Authors: Jerzy Peterkiewicz
I thought Eve’s lakeland was much farther away from the land of the tree-apes. It took us merely a day and part of a night to reach the enclosure which the big chieftain had chosen to be the seat of his dominion. There he was buried, like a man, under a heavy stone, so that no jackal or buzzard could attack his grave. This I learnt from a very clever sign which the young treeman had moulded for me, using clay, sticks and a little stone. It was during our second rest, and I told him too, how their ruler had died from Adam’s unspoken thought. The treeman nodded often, he understood my words or perhaps knew the story already.
We arrived in the dark. I was led into a twig-plaited bower, smelling of mint leaves and juniper; there I found food and drink prepared for a human creature, soon a small fire was lit outside by some invisible hands. No one disturbed me, I had time to think and to sleep. My first thoughts, however, didn’t go to Irda alone; I was trying to imagine them all, half-human apes, quarter-human apes and daughters of man, there in those tall trees, ignorant of my presence in their midst, or, maybe, ordered to wait patiently until the light of day.
On awaking I saw fresh food, a new fire, and a tree man very much like the one who had fallen into my trap, their eyes had the same glow of intelligence and understood my signs. Instead of using the other’s clay speech, this treeman could utter a few human words. The most important of them were two names, his and Irda’s. He called himself Na-ar and was married to Irda.
Na-ar treated me with great respect, but no fear showed in his eyes. Like his brother he could stare at me without harming his beautiful human eyes. I asked him many questions, some of which he didn’t seem willing to answer, although at first I believed he had missed the sense of some words. No, he understood me perfectly. How many children had they, he and Irda, and Na-ar showed with his dark sinewy fingers: thirteen.
Impossible, I said, for I thought immediately of the twenty births by which I counted my ages.
This he found difficult to explain in words because he didn’t know many and the clay speech probably lacked signs for such ideas. Finally, I gathered from the animal noises he also tried on me that the mating between the tree-apes and my daughters quickened the birth of their offspring, and so they were many. They had to multiply and they did multiply to ensure their dominion over the trees.
Irda’s husband had a word and a gesture to inform me of her illness. ‘Bad,’ he said and quickly squeezed his hairy temples. And then he brought to me Amo’s daughter, my last child, and some of her offspring. No questions were needed now, no speech whatsoever, whether laid on the tongue or on the clay. Irda stood empty of Irda.
She didn’t recognize me. And I saw before me an aged woman clothed in monkey skins, her grey hair tangled into the shape of a beehive, her arms and legs thin and scratched all over. Her husband and the husband’s clever brother explained what was unnecessary to explain: that she kept falling off the trees, because her illness was bad, bad in the head, there-and again they touched their own hairy temples. Cure Irda with your fingers, they both pointed to my trembling hands, cure her.
Then her children tugged at my tresses, my girdle, my bracelets. And they squealed and snorted, and shrieked with human sounds, the idiots of my new generation.
I stood in their midst, invoking from within my deepest silence the power that was once named Eve.
Yes, I did try to cure my crazy daughter. I placed the burning tip of my finger in the middle of her forehead, I pressed it hard, I mumbled something to the demons howling inside her thoughts behind her brilliant eyes, and I hoped, how I hoped then, that I would brand her with the fire of sanity, and that the mark would remain there, with the Sky Man’s will or against his will.
Since Irda’s sickness had already triumphed in her offspring, those human apes with invisible tails, I couldn’t burn it out at the roots. She didn’t want to return with me.
Like her mother, Irda trusted the trees; like Eve she loved them.
3
Now my great age and my great weakness were known to all the creatures of the earth. How could I be called the mother of the earth if I had failed to cure my own daughter? The treemen spread the news. I had no power in me, no protection from my husband, and the Sky Man was against me, as before. So the animals which he had put between Eve and her husband were now invading my land from every lair in the forests around the big lake.
The traps, my sly traps, could stop one attack at a time, but they couldn’t intimidate thousands of arrogant beasts. Like insects during a drought they rushed on, devouring all they found on their way, blind to fear and indifferent to pain.
The centre of my homestead, surrounded by snares and night fires, was becoming smaller as I retreated under their renewed onslaughts. In the end I hid in my ancient home, its entrance barred with two stones. I watched the animals, greedy tigers and water-pigs, giant eels and spiked giraffes, elephants and timid stags, wolves, horses and cows, I saw their herds and packs crowding in, trampling the ground which was mine, pushing against the rain walls, destroying Amo’s ditches and Eve’s paths, erasing the sacred memory of Adam’s steps.
No child of mine, none of my breed came to my rescue. I was the widow of the earth, and the earth belonged to the beasts. Even the tree-apes who tried to cheat men out of their inheritance, even they preferred to side with the multitudinous armies on four legs. The treemen still had their treetops, but the trunks below were knocked and brushed by the lowing herds on the move.
I wanted to die facing the clear water. I wanted to be close to my lake. With all the strength I had I pushed the stones aside. Into the animal throng I walked, made my way slowly, almost unnoticed by their stupid greedy eyes. No, it mattered little whether I blinded a few of them, or not; they wouldn’t even fall to the ground, so tightly they were squeezed in this enclosure.
