A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel (29 page)

It was agony, he tells me thickly, his voice growing older, taking on the uneven texture of the rushlight. My mother, I’ve never told you about her. God of my father, Jissi, a woman to make you kill yourself, or her, or both. All right, I’ve told you some. I know I’ve told you how she never shouted or showed anger, only simpered and smiled. She had been well brought up, what they used to call “hill quality,” a child-bride from the mountains up the coast. But listen, how can I tell you. She had a series of servants, always young girls, terrified as rabbits. As soon as one got used to her, showed signs of resignation, my mother would replace her with another. She needed them to be frightened, you see, needed that entertainment in her life of seclusion, someone to terrify. She needed the sound of weeping in the house, from behind the screen where the maid slept. . . . It soothed her, helped her to sleep herself. . . . They were always inseparable, my mother and her trembling maid. Other women, our clanswomen, would visit. My mother had a note at which she pitched her voice to speak to the maid—chilling, penetrating, and yet so soft. . . . The girls lived in terror, it was unspeakable. One of them ran away. The laborers tracked her. Yes, they would have killed her. But she escaped, she must have gone aboard a Pravish ship. I hope she settled somewhere, I hope she found love.

Love, Jissavet. In our house it did not exist. It was the same with everyone on the hill. Love, for our people, was synonymous with dishonor. It was something to be avoided, hidden, crushed. . . . They spoke of it in hushed tones, telling about my cousin who loved a man forbidden to her and drowned herself, or disapproving of a father who doted on his young son, saying the child would be spoiled, would become a weakling. Then I don’t want to be strong, I told my mother before I left. That was her complaint, that I was weak. I don’t want your kind of strength, I said. Do you know what she said to me? I wish I’d aborted you with
tama
-root.

He strokes my hair softly, my disease, my sun-red hair. It’s better here, he whispers, despite everything. I know he means, Despite the fact that you are dying young. On my cheek, a tear. It is not my own.

But she loves you, I said. Your sister.

I think it was true, despite what he said, his hatred of her gifts, his conviction that she was trying to poison his home. She was young when he ran away, a girl of sixteen. He must have been a god to her: this kind, sad-eyed elder brother. She must have wept when she saw that his
jut
had disappeared from the altar, that he was gone. And she had preserved her memory of him for years, hoarded her wedding gold, made cups and bangles disappear, perhaps blamed a maid. Her treasure growing slowly in a cupboard. And then, one day, she thought it was enough, and she found the servant who had most loved him, an old man now, and she said to him: Find my brother. And old Tipyav shouldered the sacks, and she stood at the door in the twilight and watched him, her heart full of pride and love, never knowing how her gift would be received.

Jetnapet, my aunt. I kept hundreds of dreams of her; I thought of her as I lay in the open doorway. I rested my eyes on the cool, marvelous structure of the hill, and I thought: Now, my aunt, you are combing your long hair. You comb it out into sections, each one fixed with a clasp of gold. And now you are trailing your pet dragonfly on a string. Your smooth face, your deep, compassionate eyes. Perhaps you’ve heard of me, perhaps you even know I’m wearing your bracelet.

My father’s mouth cracked. He laughed loudly; the sound frightened me. He drank from his brown gourd of millet beer, and his voice broke when he said: Jissavet, don’t do this to me. You have no right.

He closed his eyes: You have no right.

And later, it was during my mother’s excitement, her calculations, what we would have to sell to get us to Olondria: my father laughed harshly, sitting propped against the wall with the beer gourd between his knees in the hot night. His laugh woke me. I saw his hair straggling down the sides of his face, his wild eyes, the sweat dripping on his neck. Well, she’s proved herself, he said. His voice was far too loud, and my mother looked up guiltily from the corner.

She’s won, my father said. My wife is pawing through her ceremonial dishes, my daughter sleeps with a bracelet on her arm. He raised the gourd and drank, his arm swaying so that the whole room seemed occupied by its violent, wandering shadow. His teeth shone wetly when he laughed. Well, Jetnapet! Dream well on your cotton bed, you viper!

