Inner Circle Read online

  Tears dribbled from them, larger and thicker, then he fell to the side, his red bones cutting the reeds as his whole body shook, trying to slide back into the slime. I bent over him and watched his eyes. Now they didn’t move: the water animal was blind. And I despised him, as I despise all the mute breed on land and in water.

  Only the serpents have eyes that cannot be harmed by mine, yet they slither away from my echoes, because they know me by the sound of my feet. And I, too, feel their wriggling presence about me in the grass as I wade through it, marking the beginning of a new path. Some trees still bow before me; like the dragons they are old enough to remember the two skies and the rain clouds at their roots. And if I lie asleep in the grass, one of the old trees always stands in attendance, and the animals keep at a distance, watching how it twists and unfolds its arms.

  My son told me after a hunt that he could have killed the whole herd of them, so heavy they were and so unable to run; and the tree, my son said, walked in a circle while I slept. Did I dream then, he asked me, because only my dreams could make the ancient race of the forest turn on their roots in the light of day. He was afraid of his dreams, and I had none since his birth, ten children ago. No, I didn’t see a dream, I told him, it was the grass that must have reminded the tree of its ancient duty. My son kissed the edge of my hair and kissing it touched my hip with his hand. If only I could call a dream that had an obedient touch on its fingers. The touch of the grass on awaking was like a voice. Could I tell him more? That I longed to hear my name spoken aloud, spoken in a whisper, it could even be a humming sound, no higher than the blades of grass, passed from butterfly to butterfly, and scented by the fallen scales of pine-cones.

  My seventh son, born ten children ago, must be afraid of my name. He said it once in his sick sleep, but it was a cry thrown down a cliff into a dark cave from which no echoes come. I call him Amo, against the wish of my husband who is the maker of names; I don’t want to remember the name he gave Amo after his birth, which was the most painful of them all. Amo, you are Amo, you are my pain and my touch, and my resolution. On the day you find enough strength in your tongue to utter my name, it will be heard by every beast and every plant, and repeated from forest to forest, from lake to lake.

  Without hearing the sound that belongs to me I feel that my body belongs to me less; and this must be age, nameless in growing separate. My husband’s age also appears to me through separation, and so I see his name growing apart from his body. He only comes to my house when a new birth is due, he stays to beget another child and then leaves me by the shore of this lake. What age and what separation does he take from me to keep in his memory while he wanders under the changing moons, between the homesteads of our own breed? He knows his paths as I know mine, and around him there are the beaten tracks, wide and many, of the wordless multitudes. How can he believe that man and beast must remain friends?

  The other day a bird, violet and yellow, followed me to the house. It flew about the roof, as if choosing a place for its nest, nibbled at the leaves which were still green in the plaited twigs, then perched itself on the ram’s horn and made me laugh when the ram began to leap and turn round. The bird didn’t fall but cleaned its hooked beak on the horn, pecking the ram whenever it tried a higher jump. Amo heard my laughter, got up from the pile of skins he had been preparing for the winter and now stood facing me.

  ‘You have light in your eyes.’ He spoke in a voice, timid at first, as was his habit.

  ‘Such light gives you the sky’s own beauty.’ He bent and kissed my hair.

  ‘Give the bird a happy name,’ I told Amo, but his lips twitched and came close together. I knew he thought of his father’s right. I took Amo’s hand and walked with him to the circle of stones in the kitchen. Then I looked back.

  ‘It’s a listening bird,’ I said. ‘Look how it follows us wherever we go, tilting its head this way and that way. You think of a name for him, a name that listens.’

  And that night the bird slept near my bed under the image which my husband had drawn on the clay of the wall when the clay was still moist. I woke up just before sunrise.

  Not to the clashing of the reeds, not to the clapping of the lake, but to a voice, sharp and screechy, which was opening a word, as if that word were coiled up inside a shell.

  ‘Bi-rrd, birr-d.’

