It was completely dark. I had never seen the sky so black. I ran like a blind man, with my hands outstretched in front of me. Every few steps I tripped and fell, over tree roots, stone walls, over my own feet. I ran across the fields toward the hill from which I had first seen the ocean. Every few steps upward I fell. I climbed like an ape, on all fours, feeling my way with my hands. There was a wild, roaring sound in my head. I thought it was the growls of people following me. I imagined that Chil-sing and the other young ones had gotten past Augustine, had aroused the village, and that all were coming after me to tear me apart.
I judged them all by myself, assuming that their patience and gentleness covered pent-up rage which would now be unleashed upon the murderer. The twice murderer.
I had never felt any guilt about Connie’s death. But now, I had killed twice. Two accidents? Now they would follow me and kill me: quick, primitive justice. I thought I could hear them calling back and forth to one another as they searched the fields and orchards for me. I was terrified, yet in a way I hoped they would hurry up and find me, and get it over with.
At the top of the hill, I fell forward on the grass, my eyes closed, my arms hugging my knees, waiting, expecting at any moment to hear them coming. I wouldn’t run anymore. I was too tired. I only wanted to sleep. But I was afraid I would dream. I lay shivering until the roar in my ears became the night wind, and the voices, the calls of birds. I sat up and looked around. The sky was a lighter black, and I could see the village as a series of black forms. Gradually the sky lightened. But the village remained still, not a sign of any person.
As the sky took on its first tinge of blue, the people began coming out of the tents. But they did not turn outward toward the fields. They began to walk the spiral paths inward toward the la-ka. Soon all the paths were empty again, and the bright dawning sun lit what looked like an empty village, appearing and disappearing in tricks before my aching eyes. The sky brightened in utter silence, except for the birds. I imagined the people were, meeting to decide what to do about me.
Then I heard a thin stream of sound, a thread of unison melody, carried to me in fragments by the wind. And as I kept my eyes on the area of the la-ka, I saw the people begin to come out, in ones and twos, following the spiral paths, slowly winding outward. I saw only snatches of them through the bushes and trees lining the walls, a steady procession.
As they neared the outer spiral of the village, I could see those in the lead more clearly. I saw Chil-sing’s golden hair flash in the sunlight. He and the other young ones walked two by two, carrying something between them. I knew it was the body of the old man, the only person on the island who had come to it as I had. How much I could have learned from him, and now it was too late.
I watched them cross the fields, going away from the hill where I was, going toward the ocean to the east, where the sun was rising. Of course, they were going to bury their dead before they dealt with me, but I’d been too self-centered to realize that they would think of that before they would think of what to do with me. They would have plenty of time for me after they had given old Tarn a proper funeral.
I lay on top of the hill, dozing in the sun, as a cat dozes, half alert, never descending into that deep sleep where my shadows waited for me.
After a couple of hours, I saw them coming back. This time the leaders were the old ones and the infants, carried or helped by the young. They wound their way inward to the la-ka and stayed there the whole day except for the brisk traffic between the la-ka and the hol-kas, which were constantly occupied, one person crawling in as soon as another came out.
When it was dark, I climbed down the hill and gathered fruit, which I took back up the hill to eat. It was cold. I crouched in the shelter of rocks, dozing, always with one ear cocked for the sound of a search party. At dawn, I peered over the edge of the hill, waiting to see what they would do. The people came out to the fields in their usual way, working and dancing, as if nothing had happened. Only one thing was unusual. It seemed to me that every time Augustine straightened up from her work, she shaded her eyes and looked upward toward the hill. I made sure that she would not see me.
I spent three days this way. By the third day I was feverish and coughing, trembling constantly. Of course, they were not going to come looking for me. They did not need to. They knew that sooner or later I would have to come down. I had begun to hallucinate. The grass began to look like sharp knives. The stones were gross, half-decayed faces. I huddled between two rocks, and the twigs which grew around them writhed like snakes. I looked at them without moving, knowing they were not real.
