So anyone who mocks or hurts another passenger, Matti said, is actually being stupid and hurting the whole boat. After all, no one here has another boat.
A moment later, or perhaps in less than a moment, the small fish twisted its body, spread the fan of its slender fins widely, and plunged into the dark water, down to the river plants.
That was the only animal Maya and Matti had ever seen in their lives. Except for some drawings of cows-horses-dogs-birds on the pages of books or on the walls of Emanuella the Teacher's classroom, and the small carvings Almon the Fisherman made and gave to the village children.
Maya and Matti knew it was a fish because they had seen fish in picture books. And they knew without a doubt that it was a live fish and not a drawing because no creature drawn in those picture books could move its muscles, twist and turn, and slip away from them so quickly, dive so suddenly to a deep, invisible place among the shadows of the water plants.
11
That was the first living creature seen in the village for many years, since that horrible night when Nehi the Mountain Demon gathered a long procession of animals, from horse to dove, from mouse to sheep to bull, and led them out of the village forever. Some of the parents, without any warning, would suddenly be flooded by a wave of longing or sorrow and begin to imitate animal sounds for their children: the chirping of a bird and the lowing of a cow, the howling of a wolf in the forest, the cooing of a dove and buzzing of a bee and the flapping of a river goose's wings and the croaking of a frog and the whoop of an owl. But a moment later, those parents denied that they were sad, pretended that, in fact, they only meant to entertain their children a bit, nothing more, and insisted that none of those sounds were part of the real world but existed only in fairy tales and legends.
The twists and turns of the villagers' memories were strange: The things they tried very hard to remember sometimes eluded them and hid deep under the blanket of forgetfulness. And the things they decided they'd be much better off forgetting were the ones that would rise out of the forgetfulness as if to deliberately upset them. There were times when they remembered the smallest detail of what had almost never been. Or they remembered what had been and no longer existed, remembered it with pain and longing, but their shame or sorrow was so great that they would decide firmly that it had all been a dream. And they would say to their children: It's just a fairy tale.
Others said: It was just a little joke. That's all.
Some children, when they heard those stories, felt a vague longing for what might have been there once, and perhaps had never been at all. But many children never wanted to hear those stories, or heard them and made fun of their parents and of Emanuella the Teacher: no animals had been seen for so many years that most of the children came to the conclusion that all those moos and coos and maas and meows, all those bzzzes and baas and yaps and quacks, were all just strange inventions their parents had come up with, old-fashioned superstitions that should be tossed away so they could finally live in the real world, because people who live in their imaginations are not like the rest of us, and people who aren't like the rest of us will get whoopitis, and everyone will avoid them, and then it will be too late to save them.
Perhaps only Danir — the jolly, long-legged roofer, favorite of all the village girls, who loved to sing all day with his helpers as they worked on the high, slanted housetops, and liked to stop on his way home and talk to children through open windows as if they were grown-ups, or the opposite, to chat with them as if he himself were still a child, and also liked to whistle tunes in the streets under the windows of the village girls — perhaps Danir was the only one they should ask what was true and what wasn't.
But the trouble was that with Danir and his friends, who gathered around him in the stone square on long summer evenings, you could never ever know when they were joking or playing tricks on you or on each other. And if they did speak seriously, even then they seemed to be joking. Anyone who tried to have a real conversation with them also found himself, for some reason, suddenly speaking in jest. Even if he definitely didn't mean to.
Almon the Fisherman, who nobody listened to because everyone made fun of him, was the only one in the entire village who could teach the children that the real world is not only what the eye sees and the ear hears and the fingers touch, but also what the eye cannot see, the ear cannot hear, and the fingers cannot touch. And it shows itself sometimes, for only a moment, to those who see with their mind's eye and know how to listen and hear with the ears of their soul and touch with the fingers of their mind. But who wanted to listen to Almon? He was a long-winded, almost blind old man who stood there and argued endlessly with his ugly old scarecrow.
12
And after the fish had gone, they could see the shock and fear on each other's faces: the mouth that dropped open, the eyes that gaped, the white-as-a-sheet paleness that spread over their forehead and cheeks. Tell me, Maya said, did you hear what I heard? Tell me, Matti said, did you hear it too? Had they really heard three or four muted, dreamlike sounds rolling down from far, far away beyond the valleys and slopes, from the edges of the steep forests on the northern cliff of the mountain ridge, low-dark echoes that sounded like the barking of dogs, then faded quickly?
Maya and Matti had heard how dogs bark in Emanuella the Teacher's stories, but was there anyone who didn't make fun of poor Emanuella the Teacher, who went after every man but, in the whole village, had never found herself even the shadow of a husband who would deign to glance in her direction?
And now, a little while after seeing the fish, Maya and Matti thought that the faint sounds coming from the northern ridge sounded a bit like barking. Or maybe it wasn't the barking of real dogs? Maybe it was just a distant rockfall? Or a trick of the treetops panting with excitement, beginning to screech and sigh with the onslaught of the gusting wind?
Who would believe that Maya and Matti had seen a live fish in the river? Or that, at almost the same time, they had heard the sound of dogs barking in the distance? Was there anyone who wouldn't laugh at them? Sometimes, one of the children would come to the schoolyard in the morning and try to tell the others about how he heard — he swears he heard it — a sound that might have been a chirp. Or a buzz. Not for a second did the children believe the boy who told those stories, and they made fun of him and teased him and said, You better stop it, and fast, before you end up like Nimi the Owl.
Perhaps because ridicule protects the ridiculers from the risk of loneliness? Because they ridicule in groups, and the one they ridicule is always alone?
And the grownups? Perhaps only because they tried so hard to silence an inner whisper? Or were ashamed of a certain guilt they felt?
Matti and Maya went back to that place many times, bent over the pool, their faces so close to its surface that their noses almost sank into the water, but the little fish never appeared again. In vain they searched every one of the dozens or hundreds of the river's small pools scattered here and there in the banks alongside the flowing torrent, among the rocks, in hidden bays, in places where water plants concealed the golden sand of the riverbed.
But once, toward evening, it happened that something suddenly passed very very high over their heads: something glided high in the darkening sky, something sailed by, slight and illuminated like a single cloud in the evening air, back and forth from the forest, completely transparent, slowly and silently passing high over their heads, then back to the forest, and faded almost before Maya and Matti realized they were seeing it.