Inner Circle

by Jerzy Peterkiewicz

  ‘Because they cannot think,’ I said.

  ‘It would calm the wild beasts to hear Amo rustle like an oak,’ my second husband said.

  I saw the first band of apes on my land, when Amo had learnt by heart some oak-tree calls and a juniper whistle, enough to rouse a wave of curious answers from the forest beyond the rain wall. The apes sat quiet on the high boughs, catching the murmurs that passed from tree to tree before they rebounded against the sounds Amo was sending out. I wondered whether the puzzled animals knew what each sound meant, but they certainly seemed disturbed by the noise in the trees.

  The night came, and they were still there. Their presence kept me awake. I told Amo to light two low fires by the wall, but not too near the needle bushes. The fire was the sign they all understood. But the full moon made the apes watchful. What more did they expect to see?

  I got up, went to the glowing cinders and raked the ashes under them. The fire rose and threw a shadow from my body onto the stone wall. A murmur caught the long feathers of the palm-trees and shook them one by one. But it was the leaping and tail-swinging of monkeys that had caused the murmur. They were hopping about the palms to get a closer look at me. Then came a faint rustle, an echo of many rustles from the woods beyond my forest. The distant oaks were still acknowledging Amo’s call in the likeness of Adam.

  For a moment I rejoiced that the new birth had brought them closer to each other: my seventh son had found his right to kingship in Adam, the name-maker and the first begetter. I had therefore done no wrong by receiving Amo’s seed. The treeman, chieftain of the apes, was jealous of him, and envious of Eve’s forethoughts. The evil had been spent long ago through Cain’s hands and loins, and now it was passing to the tree tribes of monkeys through the wombs of my three foolish daughters. That was why the big ape man fancied himself to be equal to real men in sharing a small part of our inherited evil.

  ‘Go home, apes,’ I cried over the dying fire. ‘You are on the sacred land of Eve.

  Adam will punish you!’

  A louder and wider murmur started amidst the palm-trees. They are leaving, I thought, they have recognized my voice. But as I stood in the doorway looking up through the shimmer around the moon, I saw long swaying shadows, like weeds that creep along the branches only to slip off at their end. Not weeds, no, these were their ugly tails; still wagging their insolence at me from their safe hiding places.

  I put my hands at either side of my mouth, so that my voice would carry and reach them even on the topmost boughs.

  ‘I have warned you, stupid beasts!’

  Then I woke up Adam who was sleeping on a thick moss bedding next to Amo under his beaver skins.

  ‘Rise, you have a duty. The apes are desecrating my trees.’

  Adam got up at once. He never muttered in his sleep nor yawned on waking. He had mastered the habits of his days and his nights.

  ‘It’s not for me to threaten them, Eve. But I will ask them to go.’

  When he appeared by the tall entrance stone, himself twice its height, the tails hung down rigid against the sky, more like dead eels smoked over the kitchen fire than dead creeping weeds. Then I heard his laugh. It wasn’t often heard, not since he began visiting us at my house by this lake.

  ‘They are so cunning, the apes. Like children, Eve, before some small mischief.

  Look at them, pretending they don’t know that I am here. Silly children, they’ve turned their heads away.’

  ‘Because they’re afraid of your eyes.’

  ‘I don’t want any creature to be afraid of my eyes.’

  ‘Use your voice, then. Just give the impudent beasts one loud shout, and they will scurry away with tails in their teeth. Do it now.’

  ‘They’re probably tired after jumping and squeaking late into the night. Let them sleep till dawn. It’s not long to sunrise.’

  His arm round my shoulders had a tender touch. I obeyed my first husband, and we went inside.

  He came to lie in Eve’s bed. His hands, his lips, his legs, his beardless face, all his body was love. I breathed him as if the air of my lake had lost its sedge-scented strength.

  And I didn’t think of Amo and his desire for me. For I had no thoughts in this reunion, I only knew, as Adam always knew, and the knowing was a body inside a body, a feeling inside the thing felt, an understanding inside the thing understood, never a transit from a point to a point, a picture passing in the likeness of a shadow. I knew then I loved him.

