I Am the Clay

by Chaim Potok

  At first he would not waken and the boy shook him. Then he opened his eyes and gave out a cry of alarm and gazed frenziedly about him.

  Startled, the boy took a step back and almost fell over the quilt in which he was wrapped.

  “You told me to wake you.” He heard the quivering in his voice.

  The old man stared at the boy as if he did not know him. “What is this? What is this?” His eyes looked wild, his voice was hoarse and phlegmy. He coughed and cleared his throat and blinked fiercely.

  “It is the fifth time,” said the boy, trembling. But is it the fifth time? Did I fall asleep and count wrong?

  “What? Ah. The fifth time.”

  The old man climbed unsteadily out of the quilts, grunting, scratching himself, adjusting his clothes.

  The boy slipped the quilt from his shoulders and handed it quickly to the old man and in the instant before he disappeared into the quilts on the floor of the ledge felt the shock of the cold air penetrate his clothes to his skin: a dousing with ice water. Shivering uncontrollably, he curled himself against the woman. Small. Very small. The rabbit in its den. The little dog sleeping next to me in the cave. Tiny white spot on its brown nose. Wagging tail. The spirit of Badooki in that little dog? Small.

  The old man sat in the heat thrown off by the burning brushwood watching the flames and the smoke rising into the darkness. I was dreaming I lay dead with cold earth heavy upon me and the boy reached in and pulled me from my grave. This is a boy with good magic yes but Uncle once said, Magic good or bad you stay away from it, too much good magic or too much bad magic both bring you harm in the end. Be a hunter and the spirits won’t know you’re alive and will pay no attention to you good spirits or bad spirits. Listen to me, my nephew, too much good and the bad spirits become envious. Be a hunter and live in a village in the mountains of the North or the East look there look at your cousins good sons and healthy boys they will be fine hunters one day how patiently they stalked this goral look at the size of its antlers and the color of its skin. Or be a farmer with your father in the South but stay far away from this or that magic and remember it is written, The world is a seething torrent, what man can guide it? Is it not better to choose a master who flees the world than a master who flees from this man or that man? You see, hunting is my master and together we flee the world and live among these mountains and the animals know me and even those I kill I live with their spirits and bring them offerings and so far they have not harmed me. The old man shivered, engulfed by this torrent of words forgotten for nearly a lifetime. Memory is a grave best left undisturbed. Why remember now? The boy. His presence returns to me buried memories. What sort of magic is that? Let him go back to his own village. Ah, the fire has burned low. I will let the woman sleep and take her turn for her. She has done enough these days. Tending to the boy and to her husband in this war. The world is a seething torrent. Uncle quoted from the words of the wise Master. He should thank his spirits he did not live to see this war but died instead happy in his mountains. I do not need these memories. This boy, there is something about him, he will drive us crazy with his presence. Again the fire low? Does this wood burn too quickly or is the remembering taking so much time? The air so frigid like when I was a boy plunging my arm to the elbow in winter into the river near the village and feeling the water jellied with cold. He will call me Uncle. I don’t need him to call me Uncle. I have no one to call me Uncle. I was my father’s only son and I am near the end of my life and with me everything dies.

  A faint stir rose to his ears, a vague rustling of the air in the mountains all around.

  He looked up in fear.

  A thin wash of light had slipped imperceptibly across the eastern sky. Animals stirred. The tops of mountains and trees were returning to view.

  He shook his head, dazed. How did the hours pass so quickly? Is the boy a sorcerer with power over memory and time?

  He threw more brushwood onto the fire and sat tense and fearful in the quilt, watching the flames roar upward to meet the day.

  Later, alone, he struggled to raise the cart, ignoring the stiffness in his muscles and bones, and the boy heard through the quilts and sleeping bag the noises of the scraping wood and came out of the warmth and helped him set the cart on its splintered wheels. He watched as the old man lifted the box of his father’s spirit from the flat rock and held it tenderly, murmuring to it, and then placed it on the cart.

  The woman put her head out of the quilts to the light of morning and looked around, squinting in astonishment. Then she stared fiercely at the old man, who shrugged and turned away.

  “You did enough in the cave,” he muttered.

  “What is enough?” she began to ask but could not yet find her voice. She cleared her throat and spat and said again loudly, “What is enough? What do you mean?”

  “The time passed. There was no need to wake you.”

  “I am your wife,” she said bluntly.

