A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel (30 page)

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.

C
hapter Eighteen

Spring

I wrote all through the winter. I wrote, paused, went out and walked far over the snowswept plains, a derelict wrapped in a carpet. The crone in the hillside left for her winter quarters in the village, where I could not go for fear of discovery, and I had to search elsewhere for help. The angel flickered above me in the falling snow. She showed me how to hide, when to crawl through the ditches, squirming on my elbows, how to avoid being seen from the grounds of the fortress, where prisoners worked at repairing a crack in the wall, clamped in their wooden shackles. She led me to encampments of
feredhai
, ephemeral villages of women, children, and ancients, the tents pegged fast against the wind. The men and boys were away; they had taken the cattle farther east. When I called out, a woman would raise the tent flap cautiously, shielding her lamp. And they never recoiled from the gaunt foreigner with snow in his long beard but looked at me curiously with their scintillant black eyes, and pulled me inside, exclaiming to one another in birdlike voices, and gave me medicinal herbs and what they could spare of butter and rice. Children watched from raised pallets, muffled in furs, playing with dolls made of tallow. Sometimes my hosts tried to make me stay, pushing me down with hard fingers. “
Kalidoh, kalidoh
,” they repeated. I asked Miros what it meant, and he told me it is the highland word for
avneanyi
.

I smiled. “So they know.”

He nodded, head lowered, shoveling rice into his mouth. “Not hard to see,” he mumbled.

“No. I suppose not.”

He gave a grunt which might have been laughter. His hand on the side of the bowl was so pale it was almost blue, but its grip looked firm and sure. He ate, as he always did that winter, as if someone might take the food away at any moment, as if each meal were a matter of life and death. And of course this was not far from the truth. I had watched him hover for weeks in the indeterminate territory of the angels.

Now he scraped the last grains of rice from the bowl and handed it to me, meeting my eyes. “Thank you.”

I nodded. “You look like a true Kestenyi. A bandit.”

He grinned, his features almost lost between the hanging locks of his hair and the chaos of his beard. “My uncle won’t know me.”

The words brought a chill to my heart. I took the bowl and spoon and left him. I know that he had grown used to my strange behavior, my abrupt entrances and disappearances, my shouts in the library upstairs at night, my frequent failure to answer him when he spoke. The angel was closer to me than he: I took her with me everywhere, as the hero of the
Romance
carried a spirit in his earring. I knew her through her close, urgent, volatile, night-breathed voice, the tales she told, her songs with their borders of salt. She whispered to me, she leaned her arms on my shoulders, she pressed her cheek to mine—so that the inconceivable temperature of the eastern winter, the cold I had never felt before, shocking, wondrous, disturbing, seemed to me like the body of the angel. Like her, sometimes, it revitalized my blood on the brisk mornings when the early light was splintered by the icicles; and also, like her, it numbed me when I had sat too long in the dark library, forgetting myself in our otherworldly colloquies.

Now I went up the stairs, to that neglected and shadowy room where the carpet glittered with frost in front of the balcony door. Light came through the doorway, the implacable iron light of the winter plateau, the only light in the room until I called her. I sat in the chair at the desk before my broken pens, the ink-bottle filled with ash and water, the stack of books with her story in the margins. My hand on the stiff leather bindings gray with cold, my shadow faint on the wall. I drew in an icy breath. “Jissavet,” I said.

Her voice. Its wistful texture, unrefined silk. “Jevick.” Her lights, a series of enigmatic gestures among the bookshelves. And there she was, barefoot in her shift: the black and wary eyes, the childishly parted amber-colored hair.

“You stare like a witch,” she accused me with a smile. “If you did that in Kiem, I would spit.”

“You wouldn’t spit,” I said. “You’re not superstitious.”

“No,” she said with a quiet laugh, turning her hair in her fingers. “No, I’m not superstitious. I never was.

“Is that my
vallon
?” she asked then, looking over my shoulder; for she, like me, was now an adept at passing between the worlds.

