Silent Girl (22 page)

Mother complains about Akin taking time away from his chores and about his luring others away from theirs. “What will we live on if you're all off following some dream?”

“Don't you want to sing and dance sometimes, too?” he says.

She turns her head away, wipes her eyes.

“Children can break your heart,” Ada says later. “Believe me, I know. Since the time she was your age, she has thought of nothing but those people. Some of them wouldn't be alive if not for her but do they thank her? No. They praise her son, ‘the one called Water,' they say. What's wrong with the name she gave you?”

“I'm not that boy anymore.”

“You might as well burn her books.”

A delegation of elders arrive at the water to say they've determined that an ancestor's spirit has entered Akin's body. They are setting up a schedule of Watchers to post in multiple spots throughout each day to ensure the Snows don't miss the Mountain People's arrival. More food will be needed and, as it is rumoured that orchards of apples, pears, and cherries are not more than a few day's walk away, a few people will arm themselves against the wild dogs and head out in search of the fruit and whatever else they can find. Others will take the few canoes and kayaks they have and head up the coast to look for a white wolverine.

Akin is alone at the water late one afternoon, alone with his doubts and the setting sun, when Mother appears, carrying a book. “Remember this?” she says.

He does. It was as big as his lap when she read it to him, teaching him names of animals he would never see.
Kangaroo, can you say kangaroo?

Her finger marks a page she opens up to him. “Not a white one,” she says, “but it might help those who go searching.”

A picture he can't recall. Maybe she thought it would frighten him when he was little. A hairy creature, part bear, part dog, its head too small for its fat body. Deep brown fur with pale yellow streaks along each flank. A disappointing herald.

“It'll be hard to find,” she says. “They like isolated places away from humans.”

“Fire is trying to talk his father into going on the search with him.”

“Aapa thinks the Mountain People are shadows of our deepest desires,” she says, closing the book. She holds it out to him with both hands as if in offering.

“What do
you
think?” He takes the book without dropping his gaze from her eyes.

“I think they'll be tired after their journey and need places to stay, food, water.”

“Fire asked if I'm the One. I told him I think it's you. The one who kept so many of us from starving.”

“There are different kinds of hunger,” she says.

“When the Mountain People go back, I'm going with them,” he says more defiantly than he intends, but part of him wants to hurt her.

She reaches over and gently traces his scar with her finger. “Your eyes are the very colour I pictured when my Aaka Elin described the morning light on her icy home.”

He studies her face as if he were crossing the great water today, never to find his reflection in her again. “Come
with
me,” he says. He can see her in The New Land, her long strides carrying her across fields of red, yellow, and blue flowers she's only seen in books, flowers allowed to grow for their beauty alone.

She just smiles. “May I tell you a story?”

He nods warily – she hasn't told him stories for years, but he wants her to stay. He sits cross-legged on the ground. She does the same, facing him, close enough so their knees touch.

“Once upon a time,” she says, “a woman gave birth to a child such as her heart had never seen. He was the length of her arm from elbow to wrist and full of infant sweetness.”

“Is this a poem?”

“It could be. The child grew into a man such as the world had never seen. He's no longer yours, the world said to her. Be sad, if you must, but proud, and she was.”

He closes his eyes and takes in the sounds of life carrying on: birdsong, wind breath, ocean throb. He rises and dances for her then, a new dance: sea spray erupting in joyous spumes.

Backstage

An excellent University of Toronto production of
Othello
sparked this collection. I had studied the play years before without having seen it performed. Watching and reflecting on how willingly Desdemona allowed her life to end, I thought of domestic abuse victims and the seeming collusion of some in their own misfortune. Many, like Desdemona, are socially isolated. The story that resulted from that evening –
Nobody; I Myself
– ended up being as much about idealism and racism in the United States in the 1960s as it was about social isolation, but that's the thing about stories: they often end up being about something other than what you intended.

So it was with
Not Meant to Know
. Miranda in
The Tempest
isn't a particularly complex character. She exists dramatically to become Ferdinand's bride and thus help his father and hers reconcile. She falls in love with the first good-looking guy she meets. Boring. What interested me, initially, was how she would relate to that guy, not having had any female role models in her life from the age of three. I intended to tell the story of a girl who is kept hidden from the world by her father but, as I began to write, it morphed into something else.

Other stories were triggered by questions I had about specific characters. For example, what was behind Gertrude's hasty marriage to her husband's brother in
Hamlet
? She doesn't come across well in the play, primarily because we see her through Hamlet's eyes. She has overstepped gender bounds by not remaining grief-stricken and devoted to her husband's memory. We don't see her inner conflict. Her son's struggle is the heart of the play. It's possible her second marriage was a pragmatic move. Denmark is under threat of invasion by the prince of Norway. It wasn't as if Hamlet could take the red eye from Wittenberg to assume the throne and defend the kingdom. In
Passing Through
, I give my Gertrude a chance to explain herself, time to reflect on what's important to her.

