The River and the Book (5 page)

I fasted all day and then, in the middle of the afternoon when the house was quiet, I washed myself and oiled my hair and braided it, and I went into the room and took the Book out of its box and placed it with special care on the table. I stared at it for a long time before I opened it. I took a deep breath and asked my question: What did the Tarnish cotton fields bode for us? And then I opened the Book.

The answer was only one word. It was all alone on the page, in red letters that seemed to blaze out of the paper.

Change
.

Despite the Book’s message, life continued much the same for the next year or so. We watched the River anxiously all through the winter; the banks were now ridged with lines that showed the lowering water levels over the years, and still it sank lower and lower, finger by finger, handspan by handspan. It was a big river, deep and strong, but that winter we felt its life faltering. When spring came it rose a few feet, and our hearts lightened; but by midsummer it had shrunk again, until it reached its lowest mark ever.

My sister Shiha married in the spring, a handsome man called Indra from the next village downriver. The wedding went on for three days, with feasting and music and dancing. Shiha was a year younger than I was, but, unlike me, she was impatient to get married. She was like a bright fruit ripening in the sun, warm and luscious. She took after my mother, and I took after my father; like him, I was thin and dark, and my hair was straight and dull, where hers fell in glossy ringlets about her face. Although no one looked at me if Shiha was anywhere near by, it never occurred to me to envy her. I loved to watch her when her face was in repose: as she spun wool, or made the spelt cakes that were her speciality, or plucked a sweet melody from her
tar
. She was always my favourite sister. Before she climbed into the garlanded boat with her new husband, she embraced me, laughing and crying at the same time.

“Oh, Sim, I am so happy,” she said. “But I am so sad, too! I will miss you so much!”

I kissed her glowing cheek and told her not to be silly. I was truly happy for her: their marriage was a love match, and Indra came from a kind family who I knew would be good to her. But my steps home that evening felt heavy, and when we sat down for a light meal of leftovers – none of us were hungry after the heavy feasting of the wedding – I felt that our house was like the River, more shrunken every day.

After the wedding, Kular moved out of our house, where he had stayed through the winter. He was a courteous guest, a gentle and shy man who rendered his thanks by working for my father. He remained in the village, moving in with old Tankar, who needed the help in his fields, and who lived alone, very close to Sulihar, who was still caring for Kular’s little boy.

Kular was only the first of those fleeing the Upper Pembar cotton fields; refugees became a common sight in our village. We saw whole families floating downriver on laden boats. Sometimes they stopped and bought food from us or, more rarely, begged it; but they never stayed. They told us their stories and moved on, heading to the cities in the east, where they might find a way to make a living.

A month or so after the wedding, Mizan made his annual visit, bearing goods and news. His boat chugged to our landing and all the village children came running and cheering, followed more sedately by the rest of the village. The children wore their embroidered holiday clothes, because Mizan’s visits were always an occasion for a festival. The river was so low that he struggled to clamber onto the pier, puffing and spluttering, and he bent over to regain his breath before he handed out his annual offering of sweets and nuts to the children.

His assistant, Taret, a skinny, dark-bearded man with one eye, swung up easily after him and grinned at the crowd. And then everyone went quiet, because a stranger followed them onto the pier. She was a tall, white-skinned woman with dark red hair tied back from her face. At first we thought she was Tarnish. She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and sunglasses, and a small, silver box was slung around her neck on a black strap. She looked clean and sharp, like a steel blade, and I felt uncomfortable because I couldn’t see her eyes behind the black discs that covered them. I suddenly felt quaint and childish in my silk embroidered dress.

It turned out that she wasn’t Tarnish at all. She came from a country further away than Tarn, Mizan said, a country that lay across a wide sea, and her name was Jane Watson. She was writing a book about the people who lived on the River, and she wanted to meet us and talk to us about our lives.

