The River and the Book

by Alison Croggon

  Mely looked at me with her clear green eyes and swished her tail and yawned her delicate yawn.

  “Why do you do it, really?” she asked.

  And I realized I didn’t have an answer.

  25

  Last night, Ling Ti dropped by unexpectedly to visit me, on his way home from reading his poems at the university. He had told us not to bother to come, as the other poets would be dull and we could hear his poetry any time we liked. When Ling Ti says things like that, he means it – he always tells us if he wants us to be there – so I had stayed at home. I was tired from work, and it was raining, and I had thought I might write something. Ling Ti halted in the doorway when he saw my book and pen on the table, lying in the circle of the lamplight. “I’m interrupting you,” he said. “I can come another time.”

  In truth I had been sitting at the table for half an hour, sucking the end of the pen and wondering where to begin. Sometimes my mind is completely blank; or maybe there are too many things, and I don’t know which one to pick. Many nights I don’t write anything at all.

  “You’re not interrupting anything important,” I said. “Please stay. I have some rice wine, if you would like some?”

  “I’ve already had enough to drink,” said Ling Ti. “I think I’d prefer some tea.”

  He sat down and watched as I lit the gas ring and boiled a saucepan of water. He amused me by telling me about his reading. He had intended to be polite, or so he said, because the university paid well, and he needed the money. But one of the other poets had told him afterwards that his poetry lacked soul, and so Ling Ti had told him what he thought about his poems. “Soul!” said Ling Ti. “What would that centipede know about soul? He thinks it’s all about looking at the moon and thinking about a beautiful woman and feeling a bit sad. Pap!” The upshot was, he said, that he would probably never be asked to read there again.

  I could see him glancing at my book, which was open on the table. I wanted to hide it, as if I had been discovered doing something embarrassing, but putting it away would only have served to draw more attention. It’s not that my story is a big secret, but I feel shy about telling anyone, especially Anna or Ling Ti, who are real poets.

  Mely, who had been asleep on my bed, wandered into the kitchen, yawning ostentatiously to show that she wasn’t curious at all about who had come to visit. When she saw it was Ling Ti, she rubbed herself against his long legs until he picked her up and put her on his lap, where she curled up and purred.

  Mely approves of Ling Ti: he and Yuri are the only people she will talk to, aside from me. Anna and Icana don’t like cats. Although they have made a special exception for Mely, and have even invited both of us to their apartment, Mely is still a bit offended.

  “I didn’t know you wrote, Sim,” said Ling Ti, as I handed him a cup of tea. “Is it a book?”

  I felt myself going hot all over. “Not really,” I said. “I’m writing down my story. It’s not a proper book, not like what you and Anna write.”

  Mely looked up, her green eyes flashing. “Of course it’s a proper book,” she said. “It’s just as proper as silly poems.”

  Ling Ti laughed at that and poked Mely in the tummy. “Watch it, you impertinent animal,” he said. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you, Sim. I was just being nosy. You don’t have to tell me anything. I hate talking about what I am writing. Though I can talk about it when it’s finished. Then I can talk for hours, even if it’s all lies.”

  Once he said that, I found that I could speak about my book, after all. Ling Ti listened attentively, sipping his tea and tickling Mely’s chin until she fell asleep again. In the end, I told him all about the Book, and Jane Watson, and my village. I had told him bits here and there, of course, but never the whole story. His response surprised me.

  “But you must write it down,” he said to me. “And never say again that it isn’t important. Never. Not to anyone.”

  “Would you read a book like that?” I asked.

  “I would read anything you wrote,” he said.

  I laughed. “I could be the worst writer in the world,” I said. “How can you tell if it would be worth reading?”

  He paused, and gave me a narrow look. “I’m not patronising you, Sim. I just think you are truthful, and I know the way you speak. I would like to read a story that you wrote.”

  I hadn’t imagined before that anyone might read this book, aside from me and Mely. The thought gave me butterflies. “Maybe I’m not writing it for anybody to read,” I said. “Maybe it’s just private.”

  “All writing comes from the inside,” said Ling Ti. “It burns you with wanting to be written. It’s the writing that matters. You don’t have to show it to anybody if you don’t want to.” He grinned at me. “I choose to, of course, because I am a great poet, and I wish to share my greatness with everybody.”

  Ling Ti always jokes about being a great poet. The biggest joke, as Anna says, is that he probably is a great poet. He says it to annoy other poets, especially those he says are mangy weasels who wouldn’t know a real poem if they tripped over it. (Actually, what he says is much ruder than that.) He argues with other writers all the time, and because of that many people are a little afraid of him. I was, until I began to know him better.

  A comfortable silence fell between us. I studied his face, which was serious and gentle in the mild lamplight. It’s an expression he never reveals except to his close friends. In public, Ling Ti is a showman: he gets away with being a mischief-maker because he makes people laugh. His poems are ironic and abrasive and angry and full of dazzle. Those who admire them say they are beautiful, and even his enemies find it hard to deny their intelligence. But there’s something else underneath, something quieter and deeper, that people sense and respond to. It’s why his poems matter.