In
Silent Girl
, the question sprang from the improbable plot of
Pericles
. The hero's wife, presumed dead, is buried at sea yet turns up later, alive and untouched by another man, having hidden herself in a temple to the goddess Diana. His daughter, Marina, is kidnapped by pirates and sold to a brothel yet retains her virginity. Shakespeare didn't shirk from revealing incest between King Antiochus and his daughter. Why, then, leave Marina's virtue intact? This was the incongruity that fuelled
Silent Girl
. Researching the story was painful, writing it even more so. I am stunned by the scope and range of the sex slave trade that isn't happening only “over there, somewhere.” In North America, tens of thousands of women and girls are kidnapped or coerced into sexual slavery every year.

Kidnapping also figures in
Kesh Kumay
. I had been searching for a modern counterpart to
The Taming of the Shrew's
Kate whose abdication to Petruchio at the end of the play always makes me squirm in empathetic humiliation. By lucky accident I caught Petr Lom's illuminating and moving documentary
The Kidnapped Brides
on
CBC
's
Passionate Eye
. When one woman tells Lom, “After the kidnapping, you've no choice – you start loving, even if you don't want to, you have to build a life,” I knew I had found my Kate in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.

The Winter's Tale
, like
Shrew
, presents a problem for feminist sensibilities. Hermione's husband Leontes falsely accuses her of adultery and locks her up in prison where she gives birth to their second child, a daughter. He orders the baby taken out into the wilds and left for animals to feed upon. When he gets word Hermione is dead and their first child has died of a broken heart over separation from his mother, he repents and goes into protracted grieving. Too darn late, you think, forgetting this is a romance. In the last act – which takes place sixteen years later – we learn Hermione is alive and has been in hiding. She reveals herself to Leontes as a statue that comes to life and they stroll off into happily-ever-after land, she apparently having forgiven all of his treachery. Pondering Hermione's sixteen years of fealty to an unhealthy relationship led me to imagine, in
Deep Dark Waves,
another woman's suspended animation. Through research I learned of a tendency in social work circles to deny that some women are violence-prone, resulting in a scarcity of therapeutic services to help them and their families.

I was intrigued with the atypical mothering of Volumnia in
Coriolanus
. Thinking I would work with some of feminist bell hook's theories about the continued disempowerment of North American blacks, I envisioned a story about gang culture. That it evolved into
The Snow People
, a parable about oppression in an environmentally degraded future, I can only attribute to alchemy.

Cocktails with Charles
allowed me to explore the complexities and fluid boundaries of gender.
Twelfth Night
is one of Shakespeare's “trouser plays,” as a writer friend calls them: plays in which women disguise themselves as men either to be able to travel without molestation or to gain entry into the privileged world of men. It's laughable that they get away with it, but the plays are comedies, after all. In my comedy I wanted my characters to get away with breaking old patterns to find new meaning.

It became apparent to me as I got deeper into the research and writing of this collection that some things haven't changed for women since Shakespeare's time. The reason, I suspect, is that we are still locked into gender roles and a patriarchal value system despite the efforts of many women and men to change their thinking and their behaviour. We need different kinds of stories – a new mythology, perhaps – to free us.

Glossary of Terms

NOT MEANT TO KNOW

Junket
—brand name of a rennet-based pudding.

White Castle
—self-declared first hamburger fast-food chain, offering hamburgers for five cents each in 1921.

SILENT GIRL

Anh—
a Cajun reply when one does not understand, or an expression of surprise.

Chirren
—Cajun for children.

Dipped in de Bayou
—Cajun for unsophisticated.

Duckanary
—a made-up word.

Empress of Heaven, Goddess of the Sea, Ma-tsu
—the patron saint of seafarers in Taiwan; she began as a real person born in 960 who, because she didn't cry until more than a month old, was named Lin Muo (
muo
meaning silence) and often referred to as Muo-niang (“the silent girl”). According to legend, when she was sixteen years old she received some kind of initiation from Heaven and was given a bronze amulet. After that she could ward off evil spirits, forestall calamities, heal the weak and the sick, and save imperilled fishing boats. It's said that if you call one of her names, she will appear to help you. If you call her as Empress of Heaven, she will be delayed coming to your aid by having to dress in her finery.

Guff
—Cajun for the Gulf of Mexico.

Le souper
—Cajun for supper.

Peeshwank
—Cajun for runt.

Poodoo
—Cajun for no class.

Make do-do
—Cajun for go to sleep.

Ohm
—Cajun for home.

Phi Phi Don
—an island in Thailand between Phuket and the Andaman Sea coast of the mainland.

T
—Cajun for little when affixed to first name.

KESH KUMAY

Ayee
—exclamation of excitement.

Ala Kachuu
—bride kidnapping, a common practice in rural Kyrgyzstan in the struggling post-Soviet economy as it reduces wedding costs. Some brides are willing participants (as they are in western elopements). For those who are not, the practice is illegal, but the police seem reluctant to enforce the law.

Ama
—affectionate name for mother.

Ata
—affectionate name for father.

