The sea of ice will be breaking up like a pile of cold and forgotten bones, but the group of men who will come out to meet you will guide you from block to frozen block until you reach the other shore. Then you will realize that this is the coast or the island that neh-el and you will have seen like a mirage in the old time of the flowers, which will also be the new time awaiting you here, for the men who will lead you will be shedding their heavy mantles of skins cured from the blond deer of the cold to uncover garments of much lighter pigskin. You will have crossed the frontier between ice and green, growing things.
You too will throw aside the heavy pelt you are wearing and you will feel enough warmth return to your breasts to protect your child. You will feel the heat, following the group of men whom now you will begin to tell apart by the way they hold their sharp-pointed lances, together singing a song that will announce triumph, joy, return …
You will come to the barrier of a white fence that you will quickly recognize as a wall of the huge bones of vanished animals embedded in the ground to form an impregnable stockade, which, one by one, the men-guides will enter, preceding you, and you will follow through openings in the stockade until you come to a large open area of stamped-down earth amid a cluster of small shelters of baked clay and burning-hot flat roofs.
They will assign you a hut, and they will bring vessels with milk and pieces of raw meat impaled on iron skewers. Neh-el will bow in thanks and will follow the men outside. At the door he will turn and he will tell you with a hand gesture that you must be calm and say nothing. There will be something new in his eyes. He will look at the men of this place the way that before he looked at the beasts he hunted. But now he will also look with suspicion, not caution alone.
You will spend several hours feeding the little girl and crooning songs to her. Then neh-el will return and he will tell you that he will go out every day to hunt with the other men. They are to meet at the edge of a treeless prairie where there will be great herds. They will surprise their kill when the beasts stop to graze. You will go out with the other women to pick herbs and fruit near the huts, without exposing yourself to the beasts that come up almost to the stockade.
You will ask him if here he will paint again. No, he will tell you, here there will be no cave walls. There will be walls of earth and stockades of bone.
Will they be happy to have us?
They will be. They will say that when they see the waters of the sea withdraw and freeze on the other shore, they will feel isolated, and they will wait for us to have proof that the world on the other side still exists.
Will they like our world, neh-el, will they want it?
We shall learn to know them, ah-nel. We shall wait.
But again there will be uneasiness in his eyes, as if something that has not yet happened were about to be revealed.
You will join the other women of the stockade to pick fruit and will bring elk’s milk to the little girl in her cradle of skins.
You will not be able to communicate with the other women, because you will not understand their languages; not you theirs or they yours. You will try to communicate by singing and they will answer, but it will not be clear to you what they are saying, because their voices will be unvarying and monotone. You will try to intone voices of happiness, pity, pain, and friendship, but the other women will look at you oddly and they will answer you with the same unvarying tone, which prevents you from divining what they feel …
Days and nights will go by in this manner, until one evening, at sunset, you will hear footsteps, so light that they communicate pain, as if the one walking did not want her feet to touch the ground. But the person who will approach your hut will knock with a steady sound that will frighten you because until now the footsteps and noises of this place will have been characterized by a monotonous sadness.
You will not be prepared for the appearance in the frame of your doorway of a woman covered in skins as black as her hair, with deep circles under her eyes and a partly opened mouth: black lips, black tongue, black teeth.
She will clutch the black staff she will use to knock at your door. She will appear at your doorstep, and with one hand she will lift the staff, and you will fear her threat, except that with the other hand she will touch her head with a resignation, a sweetness, and a sorrow that will make your fear vanish. She will touch her head as if she were touching a wall or were announcing herself in a way not to cause fear or because she wanted to greet you, but there is no time, the somber features of the woman, your visitor, will ask something of you, but you will not know how to answer her plea in time, the other women of the community will have reacted, they will come to your door, inflamed, they will yell at the dark woman, they will tear the black staff from her hands, they will throw her to the ground and kick her, and she will get to her feet with darting glances of fear and pride, and, defiant, she will cover her head with her hands and she will leave, dragging her feet, until she is lost in the mist of twilight.
Neh-el will return, and he will tell you that the woman is a widow who has no right to leave her hut.
Everyone will be wondering why, knowing the law, she will have dared go outside and come to you.
They will suspect you.
The law will say that to see a widow is to expose oneself to death, and they will not be able to explain why this widow will have dared come out and go looking for you.
It will be the first time that the other women will lose their calm or their distant indifference, they will change their tone of voice, they will become excited and passionate. The rest of the time, they will be submissive and silent. They will gather the yellow strawberries and the black berries and the white ones, they will pull up edible roots, and they will count with particular care the little green spheres they call pisa, opening the green pods and dropping the round fruit into clay vessels.