  As if he could hear my thoughts, Ling Ti looked up at me, pushing his glasses up his nose. “The secret, Sim, is always to write with love,” he said. “Love is the hardest thing in the world, and it’s the one thing we mustn’t forget. It’s much more difficult than anyone thinks. I believe that you know that already, and that’s why I would like to read your book.”

  It is unusual for Ling Ti to give anyone a compliment, and I suddenly felt very shy, although it also pleased me. He saw that I was uncomfortable and changed the subject, and we chatted about this and that, and then he went home. After he left, I thought about what he had said. Maybe he is right. Maybe it is love that makes me want to write this story.

  26

  I discovered a lot about people on our journey to the city. Not all of it was good. I remember the people who turned us away with blows when we were in need, or who cheated us, charging us ten or twenty times what we should have paid, because they knew we had no choice but to buy from them. But then I remember Mei, the innkeeper in the mountains, who let us stay for a week when we turned up at her doorstep, woeful and drenched, after our boat sprang a leak halfway through the Lorban Mountains.

  I don’t know why she took pity on us: she was tough and unsentimental and, from what I saw, a ruthless businesswoman. And yet she fed us and gave us a room in her attic, briskly refusing our poor payment. When Yuri offered to sing in her bar, as some kind of return, she shrugged and said he could if he liked. He did, and after the first night word spread, and her bar was full every evening following, which pleased her. But she gave us a room before she knew of Yuri’s talent, and called a carpenter to repair our boat, and loaded us with food supplies when we left, pooh-poohing any of our stumbling attempts at thanks or payment.

  By then, we did not expect kindness from strangers. I thought of Kular sitting at our table in tears, telling us that he had forgotten that people could be kind, and reflected sadly that I now knew what he meant. I forgave those in want or fear, because I understood why they closed their faces against us, but it’s less easy to forgive those to whom a bed in a stable or a piece of bread was no trespass on their need. And yet people were kind to us, sometimes when we least expected
it.

  It took us two months to reach the city, and we arrived just before the coldest part of the winter. I sometimes wonder that we got here at all, although the truth is that we were never in serious danger. There was a lot of rain and discomfort and cold and hunger, but nothing that directly threatened our lives; nobody, not even Yuri, found out that I was not a boy, nobody tried to rob us of our few possessions, or to kidnap us, or to kill us. For the most part nobody noticed us at all.

  We left the mountains and found ourselves in the plains that surround the city. Now the River was wide and lazy and full of traffic, and the water changed colour. We passed factories that poured out black smoke and leaked stinking liquids, red or black or sickly yellow, and wide broken drains that poured sewage and rubbish into the water. After both of us spent two days vomiting, we no longer dared to drink the water, and had to buy it in bottles.

  We stayed nowhere for longer than a night. I still asked after Jane Watson, but there was no news: the presence of a foreigner was not so notable here. The hopelessness I had begun to feel in the mountains took hold inside me. I felt heavy with it, as if my bones were made of lead. Those were the worst days, when I could no longer see any point in continuing the journey, but couldn’t face returning home with empty hands.

  When we finally reached the city, we felt neither relief nor gladness. Our first sight of the slums and shanties crowded at the edges shocked us. We were used to living among people who owned very little, but this was something we hadn’t seen before. Yet even there, among the filth and crowded despair and disease and hardship, we found kindness. Even there.

  27

  Yuri is quite famous now. He started singing in bars when we were living in the shantytown, and word spread, and then he got a regular spot at the Stray Dog. He saved up and bought his electric guitar, and then he had to save up some more so he could live in a house that had electricity so he could practise. I laughed at him for a long time when he came to me, wholly cast down because he couldn’t play his new possession: it was so typical of him. Luckily for Yuri, Mazita has taken over his business affairs, since he would be as helpless as a baby chick without someone to manage him. All he thinks about is his music: he doesn’t care for money or fame, except for the fact that they allow him to play what he wants.

  I still smile when I remember the moment I finally revealed that I was really a girl, although it was so very painful. It was when we first reached the city and had no money to speak of, and were living on what we could earn through Yuri’s singing and odd jobs I picked up here and there, running errands or sorting through rubbish for what could be reused or (once, because I only lasted a day) working in a smelter in the shantytown, stoking a furnace. Yuri and I had been together for weeks at this point, and I was privately astonished that he had never worked out that I was not a boy. I began to feel worse and worse about deceiving him; if he had asked, I would have confessed straight away, but he never asked. So one evening, I just told him.

  At first Yuri flatly refused to believe me, and I began to wonder, in a slightly panic-stricken way, what I would have to do to convince him. Would I be forced to take off all my clothes? For the first time, I told him the full story of Jane Watson and the Book, and my full name. I told him about my mother and my grandmother, and why I had left my village. He listened in silence, his face deepening to a dull red flush. I thought he was very angry with me, and kept talking anxiously, hoping that his anger would pass. Finally I ran out of things to say and found myself sitting in dejected silence.

  At last he spoke. “But I can’t talk to girls!” he said.

  I was very taken aback. “I’m a girl,” I said. “And you can talk to me.”

  “You weren’t a girl before,” he said. “You were just like me. How can I talk to you now? You’re a girl! And you lied to me.”

