by Kris Neville
She returned within an hour. Consulting no one, she walked through the compound (as if to be sure she were seen) and into the truck-garden beyond. She knelt and began to weed a row of alien vegetables by plucking the individual weeds from around each plant, with meticulous fingers.
An hour before sunset, Matuska put aside his assignment for the day and went to the female. Weary and exhausted, she continued to work, her raw fingers moving mechanically.
Bending, he rested a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Go home,” he said. “The work you have done has more than paid for the material.”
A casual smile twitched hollowly at her sweaty face. She ignored his hand and his voice. He left her there, back bent painfully, fingers moving, moving; at nightfall, he could still see her until it became too dark to see.
Thereafter it was not uncommon for a female native to come to the compound, to choose from the warehouse what material she desired, and to perform as an implicit, never-stated term of barter—a more than equivalent amount of labor. The females spoke no more than necessary. Matuska was unable to penetrate their reserve.
THE MAN, his name was Kinny, did not come until autumn.
Kinny—a squat block of a figure with long, ungainly arms, tiny, restless eyes, and hair wetted down until it glistened over his skull like a metal covering—stood before the doorway. He did not look at Matuska, but peered beyond him into the corridor. He swung his long arms back and forth restlessly. He said nothing.
“What do you want?” Matuska asked uneasily.
Grunting, Kinny brushed past him with sudden energy and planted his feet wide apart on the corridor flooring. “I came to see the pens.” His arms remained motionless while his nostrils wrinkled and his head swung suspiciously from side to side.
It was a colloquialism Matuska had not previously encountered. “You mean the inside, here?”
Kinny grunted.
“But first, tell me, you must tell me: why did your race abandon the cities?”
Kinny glared at him. I answer no questions, he seemed to say. Angrily he started for the door.
“No, no! Wait, wait! I’ll show you . . .”
“You go, I’ll follow.”
In silence, Matuska led him along the corridor. At his own door he stopped. “This is where I live. Would you like to see my room?”
Kinny gestured that he would.
When Matuska closed the door behind them, Kinny stared around wildly as if seeking some way to escape from the sudden oppression of the exitless walls. Then, seeing Matuska’s calm, he grinned foolishly and moved his hands limply. He rolled his shoulders and stretched the muscles in his arms. He surveyed the wooden furniture whose size dwarfed him: the massive bed, the high bureau, the tall, narrow bookcase, the sturdy table. “It is well enough.”
His eyes traveled again around the room. They rested for an instant on the brilliantly-colored painting above the bed, passed on, came back reluctantly. He bent forward; his mouth grew lax. He moved toward the bed, and at the edge stopped, still staring (transfixed now) at the delicate design and brushmanship, capturing as if alive an alien bird and an alien landscape.
“It is a beautiful picture,” Matuska said, towering beside the native. “I . . . I keep many beautiful things . . .” He reached across and handed it down. Kinny rubbed the polished frame eagerly with his heavy, blunt-fingered hands.
“Not as beautiful as the woods in spring.” His eyes glistened with excitement. “But well enough . . . I will take it with me.” Then, swinging his treasure carelessly from his left hand, he started for the door. He stopped. “The cities drew death.”
“Yes, yes,” Matuska said excitedly. “They’re not enough, and if they’re not enough, they’re nothing. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
Kinny shrugged. “The cities drew death.” And he was gone.
They do understand! Matuska cried triumphantly to himself.
Fifteen minutes later, the picture safely deposited beyond Matuska’s reach, the native stood at Matuska’s doorway once more. Before entering he studied the room carefully as if to detect any trap set in his absence. Then inside, he moved cautiously from one article of furniture to another. “It is dusty.”
“I would like to talk to you for a moment.”
“You should dust it.” Kinny drew a finger over the table and held it up for inspection, regarding it himself with exaggerated fastidiousness. He ran his other ungainly hand through his new-washed hair, as if to attract attention to it. “Give me something to dust with; I’ll show you how.”
