You can sit in the corner. It’s all you can do when it starts raining. Sit in the dry corner and watch the water slide on the floor. It finds its way to the doorway at last and joins the rest of the rain, down there, outside. There’s thunder, darkness, a cold fog everywhere.
But sometimes—wasn’t it true that you would go outside, when the sky had cleared, and run, screaming and jumping to dash the raindrops from the leaves? Wasn’t it true that the smell of the mud was buoyant, delightful, excessive—that the yellow light of the flats outshone the sky? And everywhere you could hear your own voice ringing in the cold air, and you would charge through the reeds, which sprang back, scattering moisture. And the sea, still bubbling, angry, glowed with a heavy phosphorescence. You could play with it: its radiance clung to the body.
It’s true, I touched that radiance, but then why am I always hungry, why am I always craving more, more light, more life? This life in which I have nothing, only this illness, huge, inscrutable, this illness which has slowly become myself. When I’m alone I think of my kiss, my only kiss, but cautiously; I’m afraid to wear it out with too much remembering, I limit myself, decide that I will think of it only once in a week, in a month. It is my most private memory. When I’m allowed to think of it I close my eyes and concentrate; it’s difficult to find that moment again. I start with the sound of the waves, and then I add the pungent smoke of cigars. I lick my wrist to recover the taste of salt. There, it’s coming. And there it is. The intoxication of ginger on his lips, the lips of this stranger, this alien. But each time it grows fainter, until the action of memory wears it away, and I trace, in despair, its irredeemable outline.
The ship pulls away from the shore. It is too large to feel the sea. Only at noon do we venture out of our cabin. Then, when the deck is deserted, we lie under an awning, soothed by the humid air. The ocean glitters in every direction.
We burned my grandmother’s body on the hillside.
I remember the journey there, all of us in my father’s boat, my father rowing smoothly with his long, capable strokes, my mother weeping into a cotton rag. I was feeling important because I had a responsibility: waving a reed fan over the small dry corpse. It was covered with a thin cloth, the weaving loose as if to avoid stifling the old woman in the heat.
Never, perhaps, had Kiem known such a silent funeral. My father had learned the idea among the tchanavi. There were no other mourners, no blue chalk, no horns or wailing, and to my chagrin no trays of delicacies. No, only this one lean boat, this man, this woman, this child, walking through the scorched grass, skirting the forest, trudging toward a lonely spot on the hill, bare in the dry season. My mother carried the body in her arms. And my father lit the branch which set the meager shape to crackling on its pyre, while I watched the insects fleeing the conflagration. This is Hanadit of Kiem, he said in a pleasant, even tone. And we release her into the Isle of Abundance.
I think he tried to say something to me: something soothing about death, about the body’s return to the wind. But I was bored, hot and hungry, scratching my insect bites, I felt no grief and therefore desired no comfort. The grass of the hill was desiccated and yellow, and swiftly turned black. I began to whine that the smoke had a funny smell. Let’s go back, I pleaded, growing petulant when my father shook his head. My mother would not even look at me.
My mother: she was inconsolable, possessed by grief. For this creature, this leather doll with its odor of urine. It was if there had never been a woman on earth so miraculous, so adored, so beloved as Hanadit of Kiem. Tati, Tati, she moaned. For years, as long as I could remember, my grandmother had been incapable of speech, incapable almost of movement, a mere shell, giving nothing to her daughter, placed in a corner like an old gourd. I fell asleep on the grass and then woke wildly, terrified by my strange surroundings, the dark, smoky sky of the hill, and my mother’s hideous, jerking screams.
Tati! Tati! she shrieked.
I saw her stumble, burning her hands in the bright embers.
To the end, yes, she was still the same, incompetent, clumsy, bewildered. She babbled and wept in the light of the small oil lamp. I wonder what she saw when she looked at me, if I possessed, for her, the face of the red-haired torturer of the caves. I tried to steady her hand, but my arms wouldn’t move. She was tipping the lamp, not paying attention. The tiny flame shrank and crinkled. I heard her calling down the hall in Kideti, a fool to the end, enough to make you weep. Hold the light, I said.
Chapter Eighteen
Spring
I wrote all through the winter. I wrote, paused, went out and walked far over the snowswept plains, a derelict wrapped in a carpet. The crone in the hillside left for her winter quarters in the village, where I could not go for fear of discovery, and I had to search elsewhere for help. The angel flickered above me in the falling snow. She showed me how to hide, when to crawl through the ditches, squirming on my elbows, how to avoid being seen from the grounds of the fortress, where prisoners worked at repairing a crack in the wall, clamped in their wooden shackles. She led me to encampments of feredhai, ephemeral villages of women, children, and ancients, the tents pegged fast against the wind. The men and boys were away; they had taken the cattle farther east. When I called out, a woman would raise the tent flap cautiously, shielding her lamp. And they never recoiled from the gaunt foreigner with snow in his long beard but looked at me curiously with their scintillant black eyes, and pulled me inside, exclaiming to one another in birdlike voices, and gave me medicinal herbs and what they could spare of butter and rice. Children watched from raised pallets, muffled in furs, playing with dolls made of tallow. Sometimes my hosts tried to make me stay, pushing me down with hard fingers. “Kalidoh, kalidoh,” they repeated. I asked Miros what it meant, and he told me it is the highland word for avneanyi.
I smiled. “So they know.”
He nodded, head lowered, shoveling rice into his mouth. “Not hard to see,” he mumbled.
“No. I suppose not.”
He gave a grunt which might have been laughter. His hand on the side of the bowl was so pale it was almost blue, but its grip looked firm and sure. He ate, as he always did that winter, as if someone might take the food away at any moment, as if each meal were a matter of life and death. And of course this was not far from the truth. I had watched him hover for weeks in the indeterminate territory of the angels.
Now he scraped the last grains of rice from the bowl and handed it to me, meeting my eyes. “Thank you.”
I nodded. “You look like a true Kestenyi. A bandit.”
He grinned, his features almost lost between the hanging locks of his hair and the chaos of his beard. “My uncle won’t know me.”
The words brought a chill to my heart. I took the bowl and spoon and left him. I know that he had grown used to my strange behavior, my abrupt entrances and disappearances, my shouts in the library upstairs at night, my frequent failure to answer him when he spoke. The angel was closer to me than he: I took her with me everywhere, as the hero of the Romance carried a spirit in his earring. I knew her through her close, urgent, volatile, night-breathed voice, the tales she told, her songs with their borders of salt. She whispered to me, she leaned her arms on my shoulders, she pressed her cheek to mine—so that the inconceivable temperature of the eastern winter, the cold I had never felt before, shocking, wondrous, disturbing, seemed to me like the body of the angel. Like her, sometimes, it revitalized my blood on the brisk mornings when the early light was splintered by the icicles; and also, like her, it numbed me when I had sat too long in the dark library, forgetting myself in our otherworldly colloquies.