The River and the Book (2 page)

We could still irrigate our fields, and we fed the soil as best we could, but without the floods, our harvests were poorer than they had been. As people do, we adjusted to the new conditions, and things went on as they had before.

Then we began to notice that the level of the River was falling, bit by bit, year after year. Again it was almost imperceptible: but the high-water marks went steadily down and down.

I was too busy to worry about the River. I had just turned fifteen, the age at which I became a grown woman. My father presented me to the temple with the other girls and boys my age, and we had the spring celebrations – a feast with singing and dancing that went on for three days. I was proud and happy, because I now had the right to marry if I wished to, and I could mark the cloth I wove with my own initials and make some money for myself. I was planning to buy some silk for a new dress when Mizan came that summer, and perhaps a necklace. And at last I was an Effenda, a Keeper of the Book.

Inside the Book was written everything that had been, everything that was and everything that was to come.

The task of my family was the Keeping. That is the story of my name: among my people, your name says who you are and where you are from. It tells my mother’s name, Kulafir, and my grandmother’s, Atan, and my great-grandmother’s, Mucarek, and my great-great-grandmother’s, Abaral; and it says we are all the Keepers of the Nuum, the Book. The Book was passed down from mother to daughter, and it had been that way for longer than anyone could remember. It was so, and it had always been so, and no one thought that it would ever be any different.

The Book was kept in a plain wooden box that was as old as the Book itself. The wood was dark, hard and grainless, polished with the use of many hands, so you could no longer tell what kind of tree it was made from. Only the Keepers had the right to open the box and take out the Book. It would never have occurred to anyone in the village to violate that law. We kept it in a windowless room that opened off the kitchen. The room was just big enough for a low table and long cushions, and a lamp always burned there. The Book stood on a deep shelf set into the wall furthest from the door.

If anyone in the village had a question that they couldn’t answer, they would ask the Book. Should Istan marry Loki, who was very handsome but owned no sheep, or should she marry Sopili, who had a harelip but owned a dozen sheep and three fields? Should Foolish Dipli spend his life savings on an engine for his fishing boat? Will Iranu’s son ever return from the city in the east? When will the drought end, when will the River flood again? Will the drought ever end?

“Sometimes they will ask things that make you want to smile,” my grandmother told me once. “But you must never mock or belittle anyone who comes to ask the knowledge of the Book. They may seem small or petty concerns, but if a person is moved to ask something of the Book, it means it matters to them. It is not for the Keeper to judge. And you must never break a confidence. Any question asked of the Book, no matter what it is, is secret. You will find that more difficult than you expect.”

I began to learn how to read the Book when I was five years old. My mother was still alive then, and she gave me my first lesson. She washed me with scented oil and braided my hair as if we were to attend a ceremony at the temple. Then she lifted the heavy cloth that hung over the doorway and led me into the room where the Book was kept. I often played there; it was not forbidden to anyone, unless a visitor had come to ask a question. I liked it, because it was the most peaceful room in the house. On the table was a wooden doll I had left behind that very morning.

That afternoon it seemed to be a different place, a place where I had never been before. I held my breath as my mother took the Book from the shelf and out of its box and placed it on the table. She carefully lifted the plain, heavy cover and opened it out, and I saw the yellow pages and the black and red lettering for the first time. I reached out and touched the pages. It felt like touching something alive. I had never seen anything so beautiful.

“You will learn how to read this,” said my mother. “It will take your whole life, and you will never reach the end. And each time you open it, it will be as if you are opening it for the first time.”

I looked at the writing. There were no gaps between the letters and they ran down the page, line after line, in a heavy block. Every now and then there was a red letter among the black, like a flower in a field of dark earth.

“What does it say?” I asked.

“It is a poem. A very old poem. But it is always new.” My mother turned a page, and revealed a picture. I snuggled up close to her, so I could look at it. It was a drawing of a woman seated at a table next to a little girl. They were both reading a book. The woman looked like my mother, and the girl looked like me. The more I stared at the drawing, the more like us it was: there was even a doll lying on the table.

There was writing underneath, and I asked my mother what it said.

“It says:
Kulafir begins to teach Simbala the secrets of the Book
,” she said.

I don’t remember being surprised or afraid to see a picture of myself in a book that was older than I could imagine. I think I was pleased. But for many years after my mother died I searched for that drawing. Although I leafed through every single page over and over, I never found it again.

Once I lived in a place where I knew the name for everything. Now I live in a city that is full of new things. If I went back to my village tomorrow – if my village is still there as I remember it – and tried to tell my family about what I have seen, they would wrinkle their brows, they would be perplexed. They would try to understand, because they are courteous, but what I told them would be beyond their comprehension. They would think, like I did when I was a child listening to the traders, that I was telling them marvellous fables.

I am not sure that I understand the city very well. I am still an outsider; I am still learning the rules and the words. The knowledge I spent so many hard years learning has no place here. In any case, not many people are interested. My knowledge comes from the old life, the backward and ignorant world of peasants. To understand takes too much time, and who has time? Nobody has any time.

Sometimes it seems to me that those who are interested, the foreigners who do have time, are the worst of all. They think that the things I know are exotic and strange, and my knowledge excites them. They treat me like some kind of priestess. The more I try to explain, the more their imaginations fatten and distort. They wear our clothes and decorate their houses with our gods, and they learn enough of our language to order food from a hawker and to observe the cruder courtesies, and they burn incense as if they lived in temples. They think knowledge is something you can buy, and I often wonder why they come to me instead of consulting the sages of their own lands. If I didn’t know better, I would think that they do not have sages of their own.

