I Am the Clay (15 page)

Why am I so cold with the heat of the fire on my face? So close to the flames and yet still shivering. The air so still, black and silent air, cold and smelling of raw earth. As on the night of the campfire in the forest when I dared the boys of my chronological group to cover me with earth to see how long I could stay under the ground and the earth was cold and dank on my nose and eyes and face, smelling of moist roots and wet stones, and I lay there so long Badooki began to whine and scrape at the ground and they rushed to uncover me and I climbed out laughing and brushed the earth from my clothes. Breathing through a reed they couldn’t see in the dark. And after supper Father called me to him and said, giving me a hopeless look, This is a foolish boy, how is it I have in my house under my roof such a foolish boy? And Grandfather said, The boy likes to explore, there is a curiosity in him, one must know the difference between a boy who explores for understanding and one who explores for excitement only. The second is foolish
and dangerous. Which are you? Grandfather asked me, and my father replied, I say this is a foolish boy and one day his foolishness will cause him harm, may the spirits protect and guard him, what will you do next to shame me in the village, foolish boy? And he turned away from me very angry. But Grandfather kept smiling around the long stem of his pipe. Who told Father? No doubt fat and greasy and loose-tongued Choo Kun. Dead all of my chronological group. Ashes all their homes.

There is something strange about this place. Fires burning everywhere except on those two patches of darkness and where we are now. Big black circles and all around them fires, and fires all around the Americans, are they warm the Americans, I was warm in my village with the smoke from the kitchen fire running under the floor and our sleeping pads on the floor, the heat baking us no matter how cold outside. The old man and the woman, they must be very cold if I am cold so close to the fire. The old man doesn’t like me, I don’t know why, no matter what I do he doesn’t like me, I’ll go back with them to their village if the Americans drive out the Chinese and the soldiers of the North, and then I’ll go to my village, someone must still be alive, they couldn’t all have been killed, I’ll live with an uncle, a cousin, how could they all have died?

Is it already time to wake up the woman? I’ll stay a little longer. Six times with the fire tonight instead of five, were we really in the mountains last night? let her sleep, some fires have gone out, will there be many dead of the cold here in the morning? Badooki once found a man dead in the forest near our village,
a stranger dead in the snow, no relative of anyone in the village, and no one would touch him, no one would take the responsibility of the funeral, and finally someone called the police. Badooki barked and we all came running, all in my chronological group, we were playing in the forest, and the man lay very still, not still the way you are when you sleep, but the way a stone is still, or a sack of grain, dead stone still, and fat greasy Choo Kun stared at the body and turned green and went away to vomit. I told my sisters to have a look at the body and they screamed and put their hands over their mouths and ran frightened into the courtyard beside the garden. Ah, girls.

How many times have I added wood to the fire? I can’t remember. Let her sleep.

He sat shivering inside the quilt. I made a tent of quilts once in the forest with my two little brothers and we slept in it near the campfire, all dead my little brothers, hands bound and earth in their eyes, they kill children too, why do they kill children? what did children do to them? told them stories of ghosts that night, wandering ghosts, Badooki in the tent lying next to me warm, and stories about the two stars, the wandering cowboy and the weaving girl meeting only one day a year, on the seventh day of the seventh moon, because the cowboy had neglected his cows and the weaving girl her weaving, so they were punished and must forever live separated by the Milky Way, each person must tend to the duties in his proper sphere, a story Grandmother told me, I felt it a duty to teach my little brothers what was being taught me, but they only wanted to hear more stories of wandering ghosts, and there were mosquitoes and fireflies in
the tent and the smell of the forest, and suddenly it began to rain, a waterfall of rain came through the trees, collapsing the tent and sending a river down on our heads, and Badooki ran around barking and we laughed and collected the wet quilts and ran and Badooki barked and followed us into the house and he was so wet, we all looked at him and laughed, and I called him Two Three, he was so small and wet, all his fur gone, and we slept on the floor in the house, my little brothers and Badooki and I, how long ago was that, how long, I can’t remember, how many times have I put wood on the fire, I can’t remember.

He fell asleep and woke with a start and then dozed and woke again. Shivering, he heaped wood on the bed of glowing embers and watched it catch fire and burn high and saw the snow had melted near the firepit and the earth oozing tiny rivulets despite the dense curtain of glacial air that lay upon the plain. Time to wake him, he thought, dazed. It must be time by now. Is that light coming from the sky or from the American compound? How warm they must be. And the food they have. Wake the old man, wake him, it must be time.

The old man moaned but woke without a word. Staggering slightly, he went to the fire, where he sat in his quilt staring into the flames, still inside his troubling dreams.

The boy lay down beside the old woman and was instantly asleep.

Gunfire from the American compound woke the old man from a half-sleep: three shots in swift succession. He experienced a confusion of frightful images: the Chinese, the soldiers from the North, the
woman, the cart, run, run. Rising, he tripped over an edge of the quilt and nearly tumbled into the fire. He scrambled to his feet, his hands touching soft muddied earth, and stared wildly around at the fires and the darkness across the silent plain and the cloud of reddish light over the American compound and the line of military vehicles moving along the road. Trembling, he piled more brush on the fire and sat inside his quilt listening to the beating of his heart.

