Air

by Geoff Ryman

  Somehow she was on the stone staircase, being led down into Kwan’s kitchen. All around them, the noise of the flood was gently falling asleep. Sssh, the waters seemed to say, sssh, the worst is over. The wound is lanced, the puss is draining. Sssh little ones, sleep.

  In the kitchen, everything was feverish: the single orange light, the heat of the stoves, the bustling women.

  Something bony and hard flung itself around Mae’s neck. Mae burped vile juices into her mouth and felt only elbows. Kwan, desperate, clung to her. Kwan leaned back, looked at Mae, and her lower face crumpled.

  Mae felt nothing. Who was this person?

  Kwan took her hand and led her to a table. Mrs. Pin leapt up, and with a kind of whirligig speed, spun bowls and village bread onto the table in front of Mae.

  Wing and Mr. Atakoloo looked up from their food. Both bowed deeply and in silence. Mrs. Pin ladled soup into Mae’s bowl. Mae picked up the spoon, and found it was too heavy to lift.

  She collapsed into tears and lowered the spoon and sat helplessly. Kwan crowded in next to her and Mae gave her an angry shove.

  “I tried to tell you!” Mae shouted at Kwan. “No one believed me. No one did anything!”

  The kitchen fell into an embarrassed silence. From outside came the rushing sound of water.

  Kwan, Wing, Sunni, Young Mrs. Doh—all stared at her with those same round, helpless eyes. What were they waiting for? For her to say: I forgive you?

  “That’s all I have to say,” she told them abruptly. She tore at a newly moistened piece of village bread.

  Mae found that the only person she cared about right now was Sezen. Not Joe, not Ken, not Ju-mei, not Kwan, none of them. It was a strange thing to discover. If she told the story of any of them, it would not move her. Only Sezen’s life had a meaning. Sezen, who loved Air.

  “Where is Mrs. Ozdemir?” said Mae, very carefully, very angrily. “That is what I have asked people. Sezen’s mother. Or is she not important enough to be allowed into the kitchen?”

  Kwan looked up, questioningly. “In the courtyard somewhere?”

  Without saying anything else, Mae stood up and walked.

  “Mae?” someone called after her.

  She broke into a run, fleeing from them. Leave me alone! She heard her feet on wet stone again, as if the Flood was still behind her.

  The flood never goes away, it pushes—pushes, and washes all away.

  Bunched up like a fist, Mae pushed her way unseen through people too concerned with their own loss. The sky was going silver. The rooster crowed on Kwan’s barn roof.

  Mae found Hatijah huddled in a corner of a barn in the dark. Her head was covered and she sat rocking slightly. She was singing in a wan, private voice.

  “Mrs. Ozdemir-ma’am? Hatijah?” Mae rubbed the woman’s shoulder. The family goat was loose, rooting in hay. Edrem sat with his back towards everyone.

  “Hatijah? Don’t give up hope. Suppose she rescued all those people and got them up to high hills. What a heroine she will be, ah? Think how joyous we will all be when she comes back to us? Hatijah?”

  The woman kept singing—a thin, wheedling, wordless lament. Hatijah stared unblinking and dry-eyed, ignoring the baby on her lap. Mae hugged the red shawl arid thought of fleas and the stricken household and how Sezen had fought—fought everything. And she won. Sezen had won.

  “Hatijah? Do you want to talk?”

  Hatijah kept singing tunelessly, and rocking back and forth. The older daughter sat plucking her own shawl, scowling, ignored. The useless back of her useless husband was turned towards them.

  “Can you talk?”

  Nothing.

  Edrem answered instead. “We saved the goat.” He snarled the last word. His hands were over his eyes and he creaked like an old leather chair.

  Born in poverty, die in poverty. Born in shit, die in shit, die without hope. Oh, but live in hope, oh yes, only to have those hopes broken, ground down. And for what? To want to slit the throat of a poor animal because it is alive and your daughter is not?

  To break your back, weep into the earth, be beaten by the sun, and for what? For the sometime cry of the nightjar? The once-a-year feast? The sometimes-full belly that is mostly empty? Love? When love is what makes it hurt when someone is destroyed?

