A Stranger in Olondria

(1)

The angel said:

I already know about writing. We made maps: maps of the sea, of the waters between Tinimavet, Sedso, and Jiev. And maps of the rivers, the great ones, Dyet and Katapnay and Tadbati-Nut, the ones that made our country of mud on their way to the girdling sea. We made the maps on skins. First we would draw the lines with ashes and water, and later we traced them with a piece of hot iron. For many seasons our house was full of those maps, hanging on the walls, curled at the edges, dark-faced in the rushlight.

If you want to hear my anadnedet then you must begin with a map, and it must be a map of the land of Kiem. Of Kiem, the Black Land, wet and shining, the Jawbone of a Cow. I will draw a map for you like this:

There are three rivers, swollen and fed by a hundred tributaries, brown, enormous, pouring their weight to the sea. At the edge of the sea are the shimmering deltas, the dank-smelling lagoons, a landscape flat and liquid and loved by birds. To the north there are deep forests where the rivers rush in silence. To the west the coastline rises in blue hills, where there are terraced gardens and cool air, and a great temple looking down on the villages scattered in the mud.

That is one map. Here is another:

Houses standing up on stilts, skin boats tied to their poles, lying in the mud. The world is wet. There are little waterways, tracks between this house and that, and always the green light reflected up toward the sky. There is the forest, full of the jodyamu who will suck your blood unless you travel with chicken bones wrapped in banana leaves, that’s what they like, you must lay your offering down on the roots of a tree as soon as you hear them ringing their little bells in the dark. The forest, full of danger, the witches riding on their hyenas, and the souls of the dead disguised as immense fruit bats, and the bloodstained palisades of the clearing where they do the killing when there are wars, earthquakes, epidemics, storms at sea. The forest, close and solemn. And then the rivers, brown and glinting under the trees, where pregnant women go to pray, throwing their beads to Jabjabnot the hippopotamus god, with his bloated stomach and ponderous female breasts. Leave the river, paddle your boat, the great mud flats are shining and they are hunting eels, and the sky is stained with flamingoes. There you can see the old woman filling her pot at the sacred river Dyet, the pot that will strike you blind if you look into it.

That’s where we lived, in Kiem. We were hotun, the poor, without status. The others called us “people without jut.” That is what they called us when I was small, before I began to fall ill: later they called us other names, worse names. No matter what they said to us, my mother smiled at them. Her smile was uncertain, the smile of an idiot. She smiled, twisted her hands in her skirt, looked anxious, began to cry. And then she smiled again. It went on for years.

But he, my father: he was not one of us. My father had jut, and his jut was some of the strongest in southern Tinimavet. He was a nobleman, the son of a chief, a doctor of birds who had studied with two tchanavi in the hills. He could read water. He could read faces, too, and trees, thunder, owl cries, dead crickets. His hair had been silver as long as I could remember. What else can I say about him? I loved him and I still love him and I am like him, always like him, never like my mother.

When I was very small he was not with us. He was with the tchanavi. My mother used to talk to me about him. Wait until your father comes, she would say when the others teased me. Then you’re going to have jut, the best jut in the world. Who is my father? I would ask. And she: The king of the rivers. A man from the moon, a prince, a fallen star. And so I was not surprised when he put his head in at the door and I saw his silver hair and beard, like starlight or rain.

There she is, he said.—That was me he was talking about, as he smiled in the rushlight. He had been waiting to see me. He came forward into the room and I said, Look out for the grandmother, and he looked surprised and then laughed: What a quick-eyed girl!

You see, my mother’s mother was still alive then, wrapped up in a skin so that she wouldn’t scratch herself with her dirty nails. She was wizened, as small as a child, dried up as you would think no living creature could be, utterly shrunken and silent. You could imagine picking her up and shaking her like a gourd, the dusty organs rattling about inside her. I used to pick her up myself and row her about in my boat: me, a child of six. She was that tiny. My father stepped over her and sat with us. Eat something, eat, my mother was saying. There was datchi in coconut milk, rice, buffalo curd, a pot of my mother’s millet beer. The whole house smelled of happiness and food.

In a moment, my father said. I saw him open his pack and take something out, something reddish like clay in the light. He touched it lovingly with his slender hands, so that I knew: it was jut. He placed it gently against the wall.

I go rowing my grandmother. Her little face looks at the sky. We avoid the great canal that leads to the sea. I paddle about in the rushes, beside the green expanse of the rice, in the sunlight and the heat, the paths of dragonflies. The water is murky and brown; my grandmother’s face grows dark in the sun, even more wrinkled, but she doesn’t mind, nothing disturbs her. I sing to her:

Kiem is known for its magic. Even you, the godless of Tyom, call on us to cure your diseases and banish your ghosts. We have powerful surgeons, doctors of leopards and doctors of crocodiles, and doctors of birds like my father, the “men of mist.” You can see them going from house to house when people are sick, stately, solemn, sitting upright in their boats, monkey skins dangling, carrying little bags sewn from the skins of frogs, their assistants wailing and ringing copper bells. They can bless musical instruments, take away warts, call down the moon. They battle the witches who ride in the forests at night. If your soul is lost, they can go to the shining land by closing their eyes and search for you, clothed in the gray plumage of herons.

At night they pass in a clamor of bells. We crouch in the doorway and watch them. Their boats ride low in the water, ringed by torchlight. Everywhere there are rustling sounds as people creep to their doors, lifting the curtains, peering down at the glow on the water. The boat stops, is moored to a post, a rope ladder descends, and they climb up into a house. It’s not our house. Now there are sighs everywhere, pitying murmurs, secret triumph. In Kiem you are always glad of another’s misfortune.

Yes, they are all like that—except my mother. She never understands; she is too stupid to learn how to behave. Her pity is real. Oh! how terrible! she says, wringing her hands, sometimes crying over the sadness of others. She cries over people we don’t even know, and worse, over people we do, that ugly Dab-Nin with her slit eyes and curling lip, who spits in the water whenever we pass and allows her son to tip my boat, watching him and laughing, not saying anything. Dab-Nin fell ill when I was thirteen, before I was ill myself. She coughed and lay on the floor with a swollen hip. And everyone sighed and was glad about it, everyone hated Dab-Nin, I’m sure it was a witch who caused her disease. And my mother wept. Oh, the poor woman. Imagine such idiocy. She would be glad if you were sick, I told her. My mother’s eyes widened, filling again with wretched tears. Her tears were her wealth, the one thing she had in abundance.

My father did not weep. He was always calm in the face of sorrow, dignified. He knew what it was to be sad. I think he was sadder than my mother, despite all of her misfortunes, because he understood more. He lacked the protection of ignorance. He could not weep at the death of a terrible woman like Dab-Nin, but somehow he was even sadder because of it, because everyone was in mourning for a creature they had all hated, because the world was foul and riddled with lies. He took me in his boat. We went down the stream from Tadbati-Nut, toward the great canal, away from the funeral, the vultures wheeling, the stench of the fire, the smoke creeping into the forest, the clanging of bells and the wailing of many voices. We went out to the sea. My father rowed to where the air was clean and we couldn’t hear the funeral anymore. The water was blue and the sun so hot that we opened our straw umbrellas and sat under them, drifting, happy on the great swells. We played vyet for a long time, and I managed to beat him once. Then we unwrapped our lunches and ate and drank. We didn’t go back until the sun was sinking and there were fires in the village, and Dab-Nin was reduced to ashes.

I know that people noticed it, our avoidance of the funeral, and that it gave them more to say against us. We were suspected of sorcery, of putting jut on people. And maybe they were right, at least about me. My father was too good to harm anyone and my mother was too stupid, but I—I was neither a saint nor a fool. I have thought about it often, wondered about it—am I a witch? Testing the thought of it in excitement and terror. In Kiem they often discovered witches who had not known their own natures, who had evil in them which acted without their knowledge, ordinary people, farmers, fishermen, grandmothers, even children, who went to be purged in the forest, screaming with fear. The doctors killed them in the clearing, killed the evil in them, destroyed their jut. When they came back they were simple and mild. They walked hesitantly and could not remember things and lived in smiling timidity until they were lost or eaten by crocodiles.

I thought about it then, for the first time: Was I a sorceress? Could I have been the one who killed Dab-Nin? Certainly I was glad she was dead, spitefully glad, exultant: it made me feel strong and happy with light and water. I was happy to be on the sea with my father for a whole day, while that horrible woman sizzled in her own fat. And later I was terrified that the doctors would find me out and take me into the forest to strip me of my power. But later still I thought: I’m not a witch, I can’t be one. Or at least I am not strong enough to do much harm. You see, had I been a witch, so many would have died in Kiem, the smoke from the funerals would have extinguished the sun.

