The River and the Book (8 page)

I had never been in a place like the Stray Dog before. The only thing that signals it from the street is a crudely painted picture of a dog on the brickwork next to a sinister-looking door. Inside the door, a flight of badly lit stairs leads down into the darkness, where you find a huge man whose name is Andre. His thigh muscles are about as big as my waist, and a tall black hat makes him look even bigger, so it seems a wonder that he can fit in the narrow corridor where he sits on a stool by a shabby table, playing cards and drinking whisky. He can seem frightening until you get to know him and realize he is one of the gentlest men you are ever likely to meet. He comes from a distant country, like Jane Watson, although he told me his home is a long way away from hers, and that he comes from a northern land covered in ice. He stands out because he has white-blond hair and fair, freckled skin. He’s the one who decides whether or not you can come in, and he sorts out any trouble. He won’t let in anyone who looks like a secret policeman, or a thug looking for trouble, and he has an unerring instinct. Mazita, the owner of the Stray Dog, tells me that without Andre the café would have been forced to close a long time ago.

Inside, the walls are painted with strange scenes in bright colours: there are dogs in funny hats and dancing cats and horses with large, strange flowers nodding between their ears. The café is crammed with round tables with spindly legs, each with its litter of wooden chairs, none of which match, and on each table burns a fat red candle. The Stray Dog makes very good coffee and sells bad but cheap wine that gives you a fearsome headache if you drink too much of it. Mazita is an excellent cook and serves delicious little dishes of salted squid or fried bean curd or spiced vegetables. But that’s not the major attraction. The reason people go is because it has the best parties in town.

There is a tiny stage against the wall backed by a sparkly silver curtain. Yuri plays there once a week. He is one of many musicians and singers who perform there, and through him I met Icana and Anna and Ling Ti. They have become friends of mine. Icana and Anna are always together, and they make a striking pair. Icana is a singer with a voice like musk and honey. She is taller than most men, and she wears long dresses of black lace and trailing embroidered shawls that show off her white skin and the startling ash-blonde hair that falls down her back. Anna is as short and brown-skinned as I am, and has black hair cropped close around her head. Her eyes are so dark they look black, and she has straight fierce eyebrows and a mouth like the bud of a rose. She has beautiful large breasts and a tiny waist, and she wears skirts and shirts with wide red belts to show off her figure. Ling Ti is tall and his hair sweeps back from his forehead. He is charming and funny and vain, and, like Anna, he is a very fine poet. It was Ling Ti who recited to me the whole of the poem that begins:
Watch for the cranes, who will bring my love to you, even as far as the Plains of Pembar…

With Yuri and Mely, they are my closest friends in the city. They take my hand and draw me out onto the dancefloor of the Stray Dog and I find I am dancing with my heart as light as a petal tossed on a spring breeze. I laugh and meet their eyes, and they are smiling: they are happy in the music, and happy for me, and there is nothing but this moment, and this moment is all spark and dazzle, the whirl of lace and the smell of fresh sweat and neroli and cigarette smoke and coffee. And in this moment I am whole; I have never lost anything.

And soon we will sit down and order another atrocious wine and Mazita will say, “Here is Anna Irikina, the first poet of the City of the Plains!” And the crowd will be cheering and clapping, and Anna will stand up and walk to the stage, her chin high, and she will raise her hands and silence will fall, and she will say her poem into that listening silence, and it will pierce my heart. It will pierce my heart.

Mely is now a sleek black cat with impeccably white paws, but when she ran into my ankles in a blind, spitting panic in Kilok, she was a tiny ball of fluff with soft claws that could barely pierce the skin of my hands, no matter how she scratched. I picked her up and she opened her pink mouth and hissed at me. Her eyes, still filmed with the blue of kittenhood, were blazing with terror, and her fur was wet with her own piss.

I had spent a dispiriting morning trying to gather information at the Kilok market. I was not used to speaking to strangers; before I had always met people in my village, where I was an important person, and so I had been treated with respect. That day I began to discover what it means to be an unimportant person. I found it humiliating.