  But I still wanted Adam to think love, just to hear his thought in a word.

  ‘Did the Sky Man tell you to sleep with me once more! To make me regret the seed of Amo, and in regretting forget!’

  ‘No, Eve. You know well that our father’s voice didn’t meet me last time. I stood alone in emptiness. It is because of that emptiness that I am in you now.’

  ‘Do you love me, Adam?’

  ‘That’s beyond an answer, and you wish to hear a mere answer, as easy to reach as your ear.’

  ‘Yes, I want you to name me in both of us. What are we to each other? Now, Adam, what are we now?’

  ‘I am your inner circle, and you are mine. Now as much as in our beginning. And he taught me how to draw us both on the clay of this wall when the clay was soft, so that we wouldn’t forget.’

  I knew that Adam spoke of the Sky Man. And there were the animals outside, sitting in the trees, keeping a night vigil in the trees. The Sky Man had allowed the man-mocking apes to enter my circle of land, as he had earlier put his beasts between me and my husband.

  At dawn, without making much noise, the monkeys slid down the tree trunks and touched the ground which was Eve’s, for Eve and her children to walk on.

  3

  For a long time they stood in rows under my palms, my pines and my oaks, a new live boundary across the lakeland, and neither Amo nor Adam did anything about it. The apes, Adam said, were behaving well so far, they obviously didn’t mean any harm; they were just curious to see what a human family looked like in its own homestead. What else did I expect from a curious crowd of apes? They were not a crowd, I answered, but an orderly army, lined up for a purpose.

  Amo thought the purpose was simple: the monkeys wanted a free passage through our trees to visit their kinsmen separated from the main ape woodlands by the northern tip of our lake. And since they respected Eve, they arrived in a large number to ask this favour from her. They didn’t wait for my permission. I told Amo, they invaded the tree tops and were already establishing their pathway over my land.

  ‘They may be waiting for someone,’ Amo said cheerfully, as if that someone was himself. He nearly waved towards the crouching rows. I noticed his unfinished gesture.

  ‘Why don’t you go and greet them on my behalf!’

  ‘I would, Eve, but I think the waiting is over. They’re all looking to the right.’

  And they were. I stepped in front of my husbands and saw the treeman approaching on his hind legs, a bright mop of feathers on his head. Out of precaution against the light in the sky and Eve’s gaze, both his eyelids were visibly lowered. But the ape strode well, almost like a man, weak perhaps in the knees after a long journey, and occasionally using a tail instead of a traveller’s staff. From the feathers on his head came the familiar voice:

  ‘Make way for treeman, for tree-Adam who can stand, walk and talk! I am his voice. Listen to my master’s voice! Make way, make way. . . ’

  It was unnecessary to ask for that, since the monkeys had arranged themselves in such neat files. And what I soon witnessed was a vile sacrilege or a mockery. With monkeys one could never be sure. The treeman shuffled his short legs in the passage between two rows and with his paw touched some monkeys on the forehead, between their sly little eyes. They wagged their ugly tails and bowed. Then they scratched their armpits or behinds, out of pleasure maybe, if not in mockery again.

  ‘The big tree-ape is aping Adam. Why do you stand and do nothing? Adam, you must show your might before this impudent beast, you mus
t use the law given to you by the Sky Man.’

  ‘And what is my law?’ Adam whispered, not to me but to that inner circle in himself he had spoken about. ‘What right have I got to castigate animals for their knowledge of free will, as small as mine?’

  The parrot was screeching something in the monkey language of squeaks. I saw his hooked beak turning to and fro together with the treeman’s neck, and the red on it seemed to shriek at the sun. What was the speech about? What would they do next?

  That tail guarding the ape’s balance in the rear: I watched every move of it. If it jerked suddenly, if it swished up, pointing towards us, this would be an order to attack. I only hoped that

  Adam would kill them all in one blow of his breath. Oh, how I longed to see thousands of those brown tails and paws beating and scratching the ground in painful dread!

  The tail went up, swayed near the bird’s own tail and dropped down soon after.

  No ape moved. There was silence. And the silence angered me more than the parrot’s noise. I had waited long enough through their delay tactics.

