The River and the Book (11 page)

“I don’t know,” he mumbled. “It just does. It’s … humiliating.”

I saw he was very upset and didn’t know how to answer him. I thought that we were both right, and that it did and did not make a difference.

“I mean – girls giggle and make fun of you because you’re fat,” he said. “What if you start doing that, now you’re a girl?”

I stared at him. “I’ve been a girl all along; I haven’t just changed into one. And do you really think I would do that?”

“That’s what girls do,” he said.

“Some girls,” I said. “
Some
girls. I bet boys were cruel to you too.”

“Yes, but they were boys. They just punched me and called me names. They didn’t giggle.”

Some cruel imp in me wanted to giggle then, out of sheer nervousness, but I dared not.

“Yuri,” I said sternly, “I’m Sim. I’m just me. Everybody is just who they are, just like you are just you. Whether I’m a girl or not doesn’t make any difference. I wouldn’t punch you if I were a boy. I won’t giggle at you because I’m a girl. I’m your
friend
.”

I studied him as he sat glowering and silent, biting his lip, and my heart began to hurt. “I don’t have any other friends, aside from Mely,” I said, my voice wavering. “Don’t you want to be my friend any more?”

Yuri glanced up then, and saw that I was on the edge of tears. He looked astonished. I think it had never occurred to him before that anybody could actually like him. He said nothing for a long time, and then he said gruffly that of course he was my friend. After a few days, he even said he didn’t mind my being a girl.

Along with Mely, Yuri is my closest friend; we see each other almost every day, as he lives not far from me. He is no longer the shy, awkward boy I first met: he has grown to be handsome, and has discovered that there are many girls besides me who won’t tease him. Through Yuri I met Icana and Anna and Ling Ti, and they invite me to their apartments and introduce me to other people. I now know more people than I ever knew in my own village; some are little more than strangers, but we recognize and greet each other.

The city is very different from my village, where everybody had known everybody else all their lives, and a new face was a novelty. Sometimes I find knowing so many people overwhelming and confusing. When I told Anna this, she laughed and ruffled my hair and said I was still a country girl at heart. I think she is right: I will never be at home in the city, not like someone who was born here. And yet, how much poorer my life would have been if I hadn’t met my crazy friends! I love them for their jokes and their generosity and their outrageous clothes and their passionate arguments, and I love the beautiful things they make, and most of all I love their quick and tactful understanding when I am sad. They are true companions. How could I wish that I had never met them?

Yuri seems much less troubled by the city than I am, but he was never happy at home: for him, his new life is miraculous. Me, I miss too many things.

I was hurrying home through the Financial District today after I had closed my stall, when I saw Jane Watson. I glimpsed her out of the corner of my eye, and it was as if an electric shock went through my whole body. It’s been weeks since I asked anyone about her, and months since I hoped to see her ever again.

Her face was on a bank of television screens in a shop window, flickering and discoloured. She was talking to someone in a yellow studio, seated on an elegant red chair. Jane Watson was speaking in her own language and there were subtitles underneath the picture, so that even though the sound was turned down, I could read what was being said. The interviewer said she was a famous scholar who had spent some months in our country, researching the traditional folkways of our people. Jane Watson looked very serious and said that an ancient way of life was under threat. She talked about the cotton fields and the problems with the River. There were tears in her eyes as she spoke about how a beautiful way of life was dying, and how the simple River people didn’t understand what was happening to them.

I felt a lurch in my stomach when she said that, as if I were going to be sick. My people are not simple. There are things they don’t understand, but that doesn’t mean that they are stupid or even ignorant. I watched, fascinated and repulsed, waiting for Jane Watson to mention the Book: but she didn’t talk about it at all.

Jane Watson had written her own book. It was called
The River People of the Pembar Plains
. The interviewer held it up so everyone could see. On the cover was a photograph of me, taken on the day that she came to our village. I went hot all over with embarrassment: I was wearing my best clothes that day, with my hair carefully braided, but in the bright yellow light of the television studio I just looked quaint and poor, an ignorant peasant. The interviewer asked who I was, and she told him I was one of the daughters of the headman of the village, and that she had become friends with me while she stayed in our home. I felt my stomach clench with rage: my father was important because he was married to a Keeper, not the other way around. I had thought she understood that. She said the photograph showed the dignity my people maintained, even though they lived in such poverty. She didn’t tell the interviewer my name or my title, and she didn’t mention my grandmother at all.