Because I looked like a river urchin, it was difficult to catch the attention of the traders, who would brush me off impatiently or simply ignore my presence. Even so, I had managed to ask a few people whether they had seen a woman like Jane Watson. One said she had: a fair-skinned woman had bought some almonds from her a week ago perhaps. But she didn’t know where that woman might have gone, and had heard no talk of what she was doing. Another had been told of the woman with the silver camera and red hair, but had not seen her; he said that she was with a foreign man, and they had hired a jeep and gone into the desert. He asked me why I was looking for her, and I told him she owed me money, and it seemed for a moment that he had more to say. But then a customer wanted to buy some of his wares and he forgot about me. When I attempted to start the conversation again he waved me away, not even bothering to speak.

At least it seemed clear that Jane Watson was not in Kilok, but I hadn’t found out anything at all useful. I wandered slowly back to the boat through the narrow alleyways, not really looking where I was going, and that’s when Mely ran into my legs. I was so surprised I picked her up without thinking, and I held her tightly against my chest as she struggled and spat and scratched. (She is wrong when she remembers that she was too exhausted to scratch me.)

The last thing I’d expected to find in the lonely alleys of Kilok was a friend. Yet in those first moments, even before I was certain what kind of animal I was holding in my hands, I knew that Mely and I would be friends. Maybe it was just that my heart was bruised and hungry, and this frightened kitten seemed even more abject than I was, and my need flowered out to meet hers.

In any case, I stroked her until her body stopped trembling, and then I carried her back to the boat and gave her some of the sour goat’s milk I had bought at the market. It didn’t occur to me to do anything else. I thought vaguely that perhaps I could find out where she belonged in the morning, before I went downstream to the next village. But when I woke up and we shared breakfast, it seemed as if she were already part of where I was going. I asked her if she wanted to stay with me, and she stared at me with her mottled blue-green baby eyes and miaowed, and then she rubbed her chin on my hand and purred that loud, brambly kitten-purr. And that was that.

Today Mizan climbed the stairs to my flat, puffing and grumbling, to bring me a letter from my grandmother. For all his hard-fisted bargaining, he has a kind heart: in the three years since I reached the city, he has never failed to visit me in the autumn, after his long trek upriver, to give me news of my village. I am always glad to see his sweaty, pock-marked face. I can’t offer him much for his trouble – a bottle of rice wine, some fresh bread, a meal of fish and dumplings – but he sits in my tiny kitchen on my thin, wobbly chair, Mely purring on his lap, and laughs his giant laugh, tearing hunks of bread with his big white teeth.

His visits always make me very homesick. I vividly remember other meals, other conversations, when he sat in state beside my mother and father in our house, thumping the table, making his terrible jokes. The first year, when I was still living in the shantytown, he asked me when I was planning to return home, and I didn’t know what to say.

Mizan tells me gossip and news he gathers from his travels. His journey grows more perilous every year, he says, and he is not sure how much longer he can keep going to my village. Things are getting worse month by month, week by week. He never travels without a gun and he has hired another man to guard his boat from looters and bandits. In one of the provinces in the mountains there is rebellion, and the army was sent from the city to hang the leaders. The people there are poor and desperate. In another the crime lords have taken over, and if Mizan wants to travel safely he has to pay money for protection.

I know I’m lucky to receive news from home. Some of my friends have no way of hearing from their families: they are tormented that they will never hear if someone they love has died, or is married, or has had children, or is suffering, or is happy. It is an ache in them that they never say. You learn very swiftly not to ask, or you wait until the shadows are soft and dark and the talk has become slow, and then you will be shown the precious photographs, thumbed and fading, of children who are now years older, of wives or husbands smiling at the camera in some far-off happier time. Then there are the photos or locks of hair of those whom they know they will never see again, because they are dead: killed in the accidents of war, or by hunger or disease. Their sorrow is delicate and huge, a cloud that lives inside them that no storm of tears will ever dissolve.

