A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel (26 page)

We rowed on. I’m tired, Ainut said. I was tired, too, but I had been waiting for her to say it first. All right, let’s go ashore, I said. We floundered into the warm sea and dragged our rowboats up onto the sand.

The beach was silent. We gathered fronds and wove them into a roof: our boats, tilted on their sides, made the walls of the house. One side was open, facing the sea. We slept and then rose, groggy with heat, and woke ourselves fully with a long swim. How sweet it was to be free, alone, with no one to call us
hotun
people, no one to spit in the water when we passed, nothing to remind us of our poverty, of the shame of being the children of those who were no better than animals. We grew wilder, bolder, we swam farther, tempting the sharks. Then we raced back to the shore and dashed onto the sand. We danced and sang, we made elaborate headdresses from palm fronds, we practiced fluttering our lashes at vaguely imagined boys. . . . I don’t know how I was, but Ainut was different on the beach, with a sudden spirit of mischief and delight—she capered and said silly things that made her shriek with laughter at herself, almost horrified at her own boldness. We made dances, new ones, performing the steps exactly in unison, singing, wearing only our knotted skirts. Then we were suddenly hungry with the hunger that comes from swimming and we put on our short vests and went looking for food.

There was always food on the beach. There were coconuts and sleepy lizards, obese snails dreaming in the tide pools, and higher up there were wild bananas and
datchi
, although we feared the pirates in those regions, and the pariah dogs. But on this day, the day I remember, we were too giddy with happiness to think of those things, and we went up near the caves, chattering and laughing in the long grass, gathering green bananas which we would roast and season with saltwater. Ainut’s plaits were wet, and a track of salt lay on her cheek. She was baring her teeth and rolling her eyes, imitating someone. And then I saw the man and my laughter died as if forced out of me by a blow. It was all I could do to draw a breath.

He was standing near the wall of the cliff, knee-deep in the grass. He stood with his hands at his sides and looked at us. Above him there was a gaping cave mouth and a slope of rubble leading down to where he was, the man from the cave. He was dressed in rags and his hair stood up, red in color, red, horrible, stark and flagrant as if it were dipped in blood, and his eyes, worse, remembering it, his eyes seemed without any color at all, silver perhaps or the color of guava peel. Against these colors his skin looked very black. He was a painted man. Ainut followed the movement of my eyes. She stopped laughing and then I moved, my hand shot up and grasped her arm, hard, digging the nails into her flesh.

It was her weakness that made me strong. At first, when I saw the
kyitna
man, my instinct had been to fall, to stop breathing, to die—and perhaps, had I been alone, I would have collapsed from pure terror and they would have carried me off into their cave. But Ainut saved me, she saved us both. We looked at the man and saw a movement higher up, a shadow inside the cave, and the shadow moved into the light, its scarlet hair and beard hanging down in the dust, and Ainut screamed and screamed and went on screaming. Then the first man, the one close to us, lifted his hands and waved them as if to beckon to us, and stepped forward into the grass, and my strength came up and I yanked on Ainut’s arm and started running, dragging her, shouting at her to run, to stop screaming and run. We stumbled down the beach. The man was coming after us. Everything came back to me then, everything. My mother’s warnings, anxious, irritating, don’t go far, Jissavet, do you promise, don’t go around to the shore by the caves. I prayed to my father’s
jut
. If I get away I’ll listen to her, I’ll love her better, I’ll never disobey her again. Miraculously, we reached the boats. I turned and set Ainut upright and slapped her in the face as hard as I could. Get in your boat, I said. I’m leaving you. Do you hear? I’m leaving you behind.—Sobs, screams, and the bright blue sea. We thrashed into the water, climbed in the boats, hauled on the oars and pulled away, slowly, from that accursed shore.

Even when we were far out on the water, we could still see the man. He stood in the surf, tiny, waving his arms. We could still see the stain of his hair, and we spat in the ocean to clear our hearts of the sight, the impurity. The abomination.