  Edrem began to sob—great, heaving, heartbroken, helpless, useless sobs. His skinny, bent body, his wide, flat shoulders swelled and shuddered. Mae hugged him too and smelled sweat, old hides, smoke, bread and yogurt. Like his wife, he was beyond being hugged.

  Mae was useless too.

  So Mae stood up and stepped back out into the last of the starlight, looking up at the stars, so perfect, so white, so cold. The Dragon’s Breath was still blasting and hot. People still stood in silent circles, kicking the ground. The Haj was still at his post, trying to tell Dawn and her friends a story, but looking—looking as the sun rose, for anyone coming up the road.

  The rooster cried, saying, Work. Work should begin.

  Mae climbed up her friend’s stone steps. The steps belonged to others as well, to a thousand years’ worth of families. Mae’s legs were made of bags of wet earth. Fire burned in her belly. Kwan sat exhausted on a chair in the diwan, hand buried in her hair. Kwan did not see her.

  Mae climbed up farther.

  Footsteps followed.

  Mae turned and on the landing of the staircase, three men looked up at her. She pieced together who they were. Joe and Mr. Ken were lined up side by side, as if for a firing squad. Behind was Siao. Siao’s eyes were full, and full on Mae.

  Beautiful men, so much alike really. Useless. Useless, their beautiful brown eyes, their fat male hands, their lean legs.

  “Mae,” said one of them, “Joe and I have been talking.”

  “About the weather?” Mae asked with a crooked smile. “Everyone talks about the weather.”

  “We have decided not to fight,” said Joe. “Mae. You are expecting a child?”

  “It is expecting me,” she replied. She had to sit on the stairs.

  Joe walked forward. Joe, she thought, you are beautiful again. Maybe you become beautiful when you are really needed. Maybe somewhere, you are always beautiful. Maybe if you had been born rich …

  “I was the one who left,” said Joe. “I will leave again.”

  He leaned forward and kissed her. He took her face in his hands. “My little Mae.”

  His shoulders said: You don’t heed an idiot like me. I have ruined everything. 1 lost my father’s farm. I want to wander the earth in shame.

  “Don’t feel useless, Joe,” Mae pleaded. “We’re all useless. We just do things and hope.”

  “Lung thinks I’m a fool,” he murmured. “I am a ghost here.”

  The teenage boy had suddenly found cracks in his face. Who needs a teenage village hero in his fifties? What could he do? Nothing. Except to be someone’s sharecropper.

  “I could buy you some land,” Mae said.

  Joe paused. “I hate farming,” he said, smiling. “I think I want to drive a truck.”

  “So did I,” said Mr. Ken, in recognition.

  But you grew up, thought Mae.

  So, I still love my husband. And I am going to let him go. She stood up.

  Everything was very suddenly clear, as if washed clean by floodwater. She looked at her old husband, who was going away; and at faithful simple Mr. Ken who had fathered her last-chance child; and at Siao, who was wise.

  “I am going to live with Siao,” Mae announced. “I’m sorry.”

  Without a glance at Mr. Ken, Mae climbed again. She remembered her first day at school, and seeing the older boys playing football. The captain of one of the teams stopped the game and began to fight. “That is not fair,” he bellowed.

  A little boy Mae’s own age came up and stood beside her. He was the first child in the school to talk to her. “That’s my brother,” little Siao said proudly, quietly. “Are you going to live here?” he asked.

  “Until I’m grown up,”
little Mae had answered.

  Mae went into her old, high room, and there was the machine in front of the high window and she looked out over the courtyard. The sky over the broken roof and the bowl of the mountains was already blue-gray against silver. Somewhere farther down the valley, in the future, the sun was bright, but Kizuldah was still in shadow. The rooster was crowing over and over, having sensed at last that something was wrong.

  And there was her old friend, Kwan’s TV.

  “Chung Mae. Wake. Full audio and video, no queuing, sent in real time and saved to Bugs at Nouvelles. Also to Bedri at Metoff.”

  A flick and buzz. The little seeing, detachable eye. Mae held it up in the palm of her hand.

  “Hello, Bedri, hello, Bugsy, this is Chung Mae. There has been a flash flood. This is our village now at seven-fifteen A.M.”

