There was always food on the beach. There were coconuts and sleepy lizards, obese snails dreaming in the tide pools, and higher up there were wild bananas and datchi, although we feared the pirates in those regions, and the pariah dogs. But on this day, the day I remember, we were too giddy with happiness to think of those things, and we went up near the caves, chattering and laughing in the long grass, gathering green bananas which we would roast and season with saltwater. Ainut’s plaits were wet, and a track of salt lay on her cheek. She was baring her teeth and rolling her eyes, imitating someone. And then I saw the man and my laughter died as if forced out of me by a blow. It was all I could do to draw a breath.
He was standing near the wall of the cliff, knee-deep in the grass. He stood with his hands at his sides and looked at us. Above him there was a gaping cave mouth and a slope of rubble leading down to where he was, the man from the cave. He was dressed in rags and his hair stood up, red in color, red, horrible, stark and flagrant as if it were dipped in blood, and his eyes, worse, remembering it, his eyes seemed without any color at all, silver perhaps or the color of guava peel. Against these colors his skin looked very black. He was a painted man. Ainut followed the movement of my eyes. She stopped laughing and then I moved, my hand shot up and grasped her arm, hard, digging the nails into her flesh.
It was her weakness that made me strong. At first, when I saw the kyitna man, my instinct had been to fall, to stop breathing, to die—and perhaps, had I been alone, I would have collapsed from pure terror and they would have carried me off into their cave. But Ainut saved me, she saved us both. We looked at the man and saw a movement higher up, a shadow inside the cave, and the shadow moved into the light, its scarlet hair and beard hanging down in the dust, and Ainut screamed and screamed and went on screaming. Then the first man, the one close to us, lifted his hands and waved them as if to beckon to us, and stepped forward into the grass, and my strength came up and I yanked on Ainut’s arm and started running, dragging her, shouting at her to run, to stop screaming and run. We stumbled down the beach. The man was coming after us. Everything came back to me then, everything. My mother’s warnings, anxious, irritating, don’t go far, Jissavet, do you promise, don’t go around to the shore by the caves. I prayed to my father’s jut. If I get away I’ll listen to her, I’ll love her better, I’ll never disobey her again. Miraculously, we reached the boats. I turned and set Ainut upright and slapped her in the face as hard as I could. Get in your boat, I said. I’m leaving you. Do you hear? I’m leaving you behind.—Sobs, screams, and the bright blue sea. We thrashed into the water, climbed in the boats, hauled on the oars and pulled away, slowly, from that accursed shore.
Even when we were far out on the water, we could still see the man. He stood in the surf, tiny, waving his arms. We could still see the stain of his hair, and we spat in the ocean to clear our hearts of the sight, the impurity. The abomination.
(3)
When I was old enough I asked: Where did jut come from?
We were sitting on our pallets in the evening, the light flickering and showing our skin-maps hanging all over the walls, and my father leaned forward, his eyes dark pools, and said:
In the oldest days jut lived in the sea. All the separate janut and the whole jut, it was all there, and all one. The people faced the sea when they prayed, and they knew that something powerful lived in it, and they never teased it or insulted it. Then one day a little girl came, a girl about your size, and she said, I’m going to go and talk to jut. And the people said, It is not for human beings to talk to jut, and she said, Very well, but she knew her heart all the same. And when night came she slipped out of the house and went and stood on the cliff, and she shouted down at the sea, Jut! Jut!—She stood there stubbornly and called to the sea as loudly as she could, Jut! Answer me, Jut!
And Jut answered.
I’m that girl, I think. I am like the girl who called jut. Always outside, always different from people. It’s not only that I’m different, it’s that I don’t want to be different and yet I am proud, almost proud of the difference itself. I won’t try to change. When Ainut grows up she will marry a Kiemish laborer, a poor man, but one with jut. I’ll lie with my face to the doorway, watching the wedding procession go by, already very ill, too ill to get up. At that time, the time of the wedding, I haven’t spoken to Ainut for two years, but still the procession goes by our house, that’s the way she is, she would think of me even after everything has died between us, she knows I’ll be watching her. And I am. She stands in the prow of the boat, with a necklace of marigolds, beautiful. Around her are shouts, confusion, the clashing of spears. She doesn’t turn toward me. She glides by with an averted face, remote. And then I lose sight of her in the crowd.
It comes on suddenly, the first times. I’m under the house, untying my boat. Suddenly I can’t see anything. Or what I can see is not what’s there, I see something like a swarm of flies, white and black, filling up my vision. At the same time, my head grows heavy. I lean forward, grasp the pole. Far away, through the flies, I see my hands. Just as suddenly it clears and I see my mother watching me, holding her basket. Jissi, are you all right?
It’s nothing, I say.
Then one day Ainut said: Your hair’s red.
What?
Look, right there, she said. She had turned away from the tree. She had put down her basket and was looking at me strangely as I stood holding the pole in the bright sunlight.
Look. She raised her hand, pointed. She didn’t touch my hair.
Maybe it’s papaya, I laughed, breathless. Maybe I broke one with the pole and it splashed on me.—I raised my hand and felt my hair where she pointed. It wasn’t sticky.
I don’t think it’s papaya, she said. She was always like that, thoughtful, plodding, unromantic, without invention. She looked at me with her sober eyes.
Did we break one? I asked, looking over the ground, still touching my hair gingerly.
I tried to look at my plait.
It’s too high, she said. I don’t think you can see it.
Then why did you tell me to look?—The rage was already coming over me, the desolation, the covetousness, for life, any kind of life. I touched my hair. It was as if I already knew what would happen, that we would be separated, she and I, that she would go into life, marry, have children and grow old, and I would spend a few seasons stretched in the doorway. My breath caught unnaturally, as if I were getting ready to cry.