The River and the Book Read online

  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.

  6

  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.

  When everything was finished, when the last lament had been sung and the keeners had taken their bells and cymbals and gone home, I fell into bed like a stone. I slept badly. All night I dreamed I was in the River, the waters hammering against m
y ears until I couldn’t tell whether the noise was the water or the pulse of my own blood. I held my breath and held my breath, my chest burning with the pressure of the black water, and then surfaced out of the dream like a drowning swimmer, gasping, and then, because I was too exhausted to resist it, slid back into the endless, suffocating dark.

  I woke up properly when it was still dark. I could hear my sisters breathing beside me, and in the next room my grandmother snorted in her sleep and turned over. I felt as tired as if I hadn’t slept at all, but I suddenly couldn’t bear to stay in bed, I couldn’t bear to be in this house with all these people, breathing the same stale, stuffy air. I slipped out of bed, threw a sheepskin coat over my nightdress and stole out of the house. Once I was outside I walked down to the River, which ran faintly luminous between its banks. The sky was just beginning to lighten towards sunrise.

  I sat down on a flat stone and waited. I don’t really know what I was waiting for, but I think I half expected to see my mother walking up from the house to call me in, as she did sometimes when I went out early. I watched as the stars faded and the landscape began to materialize out of the night and become solid again, and the rim of the world grew rose-pink and deepened to orange and then split with molten gold, and the first rays of the sun speared the wide, empty plains. And as I watched, the carpet of gems flared before me. Their cold brilliance hurt me, and their beauty filled me with anger. My mother had not come. My mother had not come, and the sun had risen, and I knew she would never come now, she would never call me again. And I knocked the jewels off the grasses, all the dew drops I could reach, so their prisms smashed into dull wetness. I tore the grasses until they cut my hands, I fell down on my face and howled in the heartless chill of the grey and empty morning.

  7

  My mother died the winter after I was presented at the temple. If she had been sickening, if there had been some warning, it might have been a little easier to bear. It seemed that one day she was there – scolding us when we squabbled, or sighing patiently and standing to greet a villager who was holding a squawking chicken by the feet as payment for his question, or leaning forward in the morning to light the fire in the stove, her plaited hair swinging over her sleep-blurred face – and then the next she had just vanished. She died of a fierce fever. She went out one bad night to help a young woman suffering in childbed, and a storm caught her as she walked home and chilled her to the bone.

  I don’t remember anything about the next days. I have not one single image of the sickbed, of my brothers and sisters crying, of Grandmother burning herbs in a dish and chanting, not one memory of my mother gasping for breath, of her skin burning, of her raving when her fever took hold. My grandmother told me what happened, because I asked her to, and she also told me that I was there beside the bed all the time, and that I did not sleep for those two days. But I can’t remember anything at all.

  The woman my mother had gone to help lived through her trouble, and so did her baby. For many months I couldn’t meet the woman’s eyes when I saw her and I hated her son, because together they had killed my mother. I have long forgiven them, and prayed for them to forgive me for hating them so much. “The gods give and take in their own time,” said my grandmother. “There is no profit in assigning fault.” She was correct, of course, but at the time it was hard not to blame them. I missed my mother so much. And after she died, the house felt different: a light went out, a soft illumination I had never noticed until it was gone.

  My father’s face closed like a fist. He had always been a quiet man, but now he rarely spoke at all, and sometimes the baffled desolation and anger in his face frightened us. He had loved my mother from the first moment he saw her, when he was a young boatman from the next village. He had come downriver to do some trading and my mother was on the riverbank washing clothes. He told us that it was a dull day, with heavy slate-coloured clouds brooding overhead, but my mother shone with a light that seemed to come from her skin, and as the water splashed up around her strong arms it seemed to be made of liquid silver. He stared, transfixed, as the current pulled his boat around the river bend, and when she was out of sight he wondered whether he had dreamed her, or if she was a goddess who had appeared in human form, as they were said to do. But then he saw her in the village and asked her name, and that very afternoon he brought a courting gift to our house and asked permission to woo her, and the following spring they were married.

  When we were small, we often begged to hear that story. And sometimes, smiling in his quiet way, my father would tell it, and as he did his eyes would meet my mother’s, and then they would both smile.

