The River and the Book

by Alison Croggon

  In the shantytowns I have spoken to women who have been raped, and they told me how they felt, how the most intimate and fragile sense of themselves had been torn open and violated. I think it is wrong of me to take their terrible experiences and compare them to mine, but I can’t help it. That is how I felt when I saw Jane Watson on the television. I felt as if my soul had been violated.

  29

  I dreamed of my grandmother last night. In my dream, she wasn’t old: she was young, as young as my mother was when I was a little girl. I was a crane, and I was flying over my village. The plains stretched out beneath my wings, in all their subtle and various colours. People think of the plains as empty and harsh, but they are wrong; the land quivers with life. The grasses in my dream flowered in soft colours, purple and pink and yellow, and small herds of deer looked up as my shadow passed over them, and hares startled and ran. I could hear the music of crickets and grasshoppers rising up in the warm air, and I smelled the grass, fresh and wild.

  Grandmother was standing outside our house with her arms raised, singing to welcome me to the village. It was a song I didn’t know, and I thought it was the most beautiful melody I had ever heard. When I woke up, I tried to remember it, but it vanished away with most of the dream.

  When she saw me, Grandmother smiled. She knew it was me. She waited while I circled down and perched on the chimney of our house.

  “Welcome, Simbala Da Kulafir Atan Mucarek Abaral Effenda Nuum,” she said. “It’s good to see you.”

  “Hello, Grandmother,” I said. “I am a crane now. Do you mind?”

  Grandmother laughed. “Of course I don’t mind,” she said. “I always knew you were a crane. But don’t forget us, eh?”

  “How could I forget you?” I said. “I miss you all the time.”

  “My name is in your name,” said Grandmother. “And your daughter will be all our names too.”

  As she said that, I saw that my mother was standing beside her, and then I saw a crowd of other women, and I knew they belonged to me. There was my great-grandmother, Mucarek, and my great-great-grandmother, Abaral, and many others I couldn’t name. They were dressed in their best clothes, and the sun shone down on all the colours so that I was dazzled. I blinked, and then they were all gone, all my mothers, and the village was empty. And then everything faded away and vanished before my eyes.

  I dreamed some other things I don’t remember, and when I woke up, my face was cold with tears.

  30

  I bought Jane Watson’s book today. It was hard to find and expensive, but if I am careful this month I will not be too much out of pocket. Ling Ti offered to steal it for me, as he said I should not give Jane Watson my money by buying her book, but I told him that would be unfair to the bookshop. It hasn’t been translated, and I can read it only with the greatest difficulty. Ling Ti speaks that language fluently, and he said he would read it for me and then condemn it in the literary magazine that publishes his poems.

  I said that perhaps he shouldn’t make his mind up about what he thinks before he reads the book, but he is adamant that Jane Watson should be torn limb from limb. “Not literally, of course,” he said, pushing his glasses up his nose and grinning. “Just in a very bloody, metaphorical way.” He made me laugh for the first time in days.

  Ling Ti spends half his time writing furious editorials designed to upset his poetic enemies. When I ask him why, he usually says he does it for fun. If he’s very drunk, he tells me that it’s because the world needs to be cleansed of buffoons and shysters, and that he is the Broom of Truth. Icana worries that he will get into trouble with the authorities, but he just laughs and takes no notice. I worry too. There are many poets in prison here, and even more who have been forced to live in exile.

  Me, I find that I am not interested in making the Book an occasion for some kind of silly feud. And I am determined to read Jane Watson’s book for myself, no matter how difficult it is. Perhaps she has written something about my Book that might help me to find it. But I think, more than anything, that I am hoping to discover why she did what she did. I think not understanding how she could have betrayed us like that haunts me almost as much as the loss of the Book itself.

  Mely, of course, doesn’t know why I am bothering. She says I should either track down Jane Watson and demand the Book back, or just accept that it is gone and get on with making sure I earn enough money for our treats. She is very angry that I can’t afford to buy chicken this month.

  31

  It is a long time since I last wrote here: a month at least. I’ve scarcely seen most of my friends. The last time I talked to Yuri was ten days ago. We shared a quick glass of bubble tea, and when I stood up to go home he complained that he never sees me any more. I told him I was too busy reading and he made a face and said that I had better finish soon.

  For weeks I’ve been spending my evenings struggling with Jane Watson’s book. It wasn’t just that it was hard to read because I don’t know the language very well; it also made me feel things I didn’t expect.

  Before I read any of the text, I looked at all the photographs. Only a few were of my village. Jane Watson had taken pictures of people all along the River. Some of them made me smile: Mizan, leaning on the rails of his boat, grinning into the camera; and Mei, the innkeeper in the mountains who was kind to Yuri and me, standing in the doorway of her house, her worn hands on her broad hips. Some of the photographs were very beautiful, and some of them were very sad; but they all seemed long ago and far away.

  I don’t know what to say about Jane Watson’s book. I have found out things I didn’t know: she describes the foreign companies that are financing the cotton fields, and names the insecticides that are poisoning the river water, and there are tables of figures that show how much water is being taken from the River. She writes about how the government has sent troops to protect the cotton fields from angry locals, and the corruption that has made it possible for land to be stolen from people who had farmed it for generations.