While we were out on the water my father told me about death. I still remember his voice, his gentle gaze, the way his hair and face were patterned with light piercing through his umbrella, the way he leaned back in the boat and told this story:

The first man, who was called Tche, was the idea of the rain.

And the first woman, who was called Kyomi, was the idea of the elephant. This creator was not just an elephant, he was the inventor of the elephant, which he made as a shape to contain himself. He was his own inventor.

And the rain made the man Tche. She took her little bone-handled knife and cut his figure out of a piece of deer hide. Then she sewed it all over with pieces of coral and amber and ivory, and when she had finished, there was the most beautiful boy in the world. There has never been a boy as beautiful as the first one, though we like to say “as beautiful as Tche.” No one has since made anything so beautiful out of a deer hide. And the rain put Death into his third vertebra.

And the elephant made Kyomi. He made her with his tusk, for he never uses any other weapon. He cut her figure out of a banana leaf and sewed it all over with jade and shells, and one raven’s feather for hair. When he had finished, there was the most beautiful girl in the world, and no other girl has possessed even the tenth part of her beauty. And the elephant gave her a wonderful gift: he blew salt into her eyes, so that she had the sight of the gods, by which the world may be truly seen.

All of this happened far away in the Lower Part of the earth, when it was still green land, before the fire.

And Tche and Kyomi were each alone in different parts of the forest, filled with wonder and joy and fear at everything they saw.

Now the elephant and the rain were very jealous of their creations, and their greatest worry was that these two would meet somewhere in the forest. So they held a meeting among the clouds on the top of a high mountain, and the elephant said: I do not want my Kyomi to see your Tche. For she has the sight of the gods, to which his beauty stings like a thunderclap, and if she sees him, she will surely forsake me. And the rain answered: Do not be afraid. For I have put Death itself into the third vertebra of this handsome boy. And I will tell him of it, and of its terrible potency, so that if she touches him, he will flee as if she has tried to kill him. And the elephant said: It is good. And also the girl must know that one cannot love a mortal and yet possess the sight of the gods.

Then the rain went down to the forest and found the boy sitting under a tree, where he was taking shelter, because it was raining. And she said to him: Listen, my son, what I tell you is most important. In your third vertebra you carry Death, which is waiting to catch you. You must take care that nothing touches that third vertebra of yours, especially not a woman’s hand, for it would be fatal to you!

What is a woman? asked the boy.

And the rain said: It is a creature like you, only ugly and clumsy and filled with dreadful cunning.

And the boy said: Oh! That is a terrible creature you have described! If I see one, I will run away.

And he went on with his new life, playing in the forest and in the rivers, and making boats and spears and beautiful arrows, and hunting even the flowers because he did not know any better, and sleeping on his stomach so as not to disturb Death.

And the elephant looked for Kyomi and found her down by the edge of the sea, gathering seaweed which she would cook for supper. And he said to her: Greetings, my daughter. What do you think of this sea?

And Kyomi answered with shining eyes: It is beautiful, like a long fire.

Then the elephant said: Ah! That is because you know only the gods. But if you loved a mortal man, how different it would be! Then this same sea, which is to you and me like a fire, or a great mat woven not of reeds, but of lightning, would appear to you gray and flat and even more lifeless than the mud.

How terrible! cried Kyomi. But what is a man?

That is a creature like you, the elephant said, only very ugly, with a great devouring mouth and ferocious nature.

And Kyomi said: Oh! What a terrible creature! Thank you for warning me. If I see one I will run away.

And Kyomi went on walking in the tall forests and down by the sea, gathering seaweed and drinking the dew from the flowers, happier than anyone who has ever lived after her, because she saw the world with the vision of the gods. And one afternoon she saw the boy Tche, and Tche saw her also, and they were far from the elephant and the rain. And Kyomi thought: This cannot be the man of which the elephant spoke, for he is beautiful like one of the gods. And as for Tche, he also thought, The rain did not mean this creature when she spoke of the woman who will cause me to die. And they smiled at one another and Kyomi gave the boy some seaweed and he gave her a hare which he had killed in the forest. No one knows how they came together, it might have been Ot the Deceiver who made it happen, the god in the shape of a chameleon. But they were happy, and they embraced as men and women do, hidden deep in the forest of the lost country.

And Kyomi was looking up at the sky, and suddenly it grew dark, and the trees were all blown out like a series of torches: for she had lost the sight of the gods as the elephant had foretold, and neither she nor her children would have it again. She knew it. She thought: This is the man. And weeping she drew him close, and the palm of her hand brushed over his third vertebra. And Tche cried out and thought to himself in despair: This is the woman.

Then Death leaped out and went clattering over the world.

(2)

The house my father was born in is visible from many places, but especially, on a clear day, from the sea. Lingering in your boat, at the edge of the desolate lagoon, you look up toward the lofty hills of the west. Gardens have been cut into the hillside like steps, fresh and beautiful, gardens of maize and tomatoes, guava orchards, dark green thickets of spinach and cassava, flowering patches of beans, everything tantalizing and blue in the distance. The road is a river of whiteness with small figures staggering along it, men with baskets of charcoal, donkeys with carts, and once a day the old woman coming to fill her pot in the Dyet, ringing her bell to frighten people away. The place she takes the water is there, the temple of Jabjabnot, built above a spring, straddling the cataract. It rises in plumes of mist, etched in the hill, inaccessible. It has many windows through which no one looks out.

Look up farther, along the road. There the houses begin, with their tiled roofs and pillars of carved calamander. Look at that one, the most serene, the one of the greatest elegance: that is the house in which my father was born. In the day its slatted blinds are raised to welcome the wind from the sea; the whole house is open, cool, tranquil, delicious. At night they lower the blinds, and lanterns hang from the corners of the roof, glass lamps brilliant with captive fireflies.

And here is the woman for whose sake he left that house: clumsy and startled as she paddles her boat, running aground on the mud, sometimes preferring to walk, even up to her ankles in the wet earth, because she is awkward with boats, she can’t learn to control them. And not only boats. She can’t play vyet, it’s impossible to teach her. She laughs, she waves her hands: I’m confused again! She doesn’t mind if you play, she will sit and watch you move the pieces without even the sense to feel envious or ashamed. She knows how to cook a few things, she cooks the same things over and over. Rice and peanuts, datchi in coconut milk. She talks about cooking, about a snake she saw, a baby crocodile, or nothing, she just sits there smiling wistfully.

Oh, I know she was beautiful. More than beautiful, famous, even though she was a hotun girl, without jut. There were still songs about her when I was young; there was a man who used to sing them when he rowed past our house at night. Child of the sky, beautiful night-hair, supple as a fish. Girl made of honey, disappearing in sunlight. Those were the songs they sang for my mother, full of her eyes like stars and her hair like a net to catch hearts when she walked with it loose on the wind. The only one who still sang them was that man, who was also hotun, a man older than my father with pensive eyes. I didn’t like him. But he was only one of my mother’s suitors—people said there had once been twenty of them. Oh, I believed it. Why should they lie? People in Kiem never lied for flattery’s sake. So I believed she had been a great beauty, even though to me she was this square-hipped, graceless creature with the scar on her forehead where she had once been struck with an oar in an accident. Yes, to me she was this scar, these tearful, frightened eyes, this odor of millet beginning to ferment, this hand with the fingers missing where they had been caught in a leopard trap when she was a child, this inconceivable bad luck. To me she was this terrible luck, this litany of misfortunes. And so, although I believed the tales of her beauty, I did not see how beauty alone could have drawn my father to her, to her poverty, foolishness, and constant affliction.

Once I asked him. More than once. Why did you marry Tati? And he laughed: I’ve told that story so many times. Or else he said: That’s not a proper question for a little girl. But I would insist, and he would always give in.

Out in the waters of the lagoon he said: She was rowing her boat, and I was rowing mine in the other direction. We scraped together—our oars clacking—she nearly swiped my head with hers, frantic to get away, stuck in the canal! Well, she was so serious, and the situation so comical, that I laughed. I didn’t know anything about her. I didn’t know how poor she was, but I liked the way she laughed when I started laughing. She was so candid, so easy to please…

And in the forest, when we had paused to rest after gathering mushrooms, sitting in the cool shade, he smiled and said: Well, she had lived a different life. I liked to hear about that. I liked her voice, her quiet manner of speaking. I liked the way she cared for her mother. I thought I would like to live with them. Can’t you understand that, little frog? No? They had a happy house, peaceful, it seemed to me… There is peace in your mother, like light in a lamp.

