The River and the Book

by Alison Croggon

  Over the next few days we visited a number of small villages, which were like my home – motley collections of houses and orchards – but poorer. I always followed the same routine: I would hide my boat somewhere upstream and then, with Mely perched on my shoulder, I would make my investigations. People were often distrustful and wary, even when I wanted to buy food; sometimes someone would follow me from house to house, to make sure that I didn’t steal anything. Refugees from upriver were a common sight here, and many were desperate enough to thieve. Even so, I also found kindness in unexpected places: the woman who invited me in for supper and sat me with her children and fed me bread fresh from her oven, impatiently waving away the coin I offered her, or the innkeeper who laughed uproariously when he saw the cat on my shoulder and gave me a meal for brightening up his day. It was then I noticed that those who have least often offer the most. I suppose they know what it was like to be hungry.

  Despite everything, and not without a pang of guilt, I found I was enjoying myself. The weather was fine, neither too hot nor too cold, and now I had company. If I hadn’t been so burdened with the search for the Book, I would have felt entirely carefree. I still found no word of Jane Watson: people remembered her on her trip upriver with Mizan, but had not seen her since. I began to wonder if she could perhaps make it overland to the city after all, although everyone said it was impossible because there was nothing but desert. I wished fiercely then that I could ask the Book for advice, or that I had asked the right questions when I had the chance. I knew my regrets were useless, and there seemed little choice but to go on.

  I had been on the River for about a fortnight when Mely and I stopped at another small village. Without any hope of finding anything new, we wandered into the small space that passed for the village square. Instead of the usual population of a lean dog, a few scrawny chickens and an old man propped against a tree, there was a small crowd of people, and we could hear music. In the middle of all these people stood a boy with a tar. As we watched, he lifted his voice in song, and I realized it was the same boy I had heard singing on the bank on that first bleak morning in Kilok.

  His voice seemed to soar out of his body as if it had nothing to do with him, as if he were not quite of this world. When he stopped singing, you saw that he was painfully shy: he shuffled his feet, scarcely able to look at the people who were now smiling and clapping. Blushing furiously, he pointed to his hat, which he had laid at his feet, and a few people threw in some coins. A small girl ran up and dropped in a big white radish, and ran off giggling. When it became clear that the boy wasn’t going to sing any more, the crowd dispersed, leaving only Mely and me and a few uninterested chickens.

  The boy examined his payment with a small shrug of disappointment, and then put his tar in its case. Me, I was burning with curiosity. What was this boy doing here? Why was he alone? Most of all, who was he? I went up to him and complimented him on his singing, and he blushed again and mumbled something.

  “Didn’t I see you in Kilok a couple of weeks ago?” I asked.

  He looked at me properly this time. “Yes, I was in Kilok,” he said. “I wasn’t singing there, though.”

  I didn’t want to confess that I had spied on him, and cast about for something to say, but now the boy was looking at Mely. “Why have you got a kitten on your shoulder?” he asked. “I’ve seen a man with a bird on his shoulder, but never a cat.”

  “This is Mely,” I said. “She’s my friend. And I’m Sim.”

  Mely stared at him and miaowed, and he tickled her under her chin until she started purring.

  “I’m Yuri,” he said. “I’m going to the city, because I heard they like singers there. I want to buy an electric guitar of my own.”

  He blushed, as if he had said more than he intended, but he had spoken so solemnly that I didn’t dare to laugh, although I wanted to giggle at the sheer outrageousness of his ambition.

  “I didn’t know there were such things as electric tars,” I said.

  “Guitar, not tar,” he said, with a trace of impatience. “They’re like a tar, but they sing like nothing I’ve ever heard before. I’m going to sing and make money and buy one, and then I’ll be famous.”

