by Nahum Megged
I ran back to the camp, taking long strides and breathing hard. At the camp’s border, I met Yakura and told her about the carnivorous plant. My voice was excited, as if the event had aroused desire in me, instead of fear. A slight smile touched the young woman’s lips once I had finished my story. Without knowing why, I drew closer to her and kissed her. To my surprise, she did not remove her lips from mine. I knew where my body was headed, so I forced myself to leave. I was filled with a great joy, and knew I must find Marina.
37
The Secret of the Cave
I never got the chance to find Marina. Yankor stopped me on the trail that went to the hut and instructed me to follow him. When we walked out of the camp, three warriors joined us. We silently marched to the edge of the forest and went into the grassy plain.
A gunshot rang out, and Yankor ordered us to lie down and hide in the tall grass. An anaconda slid past us quickly, marking a convoluted path through the grass. Loud footfalls came from nearby. From the sounds, I knew the people approaching us were wearing boots. These were not natives of the forest, then. The rattling of a walkie-talkie indicated they had allies close by. Suddenly I heard the sound of feet running in the grass. The foreigners opened fire. Someone cried out, followed by the sound of a body falling to the ground. The men in boots approached the man on the ground, and from their conversation I could tell they were familiar with him. One of them carried the injured, or dead, man on his back, and they quickly moved away.
A deathly silence fell on the edge of the forest. We waited for the danger to pass, and when Xnen gave the signal, we stood and continued to walk, crouching, through the grass. I thought we were going back to the tall mountain from which we had descended, but our path led us to a much lower hill. Could this hill be the holiest of holies, the heart of the forest and the entire world?
Yankor moved some rocks that were buried in the grass and revealed another opening in the ground— another in a long series of entryways that had been shown to me since my return to the forest. Yankor waited for us to go inside, then he moved the rock over the entrance and remained outside. Not far from me, I could see the light of torches. I examined the place and soon decided I was in the cave Herbert, Sr., had visited and written about in his journal. His descriptions, still vivid in my memory, seemed to have materialized before my eyes.
Rooms filled with statues and pottery led to a central room. Blind guards stood on both sides of the doorway, and when we passed them we entered a magnificent palace or temple. Herbert, Sr., was right: The sculptures in the cave looked very much like those of the Peruvian mountain culture. Sitting next to a large stone table was Herbert, Jr., whom I had thought to be dead. A large opening gaped in the ceiling, illuminating a kind of thick journal placed on the table. He raised his eyes at me and said in an amused voice, “Welcome to the place where I have lost all hope. I will never leave here, certainly not on my own two feet. But I don’t mind…because now I know there isn’t any grave.”
I looked at the journal open before him. At first I thought it was the mysterious manuscript read by Herbert, Sr., but a moment later I understood I was looking at the handwriting of the old researcher as I remembered it from a diary I had found in a New York museum. A quick look made it clear that I was looking at the original version of the journal I had seen during my previous visit to the forest and that had somehow found its way to town.
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to understand the writings in the scrolls and tablets hidden here, but my father was able to translate quite a bit of what was written in them, and I prefer to read what he learned first. I have no doubt I’ve reached the purpose of my life, even if I won’t be able to leave the forest and must take this secret to the grave, here in this cave. Sit, and I’ll read to you.”
I sat next to him and waited. He nervously flipped through the pages until reaching the text he sought. “Listen carefully,” he said. I looked at the open page and saw almost entirely illegible handwriting, full of scribbles, deletions, and corrections.