And in the doorway at dusk, when we sat with our legs hanging over the side, watching the flickering lights from the other houses, he said: You know it was not always pleasant, living up on the hill. I know it is hard to believe. But we had sorrow. Sorrow is everywhere, of course, but on the hill we had a type which I did not want. I prefer the sorrow here.

Then you married Tati for sorrow? I asked, incredulous.

His face was still, like a tree in the shadows. I don’t know, he said.

If my father married for sorrow, then he married the right woman. Sorrow followed my mother like a lover. Her father died in his boat of a fever, his body absorbed into the river to find its way to the sea alone, to rot, to be devoured by the squids. Her brother died of a snake bite, blackening, his leg growing swollen and so pestilential in odor that he could not be kept in the house. He slept in a boat until he died, singing the songs of death and trying over and over to pluck the moon from the sky. And her sister. Her sister was last seen walking at the base of the hills. One of her sandals came to shore two days later. Her basket was found, too, her lunch still wrapped in banana leaves, but no one knew whether she had fallen or jumped.

One could reason about it. There was plenty of sorrow in Kiem, particularly among us, the hotun, the low. There was not a family who had not suffered some disaster, an accident with sharks, an attack from the pirates who lived in the caves. A fall, an encounter with crocodiles, a wound that refused to heal. Rape, madness, river blindness, kyitna. One could say that my mother was not unusual among these people, all of whom were lacerated with misfortunes.

When I was small I had everything. Mud, guavas, the smell of the sea. We stayed in our boats all day then, lacking nothing. At the fringe of the forest we gathered oranges and sometimes tyepo which we would break against a stone, seeking its cream with the tint of young leaves. We made spears and hunted eels and fish in the estuaries; we swam and wrestled, discovered shells and corals, rowed our way to the forest again, made swings out of the vines, shouted, wept, forgot everything, and laughed, and laughed. We, the hotun children. We had all been born in the Black Land, but the stigma of having no jut set us apart. The old ones who sat drinking sugarcane wine along the canal spat into the water as we passed, an accursed flotilla.

We were Tchod, Miniki, Jissavet, Ainut, Nadni, Pyev. And others: Kedi who died of the fever, Jot who died of the catarrh. These disappeared and we went on playing, not even mentioning them, feeling them only in the cold air that pressed on our backs in the forest. We made slings to kill the little birds with the colorful plumage. If we caught fish, we roasted them on green sticks. Night fell rapidly in Kiem when the sun dropped behind the hills, and the shadows rushed over the land and reached out for us.

I remember all of them. Ainut was the one I loved, because of her soft hair and sober eyes. She used to swim with me near the house. My father called us “the two frogs.” He would lower baskets of rice to us on ropes. We loved that, reaching up unsteadily from our boats, pretending that the rivers were in flood, my father shouting to us that we must be careful, pointing to the imaginary crocodiles that made us scream. Sometimes we went far away together, on expeditions to the beaches, where we made houses of palm fronds. Ainut was with me when I saw the indigo sellers from Sedso, the sailors from Prav, and the kyitna men of the caves.

When I am very sick, when it’s hard to breathe, my father sits beside me. He stays for as long as I want him, all day, all night. He sings to me, he tells me stories, he traces each one of my fingers over and over. The thumb, the pointing finger, the long one. He tells me everything he can think of, helps me sit up and lie down, invents a hundred games to deaden the pain. He lets me lie with my face toward the doorway so that I can look out and we can count the birds that go past and make up their stories. I see his face in the subtle, indoor light, a light that is delicate even in the heat of the day, moth-colored, protected. I see that he is suffering, there are lines going deeper beside his mouth, he’s aging, I can’t bear it, and I weep. Crying makes it worse. He can’t endure what’s happening to me. For his sake I stop crying, pretend it’s nothing. I smile at him and reach up to wipe the tears which have trickled into his sparse beard. I dry his face with my hair, and we laugh.

The smallest things are enough to give us hope on such long days. We discover whole worlds in the tint of the sky through the doorway. My father plays his flute; the sound is sweeter than the ripple of rain, and sometimes the rain accompanies him and shelters us under its curtain.

In the background, boiling water, carrying dishes, my mother. She walks softly so as not to disturb us. And sweeter than even the voice of the flute is the dream I have: that we live on the hill, pampered and rich, and she is only a servant.

Tell me about the hill, I demand.

He can’t refuse me anything. He sighs, plucks mournfully at the threads of his beard. Our doorway faces northwest, you can see a part of the hill from here, but not the temple and not the house with the glass firefly lanterns. I want to hear about that house, to continue the dream I’m having, the dream that smells of jasmine and makes me weep. He doesn’t want to talk about it. I force him, and I don’t care. Already I believe I deserve more from life.

He says: Imagine a large room. Much bigger than our house, five or six times bigger, with a smooth tile floor. The floor is polished twice a day, they even rub wax into it, and they rub wax into all the slats in the wooden blinds. This room is empty except for the family janut set against one wall. Yes, mine was there, on the far left. My father’s jut was decorated with hanging gold leaves, my mother’s with little bars made out of silver… Yes, now you’re getting big eyes, just like a real little frog. But what was there for us to do in that room? All alone on the hill, with nothing to look at but the sea, nothing to do but bicker, wait, and die of boredom?

Nothing he says can dismantle my dream. I sift his words in my head, choosing only those which support my fantasy, ignoring all his complaints about the boredom, his father’s tyranny, his mother’s shallowness and endless deception. I hardly notice the things he tells me with the most urgency, his brothers’ fights, the way the servants were beaten, the coldness of all the conversations meant to be subtly wounding, the ruses, lying smiles, and silken cruelty. No. I take the things I want and gather them to myself. The ladies in their gold and orange robes. Their poise as they sit on the shining floor, their skin made supple with coconut oil and wreathed in the aroma of cinnamon. Each of them has a darkened lower lip, tattooed in the manner of the Kiemish noblewomen. They are graceful, unhurried, gorgeous. The wind from the sea comes in and lifts a few strands of their plaited hair; it fills the sleeves of their robes, they are like great butterflies… I dream of them, of their beautiful plates and cups, their delicate food, the oysters and the ginger and cashew nuts, their trips to visit one another, riding in their carts festooned with marigolds, under straw umbrellas. I dream of their lanterns and even the sound of the blinds being lowered at night. The blinds can be adjusted to let in the moonlight. Now moonlight streaks the floor where a lady sits, her oiled hair shining, burning incense to drive away melancholy.

Sometimes Kiem seemed as if it was always the same, unendurable. I don’t know if Tyom seemed that way too. The rain, or no rain, or mist, the rice and millet, the buffaloes up to their knees in water, the same river light, overcast, monotonous. Sometimes it seemed like a country where nothing happened, enough to make you drown yourself. I can’t stand it, I said to Ainut. And we would go searching for adventures, breathless in the heat, fighting to throw off the shroud of the long rains.

We went rowing our boats. The air was still, without wind enough to stir the reeds. We paddled slowly toward the west, for the world lay west of Kiem, and south: to the east there was nothing but ocean, inhabited by sharks, gods, and the ghosts of the drowned. We paddled beneath the beautiful blue-green hills which rose above us piled on one another like massive cloud formations, both airy and monumental, their cliffs jutting over the sea and hiding the house with the glass lanterns from our view. Below the cliffs there was a stretch of beach, sometimes littered with makeshift huts where sailors and fishermen had camped, or Tchinit the sailors’ wife, who slept in a different place every night so that the people of Kiem would not find her and burn her to death. We never saw the sailors’ wife, but once we thought we found her camp: there was a broken comb with a few long hairs. We burned these on the beach in great excitement, uttering all the most dreadful incantations we could recall or invent. Tchinit’s house was one of those, perhaps, which leaned and collapsed under the rain. And there was the house of Ipa the smith, which always seemed on the verge of disintegration but never fell, where the lonely cripple made bangles of copper wire. We rowed on. We were seeking the farthest, the most deserted beaches. Here we had once found Sedsi indigo sellers, who had given us each a square of cotton dyed the color of a bruise, and from whom we had fled, giggling, when they asked us to lie on their mats. Above these beaches there were caves in the hills, where the pirates lived. We were forbidden to go as far as this shore. There were terrible stories of the pirates, who had mouths in the palms of their hands and tails like monkeys, and lived solely on human flesh.