  Our eyes met and his didn’t go blind. They only blinked, became red, and where the colour touched a thick curve, it was already the red of the beak. As I raised myself on my elbows I felt a deep hunger in my belly, which made me forget for a moment that the voice had come out of that beak. But the screeching started once more inside it and I could hear almost clearly:

  ‘Am birrd, yourr birrd.’

  ‘No bird speaks,’ I whispered.

  The sun glow divided the colours on his feathers and they seemed to spark whenever the bird shifted his wings, violet over yellow, black across yellow and violet.

  ‘Learrnt speechch from shshee.’ Listening to him I didn’t know which shimmered more: his words or his feathers.

  ‘She—who is she!’

  ‘Shshee iss you.’

  I was tempted to ask the next question, for I felt, as I had once felt, nineteen children ago, that no question could come alone and go alone.

  ‘You know my name, listening bird!’

  ‘Yess, yess.’ The wings flapped, out of the sun glow and in again. ‘Learrning speechch, learrning yourr ssound.’

  ‘Don’t utter it, bird. It will kill you.’

  ‘Ee-vve,’ he screeched into the silence of my house, ‘Ee-vve.’ Neither the first sound choked the bird to death, nor the second. And echoes lost both soon in the clay-muted corner beyond my son’s bedding. A shadow stirred above it. This time a question had to pass between our mouths.

  ‘Who was talking with you?’

  ‘The listening bird, my son.’

  Amo didn’t answer that it was impossible for birds to talk, he rose, looked into every corner and then, leaning through the window, watched the sky.

  ‘The bird is gone: he said. ‘But the clouds are foaming over the lake. I can smell rain.’

  I knew what he was thinking then, for he had seen with me the fever and the stomach sickness of the earth after rainfall.

  ‘Birds smell it sooner than we do.’

  He nodded to my words.

  2

  I hate the Sky Man when he is nothing but the sky. He will suffocate us with his plants, mushrooms and moss before the hooves of his multiplying beasts trample our breed into this fertile mud. What else is he keeping in readiness under the ground? How many more times must his sky fall upon us, so that his slow strangulation will be complete to his revengeful joy? But the Sky Man will never hear a cry from me, the woman whom he mocks through my husband’s stupid mouth as the mother of the earth.

  Mother: I would vomit with all my entrails to feel the birth pangs of those slimy pods tearing up the surface as soon as the rain sinks into it. I would bite my own womb with the thorns of the rose bush, if the leaves and the petals that get drunk with rain-water whimpered their love to me. The trees are different, they have pride and age; and whenever they bow before me as they all used to, I understand the sacred sound of my name. The trees remember. They once shared with us their infancy and their silent innocence. But one day the sky and the earth might both open wide in one gasp to smash and suck in the crowns, the trunks, the roots, the whole ancient colonnade erected between the two heavens when the heavens were young and joined in matrimony.

  The storm last night overturned the cedar which I had chosen as the landmark for all my paths when the house was only a circle on the ground, nothing else. Now the cedar fell, its roots broke and showed the clods of black earth they were still clutching; and I wanted to pull down the walls of my home so that they could grip something harder.

  Amo was on all fours, like a beast, chasing the growing lichen out of the doorway, hitting and squashing the popping heads of mushrooms.

&n
bsp; ‘The roof is all tangled hair, mother, even the long beams are sprouting green wisps. Stalks, twigs, leaves, buds—everything, mother, is moving and crackling.’

  ‘Get up, stand on your legs, Amo, you’re not a sniffing animal. Climb on to that roof. Plants won’t eat you, my son, you’re not an insect.’

  Amo climbed up. His own black hair became entangled in the green tentacles and he kept banging his head with his right fist, with his left clung to a piece of wood inside the leafy, wet swarm. Suddenly, he thought of something else, let his legs go as far as the stone barring the entrance and stood again on the ground.

  ‘I’ll get some sedge and a handful of mint-herbs, spread them well across the roof, and the big leaf-eaters will fly in, mother, so many of them that they’ll do my work before the sun touches this stone.’