Sometimes it frightens me to look into their eyes. It is as if a hard barrier divides their soul from themselves. Their soul cries like a lost child deep inside them, but all they hear is a faint echo of its sobbing. They can’t break down the barrier and take its hand and comfort it, because they don’t even know that the barrier is there. They only know that they are unhappy, and they believe that happiness is something that can be found, and that when they find it, it will solve everything.

On the other hand, as Mely likes to remind me when I complain too much, these people are the reason why I am not so poor that I have to live in a shack made of boxes. They pay me generously. I try not to be ungrateful, and I try to remember my grandmother’s admonition that one should not mock the desires or questions of others, no matter how trivial or stupid they might seem. I deal with them as honestly as I can, but I know I cannot give them what they want. A gift must be received as well as given, a poem must be listened to with the ears of the soul, and their souls are crying so hard they can hear nothing. They make me feel like a fraud, and I begin to doubt myself. I wonder whether my whole life is a dream, a story I made up and began to believe because I told it so often.

When I feel poisoned by their strange hunger, I catch a bus to the west, to the shantytown, and walk around the market and listen to the storyteller. I speak to the people who live on the edges, the poor who come from villages far away. They do not talk about what they have lost, because it is too painful, because they have not found the words to say it, because there is no need, because everyone has lost the same things. Sometimes they are coarse and brutal and selfish because they have lost so much, because they no longer even hope, but I do not despise them for that. More often they are kind and generous. They sing the old poems, and they eat out of the common bowl, and in a corner of their shack there is always a shrine to the small gods, even if it is made of scraps of paper and wood and tinfoil. Their children are sharp and bright, and when they grow up, many of them do not keep the gods in their houses. What use are our gods in a big city where no one listens? I think that if they forget their gods they may forget themselves, like so many of the foreigners who visit me: but how can I blame them for that?

The shanty dwellers do not come from my village. Many of them don’t even speak my language. They are caught between one world and another, and they no longer belong anywhere. When I go to visit them, I feel less alone.

When I told Mely I wanted to write down my story, at first she said nothing. She stared at me with her cool green eyes and I thought she was laughing at me. At last she flicked her tail. “Why not?” she said. “You are a Keeper. You should have a Book. And you might as well make your own.”

Mely’s comment took me aback. I hadn’t thought of my story as being like the Book, and it seemed disrespectful to think that I could replace the Book with my own words. I wondered then if perhaps I shouldn’t write it, if to do so would be a kind of blasphemy. When I told Mely my thoughts, she flicked her tail again. “You people are strange,” she said. “Someone must have made the Book. It didn’t leap out of a burrow or fall off a tree. So why can’t you make one too?”

“But I don’t want to replace the Book,” I said. “I just want to write down my story.”

“So? It will be a new Book,” said Mely. She was already bored with the conversation. “I’m tired of looking for the old one.”

And so I went to the paper shop in my street and bought a notebook and a pen. The notebook has black covers and creamy white paper with faint blue lines, and the pen has black ink. They were expensive, but it seemed important to buy the proper materials for such a solemn undertaking as writing a new Book.

I put the pen and the notebook on my table in the kitchen. I left them there for days. I didn’t have the courage to make the first mark on the paper, to sully that perfect creamy-white field with my handwriting.

“What if I make a mistake?” I asked Mely.

“How will you know if it’s a mistake?”

“I don’t know anything about stories,” I said. “I will make lots of mistakes.”

I knew it was stupid to ask Mely. What does a cat know about books? But she said, “How can you make a mistake? It’s your story.” And then she fell asleep at once, so I couldn’t ask her any more questions.

That night I opened the notebook and began my story. I have been writing it now for six evenings, and every morning I read what I have written to Mely, because I need to feel I am making it for someone. I know I am not telling things in the proper order, but I think Mely is right: it is my story, so I can’t make a mistake.

And tonight I am remembering how I would walk out of the house at dawn on spring mornings, my feet bare and freezing, because I loved to see the sun on the dew drops that hung trembling from each grass blade.

I thought that the dew on the grass at sunrise was like a sultan’s jewels in one of my grandmother’s stories. When she spoke of vast treasures, of vaults heaped with diamonds and rubies, I always imagined the dew at the moment when the sun’s first rays spilled over the horizon and struck it into fiery brilliance. I would stare at them until my eyes were dazzled and warm tears ran down my cheeks. I could smell the woodsmoke as people started their fires for the first meal of the day, and I listened to the low bleat of the sheep and the quiet music of the River and the early cries of the birds.

My tracks stretched dark behind me where my feet had pressed down the grey, wet grasses, and on the slope in front of me sparkled a miraculous carpet stitched with countless tiny gems, each one a polished and perfect crystal that flashed emerald and violet and ruby and gold. It was so beautiful I held my breath. And then the sun lifted and the magic faded, and I realized that the numbness of my feet was climbing up my legs and making me shiver, and I turned back to the house and the duties of the day.

On the morning after my mother’s funeral, I went out of the house before dawn to be on my own. I wasn’t thinking about the dew. I just wanted to be alone. The day before the house had been so full of people. The whole village had come to pay its respects, as well as village heads from up and down the River, and we had many guests sleeping in the house. My mother had been an important woman. All day I had gravely accepted their gifts and their sympathy, and I worried about how to serve the lamb and whether Raitam was burning the bread, and who was sitting where. Dipli and Lokaran might come to blows if they sat at the same table, but I didn’t want to offend either of them by giving the other precedence, and the Juta family was feuding but, while everyone knew about the feud, nobody was certain who was on whose side because the alliances and enmities changed every day… And underneath I thought I would suffocate with impatience and anger that I had to think of these things at all, which had always been the cares of my mother. I knew my grandmother was really in charge – she moved quietly and deftly between the guests, her face calm like iron – but I knew that now it was my job too, and I worried about everything. I kept my face formal and courteous as was required of the Effenda, and my stomach grew hot and tight with rage.