  I looked at him curiously, because I really didn’t know what he was talking about. Then, with a care that suggested he was showing me his greatest treasure, he took a mobile phone out of his pocket. I didn’t know what that was, either, until he explained. He pressed some buttons and it lit up, and then a tiny moving picture appeared in a screen on the front. It showed a man with an electric guitar, standing alone in a pool of garish light. Yuri only played it for a few seconds, and then turned it off: he said it would soon run out of power, and the phone was almost flat. The sound was fuzzy, but I could make it out: the man was singing, and the guitar was singing. The music sounded shiny and strange, but it moved me, and I looked at Yuri with quickening interest.

  “I’m going to the city too,” I said, on an impulse. “Why don’t we travel together? I’ve got a boat.”

  His face lit up. “A boat?” he said. “I was thinking I might have to walk there…”

  “You can’t have walked from Kilok, surely?” I said.

  “No, Old Yenni gave me a lift in his truck,” he said. “But this was as far as he was going, and he left yesterday.” Suddenly Yuri looked tired, and very young. “I don’t have any money, and I don’t know what to do, really. The city’s much further than I thought.”

  I found myself staring in astonishment at this plump, tousle-haired boy. I thought he must be a bit simple: how could he have made such a momentous decision without first planning? Even I, ignorant as I was, had thought to bring food and money and clothes with me. It was as if he had just picked up his tar and left: and later I found out that was pretty much what he had done. But I was wrong to think that he was simple: it was more that his desire blazed inside him so fiercely that it left him little space for anything else. Yuri is as single-minded as any person I have ever met.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked at last, for want of anything else to say.

  “I have a radish,” he said, holding it up and grinning. “How could I be hungry?”

  “I have some food we can share,” I said. “But I have to do some other things first. If you wait, we can eat soon.”

  Yuri trailed after me as I made my tour of the village, where I asked my questions and discovered that no one there had seen Jane Watson coming back downriver. Because of Yuri’s singing, we were both invited for a meal with the village elder. There was rice wine and goat stew and afterwards there was music. Mely sat in my lap and purred as we sang the old, beautiful songs, and then we took our leave and stumbled out into the star-filled night.

  22

  Yuri might have been a river boy, but he was not much at ease in boats. He clambered in like a landsman and sat uncomfortably in the middle, clutching his tar and bag, and gulped as I steered us mid-river. As we had not much else to do to pass the time, he told me his story. He had been orphaned at an early age, and since then had lived with his uncle in Kilok, who, it seemed, had not a lot of patience or kindness to spare for a fat, clumsy boy with little talent for anything except daydreaming and making music.

  “He didn’t like me much,” Yuri said. “He’d just sigh and go, Tch tch, and tell me how much I was costing him. If I could have been good at fishing or something, he might have forgiven me.” But Yuri was disastrously bad at most tasks: he fell out of boats, he fell out of trees, he spilled buckets of milk, he let the goats eat the barley. Punishment made no difference, and at last his uncle just shrugged and let him alone.

  If his uncle had had more imagination, he might have apprenticed Yuri to a musician, but it never occurred to him to do so: music was strictly for the evening, after the day’s work was finished, and he didn’t believe it was work. If it hadn’t been for Jane Watson, Yuri said, he might have stayed in Kilok his whole life. At this, my ears pricked up.

  “It’s funny you were asking
questions about her,” he said. “Miss Watson came to Kilok and spoke to my uncle. She was nice. My uncle made me sing her a song, and then she gave me the phone and showed me the electric guitars and told me about the music in her country, and how singers could be very rich, even here, in the city. I thought about it all for a long time after she had left, and I wondered why I couldn’t be rich too, if I went to the city and became a singer. Then I could pay back my uncle all the money I have cost him, and have my own house. And then Old Yenni said he was driving downriver, so I asked if I could come too. And here I am.”

  For a while I sat silent, struck by how Jane Watson had so lightly changed our lives. Did she ever think about the effects of her actions? She must have known that to steal an object like the Book would be devastating to our whole village, but that knowledge hadn’t stopped her. To me, this seemed to be the very definition of wrong. With Yuri, her actions seemed equally wrong, but in a different way.

