The River and the Book Read online

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  For Catherine Dan, with gratitude and thanks

  O my name: where are we now?

  Tell me: What is now? What is tomorrow?

  What’s time, what’s place, what’s old, what’s new?

  One day we shall become what we want.

  From “Mural”, by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by

  Sargon Boulos

  1

  I am not a storyteller, so I don’t know how to begin. When I think of Blind Harim the Storyteller, my courage wavers. Harim’s voice enters your blood like a drug, bringing visions and strange dreams. He attracts crowds of people who bring mats and sit around him in rows, their faces upraised like flowers. The men roll cigarettes of dark tobacco and smoke them as they gaze at the ground, their harsh faces suddenly gentle, and the women bring bags of sugared almonds and pop them into the mouths of small children, to keep them quiet.

  Mely and I go to listen to Harim when the city seems too bright and cruel, too full of noise. Behind the neon signs and glass skyscrapers of the car-choked streets, behind the pavements flooded with businessmen in suits and wealthy high-heeled women and beggars and window-washers and tourists whose sunglasses reflect the entire world in miniature, far behind them, where no tourist ever goes, there is a market where people come to buy and sell. There you can buy cucumbers and second-hand mobile phones, engine parts and spices, dull-eyed fish caught in the stinking harbour and iridescent beetles in boxes, patched clothes and old shoes. Nothing costs very much, because everyone who goes there is poor. But nobody is too poor to listen to a story.

  When Harim arrives at the market, people turn and stare in his wake, although there doesn’t seem to be anything special about him. He is led by a small boy, who carries his cushion and then sits silently beside him as he speaks. I have never heard the boy say a single word.

  There is one dusty tree in the square, which offers some thin shade against the sun. That is where Harim tells his stories. He bends down slowly, feeling his way down the trunk with the tips of his fingers. He lifts his sightless eyes to the sunlight that filters through the branches and rests his stick across his knees, and then, very carefully, rolls out an old, worn piece of embroidered silk, which he places on the ground before him. That cloth is where you put your coins when he has finished telling his story.

  He waits for the correct time to begin. Somehow he senses when it is right, when a sufficient crowd has gathered but before the people have become impatient. Most of the time he tells us stories we already know, but sometimes he tells a new story that nobody has ever heard. I like the new ones best. He always begins in the same way: As far away as the North Wind, and as long ago as for ever… And when he says those words, the crowd holds its breath, and then everyone sighs out, all at once. Mely curls up in my lap and begins to purr. I look around at the others, and I know my face is the same as theirs: bright and hungry. In that moment we are all children, and the world is fresh and full of promise.

  I am not a storyteller like Harim, but my story burns inside me, wanting to be told, and I have decided to write it down. I am sitting in my kitchen at my table. It is evening, and the moths are fluttering around the room, bumping into my lamp. Mely is fast asleep on the other chair. I like the noise the pen makes as it scratches across the paper. It is very peaceful. It feels like a proper time to begin.

  This is the story of the River and the Book, but it is my story too.

  2

  My name is Simbala Da Kulafir Atan Mucarek Abaral Effenda Nuum. It’s usually shortened to Simbi Nuum, but those who love me call me Sim.

  Once, not very long ago, I lived in a village with my father and my brothers and sisters and cousins and uncles and aunts. My father, Dato, is a fisherman, and I have two brothers, Tiak and Solman, and three sisters, Shiha, Ketsi and Little Beran. They are a noisy, mischievous tribe. Compared to my siblings, I was considered a solemn child. Perhaps it is because I am the oldest, but my mother said I was born serious.

  My village is a small, unremarkable place like many others that line the River. Its name is not important, except to me. There are perhaps three dozen houses. They are the humble colours of the earth we live on, pink and brown and umber, built many years ago by hands that now sleep in the same earth they shaped with such love. The walls are thick and the windows small, and the houses make flat planes of light and shade that catch every mood of the seasons. The doors are wooden and painted blue or red, and they invite you inside, into their hearts.

  Inside you blink with the sudden colour: there are big cushions as vivid as blood, and bright embroidered hangings, and the glowing wood of low tables smooth with long use. Pierced brass lamps sway from the beams and throw their intricate shadows over whitewashed walls and thick carpets, which are patterned like the gardens full of peacocks in the stories my grandmother told me. And always the smells of food cooking and the sounds of people talking or arguing or laughing.

  When I was a child I never went hungry. Each year we harvested a crop of barley, and my father grew cabbages, radishes, turnips, peas, beets and beans, and we had a small orchard of apple and walnut trees, with a mulberry tree to sweeten our table and mountain pepper to spice our dishes. There was meat and milk and, of course, fish. Sheep and pigs wandered in the street, and chickens scratched for grain next to the black-headed cranes that came each summer. No one ever chased the cranes away: they were welcome guests, the messengers of the gods. Each spring, when my grandmother saw the first crane winging towards the village, she smiled and raised her arms in blessing, and quoted the poet: Watch for the cranes, who will bring my love to you, even as far as the Plains of Pembar.