“Look in the top drawer. Yes, pull it out. There, use that. I want to ask you some questions.”
“I dust,” the native said imperiously. “I do not answer questions.” He brandished the cloth. “You watch.”
HE DUSTED slowly, precisely, bearing down with unnecessary vigor at the end of each calculated stroke. He had to stand on tiptoe to reach the back of the bureau. He glanced over his shoulder, now and again to be sure the colonist was observing the mechanics of dusting. He held a semi-transparent globe to the light, turned it this way and that, wrinkling his face in intent inspection. He rubbed it briskly, examined it in the light again, and at length reluctantly returned it to the table. He was exceedingly careful to see that each object went back precisely as it had been—as if he wished to avoid the reprimand that might occur if one were disarranged. His hands moved with unaccustomed gentleness.
The silence had been unbroken.
He replaced the sash in the drawer. “You could do it.”
“I must remember,” Matuska said.
And so “they came together—each an outcast from his own world: the one newly-awakened to an awareness of beauty, and possessed of a curiosity that time and events had relegated to his long-forgotten ancestors; the other, searching and sick at heart, believing that the commitment to proliferation of his fellows was merely a desperate, futile, and lonely protest against the long night of eternity, needing to communicate to someone across the multiple barriers of alienness his primeval, vast and bottomless longing. The two of them, aliens and strangers, met and spoke and were forever locked away from each other by the worlds they could not entirely forsake.
Dimly, unvocally, Kinny experienced shadows of his racial past among the ornaments and colors of Matuska’s room; sadly, frighteningly, Matuska experienced the silence of his racial future among the weathering mounds of the cemetery.
3
KINNY BEGAN to come regularly to the compound and to Matuska’s room. Within a month, it was not unusual for him to arrive shortly after the colonist left for his work in the morning, to remain within the room (eating a noon meal of dried meats and roots there) until shortly before Matuska’s return at dusk. He spent the time cleaning and recleaning everything within the four walls, until the wood of the furniture glistened from his polishing; the floors gleamed; and the often-handled ornaments, and ever more numerous pictures (which Matuska began to purchase from other colonists) sparkled—until there was about the room a brightness and a freshness and a warmth that could not be found elsewhere upon the planet.
They were aware of each other’s occupancy of the room; a little of them both was combined and transmuted within the silent walls, so that at first they seemed to draw more closely together as the days progressed. But they seldom saw each other; they seldom spoke; soon their relationship assumed a static quality.
Once, when Matuska came in early, Kinny was fingering the binding of one of the books and puzzling over the tightly-printed symbols of the text.
Matuska said, “I will explain these, the books, the use of books . . .”
Kinny returned the book to the shelf. “I have seen what there is to see. We no longer make them, since they serve no purpose.”
And again, not too long afterwards, Matuska noticed that the native had taken nothing further by way of payment, and he delayed until Kinny arrived. He opened the jewel-case he was holding and removed the largest of the irridescent lava rocks. �
��For you,” he said, extending it.
Appreciation flickered in Kinny’s eyes; but the native turned from the gift and began to finger over the remaining stones, finally selecting one of the smallest—as if he could have taken any or all of them. “This has caught my eye. I will take it.” Only for an instant did he glance back at the one Matuska held, and then he dropped his choice into his fur-piece. Recently he had sewn in, crudely to be sure, a bit of leather as a pocket.
One afternoon—Kinny had been coming regularly for over a month now—Matuska returned while Kinny was still in the room. He watched the native for a moment, then he said, “You are careful never to change the arrangement of the furniture.”
Kinny blinked his eyes dumbly. “You may if you wish. You have my permission; I don’t mind. Variety is good.”
It seemed to Matuska that their failure at some undefined point to progress further in understanding each other had come to be symbolized by the unvarying sameness of the room.
