A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel (27 page)

My mother’s sobs grow louder when she hears him come in. He kneels beside her, whispers, strokes her hair. He probably thinks I’ve insulted her. The thought makes me want to laugh. But I don’t laugh, because I don’t want to cry.

She tells him, she says,
kyitna
. She weeps in damp heaves. The light moves over the thatch, drawing nearer. His knees crack as he lowers himself to the floor, the light above my hair. Hello, little frog. His voice is unsteady.

Hello Tchimu.—I don’t meet his eye, I look straight upward. He brushes his hand lightly over my hair. Then he stands again, his knees crack, and the light moves away. I love him, he is so calm, unflinching, controlled.

He bends down and talks to my mother in a quiet voice. Her sobs increase. He takes a leaf from the pile beside the water pots. He wraps some
datchi
in it and puts the package into his knapsack, and then he lets down the ladder and climbs out to free his boat.

He is out all night. He gathers seven frogs. He kills a leopard. He rows to the west and awakens Ipa the smith. My father pumps the skin bellows, sweating on the night beach, the flames flaring up, the smith hammering. Then my father leaves; he goes to the forest. He seizes crickets in the clearing. He opens his own veins. He bleeds. In the darkness, the rusty, clotted palisades of the dying place. An owl cries: he ignores the terrible omen.

In the morning our house is ringed with charms of dreadful potency. Copper bells tinkle in the breeze. There is a smell of urine and charred bone, and there is blood on all of the wooden stilts which support our house. My mother is cooking porridge over a brazier, inside the room. My father, very pale, sits by the wall. There is a poultice on his arm, and when I open my eyes he smiles, proud, vehement: We are not leaving this house.

I dreamed many times of the man we had seen on the beach, near the pirate caves, the man with the dark face, fox-colored hair, bleached eyes. I don’t know how many times I dreamed of him; it seemed like hundreds, and each dream released the same, specific terror. Ainut was always with me, always heavy, always needing to be dragged. It was essential that I protect her. She was myself, the world, she was as heavy as all of the children of the village, she had too many legs and arms. And the man, coming after us. His feet bending down the grass, the precise nature of his breath and shadow. The sea, far away, a strip of blue at the edge of a dazzling beach. The distance was too great. We would never make it.

Now I don’t know what he wanted. I think of him with pity. The way he waved his arms, as if pleading with us. And sometimes I think he wasn’t pleading at all, that we misunderstood: that he was attempting to warn us, even to save us.

So, my father closed us in. We had that: his supreme courage. Nothing like it had ever been seen in Kiem. This deranged doctor of birds, this lunatic with the
jut
of chiefs, living blatantly in the village with his
kyitna
daughter. Living in front of everyone, with the charms drying all over the house so that no one dared approach, not even with fire, sitting under his house and weaving a mat, in plain view, with the absurd nonchalance of the demented. Wait for a few days, he told my mother, then you can go out again. At first only he appeared, tempting attack. And we looked through the spaces in the thatch and saw the house surrounded, ugly faces, rusty hoes and spears.

Look, I whispered to my mother. There’s Ajo Ud. And there’s old Nedovi with a torch.—We had sweat on our palms, we couldn’t eat, could hardly stand, yet I felt closer to her than I had done in years. I even let her squeeze my arm, happy to make her happy with this graciousness, knowing she didn’t expect it. Look, it’s Ajo Kyet, she whispered, horrified, moving aside so that I could peer through her place in the thatch.

It was Ajo Kyet. He was the village doctor of leopards. He stood in the boat, his arms crossed on his chest. He did not look the way he did when he sat under his big house near the canal, with a white cloth around his waist—no, he was resplendent with new butter on his hair, and the tails of six blue monkeys hung from his cloak, and his leather belt was trimmed with several bags made of leopard skin, and clouds of incense rose from his long boat. His face was streaked with red. He looked splendid, imposing, and sorrowful. His voice boomed from his broad chest as I watched. Jedin of Kiem! he bellowed, raising his hand. You have brought abomination on us, the curse of
jut
be upon you.

My father’s voice startled us, right beneath our feet. Good morning, Kyet! he shouted. The blessing of
jut
!

There was a murmur from the crowd. Ajo Kyet looked sadder than ever. Oh, Jedin, he cried in thrilling tones. Gone are the days when you might call me Kyet. You have put yourself outside, and you know it as well as I do, in your heart. Your
jut
knows. Take your curse and go, Jedin of Kiem.

