And no one noticed when the boy slipped out of the bed and left the house. He had barely reached the corner when he started vomiting. Grasping at the wall, the boy moaned and wept; suffocating with sobs, tears running down his face, he muttered:
"No, I'd rather be a fish. I'll swim away from here. I'll be a fish."
And in Orozkul's house drunken voices hooted and shouted with laughter. This wild laughter deafened the boy, causing him intolerable pain and anguish. It seemed to him that he was so sick because he was listening to that monstrous laughter. When he had caught his breath, he started to cross the yard. Now it was dark and empty. By the extinguished hearth, the boy stumbled on Grandpa Momun, dead drunk. The old man lay there next to the chopped-out horns of the Horned Mother Deer. The dog gnawed at a piece of the deer's head. No one else was there.
The boy wandered off. He went down to the river and stepped into the water. Hurrying, slipping and falling, he ran down the sloping bottom, shivering from the icy spray, and when he reached the main current, it knocked him off his feet. Floundering in the rushing stream, he began to swim, gagging and freezing.
The boy swam down the river, now on his back, now face down, now slowing up near rocky shoals, now sweeping down the rapids . . .
No one knew as yet that the boy had floated down the river as a fish. A drunken song rose in the yard:
"From the humpy, humpy mountains
I have come on a humpy camel.
Hey, humpbacked merchant, open the door, We shall drink bitter wine . . ."
But you no longer heard the song. You had gone away, my boy, into your tale. Did you know that you would never turn into a fish, that you would never reach Issyk-Kul, or see the white ship, or say to it: "Hello, white ship, it's I"?
You swam away.
There's only one thing I can say now: you rejected what your child's soul was unable to make peace with. And that is my consolation. Your life was like a flash of lightning that gleamed once and went out. And lightning is born of the sky. And the sky is eternal. And that is my consolation. And also, that the child's conscience in man is like the bud in a seed; without the bud the seed will not grow. And whatever awaits us in the world, truth shall abide forever, as long as men are born and die . . .
And so, in parting, I repeat your words, boy: "Hello, white ship, it's I!"
The White Ship Page 15
