“And she’ll keep me warmer this winter than your butterflies will.”
She smiled and looked at the gray moth clinging in stillness to her shoulder. “Soon even these will be gone.”
Tenderness for her filled me, surprising me with its intensity. I insisted that the goat sleep between us and often pushed it toward her in the depths of the cold nights. Sometimes, when I did so, she would smile in her sleep and hug the goat to her belly. The people stopped gathering at the Life Tree each night and we took up a different routine. When the gray light of dawn came, we stood and told our dreams. Then we went out to relieve ourselves and to wash. We cleaned out the ka every morning, sifting through the leaves for animal droppings, shaking out our sleeping mats. Then, leaving the old and the very young in the ka, we went out on inspection tour of the village, repairing holes ripped in mat roofs by wind (which became increasingly strong and cold), refilling the water skins and pots. Last we went to the la-ka, checked the stores and made necessary repairs. We set out some food for the animals, then gathered rations for the people in our ka.
Back in the ka, we fed each other as we would have in the la-ka. Then we sat in a circle, with our animals among us, and told stories.
People took turns telling the stories, one person each day. The story of that person would go on for hours, with the storyteller resting at regular intervals while the others sang or chanted. Listeners could interrupt the story at any time to ask a question and even, sometimes, to offer a suggestion for the plot. I began to enjoy these winter tales more than I had the ritualistic tales of the la-ka, and I wish I had time to write down some of them. One day I asked Chil-sing if the stories were traditional ones of the island.
“No,” he told me. “Each is our own story, made up from our own dreams and from our waking too.”
“They are not spontaneous.”
“No.” Chil-sing smiled. “We save them, we harvest them, we store them as we store food for the winter and we feed our kin on stories. The stories and dances of the la-ka come partly from our winter tales too; those that are repeated by request, winter after winter, are shared by all in the la-ka eventually.”
These stories went on until darkness came and everyone settled down to dream his own stories.
As the periods of darkness-grew longer, I suffered horribly. I could not sleep as long as the others, and I could not seem to get warm enough. I was hungry all the time, though I imagine that my main problem was boredom, as I lay awake in the dark listening to the others breathe.
I was grateful for the heavy rains that came. They gave me work to do, mending leaks in our ka and others, wading out through the village (the ka stayed quite dry, but the paths ran like rivers). And during the long, dark hours in the ka, the sound of the rain, gentle and steady on the matted walls of the ka, helped me to doze.
One day Salvatore asked if I would take my turn at story telling.
“I have prepared nothing for the winter tales,” I said.
He shrugged and said, “There is your whole life—preparation enough. We are hungry for stories.” I found it hard to refuse such a request, and when we sat down after eating, I began.
I had intended simply to tell something of my childhood. I found myself remembering happenings I hadn’t thought of for years. I described a house that I had left when I was not more than two years old. It was as if I too were listening to a story I had never heard before.
After that first experience I took my turn every few days and told an episode from my life. I tried to choose the more important, more dramatic episodes, but they all sounded dull and contrived next to the winter tales of the others, even of the children like Jamal. After a while I fell back on impressions and daydreams of my childhood, stories of a boy who had ceased to exist until resurrected in that circle in a dark tent that smelled of goat.
Darkness lengthened and deepened. The winds were sharp and rains frequent. The children hardly woke from sleep anymore except to eat what was brought and fed into their mouths. The old sat up from time to time, but hardly spoke. I began to notice that when Salvatore, Sbgai, Augustine and Doe (our oldest) were not sleeping or working, they sat in a trance of concentration while stories were murmered in low, slow voices. Once I reached out and touched Salvatore; he was quite warm, almost as though feverish. I tried to break Augustine’s concentration to get some attention from her. But I saw that the moment she turned to respond to me she lost her heat and began to shiver as I did.
Finally, I rolled myself up in my blanket, burrowed deep into the dry leaves and hugged my little goat closely, dozing as the children did, trying not to wake and wonder if I could survive the winter.
Just at the point where I had numbed myself to this state of hibernation, the whole village roused itself. Everyone in the ka got up and began to clean it out. I protested the loss of heat, but the activity continued and became excited. Everyone washed and wrapped himself in blankets and mats. We were going out.
“It is the ceremony of light,” said Chil-sing, with a happy smile.
The sky was gray, the paths muddy, but the wind was still for once. We followed the circular paths, dancing and jumping and singing to keep warm—or rather, they danced and sang—I shivered and stumbled along behind them.
Everyone hurried inward on the paths toward the Life Tree, which glowed skeletal and red. Someone had lit a fire near it. Children danced around the fire. They lit long stems of dry grass and were lifted up to tie the glowing bits to the wet, bare branches of the tree, where they blazed, sputtered and quickly died.
Everyone circled the Life Tree and sang a song which I will roughly paraphrase:
Already far from Home
Far from the source of life
We have strayed further
To the deepest dark.
Now turn, turn turn
We now turn back
Turn, turn, turn
Back to the light of life.