For a while I was so angry that I forgot to read the subtitles, and when I started paying attention again, the interviewer was talking to the camera and Jane Watson had disappeared and the television flickered to advertisements.

I don’t know how long I stood outside that window as people pushed past me in the twilight, cursing me for blocking the footpath. My whole body was shaking with fury. I wondered how she dared to put my photograph on the cover of her book, knowing what she had done to me. I wondered how she could cry over my village, when she had stolen its most precious treasure. I wondered what kind of person could lie like that and not feel ashamed of themselves. I wondered if she even knew that she was lying.

In the shantytowns I have spoken to women who have been raped, and they told me how they felt, how the most intimate and fragile sense of themselves had been torn open and violated. I think it is wrong of me to take their terrible experiences and compare them to mine, but I can’t help it. That is how I felt when I saw Jane Watson on the television. I felt as if my soul had been violated.

I dreamed of my grandmother last night. In my dream, she wasn’t old: she was young, as young as my mother was when I was a little girl. I was a crane, and I was flying over my village. The plains stretched out beneath my wings, in all their subtle and various colours. People think of the plains as empty and harsh, but they are wrong; the land quivers with life. The grasses in my dream flowered in soft colours, purple and pink and yellow, and small herds of deer looked up as my shadow passed over them, and hares startled and ran. I could hear the music of crickets and grasshoppers rising up in the warm air, and I smelled the grass, fresh and wild.

Grandmother was standing outside our house with her arms raised, singing to welcome me to the village. It was a song I didn’t know, and I thought it was the most beautiful melody I had ever heard. When I woke up, I tried to remember it, but it vanished away with most of the dream.

When she saw me, Grandmother smiled. She knew it was me. She waited while I circled down and perched on the chimney of our house.

“Welcome, Simbala Da Kulafir Atan Mucarek Abaral Effenda Nuum,” she said. “It’s good to see you.”

“Hello, Grandmother,” I said. “I am a crane now. Do you mind?”

Grandmother laughed. “Of course I don’t mind,” she said. “I always knew you were a crane. But don’t forget us, eh?”

“How could I forget you?” I said. “I miss you all the time.”

“My name is in your name,” said Grandmother. “And your daughter will be all our names too.”

As she said that, I saw that my mother was standing beside her, and then I saw a crowd of other women, and I knew they belonged to me. There was my great-grandmother, Mucarek, and my great-great-grandmother, Abaral, and many others I couldn’t name. They were dressed in their best clothes, and the sun shone down on all the colours so that I was dazzled. I blinked, and then they were all gone, all my mothers, and the village was empty. And then everything faded away and vanished before my eyes.

I dreamed some other things I don’t remember, and when I woke up, my face was cold with tears.

I bought Jane Watson’s book today. It was hard to find and expensive, but if I am careful this month I will not be too much out of pocket. Ling Ti offered to steal it for me, as he said I should not give Jane Watson my money by buying her book, but I told him that would be unfair to the bookshop. It hasn’t been translated, and I can read it only with the greatest difficulty. Ling Ti speaks that language fluently, and he said he would read it for me and then condemn it in the literary magazine that publishes his poems.

I said that perhaps he shouldn’t make his mind up about what he thinks before he reads the book, but he is adamant that Jane Watson should be torn limb from limb. “Not literally, of course,” he said, pushing his glasses up his nose and grinning. “Just in a very bloody, metaphorical way.” He made me laugh for the first time in days.

Ling Ti spends half his time writing furious editorials designed to upset his poetic enemies. When I ask him why, he usually says he does it for fun. If he’s very drunk, he tells me that it’s because the world needs to be cleansed of buffoons and shysters, and that he is the Broom of Truth. Icana worries that he will get into trouble with the authorities, but he just laughs and takes no notice. I worry too. There are many poets in prison here, and even more who have been forced to live in exile.