We rowed on. I’m tired, Ainut said. I was tired, too, but I had been waiting for her to say it first. All right, let’s go ashore, I said. We floundered into the warm sea and dragged our rowboats up onto the sand.

The beach was silent. We gathered fronds and wove them into a roof: our boats, tilted on their sides, made the walls of the house. One side was open, facing the sea. We slept and then rose, groggy with heat, and woke ourselves fully with a long swim. How sweet it was to be free, alone, with no one to call us hotun people, no one to spit in the water when we passed, nothing to remind us of our poverty, of the shame of being the children of those who were no better than animals. We grew wilder, bolder, we swam farther, tempting the sharks. Then we raced back to the shore and dashed onto the sand. We danced and sang, we made elaborate headdresses from palm fronds, we practiced fluttering our lashes at vaguely imagined boys… I don’t know how I was, but Ainut was different on the beach, with a sudden spirit of mischief and delight—she capered and said silly things that made her shriek with laughter at herself, almost horrified at her own boldness. We made dances, new ones, performing the steps exactly in unison, singing, wearing only our knotted skirts. Then we were suddenly hungry with the hunger that comes from swimming and we put on our short vests and went looking for food.

There was always food on the beach. There were coconuts and sleepy lizards, obese snails dreaming in the tide pools, and higher up there were wild bananas and datchi, although we feared the pirates in those regions, and the pariah dogs. But on this day, the day I remember, we were too giddy with happiness to think of those things, and we went up near the caves, chattering and laughing in the long grass, gathering green bananas which we would roast and season with saltwater. Ainut’s plaits were wet, and a track of salt lay on her cheek. She was baring her teeth and rolling her eyes, imitating someone. And then I saw the man and my laughter died as if forced out of me by a blow. It was all I could do to draw a breath.

He was standing near the wall of the cliff, knee-deep in the grass. He stood with his hands at his sides and looked at us. Above him there was a gaping cave mouth and a slope of rubble leading down to where he was, the man from the cave. He was dressed in rags and his hair stood up, red in color, red, horrible, stark and flagrant as if it were dipped in blood, and his eyes, worse, remembering it, his eyes seemed without any color at all, silver perhaps or the color of guava peel. Against these colors his skin looked very black. He was a painted man. Ainut followed the movement of my eyes. She stopped laughing and then I moved, my hand shot up and grasped her arm, hard, digging the nails into her flesh.

It was her weakness that made me strong. At first, when I saw the kyitna man, my instinct had been to fall, to stop breathing, to die—and perhaps, had I been alone, I would have collapsed from pure terror and they would have carried me off into their cave. But Ainut saved me, she saved us both. We looked at the man and saw a movement higher up, a shadow inside the cave, and the shadow moved into the light, its scarlet hair and beard hanging down in the dust, and Ainut screamed and screamed and went on screaming. Then the first man, the one close to us, lifted his hands and waved them as if to beckon to us, and stepped forward into the grass, and my strength came up and I yanked on Ainut’s arm and started running, dragging her, shouting at her to run, to stop screaming and run. We stumbled down the beach. The man was coming after us. Everything came back to me then, everything. My mother’s warnings, anxious, irritating, don’t go far, Jissavet, do you promise, don’t go around to the shore by the caves. I prayed to my father’s jut. If I get away I’ll listen to her, I’ll love her better, I’ll never disobey her again. Miraculously, we reached the boats. I turned and set Ainut upright and slapped her in the face as hard as I could. Get in your boat, I said. I’m leaving you. Do you hear? I’m leaving you behind.—Sobs, screams, and the bright blue sea. We thrashed into the water, climbed in the boats, hauled on the oars and pulled away, slowly, from that accursed shore.

Even when we were far out on the water, we could still see the man. He stood in the surf, tiny, waving his arms. We could still see the stain of his hair, and we spat in the ocean to clear our hearts of the sight, the impurity. The abomination.

(3)

When I was old enough I asked: Where did jut come from?

We were sitting on our pallets in the evening, the light flickering and showing our skin-maps hanging all over the walls, and my father leaned forward, his eyes dark pools, and said:

In the oldest days jut lived in the sea. All the separate janut and the whole jut, it was all there, and all one. The people faced the sea when they prayed, and they knew that something powerful lived in it, and they never teased it or insulted it. Then one day a little girl came, a girl about your size, and she said, I’m going to go and talk to jut. And the people said, It is not for human beings to talk to jut, and she said, Very well, but she knew her heart all the same. And when night came she slipped out of the house and went and stood on the cliff, and she shouted down at the sea, Jut! Jut!—She stood there stubbornly and called to the sea as loudly as she could, Jut! Answer me, Jut!

And Jut answered.

I’m that girl, I think. I am like the girl who called jut. Always outside, always different from people. It’s not only that I’m different, it’s that I don’t want to be different and yet I am proud, almost proud of the difference itself. I won’t try to change. When Ainut grows up she will marry a Kiemish laborer, a poor man, but one with jut. I’ll lie with my face to the doorway, watching the wedding procession go by, already very ill, too ill to get up. At that time, the time of the wedding, I haven’t spoken to Ainut for two years, but still the procession goes by our house, that’s the way she is, she would think of me even after everything has died between us, she knows I’ll be watching her. And I am. She stands in the prow of the boat, with a necklace of marigolds, beautiful. Around her are shouts, confusion, the clashing of spears. She doesn’t turn toward me. She glides by with an averted face, remote. And then I lose sight of her in the crowd.

It comes on suddenly, the first times. I’m under the house, untying my boat. Suddenly I can’t see anything. Or what I can see is not what’s there, I see something like a swarm of flies, white and black, filling up my vision. At the same time, my head grows heavy. I lean forward, grasp the pole. Far away, through the flies, I see my hands. Just as suddenly it clears and I see my mother watching me, holding her basket. Jissi, are you all right?

It’s nothing, I say.

Then one day Ainut said: Your hair’s red.

What?

Look, right there, she said. She had turned away from the tree. She had put down her basket and was looking at me strangely as I stood holding the pole in the bright sunlight.

Look. She raised her hand, pointed. She didn’t touch my hair.

Maybe it’s papaya, I laughed, breathless. Maybe I broke one with the pole and it splashed on me.—I raised my hand and felt my hair where she pointed. It wasn’t sticky.

I don’t think it’s papaya, she said. She was always like that, thoughtful, plodding, unromantic, without invention. She looked at me with her sober eyes.

Did we break one? I asked, looking over the ground, still touching my hair gingerly.

I tried to look at my plait.

It’s too high, she said. I don’t think you can see it.

Then why did you tell me to look?—The rage was already coming over me, the desolation, the covetousness, for life, any kind of life. I touched my hair. It was as if I already knew what would happen, that we would be separated, she and I, that she would go into life, marry, have children and grow old, and I would spend a few seasons stretched in the doorway. My breath caught unnaturally, as if I were getting ready to cry.

Maybe you should go home, Ainut said.

Maybe you should mind your own business, I answered, suddenly furious. You’re so stupid. The basket’s full of ants.

I did go home, though. I went quickly, expertly through the marshes. I had always had a good hand for boats. My mother was under the house, weaving a cover for the big basket, but my father wasn’t there, his boat was gone. I pulled my boat up the slope, my hands shaking, my face hot. I was only fifteen, but still, I knew. My mind raced over my illnesses, my fevers, the times I would vomit and feel faint, and then quickly feel better again. Tati, is my hair red? I thought to myself. But I couldn’t say it. I stood there beside my boat, catching my breath. I couldn’t say it. My mother smiled; she didn’t stop weaving her basket. I couldn’t shatter her with another misfortune.

Good morning, good morning, she goes along, greeting everybody, incapable of leaving people alone, nodding to them, good morning, and they turn their backs or laugh at her, insulting, or they spit into the water. Some of them, if they are in a group, pretend to respond to her. Good morning, Hianot, Dab-Nin shouts. Her voice rings across the water, hard and flat, she’s standing in the reeds with other women, leering at us. The other women giggle. One of them raises a hand in protest, not sure she wants to participate in this, but hesitant because it’s so amusing, that stupid hotun woman panting after them like a dog. The blessing of jut! Dab-Nin shouts. The women burst out laughing, it’s too much. And to you, my mother says. Dab-Nin goes on grinning at us, my mother goes on greeting everyone, and islands of spittle float on the water.

The pestle is thudding beneath the house: it’s my mother, pounding grain. The house is full of the brown, overheated shadows of midday, and I lie in the corner under the place where the thatch is decaying, so that a pattern of tiny lights falls on my face. At first, each time the pestle strikes, I feel that it’s crushing my skull. But then my mother begins to murmur, singing. She sings only to herself so that her voice has all of its confidence and free expression of sadness, its dark color.

