I dreamed many times of the man we had seen on the beach, near the pirate caves, the man with the dark face, fox-colored hair, bleached eyes. I don’t know how many times I dreamed of him; it seemed like hundreds, and each dream released the same, specific terror. Ainut was always with me, always heavy, always needing to be dragged. It was essential that I protect her. She was myself, the world, she was as heavy as all of the children of the village, she had too many legs and arms. And the man, coming after us. His feet bending down the grass, the precise nature of his breath and shadow. The sea, far away, a strip of blue at the edge of a dazzling beach. The distance was too great. We would never make it.
Now I don’t know what he wanted. I think of him with pity. The way he waved his arms, as if pleading with us. And sometimes I think he wasn’t pleading at all, that we misunderstood: that he was attempting to warn us, even to save us.
So, my father closed us in. We had that: his supreme courage. Nothing like it had ever been seen in Kiem. This deranged doctor of birds, this lunatic with the jut of chiefs, living blatantly in the village with his kyitna daughter. Living in front of everyone, with the charms drying all over the house so that no one dared approach, not even with fire, sitting under his house and weaving a mat, in plain view, with the absurd nonchalance of the demented. Wait for a few days, he told my mother, then you can go out again. At first only he appeared, tempting attack. And we looked through the spaces in the thatch and saw the house surrounded, ugly faces, rusty hoes and spears.
Look, I whispered to my mother. There’s Ajo Ud. And there’s old Nedovi with a torch.—We had sweat on our palms, we couldn’t eat, could hardly stand, yet I felt closer to her than I had done in years. I even let her squeeze my arm, happy to make her happy with this graciousness, knowing she didn’t expect it. Look, it’s Ajo Kyet, she whispered, horrified, moving aside so that I could peer through her place in the thatch.
It was Ajo Kyet. He was the village doctor of leopards. He stood in the boat, his arms crossed on his chest. He did not look the way he did when he sat under his big house near the canal, with a white cloth around his waist—no, he was resplendent with new butter on his hair, and the tails of six blue monkeys hung from his cloak, and his leather belt was trimmed with several bags made of leopard skin, and clouds of incense rose from his long boat. His face was streaked with red. He looked splendid, imposing, and sorrowful. His voice boomed from his broad chest as I watched. Jedin of Kiem! he bellowed, raising his hand. You have brought abomination on us, the curse of jut be upon you.
My father’s voice startled us, right beneath our feet. Good morning, Kyet! he shouted. The blessing of jut!
There was a murmur from the crowd. Ajo Kyet looked sadder than ever. Oh, Jedin, he cried in thrilling tones. Gone are the days when you might call me Kyet. You have put yourself outside, and you know it as well as I do, in your heart. Your jut knows. Take your curse and go, Jedin of Kiem.
My daughter is innocent, shouted my father.
There were louder murmurs. Cursed by the tongue! someone cried. Everywhere people were spitting into the water. Some of them picked up clods of mud and touched them to their lips. Only Ajo Kyet was unmoved, pensive. Rarely have I seen anyone look so sad. He went on looking sad and glittering and handsome as he spoke, telling my father in his sonorous voice that it was the gods who assigned curses, just as only the gods could bless. He told my father that there would come a time when his jut would fail, and the charms on the house would be as a handful of ash, and the people would know it and they would come with fire and with weapons and obliterate the last trace of our home. He said that my father ought to have known, that he ought to have slipped away with us in the night instead of perpetrating this outrage, spending his own blood to make a sign to all the village that there was kyitna here, filth protected with magic. Moral filth, he called it. He was eloquent, noble, stately. We are innocent, my father shouted.
Ajo Kyet shook his head. Innocence cannot survive, he said, in the body of corruption.
(4)
A thousand times I promised myself to be different, patient, kind. I would go out alone, rowing my boat, after she had driven me to rage with her simplicity, after I had mocked her, sneered, or shouted. I would go out alone with only a clay beaker of water. The sea calmed me, the sky the color of mud. I would mutter to myself, arguing, defending her, rowing over that heavy, livid sea. She was guileless, she was good. She had done nothing wrong. Only expressed her pity for Ud’s first wife, or interrupted when I was learning a tchavi’s song from my father, asking how it could rain when there were oranges.
If there was so much fruit, she said, the rains would be over already.—She was under the house, building her cook fire. I was sitting beside my father in one of the grass-bottomed chairs. Of course the rains would be over, I snapped. That’s what he’s trying to say.
Well, she said doubtfully. But he says it rained for hours.
I know. He means—he’s showing the search for the tchavi. The way—I paused, helpless. It was no use talking to her.
Perhaps the fruit came early that year, she said.
And the way she said it—as if she were comforting me for the song’s mistake, while she squatted, fanning the fire with a reed fan, and my father sat, gentle, not saying anything, only waiting for her to be finished, not even trying to correct her—the way she was so satisfied with nothing, wanted no knowledge at all, only to sow, to dig, to have clean water, content to remain a fool forever—I can’t stand it, I shouted, and I untied my boat and dragged it down to the water.
Jissi, my father said. He was disappointed in me. He often said: Your mother is one of the humble. The humble are innocent; they do not need humiliation.
I rowed out to sea. I didn’t look back at them.
But now I will never row out to sea again, not alone. And I’ll never walk in the fields of millet either, hearing the wind expressing its longing amid the tall grain. And I’ll never build fires there to eat stolen fish. No, it’s over, from now on there won’t be any escape from her, her sighs, the way she squats heavily on her hams, the sloshing, sloshing sound at night as she rinses out her dress, and her odor, that smell of ancient things, of the dark. I can hear her turning over at night, sometimes snoring. She’s always tired, she sleeps in an instant, abruptly as a child. The sound of her sleep, her breathing, it’s oppressive. The house is so small, there’s no air, and I cry because I’m trapped there with her. I cry because I want my boat, I want to be out in the sunlight, I want to look at the sea again, at the mountains, it’s terrible when I can hear people talking across the water and I’m alone, never free of them and yet always alone. Yesterday, it’s always yesterday that a group of people came, people my age, and stood on the opposite bank and taunted me. Among them were Tchod and Miniki. Throw out your mother’s rags, they sang, don’t you know that eating them gives you kyitna?