I have discovered the great secret. There is no secret and no way of reaching it. There is also no way to reach the creator of the secret and no way of knowing if he exists. I have discovered the secret and learned that there is no secret, because everything is revealed before our eyes. Only the observer is lost in his own blindness and does not understand it. We have created blindness because we need the secret, so we could conceal it from others. With our little hand, we blindfolded our eyes, and it conceals all sights from us. And why have we covered our eyes with our hands? Because we wanted to see inside the darkness, and perhaps, like little children, we hoped no one would be able to see us with our eyes covered…”
The son’s hand turned to another page, his finger traced the written words and he continued to read aloud. We are all nothing but masks. Living masks that sometimes stop the rain, halting lightning in flight or silencing thunder. And the masks dance to the rhythm of the heart, as if drums were beating inside us. And the masks possess two voices. They are chanting, screaming, and singing into the world surrounding us, but they also whisper into our inner depths, and we do not always hear their whispers. If only we could hear it, the two voices would join together. And music would rise from their union, and all moments would fill with holiness.
Once again, the son’s hand flicked to another page, and his voice continued reciting the writings. Goodness begets hope, and evil extinguishes it. Beyond that, there is no good or evil, no past or future. We all struggle with each other endlessly and nurture each other endlessly. The world outside us exists inside us, and everything teeming inside us lives and breathes outside us. Yesterday, we walked outside the camp to hunt. Four archers we were, and I thought that the great secret of life was revealed to me: life is nurtured by death and death is nourished by death and death is nourished by life, and we are the only ones who refuse to believe… Herbert looked at me and smiled.
“Did your father write the text, or was it translated from the ancient book he found?” I asked.
Herbert didn’t answer. Without a word, he returned to the open journal and continued to leaf through its pages. I decided to allow him to continue to delve into the writings of his father, who may have lost his mind before the cave and its secrets closed in on him.
The warriors who had accompanied me were gone, and I turned to explore the other rooms. Animals, trees, and fruit were painted on the walls. A few of the paintings repeated themselves and looked like writings. Niches were carved into the walls in one room containing rolled-up skins. I assumed they were parchments. I reached out to take one, and a few warriors emerged from nowhere and politely ordered me to leave the room. “You are not allowed in here,” they said.
They spoke a dialect of Yarkiti I’d heard only a few times. I asked if they came from upriver, from the dense forest that did not contain any paths.
One of them, a young man wearing a mask that covered only half his face, said with pride, “I was born here, in these caves!”
I looked at his mysterious expression, and suddenly thought I understood the true meaning of his words, and realized why he wasn’t smiling: The Yarkiti word for “born” held more than one meaning because they are reborn many times during their lives.
I was overcome by tiredness again, and the warrior looked at me and ordered me to follow him. We reached a small room and entered it. A torch embedded in the wall lit up the small space, which was filled almost entirely by a large bed. It was a wooden bed with hides spread on it and carved animal heads adorning its four posts. I was sure the bed had not been manufactured in the forest — it reminded me of furniture I had seen in my old world. The warrior pointed at the bed, instructed me to rest in it, and forbade me to extinguish the torch. “You will quickly get used to the light and be able to sleep,” he said.
My eyes closed, and I suddenly felt I wasn’t alone. I looked up to ask the warrior to leave and let me be but dis
covered that a stranger in a peculiar costume was standing beside the bed. It took me some time to identify the attire, probably because it was so far removed from the forest and its inhabitants. The stranger was dressed like a knight, straight out of a fairy tale. His eyes were black and his face was adorned with a dark, triangular beard. He angrily placed his hands on his hips and looked at me with rage in his eyes, as if asking what I was doing in his bed. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and rested his bearded chin on his hands. Impulsively, I raised a hand to touch his shoulder, and my fingers went through his body. Only then did I realize I was sharing the chamber with a ghost. The stranger got off the bed and left the room, and I fell asleep immediately after. In my dream I was on the run, and I didn’t know from whom I was running or where I was running to.
Once again, I felt a presence beside my bed, and when I opened my eyes, I saw it was a Yarkiti warrior I didn’t know. I thought it was the Noneshi, but then the warrior took the burning torch from the wall and said, “Come. Yankor is calling you.”