  Amo was right, and the leaf-eaters came as if summoned by his hunting yell. Yes, my seventh son had a quick mind and knew the habits of hunters, whether they ran their prey down for the kill or ate it alive on the spot, still growing at their mouth. When the earth had dried near the house by noon, I burnt the lichen up to the stone gate, lit another fire in the midst of mushrooms and their stench drove away the crawlers with hairy horns and leaping eyes. Then I lay down behind the trunk of the fallen cedar and put my arm on it in the gesture of a wedded woman. I rested with my tree though the tree was dead and showing its roots to the sun, which would strip them to the smooth whiteness of bone.

  Amo was now in his flat twin boat on my lake, hunting the hunters of the water.

  In daylight and in darkness, in rain and after the storm, I had my tenth child with me; and the Sky Man couldn’t take away the promise he had given my husband that my womb would bear children until my death. For the Sky Man’s promise was always his law and he obeyed himself in his law from the beginning.

  ‘Eeve, your birrd.’ He was perched on a twig of the cedar, his feathers casting yellow and violet specks on the bark below. I wasn’t surprised at his return. The bird’s voice, however, sounded different, more clear and more human. Perhaps the hot rain had washed the beak and melted the screech inside it. He still lingered over my name, opening it like a long-lipped flower.

  ‘Birrd brings Eeve guest.’

  ‘Which of my sons has come to visit me!’ I knew that it couldn’t be any of my twelve daughters: they were too tired, too busy giving birth to child after child since their own childhood. They had neither my strength nor shape to walk great distances after so much pain.

  ‘Son, no. Bird iss with treeman.’

  ‘Who’s the treeman!’ I was up on my feet, looking around.

  ‘Your bird has masster.’

  ‘Show me your master, listening bird.’

  The visitor showed himself. He jumped down from a palmtree which now seemed much higher because the cedar was no longer there to extol its own splendour. The creature had very long arms and short legs which he tried to keep unbent but couldn’t.

  His small eyes shifted with great speed: they were everywhere on my body, but when I stared back, they ran like mice to their nests. The bird flew up and sat on the ape’s head.

  ‘Am treeman,’ he spoke his name through the bird’s beak. ‘Man,’ the bird said as if! didn’t understand. I laughed and it was a noisy laughter because the listening bird flapped his wings, the yellow feathers suddenly aglow over the treeman’s forehead. The small eyes were twice shut, for the hair covered them from above.

  ‘He can’t stand up on his legs, bird.’

  ‘I can,’ the bird answered for him and the treeman had another try, but his knees needed a prop in front. Now his right arm, now his left touched the ground. He jerked them upwards each time.

  ‘You’re cheating,’ I said. Since the bird was his voice, I spoke to the ape as if he could understand me. Perhaps he did. ‘Try your eyes on my eyes and you’ll be blinded like a wabbly water-pig.’

  ‘Can see through eyelids.’ The listening bird at once carried his thought to me. At that moment 1 saw that his eyelids were still hidden under his forehead hair.

  ‘You’re cheating again.’

  ‘No. Treeman sees through leaves.’

  He amused me. I wished Amo were with me to be amused, too. But the lake hid its best fish many oar strokes from the reeds. I heard the treeman’s bird speaking my thought:

  ‘Your son on your lake. Eeve alone without man.’

  My pride took its power from being alone. A circle smaller than the lake, my husband had once said, and yet a true circle enclosed within itself.

  ‘Can you draw a circle, ape?’ I wanted to see its teeth naked in anger.

  ‘Ape?’ There was a screech audible in the repetition. ‘Tree man is ape’s own word. I think words.’ He made a big round gesture with his arms; it wasn’t a sign of anger, but a circle drawn in the air. His eyes glittered as the sun forced his whole face to open up skyward.

  ‘What do you want, treeman?’

  ‘Bring peace.’

  ‘My husband talks of peace. You are not like him.’

  ‘Adam-man is man from sky,’ the beaky screech answered.

  ‘No, no! He’s not the Sky Man!’ I cried out of despair or a long-forgotten fright.

  ‘Treeman brings himself to woman. Eeve is not strong without Treeman’s army.’

  ‘Where is your army?’

  ‘In trees, Eeve. We conquered trees.’