Kinny turned without answer and was gone. Matuska, in stunned incomprehension, heard his feet hurrying along the corridor with heavy, disapproving slaps, and he wanted to cry out in anguish, “Come back! Come back!” He wanted to run after him and apologize for the insult, even though he could not understand the nature of it.
He felt futility and bitterness, confusion and hurt, betrayal and sorrow remembering how final the feet had sounded as they fled from him.
SNOW CAME; Matuska daily hoped for Kinny’s return and was daily disappointed. The vocal messages he entrusted to the females were unanswered; perhaps even undelivered. His sense of loneliness increased. He needed Kinny’s reassuring if enigmatic presence. The other colonists became more disapproving of his interest in the natives. He was afraid they might even forbid the females access to the compound. The other colonists were interested in only one goal: planting the colony firmly and assuring its survival. Matuska wanted to scream curses against the irony of each new building they erected. Watching the natives troop silently to bury their dead, he wanted to cry to his fellows, “See! They know! They build no walls against eternity! They know, they understand!”
Perhaps a message was delivered; perhaps the secret needs overcame the insult. At any rate, Kinny returned. The snow was a deepening blanket now.
Matuska did not see him the first day. The new sparkle of the furniture informed of his return. Matuska was afraid to wait for him the next morning; he dreaded the first meeting, dreaded that he might give some new and unintentional insult, even in the manner of his greeting, that would send the native away forever and restore the colonist’s isolation.
It was three days later that Kinny was waiting when he returned from work. The native nodded and stepped to the middle of the room. He regarded the arrangement of the furniture critically. “I will move this,” he said as if the idea suddenly occurred to him. Then he began to move furniture frantically, pulling and hauling it this way and that—trying to place it in some order so that it would be superior to (it was plain he did not understand in what way such things are judged) to the prior arrangement. The muscles in his forearms and back rippled with the effort, and he grunted heavily, lifting, pushing, displaying his strength . . .
l
Shortly the snow lay deep; it was a huge, endless whiteness upon the forest; it piled against trees and spread across the thick ice of the river. The tree-limbs creaked with snow and snapped brittlely and fell, trailing streamers of whiteness, and plunged silently into the cushion below.
Crude stoves in the villages burned defiantly against the cold. Natives flickered from house to house like wasted shadows. Beyond what little security was there, their world lay in drab hostility. Hunts went out daily and often came back with nothing.
Kinny’s face was gaunt.
Matuska wanted to explain that the colonists were not permitted to dispense their food-stores; that the silos stood for those to follow and their welfare could not be mortgaged to alleviate native suffering; a new sense of shame, perhaps as much as fear of offense, made him keep silent. Slowly he came to feel that it was his responsibility to lessen their suffering. It was a frightening thought; his compassion and sorrow filled him with a nameless brooding and discontent. Ignoring the disapproval of his co-colonists, he took a morning from his work. He was polishing his hand-weapon with an oily cloth when Kinny began to stamp the snow off his fur-wrapped feet outside the door.
“I will go hunting,” he said without looking up.
Kinny went to the drawer for his dust-rag. He shrugged indifferently.
Matuska dreaded the cold and exhaustion to follow. He lingered as long as he felt decently he could in the warmth of the room.
At the door he found Kinny, his face eager, just behind him. “I will go with you.”
Outside, Kinny hopped about nervously, making animal sounds of excitement deep in his throat. His breath billowed hotly before his face.
Leaping across the snow, almost to its belly, came Kinny’s mongrel, yapping in shrill joy. The native rubbbed the dog’s head and silenced its clamor by strangely-affectionate words. Shivering, then, the animal turned and ranged ahead of them. And the three of them, the dog leading, Kinny in the rear, plunged into the white forest.
Passing on the ridge above the village, Kinny had to call the log in. It had started to race down the slope (it seemed almost too great an expenditure of energy for such a sickly body) to where a female native was driving two cows before her.