They will also gather eggs of the birds that flock to feast on grains and the black berries. For their men they will cook the brains, the tripe, and the fat throats of the beasts of the prairie. And as the evening light wanes they will braid rope from the fibers of the fields and make needles of bone and clothing of leather.
You will realize, when you go with the women to distribute food and clothing to the huts of the men and the ill, that, although the scope of this daily, monotonous labor is restricted to the area of the bone stockade, farther away there is a space within a fortress where a building more sumptuous than the others will be built—it, too, of the ivory of death.
One night there will be a great uproar and everyone will run to that space, summoned by the drums that you will have heard before but also by a new music, rapid as the flight of the raptor, only of a sweetness you will never have heard before …
The men will have dug a space deeper than wide, and from the large house, yellow as a mouthful of infected teeth, they will carry the body of a naked young man, followed at a slow pace—in its very slowness as much rage as grief—by a man with long white hair and sagging shoulders, his face covered by a mask of stone and his body protected by white hides. He will be preceded by a second young male, as naked as the corpse, carrying a vessel. The men will set the body of the young man on the ground and the old man will go over to look at it, for a moment removing his stone mask in order to take in every detail of the cadaver.
He will have a face that is bitter but lacking the necessary will to contest or to act.
Then the men will lower the body into the hole, and the aged, masked man will slowly empty over it the vessel of ivory pearls the sad adolescent will have in his hands.
Then will rise the song that you will have expected from the beginning, ah-nel, as if everyone were awaiting that one occasion to add to the plaintive chorus the cries, caresses, and sighs that the old man will hear, unmoved, as he sprinkles the pearls over the corpse, and then, exhausted, he will support himself on two men, and all three will return to the house of ivory accompanied by the sound of sad, sweet music issuing from a tube drilled wit
h small holes, while the other men of the stockade will continue to toss objects into the open grave.
That night neh-el will show you something stolen from the tomb. It is the bone tube with many holes. Instinctively neh-el will lift it to his lips, but you, also instinctively, will put your hand over the instrument and over neh-el’s mouth. You will be afraid of something, you will suspect even more, you will feel that your days in this place will not be peaceful, ever since the visit from the woman with the staff you will have convinced yourself that this place is not good …
There will be a portent in the flight of vultures over the fields where you will be working the morning after the burial of the young man. Neh-el will return with more news. The hunters will have talked, even though the women will have been silent. Neh-el will quickly learn the key words of the language of the island and will tell you, ah-nel, that the boy is the oldest of the old man’s sons, that the old man is the one who commands here, that the dead youth was to have been the one to ascend to the ivory throne, the first among all the sons of the basil, for that is what the old man is called, fader basil, that he has several sons but that they are not equal, that there are a first, a second, and a third, but now the second will be the favorite and the one who will succeed the aged fader basil. Terrible things will be said, ah-nel, it will be said that the second son killed the first in order to be first himself, but, then, ah-nel will ask, will not the old man fear that the second will kill him in order to be the new fader basil?
You must say nothing, ah-nel. I will hear more, and I will tell you.
Will we understand them and they us?
We will. I do not know why, but I think that, yes, we will understand each other.
Neh-el, I am beginning to understand what the women say …
Neh-el will stop in the doorway and will turn to look at you with the kind of alarm and amazement that are like the division between inside and outside, yesterday and today.
Standing in the entrance to the hut, with the yellow light at his back, he will say:
Ah-nel, repeat what you just said.
I too understand what the women say.
You understand, or you will understand?
I understand.
You know, or you will know?
I learned. I know.
What do you know?
Neh-el, we have returned. We have been here before. That is what I know.
Now the sky is moving. Swift clouds not only bear wind and noise but are possessed of time; the sky moves time, and time moves the earth. Storm follows storm like lightning, flashing and immediately gone but never preceded by the sound of thunder, the bolts as they fall rip the firmament and rivers run again, forests are inundated with penetrating scents and trees are revived, yellow birds flock, redbreasts, whitetails, blackcrests, blue fantails, plants grow, fruit falls, and later leaves, and again the forests will be denuded, and all this while neh-el and you keep the secret of your resurrected past.
You have been here.
You know the tongue of this place, language returns, but in this moment no one pays attention to you, because the widow of the chieftain’s first son has thrown a mantle of black skins over her husband’s tomb, hurling curses against the second son, accusing him of killing the firstborn, accusing the aged fader basil of blindness and powerlessness, of being unworthy to be basil, until the company of men with lances bursts into the open space before the house of bones and a young man with black braided hair, large lips, a darting, furtive gaze, uncompromising gestures, and an attitude of new beginnings, and adorned with large metal bracelets at his wrists and stone necklaces around his neck, gives the order to run the woman through: if she loved her dead husband so much, let her be joined with him forever. He is your brother, the widow manages to shout before she is silenced, bathed in blood.
