A half day’s walk past the first forest stream I saw the house. Small, dark, barely windowed, its roof like tree bark for bears to scratch on. A house so odd I didn’t know it for what it was till I saw the door and chimney just like in my own white house. The breezes tangoed there partnerless now, had been dancing without me for how long? I longed to be home. This strange little doorway made me miss my own with a sharper pain than I’d yet known. I was afraid of the house and the others that followed in its wake. I slunk through their gardens at night, sleeping under their hedges when the sunlight fought its way through all those leaves.
I’d come all this way hoping to find your village, Alia, but I’d been lost so long human habitation frightened me. I followed hoof prints to streams, afraid of what I’d find on human footpaths. I wandered by moonlight through this up and down country, hoping to find the larger down that might lead me to the coast and home, thinking to forget you after all, or to wait for your possible return. Who could live here, in such peculiar houses? I never thought my own people would be as strange to me, that I’d grown too accustomed to visions, to mouthy stones.
I made camp one night above a small waterfall, spilling into a pool on either side of which gardens lay. It was chilly and I wanted a fire but was afraid of discovery.
A story came to me then, of a hero returning from his visit with gods. At night he reaches the edge of a town, but decides to wait till morning before making his entrance. It’s a cold night, and he freezes in his little camp, too scared of the fire he’s stolen to use it. There was no proud homecoming for him like in those other stories, the ones they made up. His people were skittish of foreigners, and so, when the hero arrived in the morning, and breakfasted with the table manners of gods, they ran him right back out of town. Or so I thought before I fell asleep.
That night brought a different dream: I was being slowly eaten by a little she bear. The bear took a bite from my ribs, chewed methodically, took another from my neck. When the bear started eating faster I woke up, afraid of finding myself only half there if I put it off any longer. I woke to the half light of dawn, an absence of bears, the sharp point of a stick descending. When they’d beaten me long enough I lost consciousness.
Just once I woke to see their faces, glowing moons exalted by greed. I forgot to fear for my life, screaming questions, wanting only to know what they were after. Someone else came then, and by the sudden respite in their violence, I knew it was one the others feared. A woman bent over me and I could see her face, luminous like a moon, her skin pale like yours. She sent the others away; already I was calling her by your name. “They’ll never tell you why they hate you,” she said harshly, and took me to her home, dragging my bleeding body over stones.
She gave me herb tea to make me go back to sleep. In my brief moments of wakefulness she fed me; days of fish broth were followed at last by dried salmon. I chewed on its saltiness as though I was chewing on life. I was: I’d been starving myself as mourners do, my half rotten mind forgetting to eat except for stones.
She moved me outside to the porch and I sat there for days, not moving except to make myself horizontal for sleep on the swing. When the sun shafted through the trees in the afternoons I’d examine my hair for stray greys, pulling them out methodically one by one.
Even after my body healed I was still hearing the trees talk; the mangoes and banyans, respectively proud and full of vanity. She would come home from fishing and I’d babble at her, talking about our summer by the sea. You see, Alia, for the first weeks I mistook her for you, even though she corrected me often enough, telling me her name was Sonia.
Now I think she was your shadow, your reflection. Perhaps if I’d constellated with my own twin I wouldn’t have drowned so easily in hers. Discouraged by my name calling, she locked me up in the pig barn, as though the sight of me disturbed her. I scratched at the walls, worried she’d change her mind, return with the villagers, with sharpened sticks.
She let me out a few days later to take me fishing, cheerful and chatty as though nothing unusual had happened. She said she knew secret ponds, hers alone, and blithely added that if anyone were to follow us I’d have to kill them. She armed me with an old fish knife, dull and rusty with neglect. Of course, it reminded me of grandfather’s. On the path to her pool she showed me where she’d marked the grave of an intruder. I didn’t ask her if it was real; it did my job for me, keeping them away. I knew well enough her people feared her, and not only because she caught more fish than anyone else in her village. It was one of the reasons she lived apart, to protect the locations of her pools.
I felt sometimes as though she kept me as an object for her profanities, her cruelty, yet while she was often unkind, it was still true she’d saved my life. She thought her people suspicious idiots, but kept me in the pig pens just in case. Or was I more amusing there? Poor woman. Her daughter, ashamed of her, had gone to live with relatives in the village proper. “With a mother like you,” she’d said, “I’ll never get married. ” True enough. A mother like Sonia might eat the bridegroom for breakfast on the big day. There were other days I thought she’d saved me just to upset the villagers.
Willows swept the shores; the musty smell of dead leaves seeped into our clothing. It was a nice change from the pig shed. Sonia’s little boat slept on the pool, its stern sinking slowly with the sun as it grew heavier with the day’s catch. She’d tell me stories those afternoons, about magic salmon, capable of returning the eater to his own true, lost path. We never caught any, and once I asked her why. You could only find them, she said, in pools more secret, more enchanted still than this one. She did go fishing alone sometimes, but never showed me what she’d caught. Sometimes I was even brave enough to laugh at her. Still, I believe it was true, that she really did; her mistake was to guard her catch too jealously, as though it might protect her from harm. I thought if she’d shared what she knew with her people they’d have been kinder, less hateful of outsiders. She was the only one who’d ever travelled.
But when we fished together a yellow dream fell over us and Sonia would smile. For those hours on the pond I could let my old heart out for a swim and pretend she was my lover as you had been. I wanted her, too, but she seemed so old. In truth she wasn’t much older than me, but there was something in her eyes you couldn’t go near without hurting yourself. My dreams fell into those eyes, and I was imprisoned again, by a woman who knew too much. It never occurred to me how those eyes must cut the other way, must hurt her also.
She traded fish for silver. She beat the silver into the shapes of little pigs, wearing them on a string around her neck. Fish into pigs, an act of transformation: silver between. Sometimes she’d count them. When there were enough she bought a piglet. I spent a lot of time with the little sow, trying to learn her language, as I’d lost hope for people. I called her Polaris, after the star that is at once the source and absence of all motion, the end of a little bear’s tail and the apex of the centre pole around which our sky slowly spins. A big name for a pig, who was after all a pig and not a bear. As I got better I hoped to have someone friendlier than Sonia to talk to in Polaris, but she never spoke to me. I thought it was her revenge for having been given the wrong name, but I knew of no pig stars to name her after. Still, I never stopped believing she was our lost dream child, Alia, that she’d found her way down the broken ladder at last to be with me.
We bred Polaris and when my second spring came she had six babies. I was as proud of them as she herself. Sonia moved me into the house right after that. Maybe she was jealous, or just afraid I’d turn into a pig. I moved up from the pig pens without ever having learned their language.