“Yes,” I said, my hand on the books protective, for I could not help but be proud of those lines, wrung as if from my heart. I opened the first one,
Lantern Tales
. “This is Olondrian,” I said, pointing to the printed text, “and on the sides—this is Kideti.”

“No one can read Kideti,” the angel laughed.

“I can,” I said. I showed her how I had used Olondrian characters for the sounds the two languages shared. Sometimes I used a letter for a neighboring sound in Kideti: so our
j
sound was the Olondrian
shi
. And sometimes I altered the characters to make new ones: our
tch
sound was also a
shi
, but one that carried a plume-like curve above it.

“Listen,” I said. The sun was sinking, flooding the desert with scarlet. It seemed to blaze up unnaturally, casting a threatening glow on the book in my hands. I fumbled with the pages. Suddenly my chest felt tight; distress seized me as I read the opening lines:

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. . . .

“Stop,” she whispered at last.

I had not finished the
anadnedet
. My voice faded uncertainly from the air.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve hurt you.” I felt the distress again, more intensely than before. My fingers curled around the page.

“No,” she said hoarsely. She was weeping somewhere far away, inconsolable, beyond my reach. The pain it gave me, the sense of helplessness, was so exquisitely sharp I closed my eyes.

“It’s a terrible story,” she sobbed.

“No,” I said. “No. It’s a beautiful story. Jissavet? Can you hear me? You’ve told it beautifully.”

“I miss him,” she said. “I think he’s dead, but I can’t find him anywhere.”

“You’ll find him,” I said. “You’ll find him, I’ll help you to find him. . . .”

Still she wept, devastating me with a flood of grief. So I spoke to her, willing her to be comforted. I snatched my words from anywhere, from the poetry of the desert and the Valley, from the songs of Tinimavet. I imagined I had met her at home in the south. I told her about this meeting, how she rowed her boat on a languid tributary of Tadbati-Nut. I evoked the tepid light, the bristling stillness of the leaves. “And I was riding a white mule,” I said, “bringing pepper to sell on the hill. . . .”

And Jissavet, you drove your oar into the shallow stream, arresting the movement of your little boat, and you looked at me with startled eyes, those eyes which have the strange power to penetrate anything: a stone, a heart. I reined the mule in sharply. Can I deny that I was riveted by those eyes, with their low light, their impalpable darkness? By that shoulder, thin and flexible, that flawless skin on which the unctuous light fell, drop by drop, like honey? We were engulfed in the forest, the opaque air was hard to breathe. Your expression altered subtly but unmistakably. You were no longer surprised. You sat up, quickly withdrawing the light of your glance, and faced me instead with a look of offended hauteur. . . . Then I thought, my stare has insulted the daughter of a chief. But what chief’s daughter is this who, bold and careless, paddles her boat through the forest alone, regardless of her beauty which must attract the unwanted notice of her inferiors? And I greeted you, emboldened by the fact that you had not rowed away. Then your expression, so mutable, changed again. In it were all the hidden laughter, the irony, and intelligence which, now, you allowed to sparkle for the first time. . . .

Her misery had grown silent. Now she interrupted bitterly: “That’s all nonsense. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

But I told her that I knew. “I remember it,” I said. “I saw everything that day, aboard the
Ardonyi
.”

I told her, too, of the days before the
Ardonyi
, my days in Tyom. In the ossified glitter of the abandoned garden, where the immobility of the trees was as deep and abiding as winter itself, I spoke to her of my parents, my brother, my master. My breath made clouds of fog as if my words had condensed in the air; and when the angel spoke, her breath made light. I told her that I agreed with her father, that sorrow was everywhere, and I described the rain, the frustration, my father’s wife. I think she saw Tyom then. She imagined, vaguely, the house of yellow stone on its hill overlooking the deep green of the fields. She imagined my father observing his quiet farm, monumental on the terraced hillside under his reed umbrella. “He must have looked like Jabjabnot,” she said. My laughter rang in the frozen air, making the blue trees tremble. “He was,” I said. “He was, he was like a god. We lived in terror of him. He was disappointed in us to the day he died.”

She did not speak. I saw that I was alone. “Show yourself,” I whispered.

