Tchavi, they call me now. Not Ekawi, never Ekawi. They follow me through the village when I come down from the mountain. Children, precious as water after my months among the peaks. Breathless women begging me to come into their homes for a meal. Tchavi, Tchavi. A ragged procession follows me down the road, and people glance at one another and say: “He is going to his jut.” And others say: “He has no jut.” But no one knows for certain. I stride toward the yellow house, leaning on my staff. There, for a short time, I will stay. At home. I sit with my family, I walk, I read. I exchange the books I took into the mountains for new ones. I visit Lunre and Niahet his wife. I talk with many people, whole and hotun. And I remember Jissavet.
No, she will not come again.
I look for her on the evening paths the color of mist, at the corner of the house where moisture trickles. At this corner, behind the bushes where direct sunlight never falls, this corner of permanent shadows, mildew, decay. I breathe the dense nocturnal odor of jasmine, the smell of the rain-soaked wall. “Autumn comes with a whisper, smelling of stone…” But there is no autumn here, and there is no angel, no dark butterfly on the roof, no glancing and inexplicable light.
I walk under the dripping trees. Across the sky the blood of my heart is spread in the shape of her fine, receding footprints. Like doors of fire, opening and closing. While in the courtyards of Tyom the braziers are lit and the old men wheeze with laughter.
I lean on the fences, looking for her. A lamp is lit in a nearby house and a dark shape moves from the grass to the little pathway of broken bricks: a clay jar in her arms, she passes, one leg and then another leg. Her queenly back, the oblique light on her heel. I am ready to cry out; I make a movement and she turns. Her face is surprised in the dusk, no more than eight or nine years old. Of course, I recognize the house, it’s Pavit’s youngest daughter. I have always known those windows smothered in leaves.
Afternoons of Tyom. Drunk with the heat I stagger up from the hour of rest, my head throbbing, my mouth dry. I stumble into the courtyard, already vaguely looking for her in the water jar, the cup held to my lips, the heavy light on the stones. Flies buzz around me, rumors of her in the shadow of the wall. I narrow my eyes, gazing into the sunlight, and the heat and sweat on my lashes make me believe I see her incipient form, radiating luster among the hibiscus. But she does not come, she never arrives. She is always on the point of being, never crossing over again into life. When the storms roll in from the sea, I sit in the doorway of the hall while the rain unleashes its demons in the darkened courtyard.
And now, how glad I am that I did not burn this stack of books, this poor vestige of her, pathetic as a stray hair! For I am like those lovers who keep obscure and grotesque charms, a maize-cob gnawed by the loved one, a tick scratched from her ankle. Such is the angel’s anadnedet. I kneel at the table in the schoolroom, reading in the oily gleam of my lamp, for the light that enters from the garden is not enough, only the faded light that penetrates the curtain of rain. In the resonance of the downpour I review her passionate language. “There’s thunder, darkness, a cold fog everywhere.” The poverty of the words does not deprive them of significance: sometimes I think they are almost, almost enough… almost enough to call her up again, real, before me, with her flashing eyes, her sumptuous, unreachable skin. So the lover invents his own religion, praying over his treasure of discarded fingernails. The anadnedet has no more power than these—perhaps less. Yet I adore it; to touch its pages gives me joy. There, at the corner, a stain of ink shows where I started when she suddenly spoke to me in the midst of my hurried writing. Wonderful stain, peaked like a star. And all these creased and dirty pages, dry and porous in the light of my lamp. I bend down close: they smell of smoke as they speak to me of a watery temple, maps “curled at the edges,” “immense fruit bats.” Jissavet does not live within these words, she is not contained by them. What would she say of this rainstorm, had she lived? No, I will never know how she would respond to this crash of thunder, if she would start, laugh, or run outside into the garden. Still, I read. When the rain stops I can hear the sound of the pages turning, a sensuous sound like a woman turning in bed. A whisper beneath the dropping of water from the wet leaves of the garden hedge and the echoing clamor of the disturbed cockatoos.
I am like no other tchavi in the history of the islands. When I visit Tyom, children come to me in the old schoolroom. They come with pens of tediet-wood, with hibiscus-flower ink in leather bottles, with stiff paper lifted out of a slurry of leaves. These are made by the yellow man who lives on Painted Mountain, a mad old codger who gives them to anyone who asks. Only the children ask. In the schoolroom they show me the words they have written during my absence, whole stories in Kideti, embryonic poems. This alphabet was developed in Olondria, I tell them, but it is our own; it was used to pen the first work of written Kideti literature. The Anadnedet, by Jissavet of Kiem. This is why we call it Jissavet’s Alphabet. At the end of each lesson I read aloud from this seminal work. And I introduce them to others, books I have translated from Olondrian in the most violent and sacrilegious form of reading. And I tell them: This is a journey to jepnatow-het, the land of shadows. Do not mistake it for the country of the real.
Perhaps even the land named in the books is no longer real. Terrible rumors reach us from the north: libraries burning, devotees of the Stone dragged into the street. Perhaps, one day, Tyom will become the last refuge of books. I do not know. I read. I take the children of Tyom hunting with Firdred, spearing boar in snowy Olondrian forests. Together we enter the dark-shuttered castle of Beal. And Fodra takes us to Bain, to the white walls overlooking the sea, the eternal flavor of olives. Then I look up: the light has changed, the children are restless with hunger, we have all lost another afternoon of our lives, gaining nothing but an enigmatic glow: for the cup I lift now is not merely a cup but carries on its glazed surface the shadows of sails. And this lintel, suddenly it’s darker, as if magically aged. And the flowers of the courtyard, exhausted with heat, hang on their stalks like handkerchiefs forgotten after a midnight ball, like sashes lost at romantic assignations. In the same way, perhaps, I am still influenced by the angel, subtly, hazily, as the tide responds even in the dark of the moon. Sometimes she comes to me in dreams, and it is as if I have been permitted to enter the huge and vanished doors of childhood.
My lost rose, my distant bell! What was that feeling of happiness, welling up unexpectedly under the sorrow? I was in the schoolroom after a lesson; my mother was there; the room was hot and bright, the walls yellow with light from the open doorway. I stood, shaken with joy, concentrating on the feeling as if analyzing a new and delightful taste. It was the angeclass="underline" the pure heat, the warbling doves in the sunny garden, my mother’s golden face lit by the walls.
“What is it, younger son?” she asked me, laughing.
What is it? Yes, what is it? It is the reason I walk the mountains after dusk, unable to bear even my tattered shelter of dried grass, and watch the fireflies pulsing over the forest. Oh, will she not come? Can they not call her, those roving lamps? No: I am alone in the sultry air, in the faintly violet darkness, in the odor of damp leaves. But I go on waiting for her. I look for her still.