One could reason about it. There was plenty of sorrow in Kiem, particularly among us, the hotun, the low. There was not a family who had not suffered some disaster, an accident with sharks, an attack from the pirates who lived in the caves. A fall, an encounter with crocodiles, a wound that refused to heal. Rape, madness, river blindness, kyitna. One could say that my mother was not unusual among these people, all of whom were lacerated with misfortunes.
When I was small I had everything. Mud, guavas, the smell of the sea. We stayed in our boats all day then, lacking nothing. At the fringe of the forest we gathered oranges and sometimes tyepo which we would break against a stone, seeking its cream with the tint of young leaves. We made spears and hunted eels and fish in the estuaries; we swam and wrestled, discovered shells and corals, rowed our way to the forest again, made swings out of the vines, shouted, wept, forgot everything, and laughed, and laughed. We, the hotun children. We had all been born in the Black Land, but the stigma of having no jut set us apart. The old ones who sat drinking sugarcane wine along the canal spat into the water as we passed, an accursed flotilla.
We were Tchod, Miniki, Jissavet, Ainut, Nadni, Pyev. And others: Kedi who died of the fever, Jot who died of the catarrh. These disappeared and we went on playing, not even mentioning them, feeling them only in the cold air that pressed on our backs in the forest. We made slings to kill the little birds with the colorful plumage. If we caught fish, we roasted them on green sticks. Night fell rapidly in Kiem when the sun dropped behind the hills, and the shadows rushed over the land and reached out for us.
I remember all of them. Ainut was the one I loved, because of her soft hair and sober eyes. She used to swim with me near the house. My father called us “the two frogs.” He would lower baskets of rice to us on ropes. We loved that, reaching up unsteadily from our boats, pretending that the rivers were in flood, my father shouting to us that we must be careful, pointing to the imaginary crocodiles that made us scream. Sometimes we went far away together, on expeditions to the beaches, where we made houses of palm fronds. Ainut was with me when I saw the indigo sellers from Sedso, the sailors from Prav, and the kyitna men of the caves.
When I am very sick, when it’s hard to breathe, my father sits beside me. He stays for as long as I want him, all day, all night. He sings to me, he tells me stories, he traces each one of my fingers over and over. The thumb, the pointing finger, the long one. He tells me everything he can think of, helps me sit up and lie down, invents a hundred games to deaden the pain. He lets me lie with my face toward the doorway so that I can look out and we can count the birds that go past and make up their stories. I see his face in the subtle, indoor light, a light that is delicate even in the heat of the day, moth-colored, protected. I see that he is suffering, there are lines going deeper beside his mouth, he’s aging, I can’t bear it, and I weep. Crying makes it worse. He can’t endure what’s happening to me. For his sake I stop crying, pretend it’s nothing. I smile at him and reach up to wipe the tears which have trickled into his sparse beard. I dry his face with my hair, and we laugh.
The smallest things are enough to give us hope on such long days. We discover whole worlds in the tint of the sky through the doorway. My father plays his flute; the sound is sweeter than the ripple of rain, and sometimes the rain accompanies him and shelters us under its curtain.
In the background, boiling water, carrying dishes, my mother. She walks softly so as not to disturb us. And sweeter than even the voice of the flute is the dream I have: that we live on the hill, pampered and rich, and she is only a servant.
Tell me about the hill, I demand.
He can’t refuse me anything. He sighs, plucks mournfully at the threads of his beard. Our doorway faces northwest, you can see a part of the hill from here, but not the temple and not the house with the glass firefly lanterns. I want to hear about that house, to continue the dream I’m having, the dream that smells of jasmine and makes me weep. He doesn’t want to talk about it. I force him, and I don’t care. Already I believe I deserve more from life.
