Paradise and Elsewhere (2 page)

 

D
oes the goat cry
when it is milked, or the sheep when shorn? There is no end to the foolishness of the tourist, I think as the bus pulls into the square. And for a man with a belt of money to weep over such a sum is a truly astounding thing. I tell myself this but nonetheless, I prefer a smile and this was not how it was supposed to end and despite myself I keep remembering the man, how he wept and how the woman who seemed so hard before touched him gently between the shoulder blades.

I think of him as I change the fifty note into four tens and ten one aeiki coins. I think how for a few hours I am as rich as him, the tourist. I can go anywhere, eat anything. But only here, in my country. I have never been to any other, and that is why I do not know whether it is beautiful here or not.

A woman sits under the trees in the square, her blind eyes like two half-cooked eggs in her face. She can tell when someone comes near from the sound of their steps and the breeze they make. I give her two aeiki from my part of the money and when I put the two coins right in her hand her fingers close over them fast, as if I might change my mind.

I always do this, and she always says, “Bless you. God will know that you are a good man.” But today this leaves me feeling empty. I am still feeling that way, and thinking that I will have a Coca-Cola to fill me up, when I meet the blonde woman, tall, perfect, like an actress from the movies. She wants the bus station, she says. I take her rucksack from her and lead her there, going through the back streets, naturally, because that way it seems longer and more of a service.

“Thank you,” she says, standing there where all the buses and people are, her rucksack on the ground, “you are very kind.” Her hand moves to the money belt around her waist and I realize then that I need not have taken the long way:

“No,” I tell her, “no charge.” I pick up the rucksack and walk over to the man who is loading the luggage on to the top of the bus to T'ing. I tell her she must keep the ticket for it safe, and she thanks me again before she climbs on. She waves as her bus sets off.

 

I
sit by the window
on the way home and listen to the music, a song about God, and how he sees into our hearts. Aieu, I think to myself, just maybe it will be all right if he picks your heart to look into. Right now it feels like a light place, a good place, and I sing along to the words in my head until the coins dig into my hip bone and that makes me think to check my back pocket, where I put the four green ten aeiki notes. I pull them out and then I see that in there with them there is another, a red one, another fifty. The blonde foreigner must have done this as I bent to carry her bag over to the bus. She paid me anyway.

The bus stops by the boulder at the side of the road. As I begin to walk towards the trees that mark the village I find myself thinking how I could open my hand, let her money be picked up and blown in the wind, which is God's will—yet I can't do it. And I can't go home. I look back at the road, and the little puffs of dust that show where the bus is now. Then I think: Fifty aeiki would take me to the border, beyond… But what then? I have no picture in my mind. Still, I do not want to go home, so I pick my way through the narrow paths between the fields, over the planks that cross the irrigation channels, towards the riverbed.

My uncle sits in a small patch of shade on the bank. The whites of his eyes are pink and the rank, sweetish smell is very strong today. The cloths on his head and around his waist are so dirty they are almost the same colour as the earth itself. Yet my father says he is clean in other ways: we must all respect a man who has kept himself free of the flesh. Flies circle him, settle, and he does not move. He is eating an apricot. Beside him are five more, sunset coloured and perfectly ripe, gathered into a small palm basket lined with glossy leaves. A gift. No one else here eats apricots; they are for selling. An aeroplane calls just for them every day.

I sit a distance away. He goes on chewing in his slow, toothless way as I tell him how I saw the two strangers coming, how later I sat on the bus and found the blonde foreigner's money that I did not want, because I wanted to be more than someone she paid to take her bag. At the end of it all, I reach forward to offer my father's brother, the holy man, the fifty aeiki note that she put in my pocket. He looks at it, and then at me; only his eyes move. He shakes his head slowly from side to side, removes the apricot stone from his mouth and throws it in the river. My voice rings out:

“What are you here for, if not to take our gifts?” He looks into the distance inside my head. He picks up the basket, offers me an apricot, which I refuse. He wipes his mouth on his sleeve, tells me:

“You might resolve to keep the fifty Aeiki note without spending it.”

“Why? Money must
do
something.”

“True,” he answers. “It has already.” He turns to face the river again, sitting so still that he could be dead. And eventually, I fold the banknote over and over into a small square and tie it tight with a thread from my shirt. I suppose I could make a tiny box for it, and hang it around my neck.