  ‘Amo,’ I said, ‘prove to your mother and wife that you are the second Adam.

  Teach the beasts to obey your eyes. Go to them and show yourself as you are, the name-maker and the maker of weapons.’

  Amo nodded. Then he took my elbow with the gesture I knew so well, the gesture of bending a weapon. I felt his courage suckling mine through the skin. Before they withdrew, his fingers trembled.

  ‘Eve, I’ll speak to the treeman.’ And he stepped forward.

  ‘Don’t listen to the listening bird. Punish his master.’

  ‘I will, Eve.’

  I was very proud of his manly walk. His right hand swung forward accustomed to holding a bow or an axe, but now he carried nothing. The parrot shrieked and the treeman turned at once. He, too, stepped forward, but wouldn’t look straight at Amo. I wished Amo had a thin arrow ready on a hair-string to pierce a hole in one of those sly eyelids.

  Then the ape-man would have to stare through stinging blood.

  The apes stayed in unbroken rows as before, their tails in the grass, some coiled like vipers. Above them the parrot spoke their master’s thoughts.

  ‘Thiss iss Amo Abel. He iss Eeve sson hussband. Lissten, he knows tree speech, he knowss tree speechch.’

  A murmur began in the first file, grew louder in the next, and burst into menacing squeaks. This was the time of decision and risk. Amo stood near the chieftain of the apes, ready to send a double arrow from his black eyes.

  ‘Only tree-Adam may sspeak tree sspeech. Only . . .’ The parrot stopped because the head under him tilted. It must have been a sign. I saw the bird flap one wing; his claws seemed to be scratching the ape behind the ear. This quickened a few thoughts crawling beneath all that hair.

  ‘Treeman had drream. Lissten!’ The bird screeched and hissed. ‘The Ssky Man sent dream to treeman to punishsh Amo.’

  ‘Amo!’ I cried, ‘don’t listen to the bird. Go at the ape’s eyes. Amo, the eyes !’

  In answer to me, he stretched his arm out as if to force the other to look with fully opened eyes, but no sooner had he made that gesture than the tails, several of them at once, uncoiled and swung out from the grass.

  ‘Amo!’ I shrieked and grabbed my own hand.

  His neck was encircled by the tails, they jerked, intertwined with one another and pulled, closing the loop. Amo’s head jumped, stayed in the air for a moment, and then the apes loosened their grip. One by one, the tails slackened and dropped. My son’s body was leaning forward. If I could have run then, I would have caught him into my arms, so slow was that fall from death visible to death invisible.

  ‘They have strangled my son,’ I said to Adam in a very calm voice, and Adam started to walk with his light inaudible steps, each of them pounding inside my heart. The treeman advanced first on his hind legs, then he used one of his arms, and finally walked on all fours until he was but a few steps away from Adam. I expected him to rise and give the others a sign to attack. The ape, however, remained on the ground, his big jaw close to the grass, his tail trailing behind.

  Adam didn’t touch the treeman. He didn’t even utter a sound, or perhaps I heard nothing. If he shaped a silent word with his mouth for the beast to see, it wasn’t noticed, because the big ape kept his head down. Adam bent over it, and this was all he did.

  The treeman, chieftain of the apes, tumbled to one side, dead. I knew it couldn’t be otherwise. The parrot, too, fell into the grass, but this wasn’t meant to be the end for him. Soon, violet and yellow streaks glistened from the top of a thorny bush, he was cleaning his beak on a twig. And 1 knew in an instant that the listening bird who had learnt speech from me, would never screech out another human word. His service to the ape master was over.

  None of the monkeys dared to approach the body of their ruler. They stood in the same orderly files, this time waiting for a command from Adam. They watched his beardless face, thousands of small shifty eyes glaring at his mouth. The lips didn’t move.

  Silence hurt them as it hurt me, yet only from this silence could a new event emerge.