Rejoice in darkest night
Dark night brings deep dreams
The farther we go
The closer to our Home.
So turn, turn, turn
We now turn back
Turn, turn, turn
Back to the light of life.
We continued to circle the fire and the tree until the fire burned out, exhausting the last bit of stored fuel. Then we filed into the la-ka, where the remaining provisions were parceled out, and we carried them, still singing, back to the ka. I had to admit I felt quite cheered up by then.
That night the stories continued long after dark, everyone taking a turn at them. When my turn came I told the Christmas story, which was accepted as happily as any of the others (several of which it resembled), especially any details about the animals in the stable who gathered around the new born baby.
“And which was the child’s animal?” asked Jamal.
“A lamb,” I answered, and Sbgai grinned as he patted the neck of his lamb.
But the damp cold hung on in the following weeks. When our provisions ran out I went out to the fields to dig up root vegetables. By now all the others were nearly always in the trance or doze that would keep them alive. I again began to wonder if I would make it.
Several things convinced me that I would not. The cold, the hunger, yes. And not only those, but what they brought.
Augustine was far from me now, maintaining her dream-state. Perhaps, I thought, it was she and the brief daily sessions in the hol-kas that had kept my monsters at bay. Now they were on me in full force. We were all hallucinating, people moving in and out of dreams they told as they lived them. But all my shadows were back. In my weakened state, I knew that I could not keep up the battle against them.
I not only dreamed them, I saw and felt them, oozing out of the mats of the ka, howling with the wind. I struggled and screamed, but when I saw through them to the people lying or sitting around me, no one had moved. I lived in my nightmare; awake or asleep there was no escape.
I staggered out to th
e fields, afraid to look back to see what pursued me. I hunted for roots, though we had already dug up the crop. I felt that if I could keep moving I might keep the shadows at a distance. But I took them everywhere with me. I went out every day for seven days, then collapsed and waited to die.
I didn’t, of course. I simply writhed and sweated and screamed. And I could see that no one heard. Our bodies lay together, our feet pointing to the center of our sleeping wheel, while I and my terrors floated above, and I knew that, weightless as I now was, the shadows would absorb me, and I would die. I wanted to cry out for Augustine but was afraid that waking her would endanger her life.
Sure that this was finally the end, and without the strength or will to fight, I let go. I let go of something indefinable—my life, I suppose.
Then I opened my eyes to look at the shadow which moved in closest to me.
It was me, of course. They were all me, in one rotten form after another. There were twelve of me and we did the dance of the numbers, in the empty la-ka which echoed with our yells and screams and stomps. For an eternity we did the dance of the numbers. But in the pit was a great roaring fire. And every one of me fought not to be thrown into the fire, and screamed in pain of consumption by the fire. The pain was real, the deaths were real.
There is no point in my trying to describe each loathsome identity of me, each frantic gesture, each screeching immolation. I could see my body in the sleeping wheel below. I watched it crawl to the edge of the ka and lick water from the mud outside. And I went on with the dance.
After eons there were two of me left, facing each other across the fire pit. One of me was a woman, a hundred women, all the women, hurt, enraged and furious, that I had ever known. One of me was a man, myself, every rotten, opportunistic, cruel, avaricious and vain self I had ever been.
We faced each other and danced obscenely, cruelly, furiously, ever alert, watching. For every move of the dance was a threat, an aggression demanding simultaneous reaction and defense.
It seemed to go on for years. I was tired. I had to destroy her. I tried every way I could think of, but she anticipated my every move. Then she grabbed the initiative and I was defensive until I could get it back. But I was so tired. Finally I stopped doing anything but defensive, complementary moves. I let her dictate the dance.
Her movements slowed, and she became dim. She darkened as if turning into a shadow again. And her movements were less threatening, finally not threatening at all, but neutral. I continued to follow her. And her movements became great sweeps of grace, of joy, that I followed in perfect simultaneity as she turned darker, darker, black.
“Augustine!” I cried and threw myself forward. Clasped tightly in each other’s arms, we fell into the fire.
I opened my eyes. Faint sunlight peeked through a rip in the mat above me.
“Augustine.” She was standing before me, her belly huge. She was smiling.
“Come and see,” she said. I followed her out of the ka. The earth was still wet and chill. But the air was different.
Augustine led me to the wall. “See,” she said, and bent down to point. Growing out of the rock from a crevice too thin to contain more than a few grains of dirt, was a bright red flower. “And look there.”
We held hands and pointed to the flowers. Other kin came out and did the same. A few attempted a hop or a skip, but reeled weakly against one another, laughing. Then some walked inward toward the la-ka while others cut over the walls and went outward.
“Where are they going?”
“Some to the la-ka to build a fire. It will not be easy. They will tear down dried roof mats for the fire. Some will gather new grass from the fields and others, the blossoms and herbs from the walls. And others will bring pots of water. In a little while we will have hot herb broth and we will drink to the new life.”
“I should help.”
“Not today,” she said. “Rest with me and hold my hand. It is not every winter that a man dances the numbers dance to its finish and comes out of the pit as one.”