The smells of smoke and of the first evening meals fill the air. I hear rustling, laughter: at this time the unmarried women carry their baskets through the trees to the village, home, where the walls are the colour of mixed spices and the leaves of the trees a very bright green against them. If you are quiet in yourself you can always hear the river, which is very low this year and almost the same red-brown colour as the earth, the walls, the plain. Beyond the plain are the rocks; above them, the sky. There is no space between, none at all. It is here, G'ming, where I will live out my life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lak-ha

 

 

 

 

S
trangers ask why
people would ever choose to make such a place as this their home: the topsoil is nothing but stones. It drains far too easily and a steady supply of water is impossible to obtain because nine months of the year the sun shines without respite and there is no rain at all. For the other three, torrents fall and temperatures often reach freezing, due to the winds that blow fast and furious from the pole, touching no other patch of ground except that of this remote peninsula. There is no other part of the world, especially so near to sea level, which has such a climate of fire and ice. And, likewise, nowhere else does the Hetlas tree survive, let alone thrive as it does here.

It's short but wide-trunked, a long-living tree, with brief, gnarled branches ending in clusters of dark green, blade-like leaves. The wood is soft and pale, the bark thick and hard. It is because of the Hetlas that we live here.

In the beginning, somehow—propelled, dropped there the way a seed is, who knows—a single family came to be living on this wooded shelf, perched between the terrible mountains and the raging sea. They were hungry all winter, thirsty all summer. Towards summer's end the woman began to weep, desperate to see her husband and two children withering before her eyes. She wept and wept.

“Please stop, oh please stop!” the children pleaded, desperate to see the precious fluid flowing wastefully, undrinkable, from their mother's body. “Stop crying, it will only make you thirstier!”

“For all our sakes, be quiet, be strong!” her husband admonished her. But the woman could not help herself. She sat and wept, her face in her hands, her elbows resting on the rough table made of Hetlas planks. The sound of her moans and her continual sniffing drove her husband and children half-mad and kept them from sleeping. She wept for six days without stopping, until her body was shrivelled and she could weep no more. At last, on the seventh night the family finally slept, but they woke to find the woman dead, and dry as a stick. With the last of their energy they buried her. No one had the strength to mourn.

It was not until the next day that the husband saw the table, which had turned into a skein of fibres blowing in the breeze: the woman's salty tears had washed away all the soft part of the wood, leaving only those parts which are like the veins and arteries of the human body, but much stronger. He carried the fibres out to dry in the sun, and as it happened just then a stranger passed.

“How much do you want for that?” he asked, a greedy gleam in his eyes.

“This?” the man said, puzzled, but sensible enough to pull it back out of reach when the stranger grabbed. “Forty jars of fresh, pure water, and enough food to last the winter out,” he said, adding “and another woman, because mine has died.”

 

after this, the family
began to prosper. Mischance had led them to understanding. It was easy to see that just as they lived below the forests, so they also lived above the sea. Every year more strangers came by sea bringing food and goods in exchange for Hetlas rope.

This story explains the name of our village, Lak-ha, which some say means in the old language, “The place where the bargain was struck.” Others say other things. They ask, did the woman know the purpose of her weeping? Who invented the Hetlas rope—the woman, the man, the stranger, Fate? But I say, forget it. Come inside. We have everything now: television, internet, iPod, cellphone, denim jeans, Barbie doll, same as you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of Paradise

 

 

 

 

I
n the beginning,
we knew our luck: to look through one of the narrow, outer windows upon our fertile land and the desert that lay beyond it was to meditate on our good fortune and on the oppositeness of the world: fullness and emptiness; colour, monochrome; fertility, barrenness, and also upon its miracles: ourselves and however we had come to be, that folding of rocks which provided us with so much wetness, with fruit, grain, wine. Even the miles of burning sand and thorny scrub that separated us from whatever else there might be were a blessing of sorts, for we sensed that there was an else and an other, and also that we should not rush to meet it.

Some say that in those first times we had slowly slipped into a kind of decadence, an exaggerated freedom, and they say that what has come since is some kind of consequence, even a punishment. I'm not convinced. But certainly, back then, we painted our skins and wore our clothes differently every day, we tried always to find new beauty, worried endlessly over a colour or a pattern or the design of a door handle. We studied the sky and thought of new names for its daily different blues. Back then, we were connoisseurs, thinkers, debaters, pluckers of idle but achingly beautiful tunes. We ate at meals and between them, all day, savouring what we had grown and what we could make from it. We were plump and beautiful, with our glossy hair and skin soft and supple from passing so much time in the dappled shade of trees and the softer dimness of our homes. We did not strive, yet were not idle: we gardened, wove, painted—and so the days passed, and then the nights in stargazing, the pleasures of our flesh, dreams.

It was never, as some now say, dull. Nor was it quite perfect. Rivalries developed, occasionally fights. There was once a murder, for which the punishment was a magnificent feast, then execution.

Occasionally during what we now call centuries, some kind of vehicle was glimpsed on the horizon, or even overhead. For days afterwards we would be irritable and anxious, but nothing had ever come of these sightings. It was as if they did not see us and perhaps they truly did not.