I got to me feet stiffly and followed the warrior. Many people were sitting at a round stone table with fire burning in its center. Yankor stood and invited me to sit beside him. I smelled a tangy scent and immediately recognized it. I knew that in just a few minutes, I would grow invisible wings and be sucked into the realms of the imagination. Blurry from my heavy, nightmarish sleep and the smoke that tickled my nose, I briefly told Yankor what I had seen in the bedchamber. The old shaman listened to me stonily and ordered the warrior who had accompanied me to take me back to my room.
I do not know where the warrior took me. Nightmarish images surrounded me, and a few reminded me of witches and monsters I knew well from the fairy tales of my old world. There were men and women with goat legs, horses with human heads, creatures wobbling on one foot, walking skeletons, and old women wearing strange hats. I lay on the carved wooden bed and saw the knight looking at me bewildered, disappointed that an aging scholar had taken the place of the beautiful princess he had hoped for. Everything turned white around me, and I sank in an ocean of milk. A strange-looking mermaid swam beside me. It was Yakura, and she held my dissipating hand, kissed my disappearing forehead, and said, “Soon, soon…”
In the end, the ocean of milk disappeared as well, and I knew I was in a box, swimming toward a great radiance. Strings of light held the box and pulled it toward the sun. Suddenly, brightness and darkness mixed with each other. A scream pierced the silence, and an even greater silence followed. I had arrived.
38
The Voice of the Plants
I opened my eyes. Morning light already peeked through the branches. I realized I was in my hut in the temporary camp on the edges of the forest. I went through my things and took out my journal, which I hadn’t used for a long time. I was disturbed to discover that many pages had been torn from it. I decided to write down everything that had happened to me in the cave where I met Herbert, and to do it twice, on different pages of the diary. I was convinced that only this duplication would save me, and without it all my memories would be lost. I wrote for some time, then I copied the words on some empty pages near the end of the diary. I closed the book and reopened it immediately; the memory was still there, safe between the covers.
By that time, the sun was high in the sky, yet the camp was still completely quiet. Had it been deserted with me the only one left behind? An earsplitting sound came from above, as if answering my question. I peered through the hut opening. A helicopter approached the camp and circled it before landed in the square surrounding the round house. Armed men alighted from the helicopter along with a man who looked like a doctor. They carefully moved from hut to hut, looking inside each one and continuing on their way. They will reach me soon, I thought, but instead, they strayed off onto one of the trails leading to the forest. A minute later, I heard a cry and the growling of jaguars. Then I saw them returning to the camp, supporting one of the armed men, whose leg was injured and bleeding. They hurried back to the helicopter, climbed inside and took off.
When the helicopter was gone, the people of the camp emerged from their hiding places. Why hadn’t they taken me with them? Yakura and Xnen came to me. I recognized disappointment in Yakura’s face, even a hint of anger, but Xnen beamed at me. A few of the camp women brought Marina and Christina to the hut. The two could barely move their feet or keep their eyes open. Perhaps they had been drugged to make the escape to the secret hiding place easier. I didn’t see Clara anywhere and assumed she was with Michael.
Yakura walked away down one of the paths leading away from the camp. I hurried after her but quickly discovered I was walking by myself. I became lost in thought and found myself in a small forest clearing containing a few small temporary huts. Xnen was sitting in the doorway of one of the huts. I sat in front of him.
“Marikitare,” I asked, “where are you leading me? Where are you leading yourselves?”
He did not answer for a long time then pushed to his feet and said, “You will soon know.” He turned to one of the trails, and before walking away he turned to face me. His eyes said Do not follow.