He says: Imagine a large room. Much bigger than our house, five or six times bigger, with a smooth tile floor. The floor is polished twice a day, they even rub wax into it, and they rub wax into all the slats in the wooden blinds. This room is empty except for the family janut set against one wall. Yes, mine was there, on the far left. My father’s jut was decorated with hanging gold leaves, my mother’s with little bars made out of silver. . . . Yes, now you’re getting big eyes, just like a real little frog. But what was there for us to do in that room? All alone on the hill, with nothing to look at but the sea, nothing to do but bicker, wait, and die of boredom?
Nothing he says can dismantle my dream. I sift his words in my head, choosing only those which support my fantasy, ignoring all his complaints about the boredom, his father’s tyranny, his mother’s shallowness and endless deception. I hardly notice the things he tells me with the most urgency, his brothers’ fights, the way the servants were beaten, the coldness of all the conversations meant to be subtly wounding, the ruses, lying smiles, and silken cruelty. No. I take the things I want and gather them to myself. The ladies in their gold and orange robes. Their poise as they sit on the shining floor, their skin made supple with coconut oil and wreathed in the aroma of cinnamon. Each of them has a darkened lower lip, tattooed in the manner of the Kiemish noblewomen. They are graceful, unhurried, gorgeous. The wind from the sea comes in and lifts a few strands of their plaited hair; it fills the sleeves of their robes, they are like great butterflies. . . . I dream of them, of their beautiful plates and cups, their delicate food, the oysters and the ginger and cashew nuts, their trips to visit one another, riding in their carts festooned with marigolds, under straw umbrellas. I dream of their lanterns and even the sound of the blinds being lowered at night. The blinds can be adjusted to let in the moonlight. Now moonlight streaks the floor where a lady sits, her oiled hair shining, burning incense to drive away melancholy.
Sometimes Kiem seemed as if it was always the same, unendurable. I don’t know if Tyom seemed that way too. The rain, or no rain, or mist, the rice and millet, the buffaloes up to their knees in water, the same river light, overcast, monotonous. Sometimes it seemed like a country where nothing happened, enough to make you drown yourself. I can’t stand it, I said to Ainut. And we would go searching for adventures, breathless in the heat, fighting to throw off the shroud of the long rains.
We went rowing our boats. The air was still, without wind enough to stir the reeds. We paddled slowly toward the west, for the world lay west of Kiem, and south: to the east there was nothing but ocean, inhabited by sharks, gods, and the ghosts of the drowned. We paddled beneath the beautiful blue-green hills which rose above us piled on one another like massive cloud formations, both airy and monumental, their cliffs jutting over the sea and hiding the house with the glass lanterns from our view. Below the cliffs there was a stretch of beach, sometimes littered with makeshift huts where sailors and fishermen had camped, or Tchinit the sailors’ wife, who slept in a different place every night so that the people of Kiem would not find her and burn her to death. We never saw the sailors’ wife, but once we thought we found her camp: there was a broken comb with a few long hairs. We burned these on the beach in great excitement, uttering all the most dreadful incantations we could recall or invent. Tchinit’s house was one of those, perhaps, which leaned and collapsed under the rain. And there was the house of Ipa the smith, which always seemed on the verge of disintegration but never fell, where the lonely cripple made bangles of copper wire. We rowed on. We were seeking the farthest, the most deserted beaches. Here we had once found Sedsi indigo sellers, who had given us each a square of cotton dyed the color of a bruise, and from whom we had fled, giggling, when they asked us to lie on their mats. Above these beaches there were caves in the hills, where the pirates lived. We were forbidden to go as far as this shore. There were terrible stories of the pirates, who had mouths in the palms of their hands and tai
ls like monkeys, and lived solely on human flesh.
We rowed on. I’m tired, Ainut said. I was tired, too, but I had been waiting for her to say it first. All right, let’s go ashore, I said. We floundered into the warm sea and dragged our rowboats up onto the sand.