(3)

When I was old enough I asked: Where did
jut
come from?

We were sitting on our pallets in the evening, the light flickering and showing our skin-maps hanging all over the walls, and my father leaned forward, his eyes dark pools, and said:

In the oldest days
jut
lived in the sea. All the separate
janut
and the whole
jut
, it was all there, and all one. The people faced the sea when they prayed, and they knew that something powerful lived in it, and they never teased it or insulted it. Then one day a little girl came, a girl about your size, and she said, I’m going to go and talk to
jut
. And the people said, It is not for human beings to talk to
jut
, and she said, Very well, but she knew her heart all the same. And when night came she slipped out of the house and went and stood on the cliff, and she shouted down at the sea,
Jut
!
Jut
!—She stood there stubbornly and called to the sea as loudly as she could,
Jut
! Answer me,
Jut
!

And
Jut
answered.

I’m that girl, I think. I am like the girl who called
jut
. Always outside, always different from people. It’s not only that I’m different, it’s that I don’t want to be different and yet I am proud, almost proud of the difference itself. I won’t try to change. When Ainut grows up she will marry a Kiemish laborer, a poor man, but one with
jut
. I’ll lie with my face to the doorway, watching the wedding procession go by, already very ill, too ill to get up. At that time, the time of the wedding, I haven’t spoken to Ainut for two years, but still the procession goes by our house, that’s the way she is, she would think of me even after everything has died between us, she knows I’ll be watching her. And I am. She stands in the prow of the boat, with a necklace of marigolds, beautiful. Around her are shouts, confusion, the clashing of spears. She doesn’t turn toward me. She glides by with an averted face, remote. And then I lose sight of her in the crowd.

It comes on suddenly, the first times. I’m under the house, untying my boat. Suddenly I can’t see anything. Or what I can see is not what’s there, I see something like a swarm of flies, white and black, filling up my vision. At the same time, my head grows heavy. I lean forward, grasp the pole. Far away, through the flies, I see my hands. Just as suddenly it clears and I see my mother watching me, holding her basket. Jissi, are you all right?

It’s nothing, I say.

Then one day Ainut said: Your hair’s red.

What?

Look, right there, she said. She had turned away from the tree. She had put down her basket and was looking at me strangely as I stood holding the pole in the bright sunlight.

Look. She raised her hand, pointed. She didn’t touch my hair.

Maybe it’s papaya, I laughed, breathless. Maybe I broke one with the pole and it splashed on me.—I raised my hand and felt my hair where she pointed. It wasn’t sticky.

I don’t think it’s papaya, she said. She was always like that, thoughtful, plodding, unromantic, without invention. She looked at me with her sober eyes.

Did we break one? I asked, looking over the ground, still touching my hair gingerly.

I tried to look at my plait.

It’s too high, she said. I don’t think you can see it.

Then why did you tell me to look?—The rage was already coming over me, the desolation, the covetousness, for life, any kind of life. I touched my hair. It was as if I already knew what would happen, that we would be separated, she and I, that she would go into life, marry, have children and grow old, and I would spend a few seasons stretched in the doorway. My breath caught unnaturally, as if I were getting ready to cry.

Maybe you should go home, Ainut said.

Maybe you should mind your own business, I answered, suddenly furious. You’re so stupid. The basket’s full of ants.

I did go home, though. I went quickly, expertly through the marshes. I had always had a good hand for boats. My mother was under the house, weaving a cover for the big basket, but my father wasn’t there, his boat was gone. I pulled my boat up the slope, my hands shaking, my face hot. I was only fifteen, but still, I knew. My mind raced over my illnesses, my fevers, the times I would vomit and feel faint, and then quickly feel better again. Tati, is my hair red? I thought to myself. But I couldn’t say it. I stood there beside my boat, catching my breath. I couldn’t say it. My mother smiled; she didn’t stop weaving her basket. I couldn’t shatter her with another misfortune.

