“Yes,” I said. “The wrong is mine.”
34
So I went to see Jane Watson. That was two days ago, and I have been thinking about it ever since.
I was very nervous. I took the day off work and Ling Ti picked me up from my flat after lunch. I had spent the entire morning trying to decide what to wear. It’s not as if I had much choice: I don’t own many clothes. In the end, I wore a plain black pencil skirt and a white shirt. I put on the gold earrings my grandmother gave me when I was presented at the temple, and I braided my hair, which is now almost as long as it was when I lived in the village. I wanted to look stern and smart and important, like someone it wouldn’t be easy to dismiss.
We hardly spoke on the way: I think Ling Ti was almost as nervous as I was. We took the tram to the university. I had never been there before, but Ling Ti knew it well, as he studied there for a year before he left to become a great poet. Inside one of the big new buildings we caught a lift up to the seventh floor and came out into a green-painted corridor lined with numbered doors.
“We want number twenty-three,” said Ling Ti.
It didn’t take long to find it. We stood in front of the door for a few moments, as if we were preparing ourselves for an ordeal. Then Ling Ti winked at me. Although my heart was hammering in my chest, he made me smile. He raised his fist and knocked on the door, and I heard Jane Watson’s voice calling for us to come in.
It was a small, stuffy room, just big enough to hold an enormous desk that was piled with papers, with a tiny window that looked out on a ventilator shaft. The walls were lined with shelves that held stacks of books and files. Jane Watson was standing behind her desk to greet Ling Ti. She was smartly dressed in a woollen suit, but otherwise looked much the same as when I had last seen her, although there were deep circles under her eyes. She gave me a surprised glance, and then turned to Ling Ti and gave him a wide smile.
It felt too ordinary. After all the years of searching, after all the pain and loss, there should have been thunder and lightning. Ling Ti and I should have burst through the door like warriors, brandishing swords over our heads. Jane Watson should have cowered before us and begged for mercy. Instead we crowded awkwardly into a shabby room that was scarcely big enough to hold the three of us.
Jane Watson didn’t even recognize me. She thought so little of what she had done that she didn’t even remember my face. That’s when I lost my temper, silently inside, as if a switch had been flicked on.
“Ling Ti,” Jane Watson said, in her language. “What a great pleasure.”
“A great pleasure to meet you too,” said Ling Ti. “I hope you don’t mind, but I brought a friend. She wants to ask you some questions.”
Jane Watson frowned. “I was hoping to interview you, and I don’t have a lot of time,” she said. “But I suppose that’s OK.”
“I think you’ve met her before,” said Ling Ti, stepping aside.
This was my cue, and I stepped forward, holding my hand out in greeting. Jane Watson took my hand, looking puzzled. “I don’t recall…”
“This is Simbala Da Kulafir Atan Mucarek Abaral Effenda Nuum,” said Ling Ti.
“Hello, Jane Watson,” I said in my language. My voice was shaking, not with nervousness now but with anger. “I am the Keeper, and you stole my Book.”
Jane Watson recognized me at last. She looked shocked, and then a deep blush rose up from her neck, until her whole face was red. She sat down slowly in her chair, staring at me.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. She turned to Ling Ti and spoke in her language again. “I don’t know why you’ve…”
A great disgust rose up in my throat at her denial. “Jane Watson,” I said, “I remember when you came to my village, and stayed with my family and ate our bread and salt. We trusted you. And then you stole our most precious thing. You stole the Book that belonged to me and my mother and my grandmother and all my mothers before me. It doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to us, and I have come to take it back.”
While I talked, Jane Watson’s face returned to its normal colour. She looked me straight in the eye and said again that she had no idea what I was talking about, and she reached for the phone on the desk. Very gently, Ling Ti took her hand and lifted it away.
“Miss Watson,” he said. “Don’t call security. Let’s not make a scandal. Please don’t insult us by pretending that you don’t know what we’re talking about. If you don’t return the Book to its Keeper, I will write about it and everyone will know what you have done. What will that do to your career? Imagine what people will say. The great defender of the River people, a cultural vandal and thief!”
There was a long silence. Jane Watson had now turned very pale. She licked her lips, like a nervous lizard.
“I’m surprised to find that even you are a lackey of the powerful, Ling Ti,” she said. “I thought better of you.”
“You know very well that I am not.”
“And yet you are prepared to smear me.”
“I think the newspapers will be very interested,” said Ling Ti softly. “After all, they’re looking for dirt on you, aren’t they? And what will the university say, after sticking its neck out for you? It won’t be very happy.”
By now I was so angry my hands were shaking. “I don’t know how you can sit there and say to my face that you didn’t take the Book,” I said. “I know you did it. Everyone in my village knows it.”
“You can’t prove anything,” Jane Watson said quickly, and then she bit her lip, aware that she had given herself away.
“Why can’t we prove anything?” I said. “Because you stole from people who are less important than you? Because we’re not famous and don’t write books? What makes you think nobody will listen to us?”