One day, though, the baking calm of the desert was disturbed by a moving speck which grew over several hours gradually larger then finally revealed itself to be, so far as we could tell, one of us: two arms, two legs, (though it progressed at least half of the time on all fours). A skin, not smooth and oiled like ours but grained and creased and raging red beneath its layers of dirt: a bit of flesh, just living, that dragged itself towards us across the sand and rock.

At that time there were no city walls. The figure stumbled to the edge of the oasis then knelt on the ground. Someone with a cart picked her up and brought her to the dense shade of the central square, where all of us gathered to watch.

“Water,” the traveller said. She said it in her own language, an abrupt, grunting kind of talk—but we knew what she meant and it was already being drawn. We told her our more liquid word for it, and watched as she drained the bowl then sat still on her heels, gripping it. We all felt her thirst, how the coolness of the liquid calmed the burning inside her—even her mind, we knew, would be soothed by the sweet fluid which had seeped for millennia into the basin of rock beneath us. A trickle ran down her chin and neck, and into the dusty hollow at the base of her throat. Her raw lips shone.

“Water,” the traveller said again, still in her own tongue, and the bucket was set close by her so that she could fill the bowl herself. “Water!” she shouted after her second drink, and her face cracked into a smile, which we, standing there returned: it is always good to see someone get her relief, whatever it may be. She made to get to her feet, sank down again and plunged her hands into the bucket, splashing the cool liquid over her arms and chest. The faded brown cloth she wore stuck to her flesh, making her seem even thinner than she was, but at the same time her eyes, scoured almost shut by the gritty desert wind, opened a fraction more and we could see that they were green.

We carried her to the pool. She sat for a long time on the side with just her feet in the water, weeping. Then she slipped in by inches. We watched, bewildered and moved: none of us had ever been so dry, so desperate, so alone.

How did she come to be there? Some guessed that she must be some kind of outcast: why else would a person, a bag of water, thinly skinned, wander in an endless burning waste? No one would choose it. Somewhere, to the West, since that was the way she had come, she must have done something terrible enough to be sent away from her people, whoever they were. Had we ourselves not considered exile as a punishment for the murder, but dismissed it as too cruel? But perhaps, others argued, she had simply set out on a journey, as other peoples evidently did, and somehow been left behind by her companions. Did she know we were here? Had she or they even sought us out? How could we know?

It seemed to me that it was as important to be just, as to be careful. How would we ever know the traveller's story, let alone whether or not she was telling the truth? And what would we do with her, seeing as it was surely not possible to throw her back where she came from, unless some kind of guilt could be established?

 

W
hatever our speculations,
the traveller certainly did not seem like any kind of threat. In a day or so the sore eyes widened further and brightened, the broken blood vessels healed. Her breath came more regularly. But health was exhausting and every half hour she would curl up and fall asleep. So there was no great urgency to our discussions and we soon grew to enjoy her delight in the abundance that was ordinary for us. We competed for turns at giving her drinks from our most beautiful bowls, and in flavouring the water with fruits and essences. We showered her with clothes and jewellery, and waited to see which she would wear. We studied her to know how to behave for the best, when for example, to leave her in peace, as she seemed easily worn with company and embarrassed by nakedness.

Our suspicions melted. We felt the tug of something like love for the traveller, who had come so far to reach us, was like us, yet was not. We noticed, for instance, how firmly she knew what she wanted and was impossible to persuade, utterly immune to temptation or distraction. For many days she refused all solid food, taking only paps and gruels and that very slowly—so that we took to inventing new recipes with watered milk and pulverized grains and fruit. Just as we had accustomed ourselves to producing these and learned which ones she liked, the traveller began to ask instead for a share of what was on our plates. At this point we understood that she was truly recovered, and opinions began to divide again.

I said that she must be taught our language. Then she could tell us why she was here, and we could decide whether she would stay or not, and if so she would have to be told our methods of cultivation and given a home and responsibilities. Others agreed that she should learn how to speak to us, but only so that we could find out where she had come from and send her back to it; there were limits to hospitality. However well-taught and well-loved she was, these people said, she would always feel slightly apart from us who had always been here. That could make her secretly vengeful, excessively ambitious, or craving of recognition, therefore dangerous.

The truth would take too long to discover, said those who were already convinced she had been exiled for committing some ghastly offence. By the time we were sure of the facts, we would be fond of her and she would in effect be living here already; sending her away would be more painful, but just as necessary. We should simply give her a bag of provisions, they said, and encourage her to continue her journey the next day.

We talked this over in twos or threes in the fields and gardens, we continued in larger groups, between other things, as we sat at table in the evenings. Any opinion that seemed extreme or novel quickly passed by word of mouth and was tested, adopted or rejected by the rest. Back then, we always discussed things minutely, this way and that, taking our time, pondering until some kind of agreement was reached. There is no hurry, we always told each other then, it is a pleasure in any case to talk… And the case of the stranger in the garden was endlessly complicated, or fruitful, depending on how you saw it.