At the mention of a book, the villagers turned to look at her with respect. We all thought she must be some kind of Keeper. I studied her with fascination. I had never seen a woman like Jane Watson before. She stood on the pier, her feet far apart, unworried by the fact that the whole village was staring at her in silence. She greeted us in our own language, with an accent none of us had heard before, and smiled. My father courteously returned her greeting, and then Mizan and Taret began to haul their wares out of the boat and set up their stall on the bank beside the pier, and we all got on with our trading.

Jane Watson stood a little apart, out of the way, and took photographs. I knew what a camera was – Lukman, one of my cousins, had an old black camera which was one of his most precious possessions, although he could never use it because he didn’t have any film, or any way of developing the photographs even if he found some. And a few of us had made the journey downriver to Kilok, where for a small sum a photographer would take portraits that were then displayed proudly on the walls back home. But I’d never seen one as small and shiny as Jane Watson’s. I only knew what it was because I asked Mizan.

“She takes pictures,” he said, shrugging. “All the time. I think she’s crazy. But she’s paying me well, so she can do what she likes.”

“Is she a Keeper?” I asked.

Mizan glanced quickly up at me. “I don’t think they have Keepers where she comes from,” he said.

I was burning with curiosity, but I knew now was not the time for idle chatter. There was a long line behind me, and much business to be done. I sold Mizan my lengths of cloth for a good price, and bought salt and oil for the house and a pair of pretty enamel earrings for myself, sealing the deal with a handclasp. Then I left. Jane Watson was still taking photographs, surrounded by a gaggle of curious children who were keeping a respectful distance. I glanced over at her, and she looked up. Although I couldn’t see her eyes, I knew she was watching me. Then she swung the camera up to her face, and I felt a sudden strange horror at its blank gaze. I turned away and hurried off, clutching my purchases to my breast.

When I think of Jane Watson now, I don’t feel angry. It seems strange: not so long ago, I hated her with a passion that frightened me. A wild animal crouched in my chest, and it seemed it would take the smallest gesture for that animal to leap out and tear everything to pieces, rending flesh, tearing skin, breaking bones. And I would have been glad to let it go, I would have set that savage beast at Jane Watson’s throat and I would have been happy to see her scream in agony, I would have rejoiced to see her blood spill steaming onto the ground.

And yet, despite my initial distrust, despite what happened afterwards, the truth is that for a while I liked Jane Watson. While Mizan went upriver to do his trading, she stayed in our village for almost a month, taking photographs so constantly that we ceased to notice it. She lived among us, learning the pattern of our days. She helped to feed the pigs and the sheep, and learned how to open and close the locks on our irrigation channels, and hoed our crops and lit incense at the temple. She taught me some of her language, which meant that later, when I came to the city, I could talk to the tourists and make my living. Each night she sat down with us and ate our bread and salt.

When Mizan returned, we held a farewell feast. We sang her our most beautiful songs, and she told us how grateful she was for our generosity and our trust. I cried because she was going away, because I would miss her. She had told me so many interesting things about the places she had visited and the country where she had been born. And she kissed me on both cheeks, and said that one day we would see each other again.

She went to sleep in the bed that I had made for her, and rose with the sun. She washed her face and broke her fast and then we all went down to the River to wave her goodbye. Stepping onto Mizan’s boat, she turned to face us, the pale early sun shining behind her head so she seemed to be wearing a halo of copper. She held her hand high in the air until she vanished around the next bend.

Later that day, several hours after she had left, we discovered that some time between nightfall and sunrise Jane Watson had slipped secretly into the room where we kept the Book. She had taken the Book out of its old box, which only the Keepers were ever allowed to do, and had hidden it in her bag, and when she left with Mizan, the Book left with her.

Jane Watson stole the Book. And after that, nothing was ever the same again.

My memories of the days after the Book was stolen are all in fragments. I remember my grandmother’s pale face, her eyes bright with unshed tears, and my father’s mouth, set in a stern, hard line. I remember that a storm blew in from the mountains, and I watched the nut trees thrashing against the luminous yellow sky and the leaves flying off into the darkening night. I remember the endless visitors from the village, a stream of them for days. Everyone wanted to see the empty box, the violated room, everyone wanted to touch the Keeper’s shoulder, as one touches the shoulder of a mourner.