They hunted nearly all morning before they jumped a fawn. Matuska’s feet had become leaden and icy; his lungs labored painfully against the air that cut like glass slivers. The fawn flashed fleetly beyond arrow-range, within a heartbeat. But the sharp splat of Matuska’s weapon did not send an arrow, and the fawn stumbled and collapsed while Kinny held the mongrel, lunging desperately in its desire to fall on the kill.
Matuska approached and soberly poked the cooling carcass with his toe. “You may have it.” He watched Kinny’s reactions. Kinny shuffled his feet in the snow and panted wetly above the blood-odored kill. “We have no need of it,” he said, and they left it lying there, taming the snow dark beneath its body.
Within the hour they shot two does and a rabbit. They left the does. Kinny fed the rabbit to the dog. “I overlooked to bring his food,” he apologized. “If we always left all of the kill, the dogs would not long survive to run more game. They are very valuable.”
Matuska struggled to conceal his exhaustion. Each breath seemed fire. He stumbled. “It is enough for today.”
On the way back to the compound, they stopped once to rest. While Matuska leaned heavily against a tree, Kinny capered impatiently behind him.
KINNY PARTED from the colonist at the gate and trotted toward the village, hurrying, Matuska knew, to retrieve the kill for his tribe before wild animals picked the bones clean. Matuska could not understand the frustrating indirections of their every relationship.
Thereafter he hunted once each week. He forced himself to work longer hours in the colony to make up for the time. He saw Kinny only on hunt-days.
On the fourth hunt, heart throbbing desperately he said, “Tell me. Why do you bury an animal with each corpse?” He held his breath, for fear that even such a harmless question might constitute an insult. His growing need for the physical presence of the native made him almost afraid to talk at all. And yet, in that burial-ritual, he seemed to catch a whisper of assurance: if he could only understand it completely, he felt that he would never need feel alone again.
“It is natural; it must be done.”
Matuska judged the tone. There was no hostility in it.
On the next hunt he asked: “Why must you bury an animal with each corpse; why must it be done?”
“It must.”
“Yes, but why? If it must be done, how is it that we do not do it also?”
“But why should you?” Kinny said. “Let us go.” He waited for Matuska to move. “Why should you?” he cried happily . . .
4
IN LATE January there was a brief period of freak warm weather, when the snow melted .rapidly, during which the natives organized a great animal-hunt. Kinny was gone for three days.
Matuska knew the hunt had ended when the cymbals in the village announced a death. Many native hunts ended in that fashion.
Kinny came the same morning. It was one of Matuska’s rare free days.
All morning Kinny did not speak. He was listless at his cleaning; he stared frequently out the window and across the compound.
Matuska watched him mutely and helplessly. At last he asked softly: “The cymbals? They were for a friend?”
“For a careless fool; I have no friends.”
“But you are sad?”
“. . . In the night, my animal died. I went this morning to feed him and he was dead.”
“I am sorry.”
Kinny said nothing.
“You must get another one.”
Slowly Kinny shook his head. “They will not give me another.”
“But why?”
“There are only so many. It has been a hard winter on most of our animals.” He moved to the bed and sat down. It was one of the few times he had sat in Matuska’s presence. He began to sob dryly, without shame. “I have nothing else.”
Matuska realized how deeply he had become attached to the native. He wanted desperately to comfort him. “Have you no female?”
“No, I . . . No. Nothing.”
Matuska waved his gaunt hands helplessly. He bent forward and spoke softly. “They blame you for coming here? Is it that?”
“Why should they?” Kinny demanded. “I go where I wish.” Tears glistened on his cheeks. “I will come back tomorrow.” He stood and was gone.
Matuska had not realized the depth of affection they could develop for even an animal. This revelation—when he remembered their burial-practice—left him chilled and afraid. He had long ago forced the comprehensive evidence of their savagery oat of his mind treating each instance of it as a sad but unique phenomenon. He had not really understood its extent; but now, belatedly, as understanding began to grow, he felt somehow personally responsible—as he felt responsible for their winter misery. The discontent that came with sorrow and compassion increased in intensity.