Not until later did anyone mention the word: Olondria. But even then, in the early months of my illness, they must have considered it, they must have whispered of it in the darkness, agonized over the terrible expense. I had heard of Olondria, a land detached, fantastic, on the other side of the massive northern sea, a land of cold, of vallon, where the people were tall and colorless and spoke a language invented by the ghosts. To me it was absurdly distant, so inaccessible that it left me indifferent, unlike the bazaars of Akaneck. When my mother told me that I was to journey there, I laughed. She lowered her eyes, trembling. Don’t, she said.

I won’t cut my hair, ever. My mother notices it at last—I’ve been in the house for two days, afraid to go out. The redness spreads from the roots of my hair, as if a blood-touched egg has been cracked on the crown of my head: slowly, obscenely, like that. I say I’m not feeling well, I’m tired of boating, I give any excuse. I sit looking through our water maps, morose. Then my mother notices. She lights a candle in daylight despite the bad luck and holds it over my head, trembling.

Words pass between us. She’s quivering, reduced to grief. She presses one hand to her heart, the other gripping the rush candle. No, no, no, she says. I look at her, I’m hard-eyed, arrogant. Why not? I say, scoffing at her. I cross my arms to hide the fact that I am shaking too, I look at her with my head up, tense, defiant. She puts her fist in her mouth, bites it. Tears roll down her cheeks. I tell her: Crying won’t help anything.

But what a relief it would be to weep, throw myself into her arms, drench the front of her dress in tears, sobbing in horror, despair—to have her rock me to and fro, crooning, to let myself be broken in front of her, gathered by her, resorbed.

I do not know why such surrender seemed to me worse than death.

So, my mother trembles, staggers, weeps. She puts down the candle, she opens the pot in which we keep the tools, she brings out the old razor wrapped in cotton. She thinks we need to cut my hair, now, perhaps it will grow back normally. I refuse. She stands, aghast. The razor in her hand is like the enemy of my fate: my hair, the confirmation of destiny.

When my father comes home that night there is nothing to eat but cold datchi. My mother sits, weeping, in the corner. And I lie on my back, staring up at the slope of the thatched roof, stern, dry-eyed, with my hair in two plaits. My hair, the punishment of the gods. The pelt of the orangutan. Our house has already become the scene of a shipwreck. Fear crosses my father’s face, smoothed away at once, he puts his knapsack down and lowers the door curtain.

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.

The soup was ready. They put the pot on the sand, and the older sailor unwrapped a packet of banana leaves in which there was thin maize bread. We took the bread in pieces in our fingers and dipped it into the soup. Fire on the tongue. On the sea, light flashed like a warning.

We were wonderful children, strange, vivacious, we amused them. They could not know the source of our dazzling energy, that we were intoxicated with secrets, shame, and buried unhappiness, the unspoken knowledge that we were hotun people. The attention, the approval of our elders made us delirious: we sang, we were bright-eyed, witty, impulsive, daring, we gave them everything, showed them our own beach dances, giggled and even spoke impertinently because we knew it would please them. Especially me. It was so easy to be with the sailors from Prav. I felt that I could discern every one of their wishes, and when they laughed and glanced at one another I saw that I had been right, and the thought, the power, filled me with exultation. Ainut followed me; the food and acceptance made her glow. Never could they have encountered such magical children. And wrapped in our brilliant vitality, charging it with a heady essence, was our cry: Don’t go, don’t leave us, take us with you.

Take us with you. Take us to see the bazaars of Akaneck. Take us to Prav, to the city of Vad-Von-Poi. Take us to live in that city of towers, pulley, wells, and fountains, to be sailors, to wear trousers and blue tunics. Take us to where the women have windblown hair and tapering eyes and smoke cigars, to where they grow hibiscus flowers, the flowers that make the wine you carry in an ancient glass bottle, tied at your waist, underneath your clothes.

They drank. They sang. We tasted the wine in fearful, hesitant sips. The talkative sailor told us not to be shy. The embers of the fire grew redder as the air turned blue, still, silent, leaning toward a motionless dusk. At last they stood, kicked sand over the embers, said they were going back to Pian. I wanted to plead with them, to cry… And the woman shouldered her knapsack with the clay pot bulging in it, and she looked at us sadly and told us what she knew about men and seasons.

Then they were turning toward the sea, toward the red of the sunset, and Ainut, afraid to be out after dark, was clambering up the rocks. The sailor with the spices turned toward me and caught my arm, smiling in the twilight air that was filling with shadows.

The lonely beach. The others turned away. The dark rocks. Salt, the smoke of cigars, ginger, sweat. He leaned down and kissed me with a kiss that arrested time, and then he smiled again.

Good-bye, chakhet, he said.

I don’t remember his face. It’s the only one I don’t have anymore, the only face that was lost to me in an instant. The rest, I remember them, Dab-Nin, Ajo Kyet, Ainut and the other children, the kyitna man of the caves. I remember them all, I sort through them as if they were shells or beads, lying in the heat in the open doorway, or later, lying inside against the wall, under the worn thatch with its faint and mournful odor of rotting grain. I dwell on them, brood over the details, the hard-faced sailor with his arrogant nose jutting toward his lips, the long eyes of the woman and her polished cheeks and the way her mouth lifted in a smirk, and her sad look. But him, no, I can’t remember him, he obliterated his face, the touch of his lips and tongue usurped the place of all other memories. There remains only a trace of smoke, the awareness of blue shadows, a sense of alarm, and the sound of the waves on the shore.

After the crowds cleared away, after the boat of Ajo Kyet went slowly, mournfully, trailing its clouds of incense, and a space was opened around our house, tingling, unapproachable: then, for an afternoon, we were filled with happiness. Perhaps it was not happiness, but for us the emotion of those hours was indistinguishable from true joy. My father climbed up into the house, his eyes wild and his face darkened with triumph, making his hair seem brighter, fiery. We laughed, embraced, the three of us. They had not chased us away. They had not succeeded in ruining us. And I was not feeling very sick, I sat up and ate the meal my mother prepared on the brazier, spinach and fried bananas. We all ate quickly, hungrily, keeping the door flap raised so that the daylight could illuminate the room, and we could see the boats going by, far off on the shining water, the life of the village going on despite everything. My father was full of schemes. First, he said, we’ll treat you with hawet-blossom, and then with pumpkin flowers when they’re in season. Rice-wine too, every day. And meat, if I can shoot something in the forest, or buy from Pato—to thicken your blood. Then we should go out to sea whenever we can, where the air is pure, and you should bathe.—He nodded, chewing; he was glowing with satisfaction.

And all those charms, my mother said. Will they be good forever?

I’ll get more, my father said, scoffing from his confidence. I’ll replace them. Eat, he said to me, eat all you can.—Then suddenly he was shaking with helpless laughter. That fat sow, he choked. His face when I gave him the blessing of jut.

Silence: a subtle darkening in the room.

And Ainut: I never spoke to her again. The last words I said to her: You’re so stupid. The basket’s full of ants. Perhaps last words are always like that, vapid, inadequate. The last words I said in life were: Hold the light.

What would I have said to her, had I been given the chance? Perhaps I would have told her of her grace, her wonderful steadiness, her beauty unpolluted by vanity, her expression, slightly solemn, yet seeking laughter. But no, I was only fifteen, fresh from adventures in my boat. Perhaps I would have said simply: Remember. Ainut, remember the time we saw the sailors, the indigo sellers, remember when we found the spoor of the leopard…

I would have only those memories. But she would have many others. Now, working in her rice paddy in Kiem, she has her choice of memories, she can remember her wedding night, the birth of her son, the expansion of her small farm. She can remember the first time the man she was to marry smiled at her. Why would she waste her thoughts on me, waste her time in going over a few disjointed memories of a girl she used to play with, who died of kyitna?

And yet, I believe that Ainut thinks of me from time to time, perhaps when it rains, or at night when she is afraid. I don’t think she flatters me in her thoughts. She must remember the way I bullied her, my restlessness, my impatience. She must remember how I could never admit to any weakness, my imperious manner of a daughter of chiefs, and the way that, if she questioned me or offered a contradiction, I would punish her for days with a cold silence. Finally she would have to coax me back, sometimes with presents, tyepo, bananas. I don’t think she’s forgotten that. And I don’t think she’s forgotten the three years I lay in the doorway, visible in the light of the setting sun.