  I didn’t know the rest of that poem for many years, and when at last I heard all of it, I wept. By then I was far from the Plains of Pembar, and my love was bruised and sad in my chest. And now when I look up and see the cranes high overhead, their necks stretched before them as they beat their way forward on their long migration, I ask them to carry my love with them, to those who love me and call me Sim.

  3

  In our village we had two treasures: the River, which was our road and our god; and the Book, which was our history, our oracle and our soul.

  The River shaped our lives. It was a fact, like the ground and the sky, and so we didn’t think about it: the River was just there, surly or generous, gentle or deadly. In winter it ran fast and narrow, too fast to freeze over, although sometimes you saw chunks of ice swirling in the currents. In summer it swelled with the melt from the faraway snows, and ran slow and brown. Every few years it rose above its banks and spilled over our fields, spreading black, pungent silt that fertilized abundant harvests. It gave us fish and drinking water and cleaned our clothes and our bodies, and we siphoned off its waters to feed our fields and orchards through a network of canals. Sometimes it played with us, a clear, laughing spirit, and sometimes it turned savage and drowned us.

  We all knew that the River flowed from the mountains, which curled beneath the western rim of the world. It was said that our village was found
ed many generations ago by people who had fled war and famine in the lands on the far side of the mountains. I sometimes wondered what had made them stop there, what made them decide to build their homes at just that bend on the River. Was it because they were tired and wanted to walk no further? Or did something call out to them from the land, an omen that said to them, Here is where you can make your home: a bright wren singing in a bush, perhaps, or a rainbow? When I asked the Book, it simply said: Every where is here. I puzzled over that for days, but I couldn’t make any sense of it.

  In our village, no one in living memory had ever seen the mountains. There was no reason to go west; that way there were only the Upper Plains, with a few small villages like our own clinging to the River. Adventurers went east, towards the cities. It seemed miraculous to me, who lived on the plains with horizons stretching out on every side as far as the eye could see, that there could be such things as mountains. I studied the pictures in the Book and tried to imagine what they were like, and all my childhood I dreamed of going there. The Book told me that in the centre of the mountain range is a great peak with four sides facing north, south, east and west, and down each face flow the four rivers that feed the world. Our River flows from the eastern side. This mountain is the birth chair of the gods and it holds up the sky. It is called Yntara, which means She in the old language: the mother, the goddess. The Book said that if ever the four rivers died, it would be the end of the world.

  The River was our road: it brought business and news. In the warm months the trader Mizan chugged upstream in his brightly painted barge. He sold dark sea salt, cinnamon, cloves and almond oil, black tea, steel knives and pots, minerals for the dye-makers and trinkets and perfumes for our pleasure, and he bought the fine cloth we wove from sheep wool through the long, cold winters.

  The only city people who bothered to make the long journey to our village were the tax collector and the trader. Mizan’s visit was always an occasion for a feast. The tax collector was feasted as well, but no one trusted him because he had a thin, sour face and demanded our money. (I sometimes wondered if his work made him sour, since no one ever welcomed him with pleasure, and I felt a little sorry for him.) Mizan was considered an honourable man. He had thighs as thick as tree trunks and a barrel chest, and his fat, friendly face was scarred by pox. He was widely respected for his hard-bargaining, his gargantuan appetite and his huge laugh. He would sit between my father and grandmother, an honoured guest of the household, and in exchange for our hospitality he would tell us news of the cities of the east.

  Often the news was of war and unrest, and the adults would talk in low voices, their faces dark and serious. At those times there were fewer coins to hoard in the chest where we kept our precious things, but otherwise these events were far away and scarcely affected us. Whether the news was bad or good, it seemed to us children to be as unreal as tales of a legendary past, as long ago as for ever. It had nothing to do with us.

  Nobody knew when our River had begun to fail. Some said the warnings had been there before I was born, but they were so slow, so gradual, that nobody really noticed. After all, the River had its moods, and sometimes it was less generous, sometimes more. The first sign was the disappearance of the summer floods that enriched our fields. The usual cycle was every three years, give or take a year or two: in times of wealth the River could flood two or three years in a row; in times of poverty it crept between its banks and refused to overflow at all. The longest period without flooding in living memory was eight years, during a terrible drought in my grandmother’s girlhood. When the River had not flooded for six years, she shook her head and said the dry times were coming again.

  I was ten years old then. I remember that the spring prayers that year were long and solemn, and my father bought some special incense to burn at the temple. But the River didn’t flood that year, nor the year after, nor the year after that, no matter how fervent our prayers nor how rich our incense.

  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.

  4

  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. “I
t 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.

  5

  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.