  She must have seen that Yuri was unhappy; she must have recognized his talent. Most likely it never occurred to her what her casual gift might mean to Yuri. I don’t doubt she wished to please him, just as she pleased the children in our village by taking photos and showing them what they looked like on the small screen in her silver camera. She had tossed a bomb into Yuri’s world and then sailed off without another thought. I was stunned by her carelessness. At the same time, who was I to say she was wrong, when Yuri’s desire to make music burned inside him so fiercely, yet found no answer where he was?

  I didn’t tell Yuri why I was searching for Jane Watson, beyond the fact that she had taken something that I wanted back, and he didn’t ask. He accepted everything without question, which confirmed my impression of him as a harmless simpleton. He was so different from my lively, curious brothers and sisters, who, if they had been living in such close quarters with me, would have found out in less than a day that I wasn’t the boy I claimed to be. He never once peeped when I told him to look away because I was doing my personal business, and he never asked why I wanted to be so private. It wasn’t until later that I reflected that maybe life had taught him not to ask questions.

  Yuri was right about his incompetence. He was no help at all on the boat and sometimes, in those first few days, I thought I must have been mad to ask him to join us. I tried not to be testy with him, but it was hard when he dropped an oar and I had to dive in and retrieve it, or when he stood up clumsily and nearly tipped us over. I began to feel a sneaking sympathy for Yuri’s uncle. Yet it wasn’t that the boy didn’t want to help: all his accidents stemmed from his over-eagerness, and he looked so humiliated when things went wrong that I bit my tongue. Eventually, I found that if I showed him how to do things patiently, step by step, he didn’t make so many mistakes, though he was still apt to daydream and forget what he was supposed to be doing.

  It was during our visits to the villages along the River that our strange partnership began to bear fruit. Instead of waiting for villagers to throw coins into Yuri’s hat, I carried it around from person to person, smiling and bowing, and this increased takings considerably. Very often we were both invited for meals by people anxious to hear Yuri sing again. This was welcome, because my food stocks were getting low and my money was dwindling faster than I had expected. I had thought that I might be able to earn more as I travelled, but my skills were in reading and weaving, which nobody needed, and few people could afford to pay for farm work. So it turned out that meeting Yuri was lucky for both of us. We helped each other, as waifs do, and learned how to survive.

  23

  Perhaps it sounds strange, but I think fondly of that part of our journey. I remember the boat floating gently down the river, Yuri idly plucking the tar, Mely crouched on the prow with her kitten fur fluffed out, and the sun shining over us all. The riverbanks slid past us, the dun plains stretched as far as the eye could see. Mely liked Yuri and spent a lot of time purring on his lap while I was busy keeping us away from the banks. Sometimes, drifting down the River on late-summer evenings, I realized with a start of guilt that I felt entirely happy. It was so very peaceful, with the fragrance of desert grasses floating over the water, and the first stars beginning to flower, and the cries of the curlews winding through Yuri’s music, that for a while I even forgot about the Book. I always rebuked myself sternly for these lapses, but perhaps it was not so wrong of me.

  There was little river traffic: a few small traders like my father, a few fishermen. When we passed them, we would put our hands up and nod, acknowledging each other as fellow travellers on the water roads. Even though this country was beyond my knowledge, it wasn’t very different from the lands in which I’d been raised: the same kinds of villages with the same gods and courtesies, the same goats gathered on the bank, chewing as they watched us float past.

  There was much I didn’t know, but I had read a description in the Book about the downstream course of the River, and Mizan had told me about some of his adventures. This meant I was not entirely ignorant. I knew that after it left the high Plains of Pembar, the River flowed into the Lorban Mountains. The Book had said that these were fabled for their loveliness, and were home to many gods, with many sacred places. Mizan said that the River through the Lorban Valley was deep and wide and strong, surrounded by tall, rocky mountains that were often wreathed in mist, and that it would rain there even in summer.