Me, I find that I am not interested in making the Book an occasion for some kind of silly feud. And I am determined to read Jane Watson’s book for myself, no matter how difficult it is. Perhaps she has written something about my Book that might help me to find it. But I think, more than anything, that I am hoping to discover why she did what she did. I think not understanding how she could have betrayed us like that haunts me almost as much as the loss of the Book itself.

Mely, of course, doesn’t know why I am bothering. She says I should either track down Jane Watson and demand the Book back, or just accept that it is gone and get on with making sure I earn enough money for our treats. She is very angry that I can’t afford to buy chicken this month.

It is a long time since I last wrote here: a month at least. I’ve scarcely seen most of my friends. The last time I talked to Yuri was ten days ago. We shared a quick glass of bubble tea, and when I stood up to go home he complained that he never sees me any more. I told him I was too busy reading and he made a face and said that I had better finish soon.

For weeks I’ve been spending my evenings struggling with Jane Watson’s book. It wasn’t just that it was hard to read because I don’t know the language very well; it also made me feel things I didn’t expect.

Before I read any of the text, I looked at all the photographs. Only a few were of my village. Jane Watson had taken pictures of people all along the River. Some of them made me smile: Mizan, leaning on the rails of his boat, grinning into the camera; and Mei, the innkeeper in the mountains who was kind to Yuri and me, standing in the doorway of her house, her worn hands on her broad hips. Some of the photographs were very beautiful, and some of them were very sad; but they all seemed long ago and far away.

I don’t know what to say about Jane Watson’s book. I have found out things I didn’t know: she describes the foreign companies that are financing the cotton fields, and names the insecticides that are poisoning the river water, and there are tables of figures that show how much water is being taken from the River. She writes about how the government has sent troops to protect the cotton fields from angry locals, and the corruption that has made it possible for land to be stolen from people who had farmed it for generations.

She talks about the violence that Kular described to us, long, long ago in our kitchen. Jane Watson tells it as if she is standing at a distance, looking from above like an eagle, so she can observe patterns and connections that can’t be seen at ground level. She writes about rivers that have died in other parts of the world, and warns that the same thing will happen to our River, which feeds the whole country from the Plains of Pembar to the city. She quotes scientists and sociologists and ecologists and politicians. She talks about the suffering of the village people, of how they are driven from their homes by violence and famine, to end up in the shantytowns that cluster around the city.

It is much more interesting than what she said on the television, and, despite everything, I reluctantly admire what she has done. When I got to the end of the book, I turned it over and looked at the cover: my face gazed back at me under the title, but somehow it wasn’t my face any more, just as the story Jane Watson tells isn’t my story. It belongs to so many people, but somehow it seems to me to belong most of all to Jane Watson. I heard her hard, cool voice in my head, putting together her facts and her arguments. She was very convincing. She said she is fighting for justice. She is telling the world about what is happening to my people, just as she said she would all those long months ago when first I met her. All the same, something important is missing among all those facts and figures and quotations, although I can’t put my finger on what it is.

I remember what Mely said when she objected to me writing about her.
I’m not a story,
Mely told me.
I’m your friend. What if you say things that aren’t true? Won’t you be changing how things are?
Has Jane Watson changed things by writing her book? Maybe things had already changed before I realized, and she was just what followed.

There is one missing thing that is easy to spot. In all the hundreds of pages of
The River People of the Pembar Plains
, Jane Watson doesn’t mention the Book. Not once. I read it through twice to be sure. She writes about the temple and the harvest and the weaving and the river traffic, noticing all sorts of details, but in her story the Keepers don’t exist. For a terrible moment I wondered whether I had imagined everything: perhaps the Book was just a story my mother and grandmother had told me and that I had childishly believed was real. Maybe it had never existed at all. But I remembered my name. I said it out loud: Simbala Da Kulafir Atan Mucarek Abaral Effenda Nuum. It tells who I am, and who my mother and her mother were, right back to my great-great-grandmother.