(5)

I always thought we would go to the hill. First I thought we would walk there, climbing the ridges, sleeping outside on the way. Then I thought we would go by mule, and later still I thought they would carry me there, Tipyav and my father, in the hammock. No matter how we went, I used to dwell on our adventures. The starlit nights, the camping fires, the dew. And then the first sight of the house, always lit by the glory of the sun, its winged roof sparkling in the pristine air.

One day, after everyone’s stopped speaking to us, he appears. He is already old. He taps at the pole of our house. We can’t believe it, we look at one another. A dog, my father says, and we go on eating, or they go on, and I watch them. Then the tapping again, discreet but insistent. It’s someone, my mother says. Her eyes are full of fear. My father swears. He swears more often now, now that he has had to give up his withdrawn existence and become heroic. I’m trying to draw the curtain aside. My father comes over and yanks it up. Outside, a dark blue evening, blue river light. And standing in the evening, this old man, tall and lean with a tuft of whiskers, chewing his lip, looking up at us.

No, my father says. What are you doing here?

The old man shifts his feet. It’s been raining; he’s in the mud. He chews his lip. I see that his vest and trousers, though clean, are ragged, and that he’s carrying a pair of clean sandals. He looks unhappy and burdened with the hopelessness of Kiem, perhaps senile, at any rate very old. Two stout sacks are lying on a reed mat at his feet. Stealthy faces peer from the neighboring houses.

Holding his sandals, looking up at the sky, the old man speaks. He says that he has come down to find the Ekawi. He says that he has no message, that he has come of his own will. He says that carefully: Of my own will. He says that he’s always wanted to come, but he has found it impossible until now, and that he has lived with the shame for years, and that he has no desire but to live and keep on serving his master if his master will forgive him for the betrayal. He speaks in an unbroken stream; he’s clearly practiced the words. All the time he keeps looking up at the sky, holding his sandals against his heart. When he’s finished, my father swears again, looking down on him from the doorway.

I don’t keep servants, my father says. He’s furious, trembling with rage. The old man looks at the dark blue sky and blinks. I’m finished with all that, my father says. The word ekawi has been banished from my life. I don’t want to hear it.

My mother comes to the door. Let him come in for water, she murmurs. My father flings the ladder down, wordless. The old man clambers up, carrying one heavy bag at a time. My mother tries to take one of them and staggers.

He is Tipyav. He will stay with us and help my mother and sleep in a hammock underneath the house. He will never leave us. I don’t know how he developed such loyalty, perhaps only in response to desperation. He will be our friend, our doddering uncle, our confidant, the means by which we get news from the village, our messenger, our forager, a back for me to ride on, a backbone for us all, long-suffering, patient. And he will be my mother’s servant. That much is decided, that first night. Then you take him, my father shouts. Take him, if you want him. But I will be no one’s ekawi.

And he swings down the rope ladder into the dark.

He took his boat out that night, and so he wasn’t there when we opened the heavy sacks. The old man opened the first one for us, his big, black-nailed hands fumbling with the strings in the rushlight, the contents of the sack shifting and clinking. The mouth of the sack opened all at once, we saw his hand jerk to stop something from falling, but he was too late, it clanked on the floor. We watched it roll, mesmerized. My mother gave a cry. It was a cup, somber and weighty, made of gold.

Let me hold it, I cried. Give it to me.—She was so slow, she picked it up and stared at it with her mouth open. I couldn’t bear the sight of that lovely thing in her squat, misshapen hand. I smacked my palm on the floor. Give it to me!

Humbly, she put it into my hands. Oh, it was beautiful, burnished, heavy. I pressed it to my cheek: it was cold, like water. My breath made cloudy patterns over its etched design of triangles and stars, and I wiped it carefully on my shirt. My mother had brought out the razor and was cutting the strings of the other sack, and always, I’ve always found that moment so strange, for despite our different spirits we were both blinking unusually fast, both of us struggling with our tears of joy. Why, of course you can ask me why, you’ve never seen our tiny house with the mud walls and thatched roof, the poor skin maps, the water pots repaired with gum, the narrow pallets and murky light, and you’ve never seen that light when it falls on gold. It wasn’t only the golden cups and bowls, the amber necklaces, the beads of jade and coral, the ivory flutes. It was the way the room was changed by the luster of those objects, and the light became like the glow of a thousand fireflies… Suddenly this room, our room, so stifling, so eternally sad, became like a place where things were always happening, a place of enchantments, reversals, lovers’ quarrels, impromptu poetry, where the air had the soulful, exciting odor of incense. Oh, look, oh, look, we whispered, laughing and crying. And Tipyav wore such a mournful and awkward smile, as he told us in his shy and halting way of my father’s sister, his younger sister who was called Jetnapet. Jetnapet, a beautiful name, it makes you think of the first rains, the smell after all the dust has been washed away. I’d never heard of her. I held her jade bracelet and kissed it, saying, Jetnapet, oh Jetnapet, my aunt! I loved her, I knew all about her, her beauty, her slender wrists like mine, which were so unlike the thick wrists of my mother. I knew how sad she was when she thought of my father, for what she had sent him was as valuable as an entire inheritance.

It’s mine, it’s my inheritance, I whispered. Then: Give me that, I told my mother sharply, snapping my fingers. I held out my hand, my arm deliciously heavy with rich jewelry, for the bowl she had held up admiringly to the light. What’s that? What are you wearing?

She looked startled, confused, ashamed, her hand wandering to the amber at her throat.

Take it off, Tati… Gods, on you…

We had not heard my father come in: he looked at me aghast, as if I had struck him.

How it was on the hill.

The beautiful lacquered tableware, the jade cups, the decorum, the immobility. My father tells me more about it now that I’m very weak, now that I’m dying, although we don’t call it that. During our last months in the village the stories well out of him along with his tears, he unburdens himself to me. He doesn’t play the flute anymore, he drinks millet beer, he smells of beer as he unplaits and combs my hair.

It was agony, he tells me thickly, his voice growing older, taking on the uneven texture of the rushlight. My mother, I’ve never told you about her. God of my father, Jissi, a woman to make you kill yourself, or her, or both. All right, I’ve told you some. I know I’ve told you how she never shouted or showed anger, only simpered and smiled. She had been well brought up, what they used to call “hill quality,” a child-bride from the mountains up the coast. But listen, how can I tell you. She had a series of servants, always young girls, terrified as rabbits. As soon as one got used to her, showed signs of resignation, my mother would replace her with another. She needed them to be frightened, you see, needed that entertainment in her life of seclusion, someone to terrify. She needed the sound of weeping in the house, from behind the screen where the maid slept… It soothed her, helped her to sleep herself… They were always inseparable, my mother and her trembling maid. Other women, our clanswomen, would visit. My mother had a note at which she pitched her voice to speak to the maid—chilling, penetrating, and yet so soft… The girls lived in terror, it was unspeakable. One of them ran away. The laborers tracked her. Yes, they would have killed her. But she escaped, she must have gone aboard a Pravish ship. I hope she settled somewhere, I hope she found love.

Love, Jissavet. In our house it did not exist. It was the same with everyone on the hill. Love, for our people, was synonymous with dishonor. It was something to be avoided, hidden, crushed… They spoke of it in hushed tones, telling about my cousin who loved a man forbidden to her and drowned herself, or disapproving of a father who doted on his young son, saying the child would be spoiled, would become a weakling. Then I don’t want to be strong, I told my mother before I left. That was her complaint, that I was weak. I don’t want your kind of strength, I said. Do you know what she said to me? I wish I’d aborted you with tama-root.

He strokes my hair softly, my disease, my sun-red hair. It’s better here, he whispers, despite everything. I know he means, Despite the fact that you are dying young. On my cheek, a tear. It is not my own.

But she loves you, I said. Your sister.

I think it was true, despite what he said, his hatred of her gifts, his conviction that she was trying to poison his home. She was young when he ran away, a girl of sixteen. He must have been a god to her: this kind, sad-eyed elder brother. She must have wept when she saw that his jut had disappeared from the altar, that he was gone. And she had preserved her memory of him for years, hoarded her wedding gold, made cups and bangles disappear, perhaps blamed a maid. Her treasure growing slowly in a cupboard. And then, one day, she thought it was enough, and she found the servant who had most loved him, an old man now, and she said to him: Find my brother. And old Tipyav shouldered the sacks, and she stood at the door in the twilight and watched him, her heart full of pride and love, never knowing how her gift would be received.