  Adam bent over the treeman again, and picked him up without effort. He was a big beast, longer and heavier in the stillness of death, and yet my husband carried him like a child who had fainted. Our own son was lying near by, his beautiful face trampled into the earth, smeared with the dung of monkeys, and Adam passed by his body without looking; he walked on, towards me, the ugly tail showing after each step. Adam knew that my legs had no strength to take me to Amo. But why couldn’t he understand that the sight of that carcass would only bring the whole horror back to me?

  ‘I didn’t throw a curse on him, Eve,’ he said, his arms displaying the dead ape before me. ‘I must have wished his death. I only thought his death, I only. . . .’

  ‘Adam, Adam. . . .’ I felt angry pain in my eyes and in my throat which had to let the words come out. ‘Give this abominable carcass to the tiger fish in my lake. I don’t want to poison my sight with hate.’

  ‘But, Eve, look at this misery here, his misery and mine. We both wanted to kill, and now we are both smelling of death. Can’t you feel, Eve, how putrid my thoughts have already become?’

  I was staring at the treeman with hateful fascination. There he lay on my husband’s arms, his eyes for once fully opened. There was sadness and old age in those dark small eyes of the ape. I seemed to see some grey hairs over his low forehead, and this greyness of the animal hair made him look almost human. He was born to be the first among his kind, a new beginning to the breed of apes, a beast in the likeness of man, who challenged Adam and fell dead at the feet of Adam.

  ‘Have pity on our misery, have pity. . . .’ And Adam wept over the body of the treeman.

  ‘Pity!’ I echoed. And immediately I understood that he wasn’t talking to me, but to his ‘Our father’. The Sky Man, as was his prerogative and recent habit, didn’t answer my husband. And I doubted whether he pitied that miserable animal whom he had set against Eve and her children.

  Meek and respectful, the monkey army received a blessing from Adam, and left my homestead, carrying the body of their chieftain back to the land of the trees.

  Two days after the burial of Amo, my husband departed to wander, as before, from homestead to homestead, wherever his three generations had settled.

  I lived alone with Irda by the big lake. Now I couldn’t count my ages by my new children, for I gave birth no more. The last time Adam lay with me there was no conception. Irda played with plants, stones and sand.

  I don’t remember how it happened that small baby apes started coming to us.

  They were gay, gentle and playful. At first I resented them, but I saw that Irda looked happier in their company. She grew tall and as beautiful as her father.

  Her pets, the monkeys, didn’t grow up with her. They would come to visit her when they were small, then their children came.

  The skies opened many times during Irda�
��s girlhood, and we battled with torrential rain and the suffocating growth of life on the surface. Then a long drought sucked up moisture and covered the surface of Eve’s earth with multitudes of insects.

  At the very end of the drought Irda left my home. She went to the treeland of her own free will. To live with the apes.

  Book Three

  Surface

  1

  ‘I won’t go in!’ September shrieked again, when one of the swaying doors slipped off the hinge and seemed to be falling towards her. But the door wedged itself into the sand and stopped moving. Immediately, Joker said he could see something polished and dark inside the box.

  ‘That’s hygiene.’ And Leeds obliged us with his jolly chuckle. ‘Peep in, Joker, like a brave lad that you are, but don’t forget to come back.’ Another chuckle. ‘Wit for all occasions, that’s me. And this is some occasion. Dover, my good fellow, lend me your ears and your laughing lips. You put me off my own wit, when you look so grumpy.’

  ‘Oh, come off it, Leeds. We have to think hard, all of us. We should stay in a firm circle while these things keep gaping at us.’

  ‘I wish we were on the tree rock,’ September said, trying to hold Rain with both hands.

  ‘That’s a reasonable wish, you must admit, Dover. After all, we did reach the islet and now we are not on it. Why?’

  ‘Why, you ask?’ My voice was more an echo of doubt than a retorted query. ‘Did you object when we were crossing back, Leeds?’

  ‘Me, object! My dear chap, now that I am a married man I am hardly in a position to say no to anything. Besides, you led us splendidly through the waves, just like . . . wait a minute, what was his name?’

  ‘Moses,’ said Joker who in the past had watched some micro-lessons in history on the mini-screen.

  ‘Really! I believe you’re right, Joker. So we’ve got a new Moses, how very convenient, historically speaking in the future present.’