And I saw Tarn, the dead Frenchman, standing before me with the smile on his face, the smile with which he had died. He shook his head, gave a very typical French shrug, as if to deprecate a situation which was taken too seriously. “J’étais très vieux.” Then he switched back to Ata language and said, “We never mourn for those who go Home, my kin.”
My head jerked upward. I must have dozed. The sun had already set behind the hill and my teeth were chattering. My eyes burned and my body felt as though it were being lifted by hundreds of tiny explosions going on inside of it. I was very sick. I would die that night, I felt sure.
My body twitched and shook, but my brain was very clear. I was going to die, again, as I had been going to die when my car plunged off the road. This time I was moved toward no animal howl of fear. I was afraid, yes, but I also thought it right that I should die. And since it was right that I should die, my death should be accomplished in the proper manner. I thought of walking toward the sunset, to the cliffs above the ocean, and jumping over, but I quickly rejected that. I probably couldn’t make it to the other side of the island. Besides, there was only one proper way to die, and there was no use delaying any longer. If I delayed too long, I would die wrong, here, alone, seeing delusions. I would die as I had always lived, in delusion.
My proper death was waiting for me.
I got up and began to stagger down the hill. My memory of that walk is dim. I believe that at times I was not really conscious, that I simply pushed on like a sleepwalker. Sometimes I found myself on the ground, although I did not remember falling. I picked myself up and went on. I bumped against stone walls as I went round and round, spiraling inward until I came to the pool. I went down on my knees before the pool and submerged my head in it. When I got up again, the water ran off my head, down over my body. I remembered to shake a few drops onto the roots of the tree as I ducked past. Then I was at the entrance to the la-ka.
They were all there, in complete silence, waiting, as I had known they would be. Not a head turned as I started down the steps. All watched the fire, which blazed high. Before the fire stood Augustine, her black arms folded in front of her. Something gleamed in her hand. I thought it was a knife, the first metal I had seen on the island except for Salvatore’s crown. The knife, I thought, was for me.
As I walked down the steps, my mind went completely blank. I had no idea what I would do.
When I reached Augustine, I tripped, and fell on my knees. I stayed there, with my head sunk on my chest. Somewhat numbly, I expected the knife to plunge into my neck. I began to mumble, but my voice carried and echoed in the silence. “I killed the old one. Before that I killed a woman. But these murders are the least of my crimes. I have never done anything good. I am an empty man. Not a real person. I gave away what was real in me long ago. I sold it. For nothing. I am nothing. I am not fit to live.” The words came from my mouth, without my intending to say them, without my thinking them. But as each word was spoken, I knew it was true.
I waited for the knife. Something cool touched the back of my neck. I waited. Nothing happened. I raised my head and looked into Augustine’s face. It was lit with the radiance of the fire and with something else. Her blue eyes shone with tears. Her arms were still folded in front of her. There was nothing in her hand, nothing but the gleam of her black skin in the light from the fire. I turned my head. It was Chil-sing’s cool hand
on my neck. He was helping me up.
Tears streamed from my eyes. I hadn’t cried since I was a small boy. Now the tears poured, silently, steadily in streams down my cheeks. As I stood there, Augustine reached out her hand to my cheek. She touched the tears there, then moved her hand down my neck, my shoulder, down the side of my body to my feet. Chil-sing reached out to the other side of my face and did the same, bowing down before me in a motion like washing down the side of my body.
The people got up from their seats on the steps. One by one, they came up to me, touched my tears, and moved their hands across my body, washing me with my own tears. My tears poured out faster as I understood that I was undergoing a ceremony of purification and forgiveness. They touched me, one by one. Some of them were crying too. Then each turned, walked up the steps, and left.
Chil-sing and the other young ones who had made up my “gang” waited till the last. Then, at a nod from Augustine, they went down on their knees and said, in unison, “Forgive us for wanting to hit you.”
I choked a couple of times before I had enough control to answer. “Forgive me,” was all I could manage. The young ones reached forward to touch my tears, then made motions of cleansing themselves with them as they climbed up the steps.
Then I was alone with the people of my ka. They helped me back to the ka and laid me down as one of the spokes of the sleeping wheel. There were eleven of us now.
“Nagdeo,” everyone whispered.
“Nagdeo,” I said, and fell asleep.
Three
The next morning I awoke first, while it was still dark. I surveyed our sleeping wheel with its gap where the old Frenchman had lain. Moving clockwise from me was first Augustine, then Chil-sing, Next came Aya and Salvatore, then the Greek-looking redhead who had no name. I had learned that few of the people had a name until they were about thirty, when they chose their own name, or, as they would express it, a name came to them in their dreams. Chil-sing was unusual in having a name before he had reached manhood.
And Jamal, the seven year old who lay opposite me in the sleeping wheel, was truly precocious in having a name already at his age. Next to him lay the Indian-looking girl, then a gap where the old Frenchman had lain, then the little three year old, then huge Sbgai. Next to me lay Doe, now the oldest of our “family.” Doe seldom left the village, but tended the plants near the stone walls.
As I lay watching, people began to stir. I got rather shakily to my feet as I was approached by Jamal, who took off his blanket and stood naked before me. We reached toward the top of the ka, spread our arms wide, then made our palms meet in front of our chests.
“I have fruit,” Jamal began. “Seven pieces of fruit.” He spread his fingers to show how many. “I give my fruit to Salvatore, and my fruit grows large, like the moon. It goes up and up till it is far away, shining in the sky, seven moons.”
I stood still, waiting for him to go on, but he did not. I cleared my throat and began. “I …” I began three times before I was finally able to speak to the little boy, who kept his hands clasped before him and did not move except to scratch one big toe with the other one. “I am in a very dark place. But the dark is full of shadows. The shadows move and swell. They are all around me, and I am afraid.” I concentrated, trying to remember. “They snatch at me. They grab my tunic. I spin round and round trying to keep them off me. My tunic is torn off. I am naked. Then I see a hol-ka. I dive into the opening, and crawl into the dark hol-ka. But I cannot close the hol-ka. I know the shadows will follow me into the hol-ka, and they will come and press against me; they will touch me, and I will no longer be able to run away.”
The boy made a little bow to me. The others were still murmuring their dreams, as we walked out, but I saw some of them beginning to follow after us. We walked the spiral outward together, and I asked Jamal, “Why do we tell each other our dreams in the morning?”
He looked at me as if I had asked a very obvious question. “Why,” he said, “so we will not forget, of course. If you do not tell a dream right away, it slips away from you.”
“That’s true,” I agreed. “But why don’t we write them down?”
His confused look confirmed what I had already observed: there was no knowledge of graphic representation, either pictures or writing.
When we reached the end of the spiral, I started off into the field, expecting to join some of the poeple who were moving toward the orchards, where they had been harvesting fruit for the past two days. I felt someone tug at my tunic.
“What is it, Jamal?”
The boy looked at me, puzzled. “But you are going into a hol-ka,” he said.
“What?”
“Try to pick the one you saw in your dreams. Which one was it?”
“No special one.”
The boy waited. “Aren’t you going in?”
“You mean because my dream tells me to.”
“Yes,” said the boy.
“Do you always do what your dreams tell you?”
“Always,” said the boy. “If I am sure. If the dream is clear.”
“And you think my dream was clear?”
“Very clear,” he said, and stood before me expectantly.
His steady gaze was too much. After hesitating for a moment, I pulled off my tunic, folded it and placed it on the ground, then got down on my hands and knees. I took one more look at the boy’s now smiling face before I crawled inside.
I crawled inward in the dark, slipping downward into the depths of the mound. I came to rest on a mat. I could see nothing at all. I sat up, crosslegged. I could see nothing, hear nothing. I only sensed the nearness of the stone walls, the stone and clay roof over my head, that I could touch by simply raising one arm.
A horrible, sick fear uncoiled itself like a snake in my belly. I could hear my breathing, short rasping gasps. I jumped up and hit my head on the stones above. I sat down again. My flesh crawled. I imagined all kinds of repulsive vermin crawling out of the walls and covering me. Twice I headed for the tunnel and began to crawl out, but I stopped myself and went back.
I began to feel that I might suffocate. I gasped for breath, panted. I broke out in a sweat of apprehension that the stone roof would fall in on me and bury me alive. I was already buried alive, entombed.
In that first session in the hol-ka, that was all that happened. I had no idea how long I stayed. For hours, it seemed, I drifted through alternate states of terror. Fears washed over me like waves: fear of dying, fear of being buried, fear of not finding the way out, fear of being squeezed to death by black shadows, fear of everything. I sweated and panted my fear out, until there was no more fear. Just numbness. I felt nothing. The terror had oozed out of my pores. I was empty.
I crawled out, put on my tunic and sat blinking at the sun. It was in the same place in the sky. Not more than about twenty minutes could have gone by. I rested for a few minutes, and although I had come out of the hol-ka panting and exhausted, I began to feel fresh and invigorated, as I used to after a brisk swim.
I crossed the fields to where people were picking the ripe fruit off the trees. I watched them fill the fronts of their tunics with a variety of fruit from the different kinds of trees all growing together. Then they walked through the orchard toward the hill. I followed. They climbed a few steps up the side of the hill, stopping at the first outcropping of rock. On the level surfaces of rock they laid out the fruit to dry. Small children stood near each rock, waving away the birds that came to sample the fruit. “Yours is at the top of the tree,” each child would say as he waved away the birds, most of which were tame and unafraid.
“May I help?”
The nearest person simply nodded at me, and I remembered that the Ata people did not like to talk overmuch.
I ran down the hill, found a tree where no one was working, and filled the front of my tunic, holding it up like an apron. Then I climbed back up to a rock, and covered all the level surfaces. As soon as I had finished, I hurried back down again.
&n
bsp; After about five trips, I began to feel tired, but I pushed on. On the sixth trip I stumbled and spilled most of the plums. The sun was very hot, and when I went to pick up the plums, I came up dizzy. I also came up looking into the face of Sbgai, the hairy giant whose gruff voice I had so far heard only in the morning as he recited his dreams. He sat down on the side of the hill, and motioned for me to do so. I sat down beside him. He bit into a plum and handed me one. For a few minutes we ate in silence. Biting into the plum made me realize how dry my mouth was.
“To work too hard is donagdeo; it will give you sore muscles and a headache. And all night you will dream of dogs biting your legs or of trees falling on your aching back.” He laughed.
“But you work very hard,” I told him. “I have watched you. Sometimes you stay in the fields all day.”
“But with a body like this,” he said, throwing out his arms as though to display something comical, “I must work hard, or I would have fretful dreams, dreams of weeping kin and mean sayings.”
“How much should I work?”
“However much makes your body ready for good dreams. At first, now, not too much, I think. It will change. Later You will work more. You will find the rhythm. No work makes mean dreams; too much work makes pain and twitching. Useless dreams either way. You understand?”
I nodded. “But I’m not sure I’ll know how much is enough. I’m so unused to physical labor that …”
“ Your body will find out. Let your body tell you.” Sbgai got up and stretched. “This body carries me off now, to move and move.” He grinned at me, then turned and stomped off down the hill.
I sat and watched him for a while. I still believed that letting their dreams rule their waking life was superstitious and would stifle any progress for the people of Ata. But I had to admit that this simple self-regulating manner of deciding how much work to do was not only practical—it was almost ingenious. For, assuming all the people truly believed in their dreams, and lived with only one ambition, to be “strong dreamers,” the ordering of work in this little society was assured without compulsion. No one would exhaust himself in compulsive work, lest he be restricted to dreaming only of “trees falling on his aching back.” But more important, no one would want to exist entirely on the labor of others, lest he dream “mean” dreams.
The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You Page 8