“No,” I said. “A door.”
“A door,” he repeated. New tears slipped from his lashes and down his cheeks, but I think he did not know that he was weeping. Where was he looking now with his bright eyes, devoid of color in the gloom, shot with a hard, abstract brilliance? Into his old world. Where in the days of triumph and certainty he had walked in a dark robe through the gleaming halls, carrying his writing box, and rain had fallen among the trees of the roof gardens, melting the light of the lamps. There he had walked with an angel at his side. And now he looked at me. “Tchavi!” he said. One word, half a whisper and half a cry. It carried wonder and an anguished plea. He took my hand, bent over it, pressed it to his brow. “Tchavi. Tchavi.”
I imagine his departure from the palace. He’s in a room, one of those small clean rooms of the Tower of Myrrh, a pallet on the floor, a few gnarled, half-melted candles, the open windows showing the sleeping fields. The first birds have begun to sing, and the fields are blue with mist, but he still has a candle lighted, on a chair, and by its light he is carefully turning books over in his hands and then packing them in tall, scuffed leather bags. He has not yet acquired the legendary sea chest he will purchase in Bain, perhaps in the Chandler’s Market. The candlelight caresses his silver hair, then sinks and loses its way in the folds of his voluminous dark robe.
It is the same robe that filled with rain under the trees when the priest’s daughter watched him from a high window, and now he reaches behind him and clutches its fabric in two handfuls and pulls it smoothly off over his head. It lies on the pallet, crumpled like a skin. It smells of the earth, of the wild roots he used to make its dye, of the winter rain that fell while he wove its cloth, of the wicks of lamps, of the dusty curtains in the shrine of the Stone. He stands naked, his ribs lit by the flicker of candlelight, and looks outside at the fields where the shadows are deepening. Then he bends to untie the knot of the limp cloth traveling bag which has gathered dust in the corner for nine years.
The knot will not untie. He snatches at it with icy fingers. Finally he severs the string with his teeth. It leaves the taste of ash in his mouth, and he reaches into the bag at last and pulls out the clothes, the white shirt, the tapered trousers. He is still thin as he was years ago and the clothes fit him well enough, but he does not fit them: his body is awkward. From the bottom of the cloth bag he removes, and puts on with clumsy movements, the rings and the earrings set with veined blue stones.
By the time he reaches the southern pier the hills will be blazing with light, and his earlobes, unaccustomed to the jewelry, will be sore. But now as he touches the earrings tentatively they do not feel painful, only heavy, with the dull weight of any stone. Soon he will not notice them at all, as when he stands in our courtyard and the sun of the islands fills them with liquid radiance, and the boy who converses with birds reminds him suddenly of their presence by reaching out for them and crying “Katchimta”: Blue.
And I, too, I changed my clothes. I put away my Bainish suit and slipped into my Kideti trousers and vest. A cloak against the rains, though it was still bright and hot outside when I went to the altar room and reached out for my jut. A shiver of dread went through me in the instant before I touched it, and I laughed because I had never cared for my jut, that little claw-footed shape with the jade handles. I had never cleaned it, never oiled it, never prayed over it. “Come,” I told it, smiling, and hefted it in one hand. It was heavier than I had expected, as if its insides were solid clay. When I turned I saw my mother in the doorway, and she gasped and put her hands over her mouth, her eyes filling.
“Don’t go,” she cried.
I held the jut close to my side, my cloak falling over it. “I’m glad you’re here. I was going to look for you before I went. I knew you’d miss my jut, if no one else did.”
She was not listening, could not hear me. “Don’t.” She rubbed my shoulder, tears bright on her cheeks.
“I’ll come back,” I said. “Soon. In a fortnight, perhaps. I’ll always go, but I’ll always come back.”
“I shouldn’t have let you go.” She gripped my collar, her eyes fierce. “I know something happened to you there. I’m not a fool. When Sten came—he said you were ill. What kind of illness? He wouldn’t tell me—he didn’t know, he said . . .”
I put my arm around her and kissed her hair.
“And now you’re going. With your jut. And I should be proud. . . . It’s a blessing, a tchavi in the family. . . .”