  I looked at the fallen cedar and his eyes followed mine. The bird was now hovering over the broken roots, a voice feathered with colours, or a pair of wings, suspended on sound and tuned to yellow and violet.

  Then the treeman told me about three of my daughters living with his kind and bearing children of the trees. Theirs was the dominion over the forests, now and in the future, and the tree tops were their thrones. The breed of the man from the sky, he said, would never be large in number and strong enough to create their kingdom on earth. The animals and the plants had the sun and the rain clouds on their side: they sucked the juice of fertility from both. Your grand-daughters will empty their wombs before the tenth child, Eve, and who in the next generations will inhabit those low earth-mounds you built for yourselves wherever you sleep. They are homes, I said, and no son of man will ever live with a she-ape in her tree nest. Wait, he answered, till all your women go to mate with the treemen, and then where will your sons spend their seed?

  ‘In earth, in earrth, in . . .’ the beaky screech went on and on. I had to cover my ears not to hear any more of it, and tried to punish him with a blinding gaze. But the treeman’s eyes were safe inside two hairy caves, under his forehead wisps.

  ‘Treeman has Eeve speech, Treeman thinks Eeve, Treeman wants. . . .’ The voice was still coming through my fingers. I felt a weight on my right shoulder and sent my hand there. It touched a soft thing, warm as the hollow of a nest. I screamed, heard my own noise before his, and then a wing brushed my face, scratching the skin under my eye.

  Now the bird was flying around the ape’s head, faster and faster, and the head moved too, turning itself dizzy. He couldn’t pretend any longer about standing upright. The long arms dropped and trailed in front of the bending legs.

  ‘Go! jump! fly! go!’ The hooked beak was all colour, red with panic. The bird had stopped speaking for the treeman: he was shrieking and fluttering for his own sake. What had he seen in the distance that made him so frantic?

  ‘Go-oo—shshsh—chtcht!’ The listening bird couldn’t shape human words any more, my speech had left him for good or for this darkening moment of fright.

  They departed as they had come, suddenly, the ugly toes of the treeman splitting the bark as he clambered the palm-tree, a mock-ape and a mock-male.

  Then the air seemed empty of motion. A hush fell on the shadows. Each time this happened, it surprised me anew, sending my eyes to the sky for the signs of a whirlwind on its way. Then I knew. And again the animals reminded me of his near presence by their behaviour. I walked to the stone gate, stepped on the plank over the ditch
that Amo had dug out before the last torrent, and stood in the meadow by the path leading to my lake.

  And they stood, watching. Lions, giraffes, elephants, spiked eels, water-pigs and the ancient dragons with jewels on their fins. He had light steps, but they heard each of them and moved aside to make room for him. Whichever animal he passed, he touched its head between the eyes, and blessed the eyes, the head and the whole body. The tall beasts with swaying necks held them down in readiness for that sacred gesture.

  Such a moment, only a moment like this brings tears to my eyes, as if the useless tears could shed the feeling of loss.

  3

  ‘Do you see much change in me?

  We always ask each other the same unimportant question. I mean my age, growing older and riper for death while he, I think, means his kind of change which makes us both separate, less knowing and more thinking.

  ‘No, Eve, you still have the sky reflected in your beauty.’ His answer was the same. But he meant more than my son Amo who saw in me the light of that sky which stood over his head, not the earlier sky. To my husband I reflected the beauty that had belonged to us both and in spite of the change and the loss, could shine through my features.

  ‘You walk with shorter steps, Adam.’ But he knew I was looking at his grey hair and thinking of the stoop, not the length of steps. And he wouldn’t grow a beard, unlike his sons and grandsons; it was his mouth, bare, with no hair above or below, that the animals watched with awe. It spoke human sounds and it could also make silent movements which each of them understood. The beards muffled the silent words for the animals, or perhaps these were only beards to cover up what the lips couldn’t do.

  I counted my ages by my children. And how old was he, the name-maker, the begetter, the man from the sky to the tree-ape, and the hunter who never killed to my seventh son, the beast killer?