In a haze of shivering bewilderment and fatigue, his head feeling oddly weightless and his eyes seeing the fire as flaring halos of yellow light spreading from the center of the flames, the old man thought he remembered the woman telling the boy to wake her but he could not be certain or perhaps the boy had tried to wake her and she would not rise or the boy had forgotten or the woman had not said that to the boy, she had said to wake the man and the man was to wake her, she would be angry again if he did not wake her, perhaps the boy had waked her and I dreamed the boy woke me when it was the woman who woke me, the dreams were strong tonight, dreams of planting the seedlings, with my feet in the hot brown waters of the paddies, the soil oozing out between my toes and the woman beside me or with the ox and the sun beating down upon my shoulders, and in the evening the rich smell of the fields and the cool breeze from the mountains and the moonlight on the wrinkled face of the river, strong dreams tonight, Uncle said a man before he dies dreams of the best moments of his life and carries those memories on his journey into the next world, he told me while we hunted pheasant in the mountains with a hawk, three-year-old
female bird, beautiful plumage, Uncle trained her himself, she lived in a thatched-roof birdhouse in Uncle’s backyard, sat perched on a branch six feet above the ground staring out at the world, a leather thong looped around each of her legs, a cold cruel untamed look in her glittering eyes, on the hunt the hawk sat on the thick leather glove that protected Uncle’s muscular hand, we crossed a river and climbed a steep hillside and saw a farmer plowing a patch of cleared earth with an ox, and Uncle said to me, Is that what you want to do or is this? and he raised the hawk high over his head and the hawk fluttered her wings and the bell on her back rang and later, as the hawk swept across the valley like a swift shadow in pursuit of a pheasant, Uncle said, pointing to it, That’s what I want to remember, that’s what I want as my last memory to take with me on the journey to the next world.

The old man stirred and roused himself and heaped more wood on the dying fire. Light already in the sky? Figures beginning to move about. A child crying. The muted wail of a woman: someone dead of the cold? Gray curling mist, vague distant hills, pale blurred sky. Melted snow around the fire, the ground oozing water and mud. Raw brown seeping earth. Strange.

He got to his feet, the quilt still around him, and took some steps away from the fire. In the faint light of the predawn sky he bent down and scraped snow from the ground and probed the land with his fingers. Miniature hills and vales. Rough earth, knobby, recently turned. He prodded the ground: not quite frozen, yielding. Scooping out a handful of earth, he put
it to his nostrils, smelled it, let it sift down through his fingers, sensing its texture, watching it fall.

He stood and looked around, then walked some yards to a low dead fire outside a nearby shack and bent and put his hand on the snow and scraped it away. Here the earth lay like solid rock beneath his fingers: hard-packed, unturned, frozen, winter earth, not the earth on which he and the woman and the boy slept, not that earth, a different earth.

He rose slowly and returned to the cart, walking with care. Drawing the quilt about him, he squatted next to the cart on the side where the woman slept. He sat there staring across the plain, waiting for the sun to rise.

The woman woke from a dream in which she had been tending the fire and a shower of sparks had ascended to the black sky and formed a constellation in the shape of the boy. She had been gazing up at it in wonder and love when next to her the boy stirred in his sleep and softly moaned, waking her.

She rose slowly, feeling the pain and stiffness in the joints of her arms and legs, and found herself in the dimness formed by the walls of quilts, staring at the underside of the cart. Old scarred unpainted pine cut and planed and built years ago by the carpenter.

For a long moment she could not remember where she was.

Emerging from the quilt draped over the side of the cart, deep wrinkles of sleep on her face, the woman saw the old man squatting near the cart and gazing
across the plain. She started to speak but the words stopped in her throat. She hawked up morning phlegm and spat into the snow.

He shook his head, an abrupt gesture.

She followed his eyes across the plain.

The fire was down to a bed of gray-white ash and a few glowing embers. A morning calm lay upon the plain like the hush of a new beginning, and over the ground a cottony mist through which the orange fires on the American compound glowed dull and diminished. Here and there a figure moved, ghostly in the mist. On the main road, trucks, jeeps, half-tracked vehicles, ambulances: wheels and engines oddly muted in the morning stillness. Large dark birds with outspread wings sailed slowly in wide circles across the milk-white sky.

The woman stood looking out at the plain. Did the boy wake me or did I dream it? No, he woke me, as he said he would. Strange I cannot remember waking beneath the cart during the night or sitting in the cold. Did I dream that I tended the fire or did I tend the fire and dream the boy in the stars?

A cold wind blew silkenly across the plain. The mist began to rise.

Slowly the floor of the plain opened out to her eyes.

She saw the mounds immediately and then the shanties that crowded the plain. Two low snow-covered mounds: each roughly circular and about fifty feet in diameter; each at opposite ends of the plain. Odd protrusions bare of shanties and people. Directly upon the circumferences of the mounds began the world of the refugees. Remnants of metal and canvas made up the walls and roofs of most of the shanties:
parts of trucks, jeeps, tanks, half-tracks: bent hoods, rusted doors, twisted fenders, pieces of armor; burn marks etched into them, narrow gouges, a welter of scrapes and scratches, vague tracings of numbers and words.

The woman followed the old man’s gaze as it moved across the plain and back to the cart and then to the land behind the cart. She saw they were near the center of the plain at the edge of a huge mound of snow-blanketed ground that rose irregularly to a height of about six feet.