I slowed down, moving with the swinging rhythm of the others and stopping frequently to take a drink from the skin brought around by one of the children. Still it was hard work, and the hours passed slowly. I could have gone back to the village at any time, but I was ashamed to leave. I saw some of the people lie down in the shade and close their eyes from time to time, and I did the same. Then in the late afternoon, I seemed to discover a kind of rhythm of work, and for a time I moved without conscious thought, as though I were a marionette, my movements achieved by the pulling of invisible strings, with no effort to me. This lasted for an hour, perhaps two (I was already becoming unsure of time) and then I lost the rhythm, pulled against the strings, and realized how tired I was.
By then it was sunset and we all began walking back toward the village. I was tempted to run, if I could have, because I was so hungry. During the day, I could have eaten more fruit while I worked, but I noticed that only children and nursing mothers ate while they worked. Most adults took nothing but water.
I tried not to think of food. The procession inward was slow and interrupted with much singing, and occasional dances by the young ones, watched indulgently by the older ones. By the time we reached the pool I felt more relaxed, if still hungry, and the little sprinkle of water was refreshing.
I walked straight down the steps of the la-ka and reached for one of the pots near the fire. It was the usual simple stew that some of the people had spent the afternoon preparing, delicately scented with herbs and barely cooked in the clay pots which sat near the fire. There were only twelve pots, and I felt as if I could have eaten one of them by myself. Of course, there were plenty of leaves and fruit on all the steps, but I wanted something hot and substantial. I could not resist reaching into the pot and feeding myself five or six handfuls. No one stopped me, but I was immediately surrounded by people with pots, offering me bits from their fingers. I was being indulged, like a greedy child. I felt a flash of embarrassed anger, but the people were obviously of such good, simple nature that it would be ridiculous, even more childish, to be angry. I let myself be fed from their hands, then fed the remains of the pot I held to the oldsters sitting on the steps nearest the fire.
When everyone had finished eating, we sat down as usual. I would much rather have gone back to the ka and gone to sleep, but I conformed. I had made myself a promise. After all the trouble I had caused here, the least I could do was to conform to the life of the people until next spring when they would be able to get me off the island. The others were leaning forward expectantly.
This time it was Aya, her pale, gray-streaked hair flowing over the white kitten on her shoulder. She told the Grass Story, one of the favorites of Ata, which could be done with many variations.
Basically the story was very simple, in its general pattern, describing short blades of grass as the first life on Ata. These, so the story went, were swept away by tidal waves. The grass sprouted up again and was blown away by winds. It sprouted again and was scorched by the sun. And so on.
While Aya told the story, some of the children got up and began to pantomime it, the smallest one acting the part of a blade of grass that continually popped up again after some form of destruction acted out by five or six other children. It became very funny to see the toddling four year old pop up grinning after every defeat by elements, animals and men. I forgot my weariness and my aches and pains; or perhaps laughing with the other people took them away.
But when the story and pantomime were over, everyone stood very solemnly for the triple “Nagdeo,” before they left. On the way back to our ka I asked Chil-sing why the mood had dropped to such seriousness, after such a lighthearted story.
“You found it lighthearted?”
“Well, I suppose there were serious undertones.”
“Always serious,” he said, “when we enter the presence of the dream.” I could see from the look on his face that he hoped I would not force him to talk anymore. We fell asleep, and there were no shadows in my dream that night.
The next morning it was Chil-sing who faced me to tell his dreams. He frowned as he recited a series of fragments, images that did not fit together but repeated themselves in a circle, like the spun wheel of pictures. When he was through I smiled and began, “I dreamed of a great table and on the table were cakes and pies, red meat, a great mound of chocolate …” He waited politely until I was through, and then we set off together for the fields.
“I dreamed of eating,” I said. “That’s not very strong dreaming, is it?”
“Depends on what it means,” said Chil-sing.
“Look, all it means is that I’m hungry. I’m hungry all the time. I’m a pretty jaded person, you know, used to many rich foods, so I dream of them at night.”
“If it means only that, it will soon disappear.”
“I doubt it. I’m surprised you don’t all dream of eating all the time. You all eat so little.”
“Too much food is donagdeo.”
“And by your methods you can’t produce a lot anyway. It has to be strictly rationed, right?”
“I do not know. It takes little food to sustain a body. But food becomes more when it is given, not taken.”
“What do you mean?”
“It is one of the old dreams. You have not heard it yet?”
“No.”
“Once, long ago, when Ata was very young and the twelve times twelve people had not yet dug and built the great la-ka, but sat to tell dreams beneath the branches of the great Life Tree, a strong dreamer, a waking-dreamer, was born among them. He had been born as a baby, torn out of the body, long before, but then he was born again as a waking-dreamer. And all this happened in the midst of famine, when the harvest of summer was gone, and the root crop of fall had been dug up, and still the winter fast had long to go before the first new grass would come to feed the people.” He recited in a rhythmic style that indicated he had heard the story many times.
