Inner Circle (7 page)

‘Your son on your lake. Eeve alone without man.’

My pride took its power from being alone. A circle smaller than the lake, my husband had once said, and yet a true circle enclosed within itself.

‘Can you draw a circle, ape?’ I wanted to see its teeth naked in anger.

‘Ape?’ There was a screech audible in the repetition. ‘Tree man is ape’s own word. I think words.’ He made a big round gesture with his arms; it wasn’t a sign of anger, but a circle drawn in the air. His eyes glittered as the sun forced his whole face to open up skyward.

‘What do you want, treeman?’

‘Bring peace.’

‘My husband talks of peace. You are not like him.’

‘Adam-man is man from sky,’ the beaky screech answered.

‘No, no! He’s not the Sky Man!’ I cried out of despair or a long-forgotten fright.

‘Treeman brings himself to woman. Eeve is not strong without Treeman’s army.’

‘Where is your army?’

‘In trees, Eeve. We conquered trees.’

I looked at the fallen cedar and his eyes followed mine. The bird was now hovering over the broken roots, a voice feathered with colours, or a pair of wings, suspended on sound and tuned to yellow and violet.

Then the treeman told me about three of my daughters living with his kind and bearing children of the trees. Theirs was the dominion over the forests, now and in the future, and the tree tops were their thrones. The breed of the man from the sky, he said, would never be large in number and strong enough to create their kingdom on earth. The animals and the plants had the sun and the rain clouds on their side: they sucked the juice of fertility from both. Your grand-daughters will empty their wombs before the tenth child, Eve, and who in the next generations will inhabit those low earth-mounds you built for yourselves wherever you sleep. They are homes, I said, and no son of man will ever live with a she-ape in her tree nest. Wait, he answered, till all your women go to mate with the treemen, and then where will your sons spend their seed?

‘In earth, in earrth, in . . .’ the beaky screech went on and on. I had to cover my ears not to hear any more of it, and tried to punish him with a blinding gaze. But the treeman’s eyes were safe inside two hairy caves, under his forehead wisps.

‘Treeman has Eeve speech, Treeman thinks Eeve, Treeman wants. . . .’ The voice was still coming through my fingers. I felt a weight on my right shoulder and sent my hand there. It touched a soft thing, warm as the hollow of a nest. I screamed, heard my own noise before his, and then a wing brushed my face, scratching the skin under my eye.

Now the bird was flying around the ape’s head, faster and faster, and the head moved too, turning itself dizzy. He couldn’t pretend any longer about standing upright. The long arms dropped and trailed in front of the bending legs.

‘Go! jump! fly! go!’ The hooked beak was all colour, red with panic. The bird had stopped speaking for the treeman: he was shrieking and fluttering for his own sake. What had he seen in the distance that made him so frantic?

‘Go-oo—shshsh—chtcht!’ The listening bird couldn’t shape human words any more, my speech had left him for good or for this darkening moment of fright.

They departed as they had come, suddenly, the ugly toes of the treeman splitting the bark as he clambered the palm-tree, a mock-ape and a mock-male.

Then the air seemed empty of motion. A hush fell on the shadows. Each time this happened, it surprised me anew, sending my eyes to the sky for the signs of a whirlwind on its way. Then I knew. And again the animals reminded me of his near presence by their behaviour. I walked to the stone gate, stepped on the plank over the ditch that Amo had dug out before the last torrent, and stood in the meadow by the path leading to my lake.

And they stood, watching. Lions, giraffes, elephants, spiked eels, water-pigs and the ancient dragons with jewels on their fins. He had light steps, but they heard each of them and moved aside to make room for him. Whichever animal he passed, he touched its head between the eyes, and blessed the eyes, the head and the whole body. The tall beasts with swaying necks held them down in readiness for that sacred gesture.

Such a moment, only a moment like this brings tears to my eyes, as if the useless tears could shed the feeling of loss.

3

‘Do you see much change in me?

We always ask each other the same unimportant question. I mean my age, growing older and riper for death while he, I think, means his kind of change which makes us both separate, less knowing and more thinking.