  “I really didn’t mean to lie to you, and it was very wrong of me,” I said. “But I’ve never lied about anything else. I’m exactly the same person you’ve always known. And anyway, why should me being a girl make any difference?”

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “It just does. It’s … humiliating.”

  I saw he was very upset and didn’t know how to answer him. I thought that we were both right, and that it did and did not make a difference.

  “I mean – girls giggle and make fun of you because you’re fat,” he said. “What if you start doing that, now you’re a girl?”

  I stared at him. “I’ve been a girl all along; I haven’t just changed into one. And do you really think I would do that?”

  “That’s what girls do,” he said.

  “Some girls,” I said. “Some girls. I bet boys were cruel to you too.”

  “Yes, but they were boys. They just punched me and called me names. They didn’t giggle.”

  Some cruel imp in me wanted to giggle then, out of sheer nervousness, but I dared not.

  “Yuri,” I said sternly, “I’m Sim. I’m just me. Everybody is just who they are, just like you are just you. Whether I’m a girl or not doesn’t make any difference. I wouldn’t punch you if I were a boy. I won’t giggle at you because I’m a girl. I’m your friend.”

  I studied him as he sat glowering and silent, biting his lip, and my heart began to hurt. “I don’t have any other friends, aside from Mely,” I said, my voice wavering. “Don’t you want to be my friend any more?”

  Yuri glanced up then, and saw that I was on the edge of tears. He looked astonished. I think it had never occurred to him before that anybody could actually like him. He said nothing for a long time, and then he said gruffly that of course he was my friend. After a few days, he even said he didn’t mind my being a girl.

  Along with Mely, Yuri is my closest friend; we see each other almost every day, as he lives not far from me. He is no longer the shy, awkward boy I first met: he has grown to be handsome, and has discovered that there are many girls besides me who won’t tease him. Through Yuri I met Icana and Anna and Ling Ti, and they invite me to their apartments and introduce me to other people. I now know more people than I ever knew in my own village; some are little more than strangers, but we recognize and greet each other.

  The city is very different from my village, where everybody had known everybody else all their lives, and a new face was a novelty. Sometimes I find knowing so many people overwhelming and confusing. When I told Anna this, she laughed and ruffled my hair and said I was still a country girl at heart. I think she is right: I will never be at home in the city, not like someone who was born here. And yet, how much poorer my life would have been if I hadn’t met my crazy friends! I love them for their jokes and their generosity and their outrageous clothes and their passionate arguments, and I love the beautiful things they make, and most of all I love their quick and tactful understanding when I am sad. They are true companions. How could I wish that I had never met them?

  Yuri seems much less troubled by the city than I am, but he was never happy at home: for him, his new life is miraculous. Me, I miss too many things.

  28

  I was hurrying home through the Financial District today after I had closed my stall, when I saw Jane Watson. I glimpsed her out of the corner of my eye, and it was as if an electric shock went through my whole body. It’s been weeks since I asked anyone about her, and months since I hoped to see her ever again.

  Her face was on a bank of television screens in a shop window, flickering and discoloured. She was talking to someone in a yellow studio, seated on an elegant red chair. Jane Watson was speaking in her own language and there were subtitles underneath the picture, so that even though the sound was turned down, I could read what was being said. The interviewer said she was a famous scholar who had spent some months in our country, researching the traditional folkways of our people. Jane Watson looked very serious and said that an ancient way of life was under threat. She talked about the cotton fields and the problems with the River. There were tears in her eyes as she spoke about how a beautiful way of life w
as dying, and how the simple River people didn’t understand what was happening to them.

  I felt a lurch in my stomach when she said that, as if I were going to be sick. My people are not simple. There are things they don’t understand, but that doesn’t mean that they are stupid or even ignorant. I watched, fascinated and repulsed, waiting for Jane Watson to mention the Book: but she didn’t talk about it at all.

  Jane Watson had written her own book. It was called The River People of the Pembar Plains. The interviewer held it up so everyone could see. On the cover was a photograph of me, taken on the day that she came to our village. I went hot all over with embarrassment: I was wearing my best clothes that day, with my hair carefully braided, but in the bright yellow light of the television studio I just looked quaint and poor, an ignorant peasant. The interviewer asked who I was, and she told him I was one of the daughters of the headman of the village, and that she had become friends with me while she stayed in our home. I felt my stomach clench with rage: my father was important because he was married to a Keeper, not the other way around. I had thought she understood that. She said the photograph showed the dignity my people maintained, even though they lived in such poverty. She didn’t tell the interviewer my name or my title, and she didn’t mention my grandmother at all.

  For a while I was so angry that I forgot to read the subtitles, and when I started paying attention again, the interviewer was talking to the camera and Jane Watson had disappeared and the television flickered to advertisements.

  I don’t know how long I stood outside that window as people pushed past me in the twilight, cursing me for blocking the footpath. My whole body was shaking with fury. I wondered how she dared to put my photograph on the cover of her book, knowing what she had done to me. I wondered how she could cry over my village, when she had stolen its most precious treasure. I wondered what kind of person could lie like that and not feel ashamed of themselves. I wondered if she even knew that she was lying.