  “Then help us prepare to leave this place.”

  The boy stood by, listening.

  “I am not so old yet that you need to spare me,” she said.

  “Woman, a few days ago you said the spirits would soon take you.”

  “A few days ago the spirits had already carried you off. We snatched you back. If you can stay up with the fire so can your wife.”

  “I hear you,” he said.

  “If the boy can stay up with the fire so can your wife.”

  “Woman, you are a roaring in my ears.” Stubborn noisy creature.

  Her bones hurt but she felt fully awake for the first time in days and she gazed clear-eyed at the mountains and the cart and the boy, who stood nearby with his eyes cast down.

  “The sleep was good,” she said. “I thank you for the sleep. Now we will go.”

  The man thought: She does not know her place anymore. Where does it come from, this bossiness, this belligerence? I treat her with kindness and she is angry. Is it because of the boy? What is he doing to her, this carrier of magic, this sorcerer?

  “I don’t know where this refugee camp is,” he said, taking up one of the shafts of the cart. “If it is more than a day’s journey—” He left the words unfinished. Work your good magic, sorcerer, and find the refugee camp. We may not survive another night in these mountains.

  The path, barely wide enough at times for the cart, climbed slowly and wound through the mountains and soon it was above the tree line and the sun glinted on the ice faces and snow gullies and the wind cut like swords. All morning they followed the path through the mountains and encountered no one. Yet others had been through here; there were tracks in the crusted snow.

  The old man and the woman pulled on the shafts of the cart and the boy pushed from behind. They rested three times before the sun reached its zenith: the old man or the woman raised an arm and released the shaft and they huddled in quilts near the cart to warm themselves, their vaporous breaths on each other. Nothing was spoken during those times. During the third time, as they squatted near the cart beneath the blankets, the boy noticed the splintering in the wheel. The rim was chipped and cracked and the body of the wheel—all of it wood, from rim to mortise holes, solid wood with no spaces—had begun to work loose from the hub. He sat shivering inside the quilt between the old man and the woman and stared at the wheel. I won’t tell them. The old man has probably already seen it. There are no tools anyway, how can we repair it? Maybe it will last until the refugee camp.

  Pushing against the cart later, the boy tried to raise the wagon slightly off the path each time he thought the loose wheel would encounter a large stone or ridged patch of ice. He did the same still later, when he took the shaft and the woman went behind to push. The old man sensed the break in the rhythm of the pulling and during the next rest the boy saw him looking at the loose wheel and noted the glance the old man gave him. After the rest the old man took the shaft on the side of the bad wheel and the boy, on the second shaft, raised the cart together with him to spare both wheels on
rough patches of path.

  The woman, near exhaustion, noticed none of this. She realized the man was not foraging for brushwood. No fire would keep them alive in these mountains this coming night. Here were no protective caves, no ledges, no tarns, but steep ridges, bouldered ravines, spiky towers, deep snowfields. The man wanted them to travel as far and as fast as they could and so would not relinquish his place at the shaft of the cart to go off for firewood now. She looked around dazedly. What am I saying, there is no wood here, only stone and ice and snow. But why are there no people? Where did they all go, all who passed us the day the man took sick? Vanished into the mountains? Did we take a wrong turn somewhere? But there were no turns off this path. Did we miss a turn because it lay buried in snow? But we would have seen tracks.

  She went on pushing the cart and talking to herself, dazed and bewildered. Why do they keep lifting the cart? Do they think the cart will fly? See how they raise it and put it down. What are they doing? They have turned this into a game. This pleased her, the thought that the boy and the man had somehow conspired to make the hauling of the cart into some kind of a game. But it was not long before she noticed with a shock of dread the loose wheel and from then on she too tried to ease the burden of both wheels upon the path by lifting the cart together with the boy and the old man, but after some time she gave it up, she was close to collapse.