‘No, Eve, you still have the sky reflected in your beauty.’ His answer was the same. But he meant more than my son Amo who saw in me the light of that sky which stood over his head, not the earlier sky. To my husband I reflected the beauty that had belonged to us both and in spite of the change and the loss, could shine through my features.

‘You walk with shorter steps, Adam.’ But he knew I was looking at his grey hair and thinking of the stoop, not the length of steps. And he wouldn’t grow a beard, unlike his sons and grandsons; it was his mouth, bare, with no hair above or below, that the animals watched with awe. It spoke human sounds and it could also make silent movements which each of them understood. The beards muffled the silent words for the animals, or perhaps these were only beards to cover up what the lips couldn’t do.

I counted my ages by my children. And how old was he, the name-maker, the begetter, the man from the sky to the tree-ape, and the hunter who never killed to my seventh son, the beast killer?

Our father has counted all my ages.’ He knew my thoughts whenever he wanted to know them. And he always called the Sky Man ‘Our father.’

‘Do you see him? It didn’t sound right. ‘Does he show himself to Adam?’

‘No. He speaks to me. Sometimes.’

‘Where?’

‘I can’t tell.’ My husband’s blue eyes became lost in their own colour, no longer his, but wider and deeper, ready for a descent of appearances. ‘I can’t, Eve. 1 don’t remember.’

I wished his eyelids would close to give him a healing shade, but I had to watch his face until my next question hit it hard. What would his lips do—twitch? open? let the tongue out?

‘Does the Sky Man know that three of my daughters are wifed to the treemen?’

‘He knows.’ Every wrinkle in that large and changeable face seemed darker with pain, but the lips remained calm. ‘And there are no treemen, Eve. I named them apes in their beginning.’

‘Is he against my daughters?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You could gather all your sons and kill the treemen who defile my daughters?’

His answer had the music that didn’t belong to his voice:

‘This I say, you shall not kill.’ He got up, his grey head almost touching a bough in the roof. ‘I shall not kill,’ he said in his usual tone.

Then something pierced a thought deep under my skull. It felt like being touched by lightning. Was he telling me where my secret thought lay, or was he receiving it from me, despite myself?

‘That’s why I have come to your land,’ he said.

‘It’s mine and Amo’s.’

‘That’s why I have come. But Amo is no name. I called him after his dead brother, so that the sound which was killed might live again in him.’

‘I will never call him Abel.’

Neither did my husband use that name when talking to Amo. He called him nothing. This was the first time I noticed fear in his manner of speech. Why not say simply: my son? And Amo, too, treated his father as if he had no name, no memories to share, but were a breed by itself, some odd creature from the sky, just as the treeman said.

Yet they talked together of this and that. Was the lake a lake or a sea? It might be worth trying to cross it by boat. Why couldn’t we keep more cattle? What did the last herd die of? Now and again my husband sounded like a tired name-maker who had to repeat aloud his bits of knowledge so that he wouldn’t lose them before passing them on safely into our heads. And he also echoed himself from that earlier likeness which was as faint as music between the skies.

You shall not punish those you cannot judge, you shall not kill those you cannot bring to life; you shall not, shall not, you, you. This was Adam talking to Adam, Adam thinking of Adam, knowing Adam. He shut us off, he exhausted our listless minds with that voice in the likeness of the voice. Then at last I heard silence, and after the silence Amo’s words even more soothing than silence.

‘Teach me to draw a spiky eel, a giant beaver, a dragon too, I will have them on the wall and many others besides, when I build a new wall along the lake against the creatures of the slime.’

‘I don’t know how to make drawings.’ He hesitated and, again, the name of Abel couldn’t leave his mouth. ‘But this full moon inside a ring, you drew it yourself, I was told you did.’

‘Yes, it’s true. But first there was a command in my understanding. I had to put the same sign in every home my children were to build.’

‘Is it against the evil stare of the moon? An eye in another eye?’

‘They are not eyes. Circle is their name. One inside the other.’

‘A big circle and a small circle,’ Amo said and laughed.

‘Yes, the inner circle is just as round as the one outside.’