Jedin, my mother said.

Oh, the little frog is awake, is she? The little frog . . . He paused and wiped his sweating face on his sleeve. The little one, he muttered.

But we need these things, my mother said. For our journey. She stood holding a decorative ebony box.

Oh, I know it, my father groaned. Open that box, my love, it’s full of blood!

But the box was full of coral.

(6)

His hand strokes my brow, trembling over my ruined hair. The odor of millet beer on his breath. Moonlight through the thin gaps in the thatch, and from across the marsh, the sound of drums, a feast. Your mother, he says.

Yes, he told me the truth at last.

Here is another map. It is a map of a face, my father’s face. Small bones, a pointed chin, flat cheekbones, just like mine. Two lines between the eyes, just like mine. When he is thinking, he purses his lips in the same way I do. And his frown, like mine, deepens the lines in his brow. A swift smile, a certain noble look, and the intelligence in the eyes, the same, it’s mine, it’s exactly the same.

Your mother, he said.

Where is she? I asked, suddenly afraid. Where is she? Tchimu? Why isn’t she back?

She didn’t want you to know, he said, hoarsely, caressingly, his fingers still moving over my hair. There was so little light in the room, only the pricks of moonlight. Outside, the drums, faint voices, the baying of dogs. Go to sleep, Tchimu, I said, speaking with difficulty because of the fear. You’re tired.

No, he said. No.

He told me. He insisted on telling me. He said, The truth has its own virtue, which is separate from its content. He said, this is the last story, Jissavet, the last. And it was true. He never told me another story.

There was a girl, he said, a
hotun
girl from a very poor family. Her father died when she was only a child. No, don’t ask questions. It is difficult enough. She grew. She was beautiful, like—what. Beautiful like a dream one is unable to remember, with that mystery, that formlessness, that strength . . . and without knowing anything. She never knew anything, in spite of all of life’s attempts—well, enough. This girl, Jissavet, when she was close to your age, but a year younger than you are, only sixteen, she went along the pirate coast, looking for snails I think, with her sister. Well, her sister, you know, is dead.

Her sister is dead. But she—she is alive. That is her triumph. And it is a great triumph, Jissi, you know.

He laughed softly, brokenly. Why can’t I say it? he muttered. After all this resolution, I still hesitate. . . . You see, it is—what happened, it is the sort of thing the gods should not allow. They should not allow it. But they do. Hianot was captured by the pirates of the coast. She lived with them in the caves for over a year. Sixteen months. Her sister jumped, that is another truth, her sister leaped from the cliffs and was lost. But not she. Do you see the virtue of the truth? You must know what a valiant mother you have. Her courage, her tenacity, are incredible, even more incredible than the beauty of which they still sing in the village. She lived in the caves, injured—they had stunned her with a blow to the head during the capture, the scar is still there. She ran away three times. After each of the first two attempts, they cut off one of the fingers of her right hand. The third time she escaped. She came down from the hill and into the village, like a ghost. She was with child.

He smoothed my hair softly, softly. The odor of millet beer. Tchimu, you’re drunk, I tried to say, but I couldn’t. A beam of moonlight glowing on the silver of his hair, his face in darkness. Midnight. Anguish. Dogs.

Then you’re not my father, I said.

And he: Of course I’m your father.—But I could hear the tremor in his voice. That tremor, I knew it: it was the shudder of fear.

No, I said. You lied to me, you and Tati. You have told me lies.

Yes, he whispered. He sat against the wall, his head hanging. Moonlight dribbled over his slack fingers.

You are not my father at all, I said. And then: The
kyitna
, I have it from him, don’t I?

He buried his face in his hands.

