by Janet Sola
There’s a sound mixing in with my tears, a soft pattering. I get up from the bed and go to the balcony. Rain. A million tiny pellets turn into a net of jewels as they hit the lake. In the distance I can see the gossamer outline of the ruined palace, the Overnight Palace. It will be a good place to cry.
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
The Overnight Palace
The road to the ruined palace is strewn with rocks. Here and there stacks of mud bricks have been left on the side of the road near half-finished huts. The rain is warm, fine, a shower that is over in minutes, leaving the trees, the rocks, even the hard clay dirt glowing with a fine sheen.
My guide is the palace’s profile against the gray washed sky. The road narrows and finally gives out entirely. I follow a pebble and leaf strewn path into a woodland and through a mile of wet trees and shrubs and thickets, inhabited by flashes of feathers and fur.
And then it’s in front of me. Three stories of twilight-colored stone, blue and gray, a fairy skeleton of the palace that had been. Without walls, its arches and columns and staircases are open to the elements—the rain and the sun and the field mice. One scurries in front of me and disappears. I climb over the knee-high wall that surrounds the grounds. Wild grasses are growing on the palace floor, and a sunken pool stands in the center of what used to be a courtyard. I bend over and splash my face with clear water, then wash my feet.
Gradually, I’m aware of a scent in the air, a spicy, acrid smell like burning sandalwood. I look around to see where it’s coming from. A puff of smoke rises from behind a gap in the ruined wall on the far side of the courtyard. I move quietly in a wide arc, skirting around loose stones from fallen walls. Through the gap in the wall I can see the back of a shrouded figure, wrapped almost entirely in blue cloth. I can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman, but he or she is settled under a tree, in front of a smoking wood fire, tending it with a stick.
I call out hello, namaste, but there is no response. Maybe it’s a pilgrim, or a homeless person who is camping out. As I move closer, I see that it’s an old woman, with strange blue eyes that match the pale blue of her garment, absorbed in stirring the fire. Namaste, I say again. Without looking at me she nods toward the fire. As quietly as possible, I fold my legs underneath me and sit down next to her. After a time, she reaches into a cloth bag, and pulls out a handful of seeds and nuts. She offers some to me, and the rest she scatters around her. Birds appear, tiny birds in cloaks of yellow and brown. They peck up the seeds and fly off again.
I think about fear and courage. Was I courageous last night? Maybe courage is not about taking undue risks but necessary risks. To do what is needed to move on with life, to find out what we are capable of. When I had jumped into the river the first time as a child, it wasn’t courage, it was impulse, or curiosity, or something I can’t name really. It was a jump of innocence. But in our life, something called experience comes in. It teaches us about disappointment, and having things and losing them, and wanting things and not being able to get them, and seeing that the world is often beautiful, but just as often unjust, and that wrongs go unavenged, and that a search for beauty or joy in the midst of that uncertainty is a good way to live.
Maybe what I have found is not the courage of resolution, but the courage of response, just to respond to a call in the moment, knowing that in the next moment it might change, and that it might change because of my response. What call to courage does that little child have, the one that walks on his hands because he is crippled? Only perhaps to find his own joy in whatever way he can, moment by moment. Maybe that is why his smile spreads out to the world. And what call to courage did Sahil and I have? Only to reach out to each other across the divide of cultures for love or for some other reason we don’t even fully understand. Because if we hadn’t reached out, we would never know what our story could have been.
Then my mind empties of words entirely. Or of ideas. The moments flow by seamlessly. Minutes pass, perhaps hours. At some point the old woman turns to me and hands me the glowing stick, bows slightly to me, stands up and disappears into the woods. She has gone to look for more firewood, I think. I trace the embers of the fire with the stick and watch the pattern of light through the arches of the ruined palace. I close my eyes, and listen to the sounds of the forest. It all feels eerily familiar, as if something is tugging at the edge of my awareness. I have no more tears, I have no more sorrow, only the peace that comes at the end of a storm. When I open my eyes again, a figure is at my feet. For a moment, through some trick of light or imagination, it looks like a large cat curled up, tawny, sleek, with a contained feline calm. In that breath of a moment, the image comes from somewhere deep inside: the swathed figure tending the fire under the tree, the lion at its feet. No, not its feet. Her feet. My feet. Everything is suddenly illuminated. I understand. I have become my lost painting. The image I sought was my journey. Or maybe our journey, Sahil’s and mine. A sense of peace and transcendence that comes with completion invades me. Then the illusion goes, I am looking at a crown of dark hair, a lean body in black clothes. He sits up, gently takes the fire stick from my hand and stirs the fire.
“You must forgive me,” Sahil says. “I want to protect you but I do not. I am weak. I am still learning how to be a man.”
I look at him. The downward tilt of his head keeps his eyes in shadow.
“We are all weak,” I say. “Me too. But we can learn from each other, and become stronger.”
I know my words sound like a platitude. He nods. “Will you go?”
I pause for a moment. “Yes.”
We gaze into each other’s eyes. His face changes like the weather: clouds, then, by great determination, the sun. A smile. An innocent smile, now tinged with experience. A smile that breaks my heart now and always will, when I remember it. With the fire stick he traces a curving line in the dirt. “The sign of om,” he says. “Hold, then let go.”
“Yes. I think I am learning how to do that.”
“I wish I can write like I talk, I could tell my story.”
“I will tell your story for you,” I say. “And my own. Our story.”
“Come,” he says, “leave the fire for a moment.” I get up and follow him back into the ruined palace, through rooms that are defined only by fallen walls, onto a stairway that leads up and down and up again to the very top story, lined by columns that support nothing but the sky and arches that frame the view that looks out to the lake, to the far shore. The gray skies are gone and the sky is infinitely blue.
“You see,” he says, “over there is the sun,” he nods toward the west, where it is just beginning its descent. “And over here the moon,” and I look to the east, where the rising moon is a circle of white. “Both in the sky at the same time.”
“Like you and me, here.”
“You must come back at monsoon,” he says, “and we will have a picnic in this same place, with the storm all around us. It is very beautiful at monsoon.”
“I would like that,” I say, and some deep part of me wants it to be true.
Janet Marie Sola is a fiction writer and poet living in the beautiful Rogue Valley of southern Oregon. After a professional career as a news reporter and magazine editor, she earned an MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Her poems, fiction and articles have appeared in diverse publications including Forge, Painted Bride, Poetry Flash, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She can be reached through her website janetmariesola.com