Bishkek
—a wooden stick used to churn mare's milk as it ferments into
koumiss
; also the name of Kyrgyzstan's capital city which was renamed after the wooden stick in 1991. Between 1926 and 1991 the capital was known as Frunze in honour of a Bolshevik military leader.

Chai
—milky, spiced tea.

Chanach
—pouch made of animal skins that have been cleaned and smoked over a fire of pine branches to give
koumiss
a special smell and taste.

Erf
—exclamation of disgust.

Jailoo
—mountain pasture, 2500 meters or more above sea level, used by Kyrgyz nomads in summer to graze flocks of sheep, horses and cows.

Jooluk
—ceremonial white scarf tied around a kidnapped bride's head to indicate her acceptance of the marriage.

Kalpak
—hat made from four panels of white felt with traditional patterns stitched into it as decoration. It is worn by males of all ages, especially in rural Kyrgyzstan, and is a symbol of the nation's history. Plain white ones are often reserved for festivals and special occasions. Others intended for everyday use may have a black lining.

Kesh Kumay
—“kiss the girl” or “chasing the kiss”—a traditional folk game in which a man on horseback tries to catch a woman on horseback and kiss her.

Komuz
—an ancient fretless string instrument used in Kyrgyz music, closely related to other Turkic string instruments and the lute.

Koumiss
—the traditional drink of Kyrgyzstan, made from fermenting milk in a
chanach
. It is mildly alcoholic.

Manas
—the hero of one of the world's great pieces of oral literature,
The Epic of Manas
, twenty times longer than
The Odyssey
. For centuries it was recited. The first full written version appeared only in the 1920s. In the '30s through the '50s,
The Manas
was eliminated from school curricula and certain parts of it were reinterpreted to support communist philosophy. Manas was a Khan of the Kyrgyz, reputedly born in the Talas region of northern Kyrgyzstan. The story relates his trying to create a homeland for his people and fighting off various neighbouring hordes.

Manaschi
—professional and highly valued reciters of
The Epic of Manas.

Oomiyen
—amen.

Shirdak
—traditional felt rug made by sewing patterns of contrasting felt together using patterns often inspired from nature such as mountains, animal horns, and birds. Shirdaks are used by the nomadic Kyrgyz to decorate yurts.

Som
—the currency of the Republic of Kyrgyzstan. The som was introduced in 1993, replacing the Russian ruble. The word means “pure” in Kyrgyz and implies pure gold.

Ulak Tartysh
—wrestling on horseback for the carcass of a sheep or goat. Two teams of an equal number of riders play on a field that is 300 meters long and 150 meters wide. The opposite sides of this area are the “gates,” marked with flags. Placed in the center of the field is a carcass of a goat or sheep, weighing an average of 30-40 kilograms. One game is 15 minutes long. The objective is to seize the animal carcass and deliver it into the gates of the contesting team. The players are allowed to pick up the carcass from any place within the limits of the field, take it from their rivals, pass it or fling it over to their partners, carry it pressed to the horse's side or suspended between the horse's legs.

Yurt
—traditional felt tent-like home of nomads who live on the steppes of Central Asia. Wooden poles connect the latticework walls on the bottom of the yurt to the hole in the middle of the tent for the smoke to escape and light to enter. The wood frame is then covered with felt and sometimes with canvas.

DEEP DARK WAVES

Hickety, Pickety, My Black Hen
—an English nursery rhyme and child's song:
Hickety pickety, my black hen / She lays eggs for gentlemen; / Sometimes nine, sometimes ten, / Hickety pickety, my black hen.

NOBODY; I MYSELF

AME church
—African Methodist Episcopal Church founded in Philadelphia in 1816.

Conked hair
—hair straightened with chemicals.

COCKTAILS WITH CHARLES

Mentsch
—Yiddish for decent human being.

Meshuge
—Yiddish for crazy, senseless.

Tukhes
—Yiddish for buttocks.

THE SNOW PEOPLE: 30-46 AGM

Aaka
—grandmother.

Aapa
—grandfather.

Air scooter
—based on the Air Scooter
II
lightweight helicopter available now through a company in Nevada.

CONAV
—short for the naval forces of the fictitious coalition of Pacific Republics.

Digital guardian
—based on current identification, location tracking, and condition monitoring technology.

Dimethyl Sulphide
—a biological sulphur compound emitted over the ocean by phytoplankton.

Electric shields
—based on shields in current use for riot control.

Holovision
—based on
3D
technology under development now.

Mid-Norte
—a fictitious republic encompassing the former central region of the
USA
.

New Columbia
—a fictitious republic encompassing the former province of British Columbia and the states of Washington and Oregon.

Prairie Shield
—a fictitious republic encompassing the former provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Refugia
—locations of remnant populations of once widespread animal or plant species.

Skin boat
—type of boat dating back thousands of years; modern ones are made of wood and nylon or other cloth instead of animal skins.

Sky car
—based on Moller International's
M400
Skycar, a personal vertical takeoff and landing vehicle.

Tayberry
—cross between a blackberry and a raspberry.

Note:
Readers can find discussion guides for each of the stories at
www.triciadower.com
.