Somewhere she darts, pauses, runs, trembles, stifles her breath. She climbs down rocks, through sand, through clumps of trees. Through the raw grass that cuts her feet, through the thick bushes, thorns, under branches, fighting her way among the vines. She avoids all paths, the seduction of easy passages. She runs. Sometimes she hides for a time, her heart pounding. Her two hearts. She stumbles, bruises her foot, suffers from hunger, from the heat, from the constant oppression of terror.
I don’t know why she goes on. Why not stop, why not lie down and sleep? Even at night she goes on through the forest. Her breath loud, the odor of leaves overpowering in the dark, and the river Dyet so high, too dangerous to cross. She follows the river, picking oranges to suck on the way. She fights against hope, the weakness of that emotion. Then one morning she sees the first fishermen out on the water, and she walks into the village with bleeding feet.
So, you see, I didn’t have any jut, on either side. That was only a fantasy of my childhood. The lanterns bright with fireflies, the benevolent Jetnapet, the jade cups: I had no connection to any of it. No, it’s right, I told him. I believe you. It seems right. — I was satisfied not to belong to the hill. I told him so. I said: I always knew I was not one of you.
Soon after that he lost the desire to speak.
The body of corruption. Is that what I am, Jevick, is that what you think, the body of corruption? No, not you: you spoke to me on the ship, I saw it in you at once, the lack of fear, the absence of superstition. Do you know what it meant, to speak to someone my own age after all those years? For it had been years, over three years. Three years of the mist and heat and fevers and isolation in the body which Ajo Kyet proclaimed filth.
My father said I was innocent. But the gods did not agree. And after all, I was the daughter of a pirate. I was the child of the caves, of brutality, of suffering, humiliation. Cursed by the evil of that dark coast.
Hints, whispers. I remember them, especially now that I know the truth. The cruelty in the eyes, the contempt. You can’t know the viciousness of Kiem, no one can know it who hasn’t lived there, in that shimmer and draining heat. Sick, unable to move, I remember the women whispering, sliding their eyes toward me and then away, whispering, The mother is so unlucky, yes, that business years ago, and then the aunt, it must be jut. The inspired malice of Kiem is such that they would help to hide the truth from me, pretending that I must be protected, in order to increase the pleasure of words whispered just out of hearing: Rape, the pirate coast, her fingers, her child.
Later, in our house, we’re so afraid. We make Tipyav come up and sit with us, just sit there against the wall. It’s my father, he frightens us, we think that he might die and we don’t know how we will bear it if that happens. Already we can’t look at one another, my mother and I: we’ve been like this ever since I learned the truth; if our eyes meet by chance there’s a clang, a sound that makes us cringe, the sound of a murder being committed somewhere. My mother finds it hard to catch her breath. We’re both afraid to speak. She’s clumsier than usual, dropping spoons, catching her feet in my father’s blankets, even stumbling over his legs as he lies still, a thin, white-haired old man. Suddenly he’s as old as Tipyav, older. His face has no expression. My mother washes him, silently, every night. The sponge, the vacant eyes, it’s like a return to the days of the grandmother. She lets down the curtain to strip and wash the lower part of his body.
She does this, but she can’t take care of herself. Her hair is filthy and she cries because there are weevils in the flour. I know what it is: it’s the man who came as soon as my father stopped talking, the brutal, red-haired man from the pirate coast. I think my mother sees him in the rotting part of the roof, where the rain drips, and in the bananas infested with ants, and in everything that is horrible, perverse, and persecuting her: in the obscene gestures and grimaces of fate. I see him too, everywhere. His face, with its pale reptilian eyes, has conquered my dreams of the hill, of my generous aunt. I think of his shapely wrists, he must be handsome, he smiles at me. Stop it, I scream at my mother. You’re driving me mad.
She stops. She puts the beads back into the sack. She’s been counting them for hours, it’s her only idea these days. We must go to the ghost country, where Jissavet will be cured. I suppose she thinks the gods will lose track of us. Idiot, she’s an idiot, and I don’t want to leave my father, but I’ll go, if only to escape this house, this disintegrating house with its strong odor of sweat, overpowering, and its darkness where we are all losing our minds. I’ll go with her, I don’t care anymore. Only that day, before dawn, I will hold my father, pressing my cheek to his. And I will be the one to disentangle the strands of my hair from his curled fingers when they lower me to the boat.
The map of Kiem, Jevick: it is drawn in the stars and immortal. It is putrid, already decayed, but it never dies. It is that body of corruption in which, every hour, an innocence meets its fate, a swift and soundless dissolution. I saw the map, I saw how we followed its paths, my mother and I, how we worked together in absolute harmony, how Kiem always needs these two, the one who spoils and the one who submits, how we were made for each other in that eternal design. It came to me, so beautiful it brought the tears to my eyes, with its indisputable, crystalline magnificence. You’ve ruined my life, I whispered. You’ve destroyed everything for me. Because of you I never experienced pure happiness…
It was in the Young Women’s Hall. She was bending over me, wringing a wet cloth into my hair, dabbing my forehead. Her lips were parted in concentration. I closed my eyes in the odor of her breath, drunk on revulsion and despair. When I opened them I saw the pores in her skin, her huge and luminous eyes, and suddenly, I don’t know how it began, I saw the kyitna too, how it had followed her all her life, how it had always been the sign of her destroyer. First the man from the caves, and then her child, her own child: we had always been there, as merciless as the gods. At every turn, beating her, mocking her, violating her, overturning her most humble visions, her hopes. I knew my father, I knew the man from the caves, his savage feeling at the sight of her weakness and uncertainty, the same poor flaws which had often driven me to the brink of violence: for Kiem cannot bear the presence of innocence. We hate for anyone to escape the knowledge we possess, the knowledge of the body of corruption. It was her innocence which had deprived me of satisfaction, and my cruelty which had deprived her of all pleasure. The circle was joined, complete. The attendants had already been called, and my mother struggled to hold me down on the bed. I pushed her away, not sure whether I was pushing or clutching at her because her dress, somehow, seemed always caught in my hands… From somewhere far away there came a voice, a demented howling, a most chilling, hollow, almost inhuman sound, like a voice from the other side of death. I am Jissavet of Kiem, it said, over and over. I am from Kiem.