When they heard what had happened, the brothers Yani and Sopli took their motorboat and headed downriver in pursuit of Mizan. “We’ll get the Book back, don’t you worry!” they said to me, grinning, their dark eyes flashing at the challenge. “We have the fastest boat on the river!” And they spat into the brown waves and chugged off, their wake furling behind them in white wings, and my heart rose.

They returned three days later, their hands empty, their faces downcast. They had caught up with Mizan at Kilok, a day downriver, and he had been horrified when he heard what had happened. But Jane Watson, perhaps knowing that she would be pursued, had already left Mizan’s boat. She had met an associate, a bald man with golden spectacles who drove a jeep, and they had gone south over the plains, away from the River.

“I didn’t know,” Mizan told Yani and Sopli. “By the gods, if I had known, I would have beaten that woman within an inch of her life! I would have got it back for you! I am ashamed that I brought such bad luck to your people. But I didn’t know.”

Yani and Sopli had no way of following a jeep overland, and so they came back home and told us what they had found out. When I saw their expressions, I felt something inside me clench like a fist. The brothers looked crushed and humiliated, as if something in their souls had shrivelled in shame at their failure to bring back the Book. But they didn’t steal it, I thought, and they don’t deserve to feel ashamed. Jane Watson should feel ashamed.

I wondered whether she had any human feelings, this woman who I had so foolishly trusted, to whom I had revealed some of my most secret thoughts. I imagined bitterly how she must have laughed at me as she pretended to listen sympathetically, her brows drawn in a straight line of concentration. I thought about the bald man with spectacles she had met in Kilok; it sounded as if Jane Watson had planned to meet him, as if there had been a plot. I wondered if Jane Watson had intended to steal the Book from the beginning.

At first the theft was a wound that went too deep for pain. The Book was our soul, our oracle, our delight and our pride. It was our friend. Without its guidance, who were we? Without its light, how would we see? Jane Watson’s action went beyond betrayal, into the incomprehensible. We simply didn’t understand why she had taken the Book. No one but the Keepers knew how to read it. In her hands it was useless; it would be just an object, inert and dead. And yet she had dared to take it from us. A great anger tore through the village. If Jane Watson had reappeared in those days, the gentle villagers I had known all my life would have torn her to pieces as if they were tigers.

Our anger was partly fear. Jane Watson had casually destroyed hundreds of years of tradition when she took the Book out of the box, just as the Tarnish soldiers were destroying villages that had stood on the River since people had first walked into the Pembar Plains. Things that once had been solid now were uncertain, the ground seemed to echo beneath our feet like a thin layer of rock over a great, measureless hollow that plunged to the centre of the earth. We saw the sun rise each morning with relief, as if we feared in our dreams that it might vanish overnight.

To the last question I ever asked, the Book had answered
Change
. I hadn’t expected that the change would be the loss of the Book itself.

I thought of the first night Jane Watson had dined with us, when she had begun to win my trust. She had taken off her sunglasses as she stepped inside, holding them loosely in one hand as she greeted our family, and at last I could see her eyes. They were pale blue, large and finely formed, with long fair lashes. Her skin was freckled, her eyebrows broad and straight, and her mouth was set firmly, as if she were always in the process of making a difficult decision. Her face was dour and stubborn, but when she smiled her whole face lit up with an attractive humour. I had never seen anyone like her before.

I could see at once that Grandmother didn’t trust Jane Watson. She was being very polite, and her face was expressionless and wary. It wasn’t only that Jane Watson was a stranger, and a foreigner at that; it was because Grandmother knew, as I knew too once I saw Jane Watson’s eyes, that she was a woman of power. It was a strange power, and heavily veiled; but it was palpable in the charge in my skin as she sat next to me at the table in one of the designated places for honoured guests.