  The bowl of the shadowed mountain was no longer in orderly lines. White rocks were spread in wedge-shaped lines down the hillside. They rested at crazy angles like eggs in the mud. The treasured and nurtured earth had escaped, wasted itself in bursting down the hillside.

  “It may not look too different to you,” said Mae. “But yesterday it was covered in snow. There was snow on the high hills, and today, looking at the hills across the valley, there is no snow. That is the first time I have seen that.”

  She swallowed. She traced the two parallel streets of Kizuldah with her eyes.

  “It will not look different to you, but our stone bridge was washed away from Upper Street into Lower Street. I can remember…”

  Mae had to break off, and swallow—she felt her eyes swell and heat up. But this was real time; she could not afford mistakes.

  “I can remember when the Chinese engineers visited, to volunteer to make the bridge. They came with trowels and concrete because Kizuldah had none. We were too poor.”

  Her voice, like a carpet, was worn thin. It straggled away like torn thread. Mae swallowed and continued.

  “We loved the Chinese because they were told not to be snobbish, to mix in, and they did, and they worked hard, and they left that bridge behind. And those of us here who are Chinese, thought of them every time we walked across it. The big handsome men, the happy women, who lived in our homes and praised the food. How we all admired them and their bridge. And see the house next to it? Oh!”

  Mae had to stop again. She hauled back in moisture and sadness, for she had to keep talking.

  “That was Mr. and Mrs. Kosal’s house, but it was the house on the square, and on its benches we spent our lives sitting. Old men played dominoes, our Haj would talk about his travels, and Old Mrs. Kosal, now gone, would come out and give the children bonbons. In the square we had the harvest. We would pile up the hessian sacks full of rice, and build bonfires for barbecues. Year on year we would lay out rugs and hire a band, and all of us—the old women, the boys, the little girls—danced and ate our fill of roast and yams and new rice. We sat under the tree. We called it the One Tree. It had been planted there so long ago and was big and huge; it was like a friend, it was like all our fathers taken root. And it’s been washed away. It had a swing on it, and all the children—the children of the 1950s, and the 1960s and ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s—all of us swung on that swing. So high, so hard, I think some of us must have tossed our spirits into the air. And they are still in the air. The spirits of the children, playing.”

  Mae had to wring the moisture out of her eyes.

  “The gully is where we kept our ducks and geese. Maybe some of those lived. And the house that has fallen across Upper Street, that was my friends’ house, the Dohs’ house, and they have lived there for one thousand years. The Dohs were Chinese warriors who stayed, and the house is older than the One Tree. And just above it, that was our new mosque. Every morning our Muerain would sing, and he sang so considerately in the early morning—soft and low and sad, as if he was sorry to wake us, wanted to let us sleep, sorry that we would have to wake up to empty bellies, or cold, or scorching sun. We all built the mosque. We all paid for it, even those of us who were not Muslim, and all the children ran to help with hammers, and the dogs barked, like when the trucks come to take the harvest.”

  Mae broke down. She couldn’t speak. Her face was not her own. It was like the laundry she saw in Old Mrs. Tung’s hands, wrung clean.

  She wiped her face and her mouth, and swallowed and kept on.

  “That’s the roof of the mosque in what is left of Mr. and Mrs. Ali’s house. They are a fine old couple, of our Party of Progress. And there is the Okan house; they are as old as the hills. And I am so happy, because their house is whole, it isn’t touched, and all the circular rugs that Mrs. Okan weaves herself, with old hands, over candles at night, they will have survived. We can wash them. We can wash them and put them on her floors and it will all be as it was. And next … next to them.”

  Mae drew a breath and grew grim. “Next to that is the house of my dear friend Mrs. Ozdemir. You cannot see it. But I can. I can see it as if it had never left, was still there, as if a girl called Sezen still drew at a table, and still fumed at her mother, for being sad and frightened, as if it were still full of corncobs that the family used as furniture because they were too poor to have anything else, with beautiful naked babes and words from the Koran written in crayon on the walls. I can still see it, but that girl died, and they have lost their home. But Mrs. Ozdemir’s heart is broken and so is her head, and she just sits and rocks and weeps.

  “And there is my house, too.