  She talks about the violence that Kular described to us, long, long ago in our kitchen. Jane Watson tells it as if she is standing at a distance, looking from above like an eagle, so she can observe patterns and connections that can’t be seen at ground level. She writes about rivers that have died in other parts of the world, and warns that the same thing will happen to our River, which feeds the whole country from the Plains of Pembar to the city. She quotes scientists and sociologists and ecologists and politicians. She talks about the suffering of the village people, of how they are driven from their homes by violence and famine, to end up in the shantytowns that cluster around the city.

  It is much more interesting than what she said on the television, and, despite everything, I reluctantly admire what she has done. When I got to the end of the book, I turned it over and looked at the cover: my face gazed back at me under the title, but somehow it wasn’t my face any more, just as the story Jane Watson tells isn’t my story. It belongs to so many people, but somehow it seems to me to belong most of all to Jane Watson. I heard her hard, cool voice in my head, putting together her facts and her arguments. She was very convincing. She said she is fighting for justice. She is telling the world about what is happening to my people, just as she said she would all those long months ago when first I met her. All the same, something important is missing among all those facts and figures and quotations, although I can’t put my finger on what it is.

  I remember what Mely said when she objected to me writing about her. I’m not a story, Mely told me. I’m your friend. What if you say things that aren’t true? Won’t you be changing how things are? Has Jane Watson changed things by writing her book? Maybe things had already changed before I realized, and she was just what followed.

  There is one missing thing that is easy to spot. In all the hundreds of pages of The River People of the Pembar Plains, Jane Watson doesn’t mention the Book. Not once. I read it through twice to be sure. She writes about the temple and the harvest and the
weaving and the river traffic, noticing all sorts of details, but in her story the Keepers don’t exist. For a terrible moment I wondered whether I had imagined everything: perhaps the Book was just a story my mother and grandmother had told me and that I had childishly believed was real. Maybe it had never existed at all. But I remembered my name. I said it out loud: Simbala Da Kulafir Atan Mucarek Abaral Effenda Nuum. It tells who I am, and who my mother and her mother were, right back to my great-great-grandmother.

  Even if the Book is lost for ever, even if no one but me remembers it, we are the Keepers.

  32

  In the weeks when I was reading Jane Watson’s book, Ling Ti dropped in every few days to find out how it was going. He would sit in my kitchen with Mely purring on his lap, the lamplight shining on the lenses of his glasses, and demand to know what I had read, and what I thought of it. He behaved like a teacher who was giving a lesson. He listened intently. I don’t think anybody I know listens as hard as Ling Ti. When what I said didn’t make sense, because I had misread something or I didn’t know the meanings of the words, he would take the book and read out the passage, and we would talk it over until I understood it. I asked him once why he bothered, and he said that it mattered, that what was happening to the River people was important, and what happened to me was important too. I asked him if he was still planning to write an editorial that would tear Jane Watson limb from limb, and he replied that he wasn’t sure any more if that was the right thing to do.

  He visited the day after I had finished reading. I told him then that Jane Watson hadn’t mentioned the Book or the Keepers, and how it had made me feel. Ling Ti screwed up his face. “Would you have felt better if she had?” he asked.

  The question surprised me, and so I thought about it before I replied. “It might have made me feel worse,” I said. “She would have been writing about something she didn’t understand at all. She would have got it wrong.”

  “Perhaps she was being tactful, because she knew she didn’t understand it,” said Ling Ti. “Or perhaps she didn’t think it was relevant, compared to what is happening to the River.”

  It sounded as if he were defending her.

  “The Book was the most precious thing in our village,” I said indignantly. “How could she pretend it didn’t exist? It was disrespectful. Especially to my grandmother. Jane Watson didn’t seem to think that she mattered at all.” I didn’t add: it was disrespectful to me, but I meant that too.

  Ling Ti frowned, and was silent for a while, so the only sound in the kitchen was the popping of the oil lamp and Mely’s purr. Then he looked at me, and I saw that his face was unusually serious.

  “Sim,” he said, “Jane Watson is here, in the city. She is staying at the university for a year, as a guest, and I know how to find her.”

  For a few moments I couldn’t breathe. “Jane Watson?” I said, stupidly. “Here?”

  “Yes. I could take you to visit her, and you could ask her about the Book yourself.”

  It seemed to me that Ling Ti looked slightly guilty as he said this.

  “You’ve known for a while, haven’t you?” I said.

  “A couple of weeks,” he said. “I … wanted to be sure before I told you. I know people in the faculty, and they put us in touch. She wants to interview me.”

  “Why?” I said blankly.

  Ling Ti smiled. “Because I am a great poet, of course. I thought I could take you too.”

  After all this time, after all my long searching, I almost refused. I told Ling Ti that the last person I ever wanted to see was Jane Watson. I was filled with a consuming anger. I stood up and threw the book at Ling Ti and shouted that he should have told me before, that he should have warned me, that I didn’t want his stupid help, sticking his stupid nose into my business. Mely yowled and ran out of the room. I pummelled Ling Ti’s chest with my fists and he was forced to hold me back so I wouldn’t hurt him. He just said my name, over and over again, until I calmed down; and then I burst into tears, and he held me until I stopped crying.