There she was, seated on the rim of the fountain, coming into being like the letters drawn in a magical northern ink which is revealed only when held close to a flame. She rested her hands on the edge of the fountain’s bowl; her feet dangled.

“Not like that,” I said. “In something else. In—a coat. You couldn’t sit outside like that, half naked.”

She raised her eyes and looked at me gravely.

“I know,” I said with a harsh laugh. “You don’t feel the cold. You couldn’t do this small thing just to please me? You couldn’t—just to make it seem—”

She let me talk until, hearing the foolishness of my words, I fell silent.

“Then I’m all alone,” I said at last.

She smiled, wise and sad. “Tell me more about your
tchavi
—Lunre?”

“Good pronunciation for an islander,” I muttered. “My mother always insisted on calling him ‘Lunle.’ . . .”

“And was he really from Bain, from that terrible city?”

“That wonderful city,” I said. I tilted my head back, looking up through the trees. I glanced at her, her incandescent darkness against the marble.

“I’ll tell you his love story,” I said.

I told her the story of Tialon and Lunre, and she wept. I told her everything, all of my secret things. I felt myself disintegrating, fading, turning to smoke, becoming pure thought, pure energy, like her. I wanted this dissolution, sought it eagerly. It was never enough. Never, although we clung together like two orphans in a forest. “Now you’re not afraid of me anymore,” she whispered, shivering. “No,” I said, closing my eyes as I reached for her, touching marble.

I could not touch her. And yet she seemed so close, the glow of her skin against my hand, her voice in my ear a private music. I read her
anadnedet
again and again. I wanted to write there too, to inscribe myself among the Olondrian and Kideti words on the page. My own wild poetry scattered there like grain. I thought of her playing with her friends, and I could see her so clearly: satin-eyed, dictatorial. And it seemed to me that she had been made to answer a desire which I had carried all of my life, without knowing it.

Dark nights of Kestenya. Lamplit hours in the library. And that voice, laughing, restless, proud and forlorn. The voice that inhabited the wind and rang in the sun on the trees of ice and occupied the empty space in my heart. I had not known of this empty space, but now I recognized it, and it bled; and I was wretched, distracted, and happy. I ran in the snow, shouted, and broke the icicles on the gate in the wall, stabbing her nebulous image with those bright knives.

And in the box bed I wept. “Stop,” she said. “Stop, Jevick, it’s over, it’s finished.”

“It’s too late,” I choked. “I’ll never know you.”

“You know me now.”

“But I can’t do anything. I can’t do anything for you. If I’d known I might have done something—found you—”

“Hush,” she said. “Sit up, now. Light the candle.” She asked me to throw shadows on the wall while she guessed their shapes. This was the way to play
tchoi
, the shadow game of Tinimaveti nights. But as for my angel, my love—she cast no shadow.

Miros was coming back to life. He walked around the garden, first leaning on a stick, then upright, by himself. His face was still gaunt and fierce with beard, but his eyes had regained their brightness and his body the strength to haul water and split wood. To restore his muscles, he had begun practicing
kankelde
, the soldier’s art, on a horizontal branch of a plum tree in the garden. He startled me when I came upon him swinging upside down, his face wine-dark, in the figure called Garda’s Pendulum.

In the evenings we ate whatever scraps we had in the ravaged sitting room. Firelight flashed on the tangle of his hair. He said: “You saved my life this winter.” He said: “I don’t know how you did it. It’s a miracle.”

I smiled and said softly: “You really don’t know?”

He gave me a guilty glance. “Well. Yes, I know. But I’m not—I’m not like my uncle.”

He tugged at his earring and went on slowly: “Knowing there’s an angel in the place doesn’t make me want to ask it questions. It doesn’t seem right.”

I cleaned the last streaks of
yom afer
from my bowl and sucked my fingers. “You sound like an islander.”

He shrugged and smiled through his beard. “Perhaps. I don’t know.”

When the meal was over we stood and he clapped my shoulder, and for a moment, grateful, I leaned into his rough, human embrace.