Free The River and the Book by Alison Croggon Page A

closest friends in the city. They take my hand and draw me out onto the dancefloor of the Stray Dog and I find I am dancing with my heart as light as a petal tossed on a spring breeze. I laugh and meet their eyes, and they are smiling: they