  “Sim,” he said again, and he wiped the tears from my cheeks with his fingers. Then he kissed me. No man has ever kissed me before, and for a little while I forgot all about Jane Watson and my village and the Book. I forgot about everything except Ling Ti.

  33

  I feel raw, as if all my feelings have come to the surface of my skin and there is nothing to protect me from them. It’s because at last I will speak to Jane Watson, but it is also because of Ling Ti. He told me that he hadn’t meant to kiss me that day, but that he had wanted to ever since we met. “I didn’t know how,” he said to me yesterday. “You are so prickly, Sim.”

  “Me?” I said. “Prickly? What about you? You fight with almost everyone you know.”

  “That’s because I am a great poet,” he said.

  “You are also the vainest person I know,” I said.

  “You know it’s true.”

  “You’re not greater than Anna.”

  “That’s true too,” he said, smiling. “It’s all nonsense, anyway.”

  Anna and Icana had known how Ling Ti felt all along, and when we walked into the Stray Dog holding hands, their faces lit up and they clapped. Icana says that is because they are sentimental romantics and they couldn’t help hoping that one day I would see that we belonged together. Anna says she mostly wanted us to get together because I am the only possible cure for Ling Ti’s vanity. They teased us, which made me feel awkward, but then the music started and we danced and I forgot all about being shy. At this time, in this place, I am happy. It is a happiness that is threaded through with a terrible sadness: I have lost so much, and found so much, and it’s hard to disentangle one thing from the other.

  Mely is jealous. She didn’t speak to me for two days, but fortunately she likes Ling Ti too much to stay angry. For those two days, she made my life miserable. She refused to eat or to come into the flat, and hid in the fig tree, sulking. Ling Ti was cunning and brought some chicken livers over, and we left them on the sill as we sat in the kitchen talking. Mely can’t resist chicken livers, and it wasn’t long before we saw her in the tree, her nose twitching. We pretended we hadn’t noticed her, and step by step she crept to the window, until she was hunched on the closest branch. She was very hungry, but she is also very stubborn, and she knew that if she ate the livers, she would have to forgive us. She sat on that branch for more than half an hour. In the end she came back inside, and when she had eaten the livers she pretended that she hadn’t been offended, after all. “I have been very busy,” she told me haughtily. “I have lots of friends you don’t know about.”

  Now she says it will be all right as long as everything remains the same. The problem is that nothing ever does.

  Last night all my dearest friends came over: Anna and Icana and Yuri and Ling Ti. It was a wonderful evening. I made my favourite rice dish and everyone brought wine and sweets, and we sat on the carpet on cushions and gossiped and joked. When we had finished eating, we talked for a long time about Jane Watson.

  Ling Ti has made an appointment to visit her next week, and I have agreed to go with him. He hasn’t told her that he is bringing me. She thinks that she will be interviewing him for her new book.

  “An ambush,” said Anna, her eyes gleaming.

  “Yes,” said Ling Ti. “I think it will be best to surprise her. The main thing will be to get the Book back.”

  “What if she doesn’t have the Book?” I asked. This is my greatest fear: I have no reason to think that she will have it with her. She might even have sold it.

  “If she doesn’t have it, she can tell you where it is,” said Yuri.

  “If I were her, I’d just deny everything,” said Icana, frowning. “You can’t prove that she took it, or that she has it.”

  The thought of Jane Watson denying her crime made me cold with rage. “If she does, Ling Ti should write about it, and put it in his magazine,” I said. “Everyone must know what she did. And we should tell the univ
ersity that she ought to be thrown out. I think that she should be exposed as a fraud, even if she gives the Book back to me.”

  “There’s a problem, though,” said Ling Ti, glancing quickly at me. “Jane Watson isn’t actually a fraud. She’s important, Sim. You read her book about the River people. Even you have to admit that it matters. Nobody else is writing about the things she is, and her books make people take notice, especially overseas.”

  I sat mutinously silent. Ling Ti and I had been having this argument for days. Ling Ti reads dozens of journals and papers, including foreign ones, and is very well informed. He keeps telling me that I should read more.

  Patiently, Ling Ti ran through his arguments. He said that Jane Watson’s visit to the university was already controversial, because her books had made her powerful enemies. If those people could find a way of disgracing her, they would be delighted. He said that making a scandal would only play into the hands of the people who wanted to silence her. “Do you want to help them, Sim?” he said. “Because, if you destroyed Jane Watson, that’s exactly what you would be doing.”

  “I want her to be punished for what she did,” I said. I knew I was right. But Ling Ti was also right, and underneath I knew that, too.

  “She might be feeling bad about it, and want to give the Book back anyway,” said Anna. “She might be relieved if you ask for it.”

  “If she does feel bad, why hasn’t she given it back already?” I said. “She’s had plenty of time.”

  “Perhaps you could threaten her,” said Yuri. “You know, if she won’t admit it. Perhaps you could tell her that you will expose her as a thief, and make her give you the Book that way.”