So Mizan is my angel, my messenger, and I am grateful. I write to my grandmother in the spring, and he takes my letter upriver. I tell her of my search for the Book, and of the friends I have made, and of my flat. I always try to sound cheerful. Her answer arrives in the autumn. She never asks about the Book. She writes a long letter, telling me all the major news of the year: important events, like the birth of Shiha’s twins, and village news, like Sopli’s accident with the axe, which left him with a missing finger, and the latest in the Juta family feud, and how Lila bought a new dinghy. I devour it all as if I am starving. I know my grandmother is trying to sound cheerful as well, and I know too that there is much that she is not saying. Both of us pretend that one day I will come home, and both of us know that I never will.

When Mizan left, I sat for a long time staring out of the window at the lamplight falling on the fig tree. What would I do if I went back to my village? If I returned without the Book, people would be sorry for me, and I couldn’t bear that. It is much better to be anonymous, to lose myself in the river of the city, this great flow of people as nameless as I am. And now, when I have all but lost hope that I will ever see the Book again, I wonder if I would return even if I did find it. Would it be the same Book, or would it be damaged and changed, as I am? So many disrespectful hands must have opened it and touched its pages, so many eyes looked where they should not, and maybe its power has been violated and broken. Perhaps I could no longer speak to it, or it could no longer speak to me.

I think these things in the evenings when I am lonely and afraid, and the thoughts fill me with shame and doubt. Mely will sit on my lap then and say nothing, and her animal warmth is the single thing that shines in a world that seems to me to be without hope and without meaning.

The night after I found Mely, I slept soundly and woke early. I left almost as soon as I had broken my fast, pushing the boat into the middle of the river and then shipping the oars so I could just float along in the mild sun. Now I was leaving behind everything I knew. Kilok was as far downriver as I had ever been, and I left its boundaries with a feeling of trepidation and excitement. I felt that there ought to be a flourish of trumpets at such a momentous step, but the river looked just the same as it had before.

Mely didn’t like the boat’s motion, or the water lapping all around her. She crouched in the bottom, digging her claws into the wood and howling softly, until I picked her up and soothed her. Then she simply dug her claws into my lap, so I had tiny pink marks all over my thighs, but at least she stopped howling. In a very short time, however, she became used to the boat, and at last would sit on the prow for hours, staring into the river’s ripples or ahead towards whatever was coming.

Over the next few days we visited a number of small villages, which were like my home – motley collections of houses and orchards – but poorer. I always followed the same routine: I would hide my boat somewhere upstream and then, with Mely perched on my shoulder, I would make my investigations. People were often distrustful and wary, even when I wanted to buy food; sometimes someone would follow me from house to house, to make sure that I didn’t steal anything. Refugees from upriver were a common sight here, and many were desperate enough to thieve. Even so, I also found kindness in unexpected places: the woman who invited me in for supper and sat me with her children and fed me bread fresh from her oven, impatiently waving away the coin I offered her, or the innkeeper who laughed uproariously when he saw the cat on my shoulder and gave me a meal for brightening up his day. It was then I noticed that those who have least often offer the most. I suppose they know what it was like to be hungry.

Despite everything, and not without a pang of guilt, I found I was enjoying myself. The weather was fine, neither too hot nor too cold, and now I had company. If I hadn’t been so burdened with the search for the Book, I would have felt entirely carefree. I still found no word of Jane Watson: people remembered her on her trip upriver with Mizan, but had not seen her since. I began to wonder if she could perhaps make it overland to the city after all, although everyone said it was impossible because there was nothing but desert. I wished fiercely then that I could ask the Book for advice, or that I had asked the right questions when I had the chance. I knew my regrets were useless, and there seemed little choice but to go on.

I had been on the River for about a fortnight when Mely and I stopped at another small village. Without any hope of finding anything new, we wandered into the small space that passed for the village square. Instead of the usual population of a lean dog, a few scrawny chickens and an old man propped against a tree, there was a small crowd of people, and we could hear music. In the middle of all these people stood a boy with a
tar
. As we watched, he lifted his voice in song, and I realized it was the same boy I had heard singing on the bank on that first bleak morning in Kilok.