Jane Watson was staring at her desk. Suddenly, to my surprise, I pitied her: she looked small and ashamed.
“And if I give it back?” she said at last.
“If you return it?” said Ling Ti. “We will say nothing.”
“Maybe,” I said. I was breathing hard. “Maybe we’ll say nothing.”
There was another long silence. Then Jane Watson stood up and went to a filing cabinet in the corner of the room. She took out a cardboard box and opened it. Inside was the Book. I cried out and snatched it from her.
I knew, straight away, that the Book was dead. It felt like any other book. I opened it with trembling hands, and it fell open on a word that was almost the last thing the Book had said to me. It was in the middle of the page, all by itself. It said: Change.
Slowly, carefully, I leafed through the entire book, and every page said the same thing. Only the last pages in the book were different. On them was the answer the Book had given to Jane Watson. There was the drawing of a landscape wound through by a river, and a flock of cranes flying over the horizon. On the facing page was written, in Jane Watson’s language: What profit it a man, if he gains the world and loses his soul?
I felt a huge bitterness rising up inside me, like a black tide. “You killed the Book,” I said to Jane Watson. This time I spoke in her language. “You stole it, and you killed it!”
She said nothing.
“Why? Why did you do it?”
This was the question that had eaten away at me all the time that I was looking for Jane Watson. She sat in her chair, refusing to meet my eye, and I knew then that she wouldn’t answer me. I realized I didn’t care any more what she had to say. Perhaps even she didn’t know why she’d stolen it. She knew it was wrong when she did it, she knew what the Book meant to our village, and she took it anyway. She thought she had the right to take it, because she was a famous writer and we were poor ignorant peasants, with our quaint beliefs and our old-fashioned clothes. She had wanted it, and she had taken it: there was nothing else to say.
“I know what the Book was trying to tell you, now,” I said. “I’ve learned things since I came to the city. The Book was warning you. It even used a verse from your own Ho
ly Book, so you would understand. I bet that was the last thing the Book ever said. I bet you looked inside the Book again before you stole it from our house, and that was what you found. And still you took it.”
I stared at Jane Watson with hatred as she sat at her desk, her head bowed. Then she spoke, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Then she said it again, in my language.
“It’s too late,” I said. “And it’s not enough.”
And then we left.
35
I don’t want to punish Jane Watson any more. Ling Ti and I have had some fierce arguments about it. I wanted him to write that editorial, I wanted her to be humiliated and exposed, I wanted to be revenged for what she had done to me, to my grandmother, to the whole village. But one day I remembered something my grandmother often said: “Revenge digs two graves.” My desire for revenge was corroding my own soul. Punishing Jane Watson won’t bring the Book back to life, and it won’t make me feel any better.
I haven’t forgiven Jane Watson, but Ling Ti is correct: she is more useful as an ally than as an enemy and, although she has done so much harm, she also does some good. “It may be that we have to speak in the enemy’s language, if we want to be heard,” he said.
Ling Ti often talks like that, as if he were a soldier in a war. I don’t want to be part of any war: but, as Ling Ti says, sometimes you have to fight, whether you want to or not.
Life is always more complicated than I would like it to be. When I think of Jane Watson sitting in her cramped office, looking crushed and ashamed, I am almost certain I don’t hate her. When I think of the suffering she has caused me and the people I love, I am almost certain that I do. Perhaps some good will come of this; perhaps Jane Watson will learn how to listen to the people that she says she wants to help. Perhaps one day, if I find I am ready to, I might even forgive her.
Next week, Ling Ti and I will begin the journey with Mizan back to my village. We will stay the whole summer and return to the city in autumn. It has been very complicated to arrange, mainly because of Mely. At first she wanted to come, and then she didn’t. At last, after a lot of discussion, we all decided that she would stay with Yuri while I was away, and then she changed her mind again. She hates being cold and damp and uncomfortable, and she remembers our journey to the city with distaste, but she doesn’t want to be separated from me. When she told me this, I wanted to cry: she is a very proud cat. To my surprise, she hasn’t once objected to my leaving: I thought she would be very angry. But she understands why I must go.
I am longing to see my family again. It’s as if I haven’t been able to admit quite how much I miss them, and now that we are actually going back to my village, all that missing has rushed in like a flood. I can’t wait to talk to my grandmother, and to see my father and sisters and brothers. I wonder how much they have changed in the years I have been away, and what they are doing now. I am planning to visit Shiha to see her twins, and perhaps she will play my mother’s favourite song on the tar and it will be, for a little while, as if I never left.
Yet I know it will be a sad return, because the Book is no longer what it was. I feel that I am bringing home a corpse to a grieving family. I have bought a special waterproof box and packed the Book carefully in silk, so it will be safe during our journey. My one hope is that my grandmother will know how to bring the Book back to life. She is very wise and knows more than I do about the Keeping. Perhaps, when it is back home on its special shelf in its room, I will again feel that faint tingle in my fingers, and the Book will remember all the things it knows, the songs and pictures and poems and stories and recipes, the histories and lists and languages. Somewhere in those fragrant pages is the picture of my mother showing me the Book for the first time, and somewhere, as yet unseen, is a picture of Ling Ti. When I looked in the Book for myself, it always showed me what I loved.