And he began to speak about his ‘Our father’, the Sky Man, whose image sometimes appeared in the likeness of two circles, although there was yet another, and this third circle could not be understood by man until it became visible and until man broke it with his own weak hands. Amo listened and smiled. His thoughts went in circles, too, trying to catch a few of his father’s words, but I felt how dizzy they were. I was standing near my son, sure that we could never grow separate, because my husband had already put himself beyond Amo’s reach. Yet Amo wanted to learn at least about drawing a small thing like that circle inside.

‘And could I make this one myself, on the wet clay, with a long, sharp nail!’ He showed all his fingers, expecting his father to choose one of them.

‘Yes, you could, Abel.’ The name seemed to spill blood as it opened an old scar in both of us. ‘Because, Abel my son, the inner circle is what has to be filled or emptied inside you.’

‘Is the circle then mine just like a boat, a spear or Damo the dog (‘ He mentioned his dog, though it had been kicked to death by a bison, long ago.

‘Yes, it’s yours. And when the circle coils itself up Our father will dwell in the centre of the coil.’

‘Is the Sky Man no bigger than a snail? I thought he was very very big.’

My husband didn’t answer. He took Amo’s hand and then mine, and joined them together.

‘This is your mother Eve,’ he said to Amo, ‘This is your son Abel,’ he said to me.

And I trembled at the foreknowledge within the warning that his words enclosed, a condemned circle inside a noose of a circle.

There was one more joining of hands on my husband’s departure. The listening bird caused this, unwittingly. With his beak glistening through the feathery palm leaves he must have spied on us for a long while before he dared to drop his disrespectful cry:

‘Aadam and Eeve, Aadam and Eeve.’

And my husband, without looking up at the caller, took both my hands, held them in a firm grip, himself rooted to the earth like a tree. We were poised for the clouds, the plants and the beasts to see us as we were in the beginning, a coupled life, a dance in a still moment, a deathless peace. The bird seemed frightened by what he had done and hid his beak farther in the branches.

‘It’s the listening bird, Adam. He says he’s learnt speech from me.’

‘The parrot!’ My husband let a smile raise his heavy lips, and the smile vanished at once. ‘It’s already named. So much life is named. It saddens me.’

‘The parrot, I remember now. Why didn’t I remember it on that day?’

‘He’s the great liar of the forest. He goes everywhere, listens to what is being said, repeats the words he understands and those he doesn’t understand, and in the end ties them all up into lies with his clever red beak.’

‘But the parrot spoke our true names.’

‘Yes, he said our names.’ And the warm strength of my husband was flowing from his hand into mine in the likeness of begetting which I knew hadn’t been meant for this time.

I complained, of course, about the animals. That was usual on our partings. They were pushing us out, I said, multiplying to please their lust, feeding on our lands, and only sometimes paying a small homage to Adam. Why, why was it said that we owned the earth! They possessed it with their greedy snouts, their hooves, their defiant tails.

Either we killed the beasts, hunting them in the grass and in the trees, or they would hunt us down when we became weak in our children. We needed a new breed of men, ferocious and ruthless.

As usual, Adam answered with silence. And as usual, animals waited for his blessing at the boundaries of my homestead.

The night swelled up after his departure, pregnant with thunder. Sweat was pouring down Amo’s thighs as I looked at them, saying through my desire:

‘I know you’re not afraid. I’ll take you back into my body. For this was meant.

You knew it in your touch, your fingers, Amo.’

Amo was rubbing his right arm where the fox’s teeth left a scar, his back bent and touching the wall. When both his arms stretched out, I saw that he was leaning against the place marked with a double circle.

Surface

1

‘We’re not allowed to see death,’ I said and covered my eyes. But 1 had seen the heads, and if they were drowned and now merely touching the surface of the water, I could not erase the sight by rubbing my eyelids. Either I was already a contaminated witness of death, and the others had shared the experience with me, or there was nothing to fear, and death had no dominion over us now as under the domes before.

I opened my eyes and saw that none of them had listened to my warning. We all, in fact, had our eyes fixed on the heads, hoping perhaps that some might turn round and look at us. That would be a sort of answer.

‘If I should die,’ Joker intoned, ‘bury me underground. I don’t want to be afloat.’

‘I wonder,’ Sailor put on his best faraway look. ‘Did they teach me how to swim when we were living down below, me and Joke?’