-tree and you know he has the cedar’s strength.’ The parrot screeched without words, but it sounded like a mocking laughter. Then he spoke very audibly:
‘Sstorm killed Eeve tree. Eeve Cain killed Eeve Abel.’
I couldn’t answer him, and the mocking parrot triumphed with every colour on his outstretched wings. The hooked beak, too, flowed with blood red, victorious in shape and glow.
‘Treeman ssaid Eeve cheated.’ The repetition jarred on the stone itself. The bird spoke from it, louder and clearer. ‘Treeman can walk and stand. Eeve women weak, have children under trees.’ Then that screech of a laugh again.
‘Go to your ape master now, and tell him what Eve said. And say to him, bird, that he watched the birth of Eve’s new generation. My second daughters and sons will punish the treeman’s tribe.’
‘Amo daughters—Amo curse; Amo sons—Amo death.’
‘Go away, stupid bird!’
‘Bird mother never couples with bird son to make birth.’ And he flew away into sunset, piercing a cloud redder than his beak. Stupid bird, didn’t he see how many birds, both male and female, lived in the sky, and how few we were on the surface?
Soon after sunset, my husband Adam returned, but I wasn’t the first to see him.
Amo must have met him by the ditch and they came together. I found them talking under the oak-tree, very near the moss hollow which was now filled with acorns and covered up with clay. Amo was asking Adam to teach his lips how to move so that animals would understand him. He would scrape off the soft hair on his chin with a sharp flint. No beard for him either if only his father would give him the silent words to trap the beasts more quickly.
By the nightwatch fire in the doorway I heard and observed them. Amo’s black eyes shone next to those blue ones I knew so well, from the times when trees were young and tall with us. Now the sky trees couldn’t stand up to the blows from the sky: they fell, like my cedar, and lay at the watery feet of a storm, humiliated. Some survived, stooping under their own yellow crowns.
Adam’s stoop, his age sinking deeper into the eyes: the blue that was hungry for the sky, real and reflected, the Sky Man’s sky. Oh, how ancient and defeated he looked in the night fire, next to Amo’s eyes which were trying to steal his inner colour. Two fathers underneath the sky. I had to ask Adam about his ‘Our father’, although I half knew the outcome of their meeting.
‘What did he tell you to do?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Have you no orders to punish us? Or is the Sky Man himself going to smite at us?’
‘Our father didn’t speak to me. I heard nothing.’
‘Didn’t you go to meet his voice, Adam?’
‘I did go and I stood alone between the skies. My feet were deep in the clouds.
Then. . . .’ Adam paused, and I was afraid for him, for his eyes and his feet.
‘What did you see then?’
‘Nothing. Both skies emptied themselves. I stood alone in emptiness. And there was that smell in the dark.’ He paused again. ‘The smell of death, Eve.’
2
The next day a message came through the bird from the treeman. I had no choice, the parrot screeched; either I went to live in the treeland, the parrot screeched, or they would take possession of Eve’s country by the big lake and invade my giant trees. Then I would be living in their new treeland, whether I wanted to or not. Theirs was the breed of the second beginning, not mine. I no longer held the queens hip over the earth, for my womb had been polluted by the seed of my son. The screech went on and on, like a pair of Amo’s flints being sharpened against the stone.
I slighted the treeman’s threats by making fun of his messenger. I told Irda that it was a listening bird who amused a tree-ape with human words, just a parrot under all those pretty feathers; and Irda could play with it if she liked. And though my
baby daughter didn’t understand any of the words, she waved her hand and tried to catch the parrot’s tail. Angered and offended, the bird flew up, then sat on the edge of the roof, peering down at us. He didn’t feel like talking, but still waited for my reply.
‘Before the winter starts, listening bird, I shall plait a loose basket with a hole for your beak, and it will hang from the ceiling, over Ida’s sleeping basket. You will live up there, eat, listen, talk and lull Irda to sleep with your stories about apes.’
The parrot’s peering eye now had the colour of his beak. I waited for a better moment to confuse his anger. When he spread his wings to keep balance and began trotting along the edge, I suddenly said to him:
‘Look parrot! a word lying on my hair. A jewel word, look!’
The bird looked, his red eye met mine and he lost his balance. He fell to the ground, his tail touching Irda’s leg. She wasn’t frightened, at all, she laughed, and the thin sound stuck in the feathers like the point of an arrow. I wished I had blinded his left eye at least so that the insolent ape man could see the mark of Eve on his servant.
But the eye blinked after a while. The parrot felt the ground with both wings, uncertain how to take off. Then the beak jerked and he left us, slowly rising in the autumn air.
And I persuaded Adam to teach Amo a few silent words from his animal speech, but Amo was a slow learner. He twisted his lips, pushed them up with two fingers, wrinkled his nose to help the fingers, and in the end shaped the bear’s belly-ache sign instead of the monkey’s climbing pout. My first husband tried all over again, then asked Amo to rest his face.
‘Teach Amo tree sounds and bird feather cries. He will be better at them, I know he will.’
‘I have forgotten most of the tree sounds, Eve.’ Something crossed his thought as it was retreating into a grey distance, sadder than the colour of his hair. ‘The trees are beginning to forget some of the sounds, too.’ He turned to our son. ‘Abel, we should leave the animals alone, now that the world is divided. They understand my lips, they listen with their eyes and trust what I tell them, but they never show me their thoughts.’
Inner Circle Page 10