Jetnapet, my aunt. I kept hundreds of dreams of her; I thought of her as I lay in the open doorway. I rested my eyes on the cool, marvelous structure of the hill, and I thought: Now, my aunt, you are combing your long hair. You comb it out into sections, each one fixed with a clasp of gold. And now you are trailing your pet dragonfly on a string. Your smooth face, your deep, compassionate eyes. Perhaps you’ve heard of me, perhaps you even know I’m wearing your bracelet.

My father’s mouth cracked. He laughed loudly; the sound frightened me. He drank from his brown gourd of millet beer, and his voice broke when he said: Jissavet, don’t do this to me. You have no right.

He closed his eyes: You have no right.

And later, it was during my mother’s excitement, her calculations, what we would have to sell to get us to Olondria: my father laughed harshly, sitting propped against the wall with the beer gourd between his knees in the hot night. His laugh woke me. I saw his hair straggling down the sides of his face, his wild eyes, the sweat dripping on his neck. Well, she’s proved herself, he said. His voice was far too loud, and my mother looked up guiltily from the corner.

She’s won, my father said. My wife is pawing through her ceremonial dishes, my daughter sleeps with a bracelet on her arm. He raised the gourd and drank, his arm swaying so that the whole room seemed occupied by its violent, wandering shadow. His teeth shone wetly when he laughed. Well, Jetnapet! Dream well on your cotton bed, you viper!

Jedin, my mother said.

Oh, the little frog is awake, is she? The little frog… He paused and wiped his sweating face on his sleeve. The little one, he muttered.

But we need these things, my mother said. For our journey. She stood holding a decorative ebony box.

Oh, I know it, my father groaned. Open that box, my love, it’s full of blood!

But the box was full of coral.

(6)

His hand strokes my brow, trembling over my ruined hair. The odor of millet beer on his breath. Moonlight through the thin gaps in the thatch, and from across the marsh, the sound of drums, a feast. Your mother, he says.

Yes, he told me the truth at last.

Here is another map. It is a map of a face, my father’s face. Small bones, a pointed chin, flat cheekbones, just like mine. Two lines between the eyes, just like mine. When he is thinking, he purses his lips in the same way I do. And his frown, like mine, deepens the lines in his brow. A swift smile, a certain noble look, and the intelligence in the eyes, the same, it’s mine, it’s exactly the same.

Your mother, he said.

Where is she? I asked, suddenly afraid. Where is she? Tchimu? Why isn’t she back?

She didn’t want you to know, he said, hoarsely, caressingly, his fingers still moving over my hair. There was so little light in the room, only the pricks of moonlight. Outside, the drums, faint voices, the baying of dogs. Go to sleep, Tchimu, I said, speaking with difficulty because of the fear. You’re tired.

No, he said. No.

He told me. He insisted on telling me. He said, The truth has its own virtue, which is separate from its content. He said, this is the last story, Jissavet, the last. And it was true. He never told me another story.

There was a girl, he said, a hotun girl from a very poor family. Her father died when she was only a child. No, don’t ask questions. It is difficult enough. She grew. She was beautiful, like—what. Beautiful like a dream one is unable to remember, with that mystery, that formlessness, that strength… and without knowing anything. She never knew anything, in spite of all of life’s attempts—well, enough. This girl, Jissavet, when she was close to your age, but a year younger than you are, only sixteen, she went along the pirate coast, looking for snails I think, with her sister. Well, her sister, you know, is dead.

Her sister is dead. But she—she is alive. That is her triumph. And it is a great triumph, Jissi, you know.

He laughed softly, brokenly. Why can’t I say it? he muttered. After all this resolution, I still hesitate… You see, it is—what happened, it is the sort of thing the gods should not allow. They should not allow it. But they do. Hianot was captured by the pirates of the coast. She lived with them in the caves for over a year. Sixteen months. Her sister jumped, that is another truth, her sister leaped from the cliffs and was lost. But not she. Do you see the virtue of the truth? You must know what a valiant mother you have. Her courage, her tenacity, are incredible, even more incredible than the beauty of which they still sing in the village. She lived in the caves, injured—they had stunned her with a blow to the head during the capture, the scar is still there. She ran away three times. After each of the first two attempts, they cut off one of the fingers of her right hand. The third time she escaped. She came down from the hill and into the village, like a ghost. She was with child.

He smoothed my hair softly, softly. The odor of millet beer. Tchimu, you’re drunk, I tried to say, but I couldn’t. A beam of moonlight glowing on the silver of his hair, his face in darkness. Midnight. Anguish. Dogs.

Then you’re not my father, I said.

And he: Of course I’m your father.—But I could hear the tremor in his voice. That tremor, I knew it: it was the shudder of fear.

No, I said. You lied to me, you and Tati. You have told me lies.

Yes, he whispered. He sat against the wall, his head hanging. Moonlight dribbled over his slack fingers.

You are not my father at all, I said. And then: The kyitna, I have it from him, don’t I?

He buried his face in his hands.

When the wound is discovered, the source of the pain, it does not bring pain, because the pain was already there from the first. This is the greatest surprise to me. I cannot believe that I am lying calmly in the darkness while he weeps. I think of the people at the festival, there across the marsh. They’re dancing, drinking millet beer from gourds. The old men, already drunk, have been drinking coconut liquor and are staggering to urinate in the weeds. Everywhere there are conversations, shouts. A woman turns. The musicians sweat over their drums and bells. The singer’s cries are hoarse; he looks possessed. Beneath a tree two women help another to fix her braids in place. And the young men, the girls dancing in lines, the moonlit laughter and the dogs, the sheen on the water, the fear of snakes, the beer spilled on the ground, the arguments, the secret love among the palms, the hands clapping, the crying child. It’s all there, complete, just out of reach. The discovery has hollowed out my spirit and made me light. Now I can hover over the world, now I belong to no one. And all things come to me of their own volition.

My mother, too. She comes back. She has spent the night in the forest, or perhaps in the hammock under the house, a feast for the mosquitoes. I haven’t slept. I watch her climb the ladder we left hanging and begin putting charcoal into the brazier.

I’ll never talk to her about it. I can’t. In that way I am like her, and not like the father who is no longer my father. I don’t believe in the virtue of truth. Like my mother, I’m cowardly, I hide, I’m unable to form the words. What would I say? I know that you were raped by a kyitna pirate. Why tell her that? She already knows I know. What else would I say, would I ask her about it, the cave, the death of her sister? No, there’s nothing in it, no virtue at all. And so those words will never be said, not when my father stops talking and we’re alone with only Tipyav to speak to us, not when we make the decision at last and go to the river Katapnay again to board the silent boat with its cargo of oil, not on the journey north, not on the ship or in the wagons carting us ever northward toward those pink-tinged hills, not in the mountains, not in the bleakness of the Young Women’s Hall of the sanatorium, not even in terror, in death. Never, never. Up to the end we keep living in the same way. Grain, fire, time to bathe, to sleep. This was how we communicated, though these hollow gestures. Porridge, then datchi. And later porridge again.

Somewhere she darts, pauses, runs, trembles, stifles her breath. She climbs down rocks, through sand, through clumps of trees. Through the raw grass that cuts her feet, through the thick bushes, thorns, under branches, fighting her way among the vines. She avoids all paths, the seduction of easy passages. She runs. Sometimes she hides for a time, her heart pounding. Her two hearts. She stumbles, bruises her foot, suffers from hunger, from the heat, from the constant oppression of terror.

I don’t know why she goes on. Why not stop, why not lie down and sleep? Even at night she goes on through the forest. Her breath loud, the odor of leaves overpowering in the dark, and the river Dyet so high, too dangerous to cross. She follows the river, picking oranges to suck on the way. She fights against hope, the weakness of that emotion. Then one morning she sees the first fishermen out on the water, and she walks into the village with bleeding feet.

So, you see, I didn’t have any jut, on either side. That was only a fantasy of my childhood. The lanterns bright with fireflies, the benevolent Jetnapet, the jade cups: I had no connection to any of it. No, it’s right, I told him. I believe you. It seems right. — I was satisfied not to belong to the hill. I told him so. I said: I always knew I was not one of you.

Soon after that he lost the desire to speak.

The body of corruption. Is that what I am, Jevick, is that what you think, the body of corruption? No, not you: you spoke to me on the ship, I saw it in you at once, the lack of fear, the absence of superstition. Do you know what it meant, to speak to someone my own age after all those years? For it had been years, over three years. Three years of the mist and heat and fevers and isolation in the body which Ajo Kyet proclaimed filth.

My father said I was innocent. But the gods did not agree. And after all, I was the daughter of a pirate. I was the child of the caves, of brutality, of suffering, humiliation. Cursed by the evil of that dark coast.

