Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [38]
“You can’t let it take you over,” she said. “You are stronger than anything else, any of these people.” Her voice wrapped around me like arms.
I couldn’t speak, just stared at her and then at the ground.
“How about I tell you a story?” she said. “Would you like that? Something that happened a million miles from here, many years ago?”
I looked back up at her and felt relief wash through my body, tears start at my eyes. “Okay,” I said. I sat back and closed my eyes, let the last vestiges of pain slip away. The spice scent swirled around me. Mary leaned back and draped her arm around my shoulders.
“Once,” she said, “in a small Turkish village, there lived a man named Mihalis, who had a son named Costas. Mihalis had eyes the color of kiwis and bright black hair, just like his son.”
I pictured it: a man with hair like Mary’s, sticking out in every direction and as black as ink. My whole body released and let go, sinking into the grass.
“When the child was a year old, the father decided to leave the village because he wanted to teach his son to be good, and to teach him to live without love, as he had done. Mihalis set out into the world with his baby strapped to his chest. He walked and walked and never stopped to sleep. He wanted so much to be someplace new that his feet wouldn’t stop walking when he was tired but began to run, and he ran for six days from the love he’d never found, until he ended up in a barn.
“There the father and his son survived by eating sunflowers, cooking them over a fire. They spent every day lying in the sun reading the clouds and the books they’d brought. The child Costas learned about mathematics, jewelry-making, agronomy, homemaking, horseflies, and seeds. He learned to read as many languages as there are in the world, though he had no one to speak them to.”
I laughed at the idea, letting the story overtake me. Mary paused and laughed with me, touching my hair.
“One day,” she continued, “when Costas turned eighteen, Mihalis decided to return home to the village he’d left so long ago. He felt safe, convinced that he’d raised a child without love. But Costas was terrified of walking over the edge of the earth, and begged his father to stay. Mihalis tried to describe the wonders of people and other places, but his son could not understand. And when they left their home and Costas began to see other creatures like them, the boy was afraid and filled with delight when he saw that the world did not stop, but kept stretching before them.
“They had only been walking for two days when a group of young girls passed by them. Their bodies looked like fruit trees to the young Costas, who turned to his father and asked what these creatures were that made his stomach drop and his breath grow short. Mihalis turned to his son, who had stopped in the road, and saw his stricken face. He looked back at the young women and saw that one of them had stopped also, and was turned to his son.”
I was breathless, imagining it: the group of them paused in the rough, rock-ridden road, the girl’s deep black hair strewn with jewels and hanging to her knees, her sad eyes and the sand streaking her legs. Talk to her, I thought. I imagined her curving, parted lips. Go on. I imagined myself like a fruit tree, wearing sandals that revealed my toes.
“Mihalis remembered then the girl he’d run from. Her image appeared like a storm cloud over him. Mihalis had dreamt of Katerina every night for seventeen years, but the herbs that grew by the pond had made him forget every morning the dreams of the night before.
“What is it, whispered his son again as the girl walked toward them. Mihalis knew, at that moment, the waste of seventeen dreamless years; he thought quickly and replied, It is a kind of duck, and it will eat you. The son thought for a moment before he spoke again. I want one, he said.”
I looked up at Mary. “A girl can’t be a duck,” I said.
“It is all true, Tessa,” Mary