Why were some of us afraid of the traveller? Why did we want to turn aside what fate had sent us? The traveller, I pointed out, might well be a gift as much as a responsibility. She might have some skill we did not practise, she might have reached some understanding we were still groping for. Perhaps we should accept the unfamiliar and learn from it? After all, when occasionally a new plant is found growing in our fields, we discover its properties and decide whether it might be worth cultivating. We do not simply tear it out. Others elaborated this idea, comparing the traveller's differentness to the grains of sand that cause some shelled creatures to grow gemstones inside themselves. How do we know, others countered, that the gemstone is of any value to the animal itself? Indeed the contrary seems more likely when you consider what it is: a hard object, pressing into soft flesh.

Then again, how different was the traveller? She spoke another tongue, was evidently used to other customs; she was flat-chested, had green eyes, and paler, thinner hair but more of it: she was just a little different, not enough to make her completely other. We had recognized her as human from the start. Differentness was not the point, some said. It led both ways. Rather, the issue was that she had come from elsewhere and so we did not know her story or her intentions.

In time many people tired of the discussion, though those who wished her gone were less tired than the rest. Eventually, the one thing that united almost everyone was a feeling that the traveller, who now lay peacefully on our couches, eating pies and pastes and watching us as we talked, even helping with light work, was taking up too much of our attention. I offered to make her my special responsibility, but this, I was told, would not solve the problem, and finally it was indeed decided to send her away.

Two hours before dawn, the sand would be at its coolest. The air, at that time, when the invisible moisture that precipitates in the night has washed it of impediments, is extraordinarily still and clear. The traveller was to be dispatched with as much hospitality as she could carry. We had packed her a bag, making sure to include foods as dense in nutrients as possible and salty enough to counteract sweating, but not so salty as to create excessive thirst: nuts, seedcake, dried fruits, all of it wrapped in scented leaves. Even those who had most wanted the traveller to go softened now that she was about to leave, found themselves wanting her to remember us well. Two skins of water was easy enough for a fit person, as she was now, to carry. We supplied a yoke to make the carrying easier. We made special voluminous robes, a head wrap. A party of six undertook to wake her and lead her out of the oasis, then hand her the provisions and communicate our wishes as best we could.

I was not one of the party but I woke that night at the appointed time, aware of my heart beating hard in my chest. A dog growled low in its throat, preparing for alarm. I heard, or sensed the break in the traveller's breathing in the house next to mine, the rustle of her bedclothes as she sat up. They had agreed to stand back, so that she was not afraid, then to indicate that she must dress and follow them. The light would be snuffed as soon as they emerged, so that everyone's eyes would accustom to the faint radiance preceding the dawn. My favourite time is just a little later in the day, when the colours are newborn. But just before dawn there is a quite different beauty and other senses than sight come to the fore. Perhaps, I thought, the traveller had not experienced the oasis like that before—shades of black and violet against a yellow-grey sky, the air full of whispers and rustling?

The seven of them walked between buildings, across the square and onto the network of paths that cross and link our perennially moist fields. The smells of tomato plants, herbs, melons, and compost rose about them. Dew dropped on their feet. No one said anything: the traveller's vocabulary had not evolved beyond greetings, requests for food and thanks; mainly she relied on facial expressions.

Within half an hour they were at the sand and within half an hour more they had stopped walking. A slice of sun appeared on the rim of the world. The food and drink were handed over, the shadow play ensued. One cast her arm in a circle, so as to indicate: you may go anywhere! Afterwards, this struck us all as ludicrous and faintly shameful. All together they pointed, then pushed her gently on the back. She understood, certainly, the six of them reported back that morning, but what she did was sit down on the sand. To think, we supposed. To remember where it was she had been going to or had come from? In any case, they left her there.

Later that day I was hoeing my melon bed. The scent of ripening fruit was overwhelming and the damp rich earth pushed up between my toes. I was thinking rather sadly about the traveller: how confused she must have felt between our first kindness and her sudden expulsion—when I looked up, and she was there.

In silence, we examined each other. She wore the head cloth we had given her, and the other garment, tied about the waist. She was healthy now, but still not beautiful, I remember thinking: her face and body compelled attention, but it was hard to know how to respond to them; her features, her coarse skin with its odd growths of hair unsettled, rather than pleased. Nonetheless, I felt drawn to step forward and take her in my arms—a gesture of regret and welcome mixed, I thought, but soon I realized that I felt desire, and looked into her face to see if it was the same for her. I could not tell: her expression at that moment was distant, even though I stood reflected in the pupils of her eyes; I saw, too, a kind of determination that was new to me, though as I looked I felt that the shadow of both these things might well have been present in her face all along. The traveller looked away, and stepped out of my embrace. She nodded in the direction of the houses, walked towards them.