My daughter is innocent, shouted my father.

There were louder murmurs. Cursed by the tongue! someone cried. Everywhere people were spitting into the water. Some of them picked up clods of mud and touched them to their lips. Only Ajo Kyet was unmoved, pensive. Rarely have I seen anyone look so sad. He went on looking sad and glittering and handsome as he spoke, telling my father in his sonorous voice that it was the gods who assigned curses, just as only the gods could bless. He told my father that there would come a time when his
jut
would fail, and the charms on the house would be as a handful of ash, and the people would know it and they would come with fire and with weapons and obliterate the last trace of our home. He said that my father ought to have known, that he ought to have slipped away with us in the night instead of perpetrating this outrage, spending his own blood to make a sign to all the village that there was
kyitna
here, filth protected with magic. Moral filth, he called it. He was eloquent, noble, stately. We are innocent, my father shouted.

Ajo Kyet shook his head. Innocence cannot survive, he said, in the body of corruption.

(4)

A thousand times I promised myself to be different, patient, kind. I would go out alone, rowing my boat, after she had driven me to rage with her simplicity, after I had mocked her, sneered, or shouted. I would go out alone with only a clay beaker of water. The sea calmed me, the sky the color of mud. I would mutter to myself, arguing, defending her, rowing over that heavy, livid sea. She was guileless, she was good. She had done nothing wrong. Only expressed her pity for Ud’s first wife, or interrupted when I was learning a
tchavi
’s song from my father, asking how it could rain when there were oranges.

If there was so much fruit, she said, the rains would be over already.—She was under the house, building her cook fire. I was sitting beside my father in one of the grass-bottomed chairs. Of course the rains would be over, I snapped. That’s what he’s trying to say.

Well, she said doubtfully. But he says it rained for hours.

I know. He means—he’s showing the search for the
tchavi
. The way—I paused, helpless. It was no use talking to her.

Perhaps the fruit came early that year, she said.

And the way she said it—as if she were comforting me for the song’s mistake, while she squatted, fanning the fire with a reed fan, and my father sat, gentle, not saying anything, only waiting for her to be finished, not even trying to correct her—the way she was so satisfied with nothing, wanted no knowledge at all, only to sow, to dig, to have clean water, content to remain a fool forever—I can’t stand it, I shouted, and I untied my boat and dragged it down to the water.

Jissi, my father said. He was disappointed in me. He often said: Your mother is one of the humble. The humble are innocent; they do not need humiliation.

I rowed out to sea. I didn’t look back at them.

But now I will never row out to sea again, not alone. And I’ll never walk in the fields of millet either, hearing the wind expressing its longing amid the tall grain. And I’ll never build fires there to eat stolen fish. No, it’s over, from now on there won’t be any escape from her, her sighs, the way she squats heavily on her hams, the sloshing, sloshing sound at night as she rinses out her dress, and her odor, that smell of ancient things, of the dark. I can hear her turning over at night, sometimes snoring. She’s always tired, she sleeps in an instant, abruptly as a child. The sound of her sleep, her breathing, it’s oppressive. The house is so small, there’s no air, and I cry because I’m trapped there with her. I cry because I want my boat, I want to be out in the sunlight, I want to look at the sea again, at the mountains, it’s terrible when I can hear people talking across the water and I’m alone, never free of them and yet always alone. Yesterday, it’s always yesterday that a group of people came, people my age, and stood on the opposite bank and taunted me. Among them were Tchod and Miniki. Throw out your mother’s rags, they sang, don’t you know that eating them gives you
kyitna?

In the farthest reaches of the night, Hed-hadet, the rain.

It was the beginning of the world. Hed-hadet began to swell. Bigger, bigger, as big as the mountain of Twenty Thousand Flowers, as big as the moon. No, bigger than that, as big as the ocean, bigger still, as big as the deepest night sky during the dry season. Then she burst, and the world was born in a giant shower of rain, with a great explosion of light and laughter and tears.

The sun and the moon were born then, and the pomegranate tree, and the oil-producing palm tree and the dove. The heron was born, or the thing that made the heron, and the evening star, and the bell and the drum and the thing that made the cricket. Hed-hadet gave birth to the inventor of the elephant and the inventor of the hippopotamus, and the razor and the hoe, and the
datchi
and the millet stalk, and the things which were to create the frog and the donkey.