Today Ling Ti and Mely and I went to hear Blind Harim the Storyteller. It was a warm day, but heavily overcast: it will thunder later. The market was busy with all the usual traders, and Harim had a large audience. We sat down and waited with everybody else as the small boy brought Harim to his tree, and he raised his voice and began.
He told a very old story that I once read in the Book. It’s the story of Yntara, the Mother of All Things, and how she saved us all. I can’t tell it as well as he did, because I have neither his bewitching voice nor his skill with words, but it goes like this. In the morning of the world, the god of fire and the god of water were bitter rivals. Over time this turned into hatred, and at last they swore enmity and made ruinous war on each other. The war raged for many years, and fire and water detest each other even to this very day.
In the end the god of water was defeated when the god of fire caused the Great Mountain that held up the whole sky to fall in an avalanche upon his armies. But when the Great Mountain was destroyed it left an enormous hole in the heavens, and the sky began to fall down onto the earth. Burning stars exploded in the plains and earthquakes felled whole cities, and there was enormous suffering among all the peoples on the surface of the earth.
Yntara heard the cries of her children, and came to help. She tried to mend the hole with many-coloured pebbles she took from the bottom of the River, piling them high and weaving them together with powerful spells, but time after time they tumbled down into rubble. When she saw that she couldn’t build a mountain out of pebbles, Yntara stood where the Great Mountain had been and made the most powerful spell there ever was. She turned her body into rock; her raiment became the clouds and mists; and her long hair became the four rivers that flow down each of her sides. And so the sky was mended, and the people of the earth were saved from the destruction of the gods.
The story made me feel hopeful. Perhaps, I said, if we work hard enough, even our ruined world can be healed. I know from Jane Watson’s book that if they are treated well, rivers can be restored. Perhaps our River will not die. Perhaps the Book will speak again. Ling Ti said the story was designed to make people feel hopeful, but that it was a delusory hope, and that we couldn’t wait for the gods to save us. He said we have to fight for what we love because otherwise it will be stolen from us, and maybe it might cost us our whole lives. Mely said she didn’t care what it meant, because it was just a beautiful story.
We squabbled amicably as we wandered through the alleys and streets on the way back to my flat. Then I looked up and saw a flock of cranes, flying high over the city, and pointed them out to Ling Ti. He put his arm around my shoulders and whispered the poem in my ear:
Watch for the cranes, who will bring my love to you, even as far as the Plains of Pembar.
Even as far as the Plains of Pembar. Even as far as the city, which is my home.
ALISON CROGGON is the acclaimed author of the Books of Pellinor and Black Spring, which was a Notable Book in the 2013 Children’s Book Council of Australia, Book of the Year Awards and was shortlisted for the 2014 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. She is an award-winning poet whose work has been published extensively in anthologies and magazines internationally. She has written widely for theatre, and her opera libretti have been produced all around Australia. Alison is also an editor and critic. She lives in Melbourne with her husband, the playwright Daniel Keene.
For more information about Alison,
visit: www.alisoncroggon.com
or follow her on Twitter: @alisoncroggon
Amnesty International
The story of The River and the Book has human rights at its very core. The theft of the Book is an abuse of the rights to privacy, culture and property; the destruction of the River and the communities who live along its banks comes about because of business and state abuse of human rights.
We all have human rights, no matter who we are or where we live. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted in 1948, after the horrors of World War II. It was the first document to agree common, global terms for truth, justice and equality. Human rights help
us to live lives that are fair and truthful, free from abuse, fear and want and respectful of other people’s rights. But they are often abused and we need to stand up for them, for ourselves and for other people.
Amnesty International is a movement of ordinary people from across the world standing up for humanity and human rights. Our purpose is to protect individuals wherever justice, fairness, freedom and truth are denied.
If you are interested in taking action on human rights, you can find out how to join our network of active Amnesty youth groups at www.amnesty.org.uk/youth
If you are a teacher, take a look at Amnesty’s many free resources for schools, including our “Using Fiction to Teach About Human Rights” classroom notes on a range of novels with human rights themes. www.amnesty.org.uk/education
Amnesty International UK, The Human Rights Action Centre
17–15 New Inn Yard, London EC2A 3EA
020 7033 1500
[email protected] www.amnesty.org.uk
Other titles by this author
The Books of Pellinor
The Gift
The Riddle
The Crow
The Singing
Black Spring
ALSO BY ALISON CROGGON
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. All statements, activities, stunts, descriptions, information and material of any other kind contained herein are included for entertainment purposes only and should not be relied on for accuracy or replicated as they may result in injury.
First published in Great Britain 2015 by Walker Books Ltd
87 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HJ
Text © 2015 Alison Croggon