When the wound is discovered, the source of the pain, it does not bring pain, because the pain was already there from the first. This is the greatest surprise to me. I cannot believe that I am lying calmly in the darkness while he weeps. I think of the people at the festival, there across the marsh. They’re dancing, drinking millet beer from gourds. The old men, already drunk, have been drinking coconut liquor and are staggering to urinate in the weeds. Everywhere there are conversations, shouts. A woman turns. The musicians sweat over their drums and bells. The singer’s cries are hoarse; he looks possessed. Beneath a tree two women help another to fix her braids in place. And the young men, the girls dancing in lines, the moonlit laughter and the dogs, the sheen on the water, the fear of snakes, the beer spilled on the ground, the arguments, the secret love among the palms, the hands clapping, the crying child. It’s all there, complete, just out of reach. The discovery has hollowed out my spirit and made me light. Now I can hover over the world, now I belong to no one. And all things come to me of their own volition.

My mother, too. She comes back. She has spent the night in the forest, or perhaps in the hammock under the house, a feast for the mosquitoes. I haven’t slept. I watch her climb the ladder we left hanging and begin putting charcoal into the brazier.

I’ll never talk to her about it. I can’t. In that way I am like her, and not like the father who is no longer my father. I don’t believe in the virtue of truth. Like my mother, I’m cowardly, I hide, I’m unable to form the words. What would I say? I know that you were raped by a
kyitna
pirate. Why tell her that? She already knows I know. What else would I say, would I ask her about it, the cave, the death of her sister? No, there’s nothing in it, no virtue at all. And so those words will never be said, not when my father stops talking and we’re alone with only Tipyav to speak to us, not when we make the decision at last and go to the river Katapnay again to board the silent boat with its cargo of oil, not on the journey north, not on the ship or in the wagons carting us ever northward toward those pink-tinged hills, not in the mountains, not in the bleakness of the Young Women’s Hall of the sanatorium, not even in terror, in death. Never, never. Up to the end we keep living in the same way. Grain, fire, time to bathe, to sleep. This was how we communicated, though these hollow gestures. Porridge, then
datchi
. And later porridge again.

Somewhere she darts, pauses, runs, trembles, stifles her breath. She climbs down rocks, through sand, through clumps of trees. Through the raw grass that cuts her feet, through the thick bushes, thorns, under branches, fighting her way among the vines. She avoids all paths, the seduction of easy passages. She runs. Sometimes she hides for a time, her heart pounding. Her two hearts. She stumbles, bruises her foot, suffers from hunger, from the heat, from the constant oppression of terror.

I don’t know why she goes on. Why not stop, why not lie down and sleep? Even at night she goes on through the forest. Her breath loud, the odor of leaves overpowering in the dark, and the river Dyet so high, too dangerous to cross. She follows the river, picking oranges to suck on the way. She fights against hope, the weakness of that emotion. Then one morning she sees the first fishermen out on the water, and she walks into the village with bleeding feet.

So, you see, I didn’t have any
jut
, on either side. That was only a fantasy of my childhood. The lanterns bright with fireflies, the benevolent Jetnapet, the jade cups: I had no connection to any of it. No, it’s right, I told him. I believe you. It seems right. — I was satisfied not to belong to the hill. I told him so. I said: I always knew I was not one of you.

Soon after that he lost the desire to speak.

The body of corruption. Is that what I am, Jevick, is that what you think, the body of corruption? No, not you: you spoke to me on the ship, I saw it in you at once, the lack of fear, the absence of superstition. Do you know what it meant, to speak to someone my own age after all those years? For it had been years, over three years. Three years of the mist and heat and fevers and isolation in the body which Ajo Kyet proclaimed filth.

My father said I was innocent. But the gods did not agree. And after all, I was the daughter of a pirate. I was the child of the caves, of brutality, of suffering, humiliation. Cursed by the evil of that dark coast.

Hints, whispers. I remember them, especially now that I know the truth. The cruelty in the eyes, the contempt. You can’t know the viciousness of Kiem, no one can know it who hasn’t lived there, in that shimmer and draining heat. Sick, unable to move, I remember the women whispering, sliding their eyes toward me and then away, whispering, The mother is so unlucky, yes, that business years ago, and then the aunt, it must be
jut
. The inspired malice of Kiem is such that they would help to hide the truth from me, pretending that I must be protected, in order to increase the pleasure of words whispered just out of hearing: Rape, the pirate coast, her fingers, her child.