I stared at her. “Did I talk, scream?”
“Not your body, not a sound.”
“Then how did you know?”
Her blue eyes stood out large in her thin face. “Was I not there with you? Did I not jump into the fire with you when you called? I will always, always be with you when you call.”
Four
We sat on the stone wall in the pale sunlight, holding hands. It must seem strange that I did not immediately begin to question Augustine on how it was that she had contrived to enter my dream, or how common a practice this was or how many other such feats she might be able to perform. I had heard of ESP and Indian rope tricks. I was neither willing nor unwilling to believe that some people could do such things. I had always been indifferent, since it seemed not worth the effort to separate the genuine from the false. Most of all, I had been put off by the sort of people who were interested in such things. They were always weird in one unattractive way or another, and their interest in the occult had a musty, sexual odor—old ladies with crimped hair and painted faces who hadn’t been laid in twenty years.
A rational man is not equipped to ask the right questions about a non-rational event. I felt as I had on my first climb up the hill, when I saw the expanse of ocean around me. What I confronted was not simply the physical fact of the ocean, but the possibilities arising from that fact.
Similarly, I now knew that I was not among a primitive people practicing mumbo-jumbo that occasionally resulted in an interesting effect. There had been no tricks, no voodoo charms, no magic words—but when I needed her, Augustine had been able to …
“ … to save me,” I said aloud.
She smiled and shook her head. “No one can save another.”
“To help, then.”
“All right, to help.”
“But I don’t feel any different,” I said.
She laughed. “We never do, not for long. That is why we must keep dreaming.”
The last of the people had passed by us going toward the la-ka. We fell in behind them. Everyone looked thin, but amazingly fit. I saw no one staggering. No one looked ill. No one short-cut over the walls, but all walked steadily and slowly toward the la-ka.
It was another sign of the magnificent health of the people. I rarely saw anyone ill. The people believed that ill health began with donagdeo—acts which would disturb or decrease their ability to dream, and resulted from accompanying states of imbalance. That was why they immediately went to a hol-ka, at the first sign of such imbalance. A session in the hol-ka generally averted illness. In case of accident, a person spent a day or two in the hol-ka, then went back, as much as possible while healing, to his usual activities. Actually the people did not believe in accidental injuries; and a person’s illnesses were his own responsibility. I don’t mean to imply some magic immunity from biological fate, only that illness was over with quickly, either through recovery or death. There was no chronic dis-ease.
We stopped at the pool, which was full of fresh water running over the stones which lined it, and scooped water up to our faces. We sprinkled water over the roots of the tree, still bare and black, twining hundreds of branches from the three main branches growing out of the great trunk.
Inside the la-ka the atmosphere was unusually quiet. A great fire blazed in the pit, surrounded by pots, and all the people sat looking at the flames. They seemed to be in a trance as deep as the one through which many had survived the winter. We sat between Chil-sing and Salvatore, whose eyes remained fixed on the flames. Augustine immediately dropped my hand and began to look at the flames. I could tell that she had instantly put herself into a trance. I sat looking at the flames too, my mind racing. After my latest experience I had no doubt that something extraordinary would happen.
Someone who must have been the oldest person on the island got up from a step near the fire. He or she, skeletal and hairless, was helped by two children who could not have been more than three years old. They
stood on either side of her as she went down on her knees, keeping each hand on one little shoulder for support. The little ones, muffled up in their blankets, stood very straight and solemn, as though conscious of great responsibility. Then the old one spoke.
“Has any kin been chosen?”
There was silence as the old eyes peered around the la-ka. The people seemed to be holding their breath.
Then Salvatore turned to me and said, “Now.”
“What?”
“If you want to go back,” he said, “you must stand up now.”
“Back? Back to the world. You mean right now?”
“This is the time. Before we break the fast.”
“Has any kin been chosen?” repeated the old one.
I turned to look at Augustine, but her eyes were on the fire. I turned back to Salvatore. “Can’t it wait till tomorrow, or a few days, when I feel stronger?”
He was shaking his head even before I finished the sentence. “This is the only time we are able. If you do not go now you will have to wait until after the next winter fast.”
I believed him. I was past questioning or calling the people primitive or superstitious. I believed that if I wanted to leave I would have to say so, now. “Has any kin been chosen?”
I sat with every muscle tensed, ready to rise and tell them I wanted to go. But I did not move. The silence held for another minute. Then a great sigh filled the la-ka, as though all had let go their breath with relief. And the people jumped up and began to embrace one another, to greet the ones they had not seen since the ceremony of light. While the pots warmed, the people talked and laughed, broke out in little songs here and there, and took turns standing near the fire.
“What made you decide to stay?” asked Augustine.
“I don’t know. Maybe it was you.” I had meant to please her, but she only frowned.
“I hope not. One person is not enough.”
“Perhaps I want to see the child when it comes.”
“Perhaps.”
“I didn’t really decide to stay. I meant to stand up and say I wanted to go. But … I didn’t … couldn’t move.”
The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You Page 11