  8

  The omens, it was said later, were bad that year. In the springtime, a crane crashed into our chimney and broke its neck. My grandmother saw it happen and ran up to help the stricken bird, but it was already dead, its long neck twisted grotesquely under its wings. She picked up the heavy body, which was still quivering with the life that had just left it, and there were tears in her eyes. It was the second time I had seen her weep in less than a month, although before that year I had never seen her cry at all. She buried the crane without saying a word to the children who watched her, curious and frightened, and then she went into the room with the Book and shut the door, and she didn’t come out for a long time. When she did emerge, she looked much older, as if something inside her had been quenched. I was too afraid to ask her what she had read, although I was the only person in the family who had the right to ask.

  The floods did not come in the summer, which meant it was twelve years since the River had last overrun its banks. There had never been such a gap before. Many people now said that the floods would never come again. Even without them, the River had always swelled in summer, rising greedily up its banks. This summer, the River shrank. Its level sank more than the length of a man’s arm below its lowest-ever point, and its waters were browner and murkier. Its voice changed: it was shallower and more urgent, like the voice of a sick man.

  It was less than a month after the crane broke its neck on our chimney that we first heard of the water wars upriver. It happened this way. I was lighting the fire before first light when Foolish Dipli came to the door. He knocked and then waited for me to finish my task, squatting patiently by the step. It was very early for questions and Grandmother was still abed, so I took my time. When I came outside, he stood up and smiled apologetically.

  “They need help,” he said, and pointed towards the River.

  “Who?” I asked, a little impatient.

  “Some strangers from upriver,” said Dipli. “A woman and a baby and a man. They need help.” He smiled again, but this time I noticed the expression in his eyes. Something was very wrong.

  I swallowed hard and followed him quickly down to the riverbank. The sun was only just edging over the horizon and its gold light fell on a small boat drawn up on the bank. It was crammed with all sorts of things – pots, sacks of barley, clothes, an oil lamp, blankets – all thrown in higgledy-piggledy. The boat was so full I wondered that it hadn’t sunk in the River. A thin, exhausted-looking man was sitting on the bank, holding a sleeping baby, and in the boat lay a woman.

  I could see that the woman was badly injured. Her dress was stained with dried blood all down her left side. She lay with her eyes closed, and her breath was loud and laboured. A hot panic began to beat in my stomach. I thought that I should go back to the house and get my grandmother, but Dipli was watching me, trusting that I would know what to do.

  I looked to the man for permission, and then climbed into the boat and picked up the woman’s hand. It was as cold as the river water. As I touched her, her body arched violently and she made a harsh noise in her throat. Fresh blood broke out and dripped on the blanket where she was lying. And then I felt something pass me, as if a bird whirred past my ear, and I knew she was dead, even before the last of her breath whistled out of her throat.

  I remembered then that I was an Effenda. I leant forward and closed her eyes, and
I blessed the soul that had just flown away. I saw, with some other part of me, that my hands were trembling. Then I realized the man was standing at my shoulder. He said nothing at all. He touched the woman’s brow with the tips of his fingers, and turned away, holding the baby tightly to his breast.

  I scrambled out of the boat. “You should come to the house,” I said.

  He turned towards me and I met his eyes. They were like two holes in his face; they seemed to be looking at nothing. My mouth went dry, and I could say nothing more. I had never seen such pain in a man’s expression, not even in my father after my mother died.

  Dipli gently grasped the man’s arm and led him back to our house. And there my grandmother took the baby from his unresisting arms and fed it some warm sheep’s milk. She brought him some soup and stood over him until he had eaten the whole bowl. Then she filled a basin with rainwater and gave him dry, clean clothes, and she led him to the top room, where we housed our guests. When she had taken care of the living, she went down to the riverbank to see to the dead.

  On the way, Grandmother went to see Sulihar, who had given birth a week earlier, and asked if she would wet-nurse the baby. The boy was very small, no older than a month, and he was starving, which was why he lay so limp and quiet. And Sulihar, who had no shortage of milk in her enormous breasts and loved all infant creatures, took the baby and cared for him.

  The stranger slept all that day and all night. Late the next morning, he rose from his bed and came downstairs. He was wearing the clean clothes Grandmother had given him, and he had washed himself. The day before you couldn’t really tell what age he was; he looked shrunken and tired, and he was covered in grime. Now you could see that he was a young man, maybe not many years older than I was.