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 ilclass="underline" 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.