Hints, whispers. I remember them, especially now that I know the truth. The cruelty in the eyes, the contempt. You can’t know the viciousness of Kiem, no one can know it who hasn’t lived there, in that shimmer and draining heat. Sick, unable to move, I remember the women whispering, sliding their eyes toward me and then away, whispering, The mother is so unlucky, yes, that business years ago, and then the aunt, it must be jut. The inspired malice of Kiem is such that they would help to hide the truth from me, pretending that I must be protected, in order to increase the pleasure of words whispered just out of hearing: Rape, the pirate coast, her fingers, her child.

Later, in our house, we’re so afraid. We make Tipyav come up and sit with us, just sit there against the wall. It’s my father, he frightens us, we think that he might die and we don’t know how we will bear it if that happens. Already we can’t look at one another, my mother and I: we’ve been like this ever since I learned the truth; if our eyes meet by chance there’s a clang, a sound that makes us cringe, the sound of a murder being committed somewhere. My mother finds it hard to catch her breath. We’re both afraid to speak. She’s clumsier than usual, dropping spoons, catching her feet in my father’s blankets, even stumbling over his legs as he lies still, a thin, white-haired old man. Suddenly he’s as old as Tipyav, older. His face has no expression. My mother washes him, silently, every night. The sponge, the vacant eyes, it’s like a return to the days of the grandmother. She lets down the curtain to strip and wash the lower part of his body.

She does this, but she can’t take care of herself. Her hair is filthy and she cries because there are weevils in the flour. I know what it is: it’s the man who came as soon as my father stopped talking, the brutal, red-haired man from the pirate coast. I think my mother sees him in the rotting part of the roof, where the rain drips, and in the bananas infested with ants, and in everything that is horrible, perverse, and persecuting her: in the obscene gestures and grimaces of fate. I see him too, everywhere. His face, with its pale reptilian eyes, has conquered my dreams of the hill, of my generous aunt. I think of his shapely wrists, he must be handsome, he smiles at me. Stop it, I scream at my mother. You’re driving me mad.

She stops. She puts the beads back into the sack. She’s been counting them for hours, it’s her only idea these days. We must go to the ghost country, where Jissavet will be cured. I suppose she thinks the gods will lose track of us. Idiot, she’s an idiot, and I don’t want to leave my father, but I’ll go, if only to escape this house, this disintegrating house with its strong odor of sweat, overpowering, and its darkness where we are all losing our minds. I’ll go with her, I don’t care anymore. Only that day, before dawn, I will hold my father, pressing my cheek to his. And I will be the one to disentangle the strands of my hair from his curled fingers when they lower me to the boat.

The map of Kiem, Jevick: it is drawn in the stars and immortal. It is putrid, already decayed, but it never dies. It is that body of corruption in which, every hour, an innocence meets its fate, a swift and soundless dissolution. I saw the map, I saw how we followed its paths, my mother and I, how we worked together in absolute harmony, how Kiem always needs these two, the one who spoils and the one who submits, how we were made for each other in that eternal design. It came to me, so beautiful it brought the tears to my eyes, with its indisputable, crystalline magnificence. You’ve ruined my life, I whispered. You’ve destroyed everything for me. Because of you I never experienced pure happiness…

It was in the Young Women’s Hall. She was bending over me, wringing a wet cloth into my hair, dabbing my forehead. Her lips were parted in concentration. I closed my eyes in the odor of her breath, drunk on revulsion and despair. When I opened them I saw the pores in her skin, her huge and luminous eyes, and suddenly, I don’t know how it began, I saw the kyitna too, how it had followed her all her life, how it had always been the sign of her destroyer. First the man from the caves, and then her child, her own child: we had always been there, as merciless as the gods. At every turn, beating her, mocking her, violating her, overturning her most humble visions, her hopes. I knew my father, I knew the man from the caves, his savage feeling at the sight of her weakness and uncertainty, the same poor flaws which had often driven me to the brink of violence: for Kiem cannot bear the presence of innocence. We hate for anyone to escape the knowledge we possess, the knowledge of the body of corruption. It was her innocence which had deprived me of satisfaction, and my cruelty which had deprived her of all pleasure. The circle was joined, complete. The attendants had already been called, and my mother struggled to hold me down on the bed. I pushed her away, not sure whether I was pushing or clutching at her because her dress, somehow, seemed always caught in my hands… From somewhere far away there came a voice, a demented howling, a most chilling, hollow, almost inhuman sound, like a voice from the other side of death. I am Jissavet of Kiem, it said, over and over. I am from Kiem.

You can sit in the corner. It’s all you can do when it starts raining. Sit in the dry corner and watch the water slide on the floor. It finds its way to the doorway at last and joins the rest of the rain, down there, outside. There’s thunder, darkness, a cold fog everywhere.

But sometimes—wasn’t it true that you would go outside, when the sky had cleared, and run, screaming and jumping to dash the raindrops from the leaves? Wasn’t it true that the smell of the mud was buoyant, delightful, excessive—that the yellow light of the flats outshone the sky? And everywhere you could hear your own voice ringing in the cold air, and you would charge through the reeds, which sprang back, scattering moisture. And the sea, still bubbling, angry, glowed with a heavy phosphorescence. You could play with it: its radiance clung to the body.

It’s true, I touched that radiance, but then why am I always hungry, why am I always craving more, more light, more life? This life in which I have nothing, only this illness, huge, inscrutable, this illness which has slowly become myself. When I’m alone I think of my kiss, my only kiss, but cautiously; I’m afraid to wear it out with too much remembering, I limit myself, decide that I will think of it only once in a week, in a month. It is my most private memory. When I’m allowed to think of it I close my eyes and concentrate; it’s difficult to find that moment again. I start with the sound of the waves, and then I add the pungent smoke of cigars. I lick my wrist to recover the taste of salt. There, it’s coming. And there it is. The intoxication of ginger on his lips, the lips of this stranger, this alien. But each time it grows fainter, until the action of memory wears it away, and I trace, in despair, its irredeemable outline.

The ship pulls away from the shore. It is too large to feel the sea. Only at noon do we venture out of our cabin. Then, when the deck is deserted, we lie under an awning, soothed by the humid air. The ocean glitters in every direction.

We burned my grandmother’s body on the hillside.

I remember the journey there, all of us in my father’s boat, my father rowing smoothly with his long, capable strokes, my mother weeping into a cotton rag. I was feeling important because I had a responsibility: waving a reed fan over the small dry corpse. It was covered with a thin cloth, the weaving loose as if to avoid stifling the old woman in the heat.

Never, perhaps, had Kiem known such a silent funeral. My father had learned the idea among the tchanavi. There were no other mourners, no blue chalk, no horns or wailing, and to my chagrin no trays of delicacies. No, only this one lean boat, this man, this woman, this child, walking through the scorched grass, skirting the forest, trudging toward a lonely spot on the hill, bare in the dry season. My mother carried the body in her arms. And my father lit the branch which set the meager shape to crackling on its pyre, while I watched the insects fleeing the conflagration. This is Hanadit of Kiem, he said in a pleasant, even tone. And we release her into the Isle of Abundance.

I think he tried to say something to me: something soothing about death, about the body’s return to the wind. But I was bored, hot and hungry, scratching my insect bites, I felt no grief and therefore desired no comfort. The grass of the hill was desiccated and yellow, and swiftly turned black. I began to whine that the smoke had a funny smell. Let’s go back, I pleaded, growing petulant when my father shook his head. My mother would not even look at me.

My mother: she was inconsolable, possessed by grief. For this creature, this leather doll with its odor of urine. It was if there had never been a woman on earth so miraculous, so adored, so beloved as Hanadit of Kiem. Tati, Tati, she moaned. For years, as long as I could remember, my grandmother had been incapable of speech, incapable almost of movement, a mere shell, giving nothing to her daughter, placed in a corner like an old gourd. I fell asleep on the grass and then woke wildly, terrified by my strange surroundings, the dark, smoky sky of the hill, and my mother’s hideous, jerking screams.

Tati! Tati! she shrieked.

I saw her stumble, burning her hands in the bright embers.

To the end, yes, she was still the same, incompetent, clumsy, bewildered. She babbled and wept in the light of the small oil lamp. I wonder what she saw when she looked at me, if I possessed, for her, the face of the red-haired torturer of the caves. I tried to steady her hand, but my arms wouldn’t move. She was tipping the lamp, not paying attention. The tiny flame shrank and crinkled. I heard her calling down the hall in Kideti, a fool to the end, enough to make you weep. Hold the light, I said.