Blood moistens the earth, and she seems to sink into it and become one with the corpse of her young husband.
I do not want to go out, you say, hugging your daughter. I am afraid.
They will suspect, neh-el answers. Go on working as you have been. As I shall do. Do you remember anything more?
No. Just the language. With the language, the place came too.
I knew, too. I knew that we had been here.
Both of us? Only you?
He was silent for a long while, stroking the little girl’s red hair. He stared at the walls of this, his former homeland. For the first time ah-nel saw shame and pain in the eyes of her daughter’s father.
I know how to paint only on stone. Not on earth. Or ivory.
Answer me, you say, your voice low and anguished. How do you know that I was here too?
Again he does not speak but goes out as usual to hunt, and returns with a faraway look on his face. Many nights go by like this. You grow more distant, you cling to your daughter as if she were your salvation, you and he do not speak, a silence more confining than any captivity weighs on you both, each of you fears that silence will become hatred, distrust, separation …
Finally, one night, neh-el cannot bear it any longer, and he throws himself in your arms weeping, he asks your forgiveness: When memory returns you see that it is not always good, memory can be very bad, I believe we must bless and treasure the not remembering, it was because of forgetting that you and I came together, but also—he tells you—the memories of a man and a woman who meet again are not the same, one remembers some things the other has forgotten, and the other way around, and at times we forget, because the memory is painful, and we must believe that what happened never happened, we forget what is most important because it may be the most painful.
Tell me what I have forgotten, neh-el.
He did not want to go in with you. He led you to the place, but once there he took the girl with the red hair and black eyes from your arms and told you that he would go back to the hut so no one would suspect … And to save the girl? you wondered, wanting to ask.
Yes.
You saw a small hillock of baked earth covered by tree branches, hidden by them. This mound had a hole in the top, and many branches overhanging it and thrusting inside. There was another hole at ground level.
That was how you went in, on all fours, taking a while to grow accustomed to the darkness but slowed also by the pungent odors of rotted herbs, discarded pods and husks, old seeds, urine and excrement.
You were led by the rasp of irregular breathing that sounded as if it came from someone caught unawares between wakefulness and sleep, or between dying and death.
When, finally, your eyes adjusted to the shadows, you saw the woman sitting propped against the concave wall, covered with heavy skins and surrounded by ruminants with gray backs and white bellies, companions to the woman, whose smell was strongest of any. You recognized that smell from your life on the other shore, where small herds of musk deer took cover in the caves and filled them with that same secreted scent of nightfall. Fruit peels and gnawed bones were also scattered near the woman.
She was watching you from the moment you entered. Shadow was her light. Motionless, she seemed not to have the strength to move from that hidden place in the forest outside the ivory stockade.
Ah-nel could not see the woman’s arms beneath the coverings. The appeal in her eyes was enough to call you to her side. The ceiling was higher in the center than at the sides. You knelt beside her and saw two tears roll down her wrinkled cheeks. She did nothing to brush them away. She kept her arms beneath the skins. You wiped the tears, using the ends of her long wiry white hair to dry the face with gleaming eyes set deep above wide nostrils and a large, half-open, drooling mouth.
You came back, she said to you, her voice trembling.
You nodded yes, but your eyes betrayed your ignorance and confusion.
I knew you would come back. The aged woman smiled.
Was she truly so old? She seemed old because of the wild white hair that hid much of her strange, emotional face. And she seemed old because of her posture, as if her very wearines
s was proof that she was alive. Beyond the fatigue you had sensed when you saw her, there could only be death.
She told you she could see you clearly because she was used to living in darkness. Her sense of smell was very sharp, her most useful sense. And you would have to speak in a low voice, because living in silence she could hear the most distant murmurs, and loud voices frightened her. She had unusually large ears—she pulled back her hair and showed you a long, hairy ear.
Pity me, the woman said suddenly.
How? you murmured, instinctively obeying.
Remember me. Be kind.
How shall I remember you?
Then the woman pulled a hand from beneath the skins bundled around her.
She extended an arm covered with thick gray hair. She held out a closed fist. She opened it.
In the rose-colored palm lay something ovoid in shape, worn down from constant handling yet still recognizable. You could make out, ah-nel, the shape of a woman with a small, nearly featureless face and an ample body with generous breasts, hips, and buttocks narrowing into legs and tiny feet.
The figure was so old and eroded that it was becoming transparent. The original forms were by now egg-smooth.
She placed the object in your hand without a word.
Then, immediately, she put her arms around you.
You felt her wrinkled, hairy skin against your pulsing cheek. You felt both repulsion and affection. You were blinded by the unexpected and unfamiliar pain from the center of your throbbing head, a pain identical to the effort you were making to recognize this woman.
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