Then there was a great silence. The rain stopped falling: she climbed back into the regions of the night.

All over the world, the things were looking at one another.

From the distance, chasing its dogs, came the wind.

When we met the sailors from Prav, we were climbing the rocks looking for snails. We had abandoned our boats on the beach below, and they, with their boats, were on the other side of the rocks, smoking dark cigars and making fish soup. We smelled the smoke and crept forward, lying flat on the rocks. We could look down on their heads, sleek hair, bright scarves. They all wore strips of cloth around their brows, tied on their hair behind: to collect the sweat, they explained to us later. I darted my eyes toward Ainut. No, she mouthed, shaking her head, beginning to snake backward stealthily. The sun was bright, the scent of cigar smoke
acrid, overpowering. Good afternoon! I shouted down to them.

We were surprised at how fast they were on their feet, their knives unsheathed. I clung to the rocks, giddy with terror and joy. When they saw us the tension eased slowly out of their bodies and they laughed, gesturing at one another, talking in their own language. What are you doing up there? one of them called to us. Come down and eat.—Their Kideti had a smoothness, a watery quality, as if their tongues were gentler and more supple than ours. It was an accent fluid, caressing, unforgettable.

Let’s not go, Ainut whispered.

I was climbing down the rocks. You’d better be alone! shouted one of the sailors, knife held up in warning. I saw that it was a woman. She wore the same blue tunic and trousers as the two men.

We’re alone, I said. We’re just two girls. Come on, I added to Ainut, who was climbing slowly because she was trembling. One of the men took my arm and helped me jump down onto the sand, cool in the shadows. In the background the light leapt on the sea.

God of my father, the sailor said, humorously. You’re
chakhet
. Do you know what
chakhet
is?

No. What is it?

Chakhet
. . . He waved a hand in the air as if seeking to pluck out the word. The other two were putting away their knives.

Chakhet
is brave, the woman sailor said.

No, clever, said the other man.

No, no, said the one who had helped me down. He reached up a hand and helped Ainut to jump down next to me, biting his lip, his eyes narrowed in search of the word. No,
chakhet
. . . When you do something that doesn’t need to be done. When you climb a tree because it’s tall. When you swim where there are crocodiles, or answer a chief carelessly, just to prove that you can do it—that’s
chakhet
.

When you startle people for no reason, said the woman, picking up her cigar and blowing on it to clean off the sand. And make their cigars go out and their dinner burn. . . .

Don’t listen to her, said the sailor who had helped us down. She was born like that.

We sat with them in the shadow of the rocks, around their fire. The odors of woodsmoke and smoke from the cigars. And from the clay pot on the fire, too, the smell of fish, peppers, and ginger cooking together, pungent, delicious. My mouth watered; it was rare to be offered such rich food. The sailors had brought the ginger and peppers with them. The one who had called me
chakhet
sat next to me and showed me his tin of spices, pulling it from inside his tunic. He never traveled without it. At sea, he explained, one should always put fire on the tongue, it didn’t cause thirst, that was only a rumor. The spices kept one happy, alive, they relieved the monotony. We all travel with spices on Prav, he said. While he talked, the other man, who was older, with a carved, wood-tough face, stirred the soup with a narrow twig, and the woman smoked and looked at us sardonically and smiled. She had a round face, and her breasts bulged under her tunic. The sailor with the spices asked us questions, our names, what we did in our village. I answered, and he tried to make Ainut talk. Once you begin it’s easy, he told her encouragingly, and the others laughed, and Ainut looked blank and stolid and tightened her lips. But after a time she relaxed, it was impossible to remain frightened among these sailors who were so free from care, so unruffled, with their easy laughter and indolence as they paused for a time in Kiem on their way to Dinivolim, Jennet, and Ilavet. On their way to somewhere. They told us of the black hills of Jennet, the flowers of the interior whose juice was prized by kings, and the bazaars of Akaneck where slabs of elephant meat were sold and there were golden combs, clocks, and caged dragonflies. And where is your ship? I asked. And they told us that it was up the coast in the natural harbor of Pian, among the hills, and could not believe that we had never been to Pian, never heard of it, it was so close to us, and they looked at us with pity. Poor little millet-grinders, the woman said. She watched us from the distance of her years, travel, toughness, and knowledge, with a gaze that was ironic and sage, sad and amused all at once, with her hair disarrayed by the thousand winds of the sea.