I stood and looked at the huts. They weren’t empty as I had thought them to be. Marina was sleeping in one, and Christina was sleeping in the one next to it. In the third, Michael and Clara were sleeping in each other’s arms. Before I had a chance to investigate the rest of the huts, a shadow slipped from one and immediately walked into the forest. I did not run after the disappearing figure and turned to look at the hut it had come from. A hammock hung in one corner and hot embers were in another, the remains of a campfire hastily extinguished. I saw a folded piece of paper next to the hammock. I picked it up with trembling hands and spread it open. It contained some complex drawings, resembling some I had seen during my nocturnal visions of the caves. I approached the fire, rekindled it, and examined the drawings in its light. Letters emerged from the images, as if written with invisible ink, joining to form two words: Run away! The letters immediately disappeared and were replaced by meaningless scribbles. I went outside to try to read the words in the daylight, but the paper crumbled between my hands the moment it was exposed to sunlight.
I went to Marina’s hut and tried to wake her. She shook her head and anxiously rubbed her forehead, but despite all the words and caresses I showered on her, she fell asleep again. Someone was standing at the threshold. I turned my head and saw Christina smiling at me, motioning for me to come outside. “Come on, let’s go,” she said. “Marina will wake up by the time we return.”
I followed her without knowing where she was leading me or how she knew the way. The path wound its way through the edges of the small camp and continued into the forest. Broken branches and crushed bushes and weeds indicated that human feet had recently run there. Maybe we were following the shadow that had stolen away from the hut and I would learn who it was. I walked after Christina until we reached a small clearing with a single hut.
We looked inside, and I saw my friend Amir wagging his tail happily. Was Amir the shadow that had slunk off? A dog could have hardly slept in a hammock and lit a fire. There must be someone else close by and the dog was accompanying him. I stroked Amir and looked about me.
“I think we should go back,” I told Christina, “this place frightens me.” But she held my hand and kept walking. The dog did not follow us.
The vegetation gradually closed in on us. Apparently, the road going to the secluded hut was frequently used, but the trail leading away from it had been abandoned long ago. The voices of the forest grew louder, signaling our arrival into a place unaccustomed to the presence of humans. We had no machete, which made the passage difficult at some points. I was overcome by dread. My days were few and numbered, but the young woman walking by my side, the mother of a small child, ignored the lurking danger, drawing me into the unknown. What force was directing her footsteps?
Soon, no trace of the trail remained, yet Christina contin
ued to guide us through the thicket. “Did you forget that I know a little witchcraft?” she asked with a bright smile.
When even the power of the witchcraft could no longer aid us, and the thicket became impassable, we stopped. The cheerful chirping of a bird was suddenly heard above us, then turned into a song. I had never heard such a beautiful melody. We looked up at the trees, trying to find the bird with the magnificent voice but could see nothing through the foliage. The song ceased, then we heard it again not far from us, as if the bird beckoned us to follow it. As we started to push through the branches, beneath our feet, through a crack in the thicket, the ancient pathway revealed itself. We followed the singing, until we heard it directly above us.
A fallen trunk between the bushes invited us to sit and rest on it. Before sitting, I carefully examined the trunk to make sure there weren’t any snakes or a nest of termites beneath it. The birdsong stopped when we sat, and a great sense of loneliness washed over me. Christina rested her head on my shoulder and kept her thoughts to herself. We saw a pair of quarreling monkeys on a nearby tree. One of them suddenly shrieked a warning, and the shadow of a jaguar passed close to us. The beast ignored us and continued on its way. Why was I drawn here by Christina and the bird with the marvelous voice?
“This is where it all started,” I heard a voice whisper inside me. I felt we were there to learn not everything begins and ends in the mysterious caves. I felt that I had reached the very heart of the ancient forest, a place where no man had ever set foot.
The bird returned to sing, but this time its voice was different, nervous and energetic. Then I saw it, perched on a nearby branch. It wasn’t very large. Its feathers were red and black, one of its feet was white and the other was yellow, and its beak looked like a green leaf. A snake was gliding up the trunk toward it, immediately drawing me out of my imaginary Garden of Eden illusion. I tore a branch off the trunk we were sitting on and hurled it with all my might at the snake. I did not hit it, but the noise was enough. The bird flew away and landed on another tree, escaping from the creature of the deeps that had wanted to swallow the singing child of the heavens.