  “There are reasons why my boat has a big engine, young Sim,” he’d say. “It needs to be strong and heavy, so it is not swept away on the current and smashed on rocks. It is a long way to the Plains of Pembar! And that is why I can sell your cloth for a good price, because it is so hard to get. And pay you a good price too,” he added.

  (I discovered when I reached the city that Mizan sold our cloth for a very good price indeed, a hundred times above what he paid us: when I taxed him with this, he smiled and said, “But I have expenses, Sim. We all have to live, eh? I take the trouble to come west every year. I take the trouble to bargain. Nobody thought I underpaid them in your village, eh? You were all pleased with what I paid.” That was true enough. And even though I thought he was cheating my people, I found I still couldn’t dislike him.)

  We saw the Lorban Mountains first as distant purple smudges on the horizon. Day by day, the banks grew steeper and the river grew narrower and faster. It was as if the River was eager to reach the mountains: it seemed to gather up its skirts and run towards them. I had to pay special attention so we did not get into trouble. Of course Yuri was no help at all, and Mely just crouched in the middle of the boat, complaining softly and trying to keep dry. We swirled into the Lorban Gorge like leaves on a gale. My ears were suddenly stuffed full: the air pressure shifted, there was mist everywhere, the song of the River echoed back from the rocky sides of the gorge and the mountains rose around us like the grey flanks of a huge animal.

  For the first time since I had left home, it rained. I had a skin to put over the boat, which meant we were damp rather than soaked, but it was a fragile protection against the freezing cold. Water gathered in the bottom of the boat and had to be bailed out, and my bag and all my spare clothes were soaked through. The riverbanks were sheer rock, and for the first night in the mountains it was impossible to get out onto the shore. I didn’t sleep at all for fear we would capsize. All night long I made the songs my father had taught me, to keep us safe in the currents of the river spirit. I don’t know if the River heard me, but somehow we survived those first rapids unspilled, bursting out of the narrow gorge into a wide, forested valley late the next day.

  That night I saw the face of the River god, sad and tormented, rising through the darkness and foam like a drowning girl. I heard her singing of the acid rains and the rising salt and the poisons that ran down from the cotton fields and the silt that killed her fish. I felt the lament for a damaged future rise through my bones, from my chilled feet to the top of my skull. I heard her tell me that nothing would ever be the same again.

  24

  Mely asked me today w
hy I keep writing this book. I was surprised by her question, and thought about it for some time. I want, I told her, to tell my story to someone, even if it is only Mely who hears it. Mely pointed out that I could just say it to her, without all the bother of scratching the pen over the paper, and cursing at my mistakes, and having to start again. “I would listen,” she said. “I like to listen to you.”

  So then I said that I write because I miss the Book and in some way want to replace it, impossible though that might be. But that seems like a great vanity to me: nothing will replace the Book. Although I’ve done my best, I still think I have not been able to explain the abyss its absence has left in my being. Maybe I will never be able to. I know people who have lost their homes and whose families have all died: for me, the loss of the Book is of that order, although I would never say so to them, for fear of being misunderstood. Some people might think it callous of me to equate the loss of an object with the loss of a loved person, but that is how it feels to me.

  Even though I know that writing my story each night will never replace the Book, it does stop the missing I feel inside me, even if it is only for a short time. But is that why I sit down each night and struggle so to put these things down on paper?

  I told Mely that I hoped that I might make something beautiful. I told her that I hope to remember what is lost. I said that I hope to discover something, to become what I might be. That’s why I sit here in the lamplight at my tiny kitchen table, and write one word after another. When I wake in the morning and read what I wrote the night before, it is never what I had hoped. It seems to me to be a tinny echo, when what I felt was a glorious symphony of sound and colour and feeling. Remnants, shadows, fragments. Is that all I have left?

  Maybe the strangest thing is that I don’t know any more what it is that I am hoping for.