Her tears soaked into my vest. I waited, knowing that at last she would raise her head, push back her hair and try to smile. And when she did I smiled down at her and told her again that I would come back when I could, soon, perhaps before the long rains. And I walked out with my jut under my cloak. I crossed the farm, greeting the laborers who waved to me from the fields. This happy land, I thought, this happy land. I passed the row of storage rooms, secluded under calamander trees, their doors chained shut. I went on walking, far from the village, out to the cliffs where I used to go with Lunre, the briny rocks like spines under my sandals. My jut fell soundlessly, the sea too far for the splash to reach me. About me mountains hung like palaces of cloud.
Tchavi, they call me now. Not Ekawi, never Ekawi. They follow me through the village when I come down from the mountain. Children, precious as water after my months among the peaks. Breathless women begging me to come into their homes for a meal. Tchavi, Tchavi. A ragged procession follows me down the road, and people glance at one another and say: “He is going to his jut.” And others say: “He has no jut.” But no one knows for certain. I stride toward the yellow house, leaning on my staff. There, for a short time, I will stay. At home. I sit with my family, I walk, I read. I exchange the books I took into the mountains for new ones. I visit Lunre and Niahet his wife. I talk with many people, whole and hotun. And I remember Jissavet.
No, she will not come again.
I look for her on the evening paths the color of mist, at the corner of the house where moisture trickles. At this corner, behind the bushes where direct sunlight never falls, this corner of permanent shadows, mildew, decay. I breathe the dense nocturnal odor of jasmine, the smell of the rain-soaked wall. “Autumn comes with a whisper, smelling of stone. . . .” But there is no autumn here, and there is no angel, no dark butterfly on the roof, no glancing and inexplicable light.
I walk under the dripping trees. Across the sky the blood of my heart is spread in the shape of her fine, receding footprints. Like doors of fire, opening and closing. While in the courtyards of Tyom the braziers are lit and the old men wheeze with laughter.
I lean on the fences, looking for her. A lamp is lit in a nearby house and a dark shape moves from the grass to the little pathway of broken bricks: a clay jar in her arms, she passes, one leg and then another leg. Her queenly back, the oblique light on her heel. I am ready to cry out; I make a movement and she turns. Her face is surprised in the dusk, no more than eight or nine years old. Of course, I recognize the house, it’s Pavit’s youngest daughter. I have always known those windows smothered in leaves.
Afternoons of Tyom. Drunk with the heat I stagger up from the hour of rest, my head throbbing, my mouth dry. I stumble into the courtyard, already vaguely looking for her in the water jar, the cup held to my lips, the heavy light on the stones. Flies buzz around me, rumors of her in the shadow of the wall. I narrow my eyes, gazing into the sunlight, and the heat and sweat on my lashes make me believe I see her incipient form, radiating luster among the hibiscus. But she does not come, she never arrives. She is always on the point of being, never crossing over again into life. When the storms roll in from the sea, I sit in the doorway of the hall while the rain unleashes its demons in the darkened courtyard.
And now, how glad I am that I did not burn this stack of books, this poor vestige of her, pathetic as a stray hair! For I am like those lovers who keep obscure and grotesque charms, a maize-cob gnawed by the loved one, a tick scratched from her ankle. Such is the angel’s anadnedet. I
kneel at the table in the schoolroom, reading in the oily gleam of my lamp, for the light that enters from the garden is not enough, only the faded light that penetrates the curtain of rain. In the resonance of the downpour I review her passionate language. “There’s thunder, darkness, a cold fog everywhere.” The poverty of the words does not deprive them of significance: sometimes I think they are almost, almost enough . . . almost enough to call her up again, real, before me, with her flashing eyes, her sumptuous, unreachable skin. So the lover invents his own religion, praying over his treasure of discarded fingernails. The anadnedet has no more power than these—perhaps less. Yet I adore it; to touch its pages gives me joy. There, at the corner, a stain of ink shows where I started when she suddenly spoke to me in the midst of my hurried writing. Wonderful stain, peaked like a star. And all these creased and dirty pages, dry and porous in the light of my lamp. I bend down close: they smell of smoke as they speak to me of a watery temple, maps “curled at the edges,” “immense fruit bats.” Jissavet does not live within these words, she is not contained by them. What would she say of this rainstorm, had she lived? No, I will never know how she would respond to this crash of thunder, if she would start, laugh, or run outside into the garden. Still, I read. When the rain stops I can hear the sound of the pages turning, a sensuous sound like a woman turning in bed. A whisper beneath the dropping of water from the wet leaves of the garden hedge and the echoing clamor of the disturbed cockatoos.