Good morning, good morning, she goes along, greeting everybody, incapable of leaving people alone, nodding to them, good morning, and they turn their backs or laugh at her, insulting, or they spit into the water. Some of them, if they are in a group, pretend to respond to her. Good morning, Hianot, Dab-Nin shouts. Her voice rings across the water, hard and flat, she’s standing in the reeds with other women, leering at us. The other women giggle. One of them raises a hand in protest, not sure she wants to participate in this, but hesitant because it’s so amusing, that stupid
hotun
woman panting after them like a dog. The blessing of
jut!
Dab-Nin shouts. The women burst out laughing, it’s too much. And to
you, my mother says. Dab-Nin goes on grinning at us, my mother goes on greeting everyone, and islands of spittle float on the water.

The pestle is thudding beneath the house: it’s my mother, pounding grain. The house is full of the brown, overheated shadows of midday, and I lie in the corner under the place where the thatch is decaying, so that a pattern of tiny lights falls on my face. At first, each time the pestle strikes, I feel that it’s crushing my skull. But then my mother begins to murmur, singing. She sings only to herself so that her voice has all of its confidence and free expression of sadness, its dark color.

Little one, tender one.

The one I perceived from a distance.

Yes, the one with the quick, tart smile

and the hair pinned with white flutes.

You, fishing and bringing up baskets

of jade and glass fish.

You, scattering ribbons of light

when your laugh unrolls in the fields.

Why do you lead that nightingale

on a thread of your long hair?

Why do they say you love no one?

Why are your dawns so sad?

Is it your death which frightens you,

when it shifts underneath your heart?

Tender one, sweet little one,

orange tree, fire, and ashes.

Not until later did anyone mention the word: Olondria. But even then, in the early months of my illness, they must have considered it, they must have whispered of it in the darkness, agonized over the terrible expense. I had heard of Olondria, a land detached, fantastic, on the other side of the massive northern sea, a land of cold, of
vallon
, where the people were tall and colorless and spoke a language invented by the ghosts. To me it was absurdly distant, so inaccessible that it left me indifferent, unlike the bazaars of Akaneck. When my mother told me that I was to journey there, I laughed. She lowered her eyes, trembling. Don’t, she said.

I won’t cut my hair, ever. My mother notices it at last—I’ve been in the house for two days, afraid to go out. The redness spreads from the roots of my hair, as if a blood-touched egg has been cracked on the crown of my head: slowly, obscenely, like that. I say I’m not feeling well, I’m tired of boating, I give any excuse. I sit looking through our water maps, morose. Then my mother notices. She lights a candle in daylight despite the bad luck and holds it over my head, trembling.

Words pass between us. She’s quivering, reduced to grief. She presses one hand to her heart, the other gripping the rush candle. No, no, no, she says. I look at her, I’m hard-eyed, arrogant. Why not? I say, scoffing at her. I cross my arms to hide the fact that I am shaking too, I look at her with my head up, tense, defiant. She puts her fist in her mouth, bites it. Tears roll down her cheeks. I tell her: Crying won’t help anything.

But what a relief it would be to weep, throw myself into her arms, drench the front of her dress in tears, sobbing in horror, despair—to have her rock me to and fro, crooning, to let myself be broken in front of her, gathered by her, resorbed.

I do not know why such surrender seemed to me worse than death.

So, my mother trembles, staggers, weeps. She puts down the candle, she opens the pot in which we keep the tools, she brings out the old razor wrapped in cotton. She thinks we need to cut my hair, now, perhaps it will grow back normally. I refuse. She stands, aghast. The razor in her hand is like the enemy of my fate: my hair, the confirmation of destiny.

When my father comes home that night there is nothing to eat but cold
datchi
. My mother sits, weeping, in the corner. And I lie on my back, staring up at the slope of the thatched roof, stern, dry-eyed, with my hair in two plaits. My hair, the punishment of the gods. The pelt of the orangutan. Our house has already become the scene of a shipwreck. Fear crosses my father’s face, smoothed away at once, he puts his knapsack down and lowers the door curtain.