  “My house in many ways, because it was my husband’s house, and in that house I gave birth to three children. One whole side of it is gone. I can see inside it; it’s so familiar, even flooded with sunlight, my bed, and my kitchen. I think I see my own TV in part of the loft, sunning itself. But the barn is full of mud, so I think my beautiful weaving machine will be gone.

  “But look at the beautiful new sea. Look at it sparkle. Look how full of hope it seems; look, it has seagulls, who could hate such a beautiful sea? Even if it covers houses-—houses where you played as children—even if dear friends are trapped inside, their mouths full of mud. Even landscapes die, and give birth to new ones.

  “And here comes the sun.

  “See it? It is creeping over the hills, and the terraces, and the terraces are gone. Every spring after harvest, up we all would go, men and women and children with levers and stakes and hammers and pulleys, and all of us, even the ones who hated each other, would stand together and pull up the rocks and hammer in the stakes, to repair the terraces, to hold the earth.

  “And that earth, what it did not contain? Our blood and sweat, our shit, our stillborn babies, anything to make it rich and keep it rich. What you see spilled is not mud. It is our blood, our blood of two thousand years—that is why it is so red, and that is why it seems to me that the earth screams. For it is lost now, like a beautiful child that bursts free into danger. It will be washed away, washed away down into the valley, and so much of what we are, will go with it.”

  The corner of the room was dark, and Mae was swaying, and the constant fire in her belly gnawed at her. She saw the school high on the hill swamped with mud.

  She saw its open door.

  Farther down the hill, stumbling over the ruin of Mrs. Don’s house, she saw people walking.

  “It’s Shen!” Mae shouted. “Oh, the people you see walking—see, that is our Schoolteacher, Mr. Shen! We thought he was dead, surely—look at the wreck of our school—but look, he is there. Oh, tell the Haj, tell our pilgrim, that one more of us has lived, and lovely Suloi, she lives, too—beautiful Suloi and her daughters!”

  Shen shambled as he walked, everything shaking: legs, arms. But his head was held erect, stupidly high, dumbly proud, as if he had been proved right, as if he had defeated history.

  The littlest child—too young to understand, except to wonder—her mouth was open. In the beautiful sunlight, she held out her arms and began to spin.

  “She dances,” whispered Mae. “The daughter dance
s.”

  Mae turned to tell someone that Shen lived. She turned and saw that crowded and silent in the doorway were Kwan and Wing and Sunni and Kuei and Joe and Mr. Pin and Mr. Ali and others looking over their shoulders.

  The room was going darker. Mae heard the sound of children playing in a courtyard. She heard the Muerain, year on year, and the harvest festival and the winter party, and the spring replanting with its songs, and the late-night barking of the drowned dogs.

  That’s when it came into the room. Mae had seen it before: something dark and whole, something like a dog, loyal in a sense, patient, waiting. Except that it meant the end of everything she had known and loved. The black dog settled in the corner and licked its chops.

  Mae sat back onto the bed. She dropped the camera. Kwan walked forward and picked it up.

  “The road has been completely washed away,” Kwan said, to the machine. “We are cut off and have only limited supplies of food.”

  “Wait. Look,” said a handsome man Mae once had known.

  There was a sound like sheets in the wind, clean sheets being shaken.

  “It’s a helicopter.” The handsome man spun in joy. “They have already sent a helicopter!”

  “Mae, did you send a message last night?”

  “Blurpble ah,” said Mae. She was not well.

  Mr. Ali came forward with his hat, and Mr. Atakoloo and even Mr. Masud.

  “So,” said Mr. Ali. “You will have to teach us all now, Mae—all how to use it.”

  “We will need it,” said Mr. Atakoloo. He tried to smile.

  But everything was slipping into darkness, closing down. Someone else was dancing.

  Old Mrs. Tung won.

  25

  PROGRESS PASSED INTO THE HANDS OF THE HABITUAL LEADERS OF THE VILLAGE: THE WINGS, THE MUERAIN, AND MR. ATAKOLOO.

  They set about rebuilding Kizuldah. As a blacksmith, Mr. Atakoloo was disposed to building shelters of prefabricated metal. Mr. Wing knew stone was best. Stone would hold warmth.

  “It takes too long to build!” Mr. Atakoloo protested, gesturing, puffing out his handsome white mustache.