“And the waking-dreamer sat beneath the Life Tree and the people all came before him, and they said, ‘We have only these twelve pots of grain left and these twelve baskets of fruit. Some will eat and some will starve. Tell us who shall live and who shall die before those of us who are strong take all, and the people of Ata is reduced to strong bodies with bad dreams.’
“And the waking-dreamer said, ‘You feed all the people.’ But the people protested and said, ‘We have not enough for all the people.’
“‘You have not enough for yourselves,’ said the waking-dreamer. ‘If you feed yourselves you will starve, but each feed another, and all will be filled, for kin are nourished by what they feed to others.’
“And so twelve people picked up twelve pots and began to feed others from the pots. And twelve more picked up twelve baskets of fruit and began to feed all the twelve times twelve people from the baskets. And when they were through, and all were fed, all having been fed from the hands of others, the pots and the baskets were still full and so were the people.”
We walked on in silence. “That’s a very nice story,” I said.
“It is truth,” said Chil-sing. “It is one of the great dreams of our people.”
“And because of that story—that dream—you feed one another.”
“And there is always enough,” said Chil-sing.
“Perhaps because you believe there is.” He didn’t answer. “There is a story like that one set down long ago in the outside world.” I proceeded with a very halting, stumbling and mixed up version of the loaves and fishes, and Chil-sing listened with great interest.
When I finished he said, “Yes, that is a corrupt version of our dream.”
I was a little taken aback by the arrogance of the statement. “What do you mean? In the outside world, that story is part of a great literature of people advanced enough to make markings that speak, instead of having to repeat stories night after night before a fire.”
“That may be,” said Chil-sing, “but the point of the dream is lost. The waking-dreamer o
f your story is just a trickster who can make many fishes from a few. It is not his act, but the act of the people in feeding one another that multiplies the food. Such a story becomes donagdeo when it is so corrupted. Perhaps if your people had not put it down into markings, they could have improved it, dreaming it over until it got better, instead of being stuck in such a meaningless story.”
I had to admit that I too had found it meaningless. “What is a waking-dreamer?”
“Just what the name says. One who lives in the dream all the time, asleep or awake. One who goes Home without dying.”
“Are there many here?”
“None.” He looked at me and laughed. “You ask as if a waking-dreamer is born every day.” Then he shook his head to show me that he didn’t want to talk anymore.
I began to look at the people walking before and behind me. They looked perfectly healthy for a race living on what seemed to me to be inadequate food, and doing heavy work. There were no fat ones, of course. They were a lean group, for all their differences of color and stature. But none was emaciated, and the children were as plump and active as any I had ever seen.
We had reached the circle of hol-ka, and something made me stop. Chil-sing went on without me. I looked at the hol-ka and felt a slight chill, and then I remembered that while I had dreamed of cake and steak the night before, at least the nightmares were gone. If there was any connection between that and my brief session in the hol-ka yesterday, it was worth trying again. Perhaps I sweated out my nightmares there, and could be free of them at night—if only free to dream of childish trivia.
I pulled off my tunic and crawled into the hol-ka. My experience was much the same as the day before, if anything, worse. The agony of fear and panic seemed longer, and just as I thought it would last forever, it let go of me, dropped me, shaking and sweating. I crawled out and went to work.
Things went on this way for a while, and I would have been content except for one thing. Augustine seemed to be avoiding me. If I went to work near her, she moved away. In the la-ka at night she managed to sit always on the side opposite mine, with the fire and the dream-teller between us. And, although we slept together in the same sleeping wheel at night, there was no place where people were more alone, more on their own, than during those nightly journeys into the dreams that were believed to be reality.
I began to believe that, despite her act in the la-ka, she could not forgive me for killing the old man. I knew she must be involved in some inner struggle, because she spent so much time in the hol-ka. Every day she returned to one for longer and longer sessions, which no one else seemed to notice, and one night she did not come out at all, leaving a gap in our sleeping wheel as she had the night after I attacked her.
On the next Bath Day I got up, recited my dream of climbing the Life Tree to get a roast pig that sat on the topmost branch (I never got there in the dream) and we all started off to the beach.
I knew the ritual pretty well. We walked to the edge of the waves, threw our flowers into the water, then took off our tunics, joined hands and walked forward into the water. Everyone kept his eyes on the sun rising out of the water in front of us. But I was still unable to resist taking a quick look at some of the girls’ bodies. Since I didn’t bother any of them, I thought that this bit of peeking was harmless.
As I was looking to my right, I felt my left hand being released, then grasped again by a different hand. Someone had broken into the line, but that fact was of little interest to me. Only when we were shoulder deep in the water and had dropped all solemnity to turn and playfully wash one another, did I see, as I turned to my left, that I had been holding hands with Augustine.