  In the late afternoon the path abruptly leveled and began a long gradual turn, a steep drop on one side and a nearly perpendicular headwall on the other. They witnessed a cascade of snow down an avalanche gully, heard the distant rumbling. They witnessed too the descent of shadows like the curling of smoke entering the mountains and the coming twilight and the first of the stars. Strange how the stars canopied all the sky and shone cold and blue and orange and hot: an enormous expanse of sky as if stars had fallen and earth and sky were now a single horizonless starry heaven. Mountain air affects the eyes, Uncle said, and the heart and lungs, you see the whole world in a different way. And now so we found the boy and came all this way only to die here in these mountains what kind of spirits are you to do such a thing to an old woman there is no strength left in me even for anger but if there were how I would hate you. And if I had not run away if I had stayed maybe someone would have been alive and and I could have lived with them but no one was alive and Badooki had also run away and and I would have died in those flames everything was burning the houses the air the bodies and and and look all the stars everywhere stars the ice on the mountains reflecting the stars in the sky and in the snow stars and stars.

  The old man brought the cart to a sudden halt, causing the woman to bump her head against the back. Stung sharply by the blow, she felt herself lifted out of her darkness. The boy let go his shaft and stood trembling with fatigue, unable to move.

  The old man stood at the edge of the road, staring off into the darkness below. “Fires,” he said hoarsely.

  The woman and the boy stared into a distant abyss in which tiny flames flickered and minute figures moved about.

  Now they pulled and pushed the cart, not caring for the wheels, and soon they had to lean into the cart and hold it back for the steep descent of the path.

  Near the end of their descent, the air almost black with night, the cart path briefly paralleled and then joined a wide level dirt road along which a ragged line of refugees advanced slowly toward a vast plain dotted with shanties and firepits and burning oil drums. Trucks went by on the road, heading north, only night lights showing. At the far end of the plain lay a military compound encircled by a concertina-wire fence lit by oil drums and patrolled by armed guards.

  The old man and the woman and the boy followed the road as it left the mountains and entered the plain.

  5

  Up ahead soldiers stood warming themselves near drums of burning oil at the checkpoint where the road branched off into the plain. Orange flames lit their faces and glinted off the white letters on their helmets. The air was thick with the hot acrid stench of the smoking fires.

  As the old man and the woman and the boy approached the checkpoint a soldier called out to them in Korean and the old man and the woman quickly put down the shafts of the cart. The boy came out from behind the cart and slipped between them. He felt the woman’s fingers grip his arm.

  The old man looked fearfully at the soldier. Short, thin, a hooded fur-lined combat parka and gloves. Closed, arrogant face, the face of magistrates and bureaucrats, the face of landowners. A rifle slung over his shoulder; a weapon on his hip. He looks at us knowing our lives are in his hands. Search again? His fingers on my arms and back and chest and crotch and legs. And again search the woman? The boy so frightened I feel him trembling. What will I say if they ask about him? Do not lie to our soldiers, the old carpenter warned us, they shoot anyone suspicious, they think soldiers from the North conceal themselves among the refugees from the South.

  Squinting into the firelit darkness, the old man took a rasping breath of cold air and felt a sudden bubbling and surfacing of recent memory. On the road from Seoul, beyond the airfield: jammed with infantry and vehicles. Looking for the woman. The line of refugees along the narrow path between the road and the frozen fields. A man suddenly bolting from the path and starting at a run across the road. Slipping through the line of infantry and dodging between two jeeps, running with a load of brushwood on his back. A single rifle shot, a ringing sound, and he stumbled to his knees and fell on his face. Like a straw sack of grain. Two soldiers dragged him to the side of the road and threw him into the drainage ditch. Why did he run? Suddenly possessed by a demon? A man of middle age, dead face-up in the ditch, his chest a spreading mass of blood, men and women fighting over his wood. I forgot it and remember now. Where do they go when they vanish, memories, and what brings them back? The boy is afraid. I see his eyes. Be rid of him now and not have him as a weight anymore. But the woman will be angry. Stubborn woman. He is talking to me, what is he saying?

  “You, Uncle, you.”

  The soldier, his flashlight in the old man’s eyes, was a voice only, his face and form gone in the blinding light.

  The old man blinked and squinted.

  “Your papers, Uncle.”

  “Ah, we have no papers. We left all our papers in our house in our village. Ran very fast from the Chinese and the soldiers from the North.”

  The woman closed her eyes a moment. A wave of fearsome memories: the young son of the carpenter running through the village shouting, Chinese in the hills! and the panicky scramble for the cart and throwing into it the quilts and pads and some pots and bowls and food and the box with the spirit of the man’s father and fleeing through the paddies to the main road along footpaths barely wide enough for the cart. Certainly the ox dead now and the village ashes like the village of the boy. And the graves of ancestors on the hill beyond the village? Do they destroy graves?