The beach was silent. We gathered fronds and wove them into a roof: our boats, tilted on their sides, made the walls of the house. One side was open, facing the sea. We slept and then rose, groggy with heat, and woke ourselves fully with a long swim. How sweet it was to be free, alone, with no one to call us hotun people, no one to spit in the water when we passed, nothing to remind us of our poverty, of the shame of being the children of those who were no better than animals. We grew wilder, bolder, we swam farther, tempting the sharks. Then we raced back to the shore and dashed onto the sand. We danced and sang, we made elaborate headdresses from palm fronds, we practiced fluttering our lashes at vaguely imagined boys. . . . I don’t know how I was, but Ainut was different on the beach, with a sudden spirit of mischief and delight—she capered and said silly things that made her shriek with laughter at herself, almost horrified at her own boldness. We made dances, new ones, performing the steps exactly in unison, singing, wearing only our knotted skirts. Then we were suddenly hungry with the hunger that comes from swimming and we put on our short vests and went looking for food.
There was always food on the beach. There were coconuts and sleepy lizards, obese snails dreaming in the tide pools, and higher up there were wild bananas and datchi, although we feared the pirates in those regions, and the pariah dogs. But on this day, the day I remember, we were too giddy with happiness to think of those things, and we went up near the caves, chattering and laughing in the long grass, gathering green bananas which we would roast and season with saltwater. Ainut’s plaits were wet, and a track of salt lay on her cheek. She was baring her teeth and rolling her eyes, imitating someone. And then I saw the man and my laughter died as if forced out of me by a blow. It was all I could do to draw a breath.
He was standing near the wall of the cliff, knee-deep in the grass. He stood with his hands at his sides and looked at us. Above him there was a gaping cave mouth and a slope of rubble leading down to where he was, the man from the cave. He was dressed in rags and his hair stood up, red in color, red, horrible, stark and flagrant as if it were dipped in blood, and his eyes, worse, remembering it, his eyes seemed without any color at all, silver perhaps or the color of guava peel. Against these colors his skin looked very black. He was a painted man. Ainut followed the movement of my eyes. She stopped laughing and then I moved, my hand shot up and grasped her arm, hard, digging the nails into her flesh.
It was her weakness that made me strong. At first, when I saw the kyitna man, my instinct had been to fall, to stop breathing, to die—and perhaps, had I been alone, I would have collapsed from pure terror and they would have carried me off into their cave. But Ainut saved me, she saved us both. We looked at the man and saw a movement higher up, a shadow inside the cave, and the shadow moved into the light, its scarlet hair and beard hanging down in the dust, and Ainut screamed and screamed and went on screaming. Then the first man, the one close to us, lifted his hands and waved them as if to beckon to us, and stepped forward into the grass, and my strength came up and I yanked on Ainut’s arm and started running, dragging her, shouting at her to run, to stop screaming and run. We stumbled down the beach. The man was coming after us. Everything came back to me then, everything. My mother’s warnings, anxious, irritating, don’t go far, Jissavet, do you promise, don’t go around to the shore by the caves. I prayed to my father’s jut. If I get away I’ll listen to her, I’ll love her better, I’ll never disobey her again. Miraculously, we reached the boats. I turned and set Ainut upright and slapped her in the face as hard as I could. Get in your boat, I said. I’m leaving you. Do you hear? I’m leaving you behind.—Sobs, screams, and the bright blue sea. We thrashed into the water, climbed in the boats, hauled on the oars and pulled away, slowly, from that accursed shore.
Even when we were far out on the water, we could still see the man. He stood in the surf, tiny, waving his arms. We could still see the stain of his hair, and we spat in the ocean to clear our hearts of the sight, the impurity. The abomination.
(3)
When I was old enough I asked: Where did jut come from?
We were sitting on our pallets in the evening, the light flickering and showing our skin-maps hanging all over the walls, and my father leaned forward, his eyes dark pools, and said:
In the oldest days jut lived in the sea. All the separate janut and the whole jut, it was all there, and all one. The people faced the sea when they prayed, and they knew that something powerful lived in it, and they never teased it or insulted it. Then one day a little girl came, a girl about your size, and she said, I’m going to go and talk to jut. And the people said, It is not for human beings to talk to jut, and she said, Very well, but she knew her heart all the same. And when night came she slipped out of the house and went and stood on the cliff, and she shouted down at the sea, Jut! Jut!—She stood there stubbornly and called to the sea as loudly as she could, Jut! Answer me, Jut!
And Jut answered.
I’m that girl, I think. I am like the girl who called jut. Always outside, always different from people. It’s not only that I’m different, it’s that I don’t want to be different and yet I am proud, almost proud of the difference itself. I won’t try to change. When Ainut grows up she will marry a Kiemish laborer, a poor man, but one with jut. I’ll lie with my face to the doorway, watching the wedding procession go by, already very ill, too ill to get up. At that time, the time of the wedding, I haven’t spoken to Ainut for two years, but still the procession goes by our house, that’s the way she is, she would think of me even after everything has died between us, she knows I’ll be watching her. And I am. She stands in the prow of the boat, with a necklace of marigolds, beautiful. Around her are shouts, confusion, the clashing of spears. She doesn’t turn toward me. She glides by with an averted face, remote. And then I lose sight of her in the crowd.
It comes on suddenly, the first times. I’m under the house, untying my boat. Suddenly I can’t see anything. Or what I can see is not what’s there, I see something like a swarm of flies, white and black, filling up my vision. At the same time, my head grows heavy. I lean forward, grasp the pole. Far away, through the flies, I see my hands. Just as suddenly it clears and I see my mother watching me, holding her basket. Jissi, are you all right?
It’s nothing, I say.
Then one day Ainut said: Your hair’s red.
What?
Look, right there, she said. She had turned away from the tree. She had put down her basket and was looking at me strangely as I stood holding the pole in the bright sunlight.
Look. She raised her hand, pointed. She didn’t touch my hair.
Maybe it’s papaya, I laughed, breathless. Maybe I broke one with the pole and it splashed on me.—I raised my hand and felt my hair where she pointed. It wasn’t sticky.
I don’t think it’s papaya, she said. She was always like that, thoughtful, plodding, unromantic, without invention. She looked at me with her sober eyes.
Did we break one? I asked, looking over the ground, still touching my hair gingerly.
I tried to look at my plait.
It’s too high, she said. I don’t think you can see it.
Then why did you tell me to look?—The rage was already coming over me, the desolation, the covetousness, for life, any kind of life. I touched my hair. It was as if I already knew what would happen, that we would be separated, she and I, that she would go into life, marry, have children and grow old, and I would spend a few seasons stretched in the doorway. My breath caught unnaturally, as if I were getting ready to cry.
Maybe you should go home, Ainut said.
Maybe you should mind your own business, I answered, suddenly furious. You’re so stupid. The basket’s full of ants.
I did go home, thoug
h. I went quickly, expertly through the marshes. I had always had a good hand for boats. My mother was under the house, weaving a cover for the big basket, but my father wasn’t there, his boat was gone. I pulled my boat up the slope, my hands shaking, my face hot. I was only fifteen, but still, I knew. My mind raced over my illnesses, my fevers, the times I would vomit and feel faint, and then quickly feel better again. Tati, is my hair red? I thought to myself. But I couldn’t say it. I stood there beside my boat, catching my breath. I couldn’t say it. My mother smiled; she didn’t stop weaving her basket. I couldn’t shatter her with another misfortune.
Good morning, good morning, she goes along, greeting everybody, incapable of leaving people alone, nodding to them, good morning, and they turn their backs or laugh at her, insulting, or they spit into the water. Some of them, if they are in a group, pretend to respond to her. Good morning, Hianot, Dab-Nin shouts. Her voice rings across the water, hard and flat, she’s standing in the reeds with other women, leering at us. The other women giggle. One of them raises a hand in protest, not sure she wants to participate in this, but hesitant because it’s so amusing, that stupid hotun woman panting after them like a dog. The blessing of jut! Dab-Nin shouts. The women burst out laughing, it’s too much. And to you, my mother says. Dab-Nin goes on grinning at us, my mother goes on greeting everyone, and islands of spittle float on the water.
A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel Page 26