Was I descending along my ancient path? There were no paths, no clusters of grass, no bushes, nothing but mud, dust and their dung smearing Eve’s feet. When I reached the lake, bruised by their sniffing snouts and stinking of their bristle, I fell on my knees and greeted the fragrant rushes with my mouth wide open, breathing their green air.
They were my friends, the lake was their mother. I could trust the water and all that grew from the water.
With my lips touching the lips of the lake I cried into the water, and it rippled my cry across its flat surface to the other side, invisible under the haze of the heat.
‘Eve, queen of the earth, summons you, ancient creatures, to come to Eve’s aid.’
Echoes cried with me as I chanted my lament. ‘I am old, I am tired, my children have abandoned me to the abuse of low animals, and I have had to abandon my home.’
Echoes answered echoes, but I heard no creature calling me back. So I summoned them by their names, taking upon me Adam’s authority. I called the giant eels and they didn’t leave the herds of the lower beasts; I summoned the spiked giraffes and none of them left the stagnant stampede, I even uttered the names of the water-pigs which I despised, and they, too, remained with the others. Oh, water, I whispered, take me now, spare me this humiliation. The water kept its covenant with the sky and reflected silence.
I must have fallen asleep.
When I woke up, once more on the surface of the earth which was no longer mine, I knew they had come, two ancient allies, and they took their posts at either side of my lake. Their green jewels shone across the reeds and the sedge from their thick crinkled fins to my creased face, whose ugly image I could see wobbling on the water.
The dragons, the last breathing witnesses of our beginning, had listened to Eve and now they were to guard Eve the old woman, the moonless woman, barren as the ancient life under their shimmering scales.
Now, I found my patch of ground again, untouched by animal hooves, my circle within the lost circle. Here I wished to remain, a species in itself, abandoned by the rest of his creation. I was safe as long as the dragons had jewels on their fins and breathed in the ancient fire from between the skies. Yes, they had to drink. They drank the waters of my lake. One day, how many hundreds of years from now, Eve’s lake would be dry, swallowed in gigantean gulps by the dragons, Eve’s two faithful allies.
The sly old woman had learnt much about animal traps, but the beasts lost their pluck; they would not risk a visit to the dragon lake. Birds flew over my little queendom, soft bundles of feathers migrating from warmth to warmth. I caught one with a hooked beak, and its Wings, yellow and violet, flapped through a dark passage in my memory.
Eve’s thoughts were touched by colours, violet first, then beak-red and yellow, and the thoughts tried a grimace of a smile.
‘I’ll teach you Eve’s speech,’ I said to my prisoner in a loose basket with a hole for the beak. The parrot turned and blinked her eye. Yes, she was a good listener. I told her stories. Of my genesis and Adam’s, of Amo my son-husband and Irda who went to live among the treemen. After each story I told the parrot to repeat my name again and again, so that I could hear it from her beak when the lake was still and the lowing herds asleep on the land they had taken from me. The parrot was a good learner and I didn’t mind her drowsy screech. Like my friends the dragons, I protected my slow deathless agony with frequent sleep. When my dreams were kind, they showed the earth without animals, inhabited by dragons made of ore, and hooped all round with metal.
Then a violent autumn wind sent me the present of a light acorn. I fondly thought it had come from the oak which was my last birth tree, but, of course, no growing thing could have survived the stampede of the animals. I planted the acorn and the rains lent me much juicy water in the autumn and in the spring.
After several seasons I had a child oak of my own, obedient as small children often are. So I taught the obedient oak to stride on its roots in the likeness of those ancient trees which had once protected Eve in her sleep. And the oak grew bigger and walked better in rustling circles around me, the old witch by the dragon lake. Some curious animals risked their muzzles and bulging eyes to stand nearer to such a monstrous ungodly sight. They wagged their tails, they roared or mooed in amazement, and then trotted back to spread tales in their mute wordless mumbling. No doubt the grandchildren of my grand-daughters heard these rumours and no doubt they prayed to their carved idols for my death’s first and final coming. Wasn’t Eve promised death by the big sky idol himself. Oh, yes, they knew that, such things always came down, from sacred awe to fearful piety. Good mighty Sky Man remove the witch Eve from the surface of the earth.
But the good Sky Man never hurried his big mighty ears to listen downwards.
I had, however, a listening bird, the parrot with a patient beak. And now that my tiredness seemed to age each of my senses separately, I couldn’t hear well the sound of my name, screeched from inside the red beak.
‘Repeat my name, listening bird. Lull me to sleep with my sounds. Say Eve, screech Eeeve, please, bird, I am so very old!’
The parrot gaped at me, sideways. I tempted her: ‘I will tell you again about the great King Treeman and your great ancestor, the most clever parrot of them all.’
The screeching began, but it shaped no word. I encouraged the bird, offered her food, and waited all through the night for that one soothing sound. When it came at last, it scratched the icy air up and down before hardening into speech, each word a tap on my forehead.
‘Sstupid trapper, look! you’ve trapped your deathth.’
I looked up. From whose beak was the voice coming? I tried to hold the parrot’s screech within my closing hand. Why not ask the silence overhead, between the two skies?
‘Our father, have you—?’ and I didn’t know what to ask him.
Portugal, 1964