I am like no other tchavi in the history of the islands. When I visit Tyom, children come to me in the old schoolroom. They come with pens of tediet-wood, with hibiscus-flower ink in leather bottles, with stiff paper lifted out of a slurry of leaves. These are made by the yellow man who lives on Painted Mountain, a mad old codger who gives them to anyone who asks. Only the children ask. In the schoolroom they show me the words they have written during my absence, whole stories in Kideti, embryonic poems. This alphabet was developed in Olondria, I tell them, but it is our own; it was used to pen the first work of written Kideti literature. The Anadnedet, by Jissavet of Kiem. This is why we call it Jissavet’s Alphabet. At the end of each lesson I read aloud from this seminal work. And I introduce them to others, books I have translated from Olondrian in the most violent and sacrilegious form of reading. And I tell them: This is a journey to jepnatow-het, the land of shadows. Do not mistake it for the country of the real.
Perhaps even the land named in the books is no longer real. Terrible rumors reach us from the north: libraries burning, devotees of the Stone dragged into the street. Perhaps, one day, Tyom will become the last refuge of books. I do not know. I read. I take the children of Tyom hunting with Firdred, spearing boar in snowy Olondrian forests. Together we enter the dark-shuttered castle of Beal. And Fodra takes us to Bain, to the white walls overlooking the sea, the eternal flavor of olives. Then I look up: the light has changed, the children are restless with hunger, we have all lost another afternoon of our lives, gaining nothing but an enigmatic glow: for the cup I lift now is not merely a cup but carries on its glazed surface the shadows of sails. And this lintel, suddenly it’s darker, as if magically aged. And the flowers of the courtyard, exhausted with heat, hang on their stalks like handkerchiefs forgotten after a midnight ball, like sashes lost at romantic assignations. In the same way, perhaps, I am still influenced by the angel, subtly, hazily, as the tide responds even in the dark of the moon. Sometimes she comes to me in dreams, and it is as if I have been permitted to enter the huge and vanished doors of childhood.
My lost rose, my distant bell! What was that feeling of happiness, welling up unexpectedly under the sorrow? I was in the schoolroom after a lesson; my mother was there; the room was hot and bright, the walls yellow with light from the open doorway. I stood, shaken with joy, concentrating on the feeling as if analyzing a new and delightful taste. It was the angel: the pure heat, the warbling doves in the sunny garden, my mother’s golden face lit by the walls.
“What is it, younger son?” she asked me, laughing.
What is it? Yes, what is it? It is the reason I walk the mountains after dusk, unable to bear even my tattered shelter of dried grass, and watch the fireflies pulsing over the forest. Oh, will she not come? Can they not call her, those roving lamps? No: I am alone in the sultry air, in the faintly violet darkness, in the odor of damp leaves. But I go on waiting for her. I look for her still.
Acknowledgments
This book took two years to write and a decade to revise, and it’s impossible to thank all the people who helped me along the way. However, special thanks are due:
To Anna Jean Mayhew, for her helpful comments. To the “Smiling Authors”: Kerry Dunn, Sheryl Dunn, Richard C. Hine, Marla Mendenhall, Jarucia Jaycox Nirula, Dwight Okita, Steffan Piper, and Robert L. Taylor, for constructive criticism, advice, and moral support.
To Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link of Small Beer Press, for making it happen, and for the magic editing touch.
To Kat Köhler, my partner in crime.
To my parents, who passed on their love of words.
And to Keith—first reader, loyal critic, mapmaker, and inspiration—who was there when it all began.
Sofia Samatar wrote A Stranger in Olondria in Yambio, South Sudan, where she taught high school English. She has also worked in Egypt, and now lives in the United States with novelist Keith Miller and their two children.
Learn more at sofiasamatar.com.
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