She did not smile as she cupped her hands, picked up water and poured it over my head. I did the same to her. Then I loosened her hair from its braid. She turned her back on me and let her head fall backward. I washed her hair in the water. Her eyes were closed. When she opened them again, she was smiling, and she splashed some water into my face. I splashed her back, and we laughed and played along with the children.
When we started to walk back through the water, she took my hand again. We did not look at each other as we each put on our tunic. Again she took my hand and led me across the sand to where the river emptied into the sea. We followed the river upstream, until we came to a grassy bank with trees.
She turned to face me.
“I am to be woman to you,” she said simply, without any expression.
For a minute I stood there stupidly. Then I untied and took off her tunic. She sat down while I pulled mine off. She smiled once as I laid her back against the grassy slope.
Our love-making was a kind of ceremony, like a stamp or a seal upon something. I entered her almost immediately, and as I felt myself coming, I heard a low crooning sigh from her that told me she was with me. Then we lay together on our side, her arms and legs enveloping me, our eyes looking straight into one another’s. We did not talk at all. This was a ritual to cancel out the rape, a purified re-enactment.
“What made you change your mind?” Before she spoke, I knew what her answer would be.
“After you came back to us, the dream began. Every night, all night.”
“What was the dream?”
“You were on your knees before me saying that you could not live without me.”
That wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear. “And nothing about your own needs?” She didn’t answer me. “Okay, if I was begging for you, why did you keep trying to hold out? I thought you always followed your dreams without question.”
Her skin deepened slightly and her eyes shifted once before they came back to mine. “I was selfish. Self-willed. But you’re right. I should not fight against the dream.”
“Selfish?”
“I had hoped it was over. I had hoped I was through with it. It is donagdeo to be so ambitious, self-defeating, of course. But I thought …”
“Through with what?”
“With being woman to a man.”
I laughed. “You hoped you were through with sex?” She nodded, and I laughed again. “Don’t try to tell me you don’t enjoy sex!”
“I do.”
“Then what’s wrong with it?” I shook my head as I looked at her. The same old problem. The same old guilt. The same sex-ridden, sex-fearing ghosts haunted these people as haunted everyone outside.
“It takes too much. It is …”
“Donagdeo? Come on, I can’t dream of anything but sex when I can’t have any—like food.”
She was shaking her head. “Yes, like food. But not like food. Higher and greater than food. You do not take sex as seriously as …”
“I assure you, I do,” I said, kissing the tip of her nose.
“… we who know it stands for the greater dream. And to reach it …”
“… you try to give up sex?”
“No. We let it give us up. So that it can become something that sets us free to …”
“To what?”
“I do not know. I am not yet free, it seems.” And she gave a little chuckle along with a quick squeeze of her legs around me.
Somehow that playful squeeze touched me deeply. I felt that I had entered upon some kind of commitment. Before, I had believed that relations with women were impossible without lies. But this time, looking into Augustine’s eyes, I felt that this relationship would be impossible without truth.
“You understand that I am leaving in the spring.”
“Yes.”
“You can forget me?”
“Why should I?”
“Because I’ll leave nothing behind but …”
“You will leave a child behind.”
“You’re pregnant?”
“Yes.”
We sat quietly for a minute. “I’m sorry … sorry it happened that way.” But she only shrugged. “So that is why you decided …” I had to ask her for the possessive “my;” the word was rarely used. “… that you are my woman.”
Her eyes flashed. “I
am not your woman. No one belongs to anyone. I said I would be woman to you. Why should I say that because I am pregnant? I do not belong to the man who fathered my other one.”
“You have a child. Which one?” She described a big, swarthy adolescent boy I’d seen in the la-ka. “Why don’t you live with him, with his father?”
“I live with them. We all live together here, don’t we? But he is not my boy and his father not my man. No one belongs to anyone else.”
“You belong to yourself. That’s good.”
She recoiled in shock. “Oh, no. No.”
“Then who do you belong to?” She only smiled. “How old are you?” I asked, but she did not understand the concept of measuring age by years. I could not tell her age, but guessed she must be older than I, by the age of her son, though she did not look older. “Were you very young when you had your child?” She nodded.
We made love again, more slowly this time. I had meant to give her great pleasure, but I began to fumble nervously like a boy, to feel foolish and stupid. It was her steady eyes on me, her total and open acceptance of me, her quiet pleasuring in my touch of her that ruined it for me that time. She was not an adversary, nor was she simply a body to be aroused by prescribed techniques to prescribed responses. I was not fucking her. And I was afraid.
Several times we turned away from each other as if to give up. Then she came close to me again, kissed my neck or my cheek and drew me on. The third time, I sat up, feeling myself in danger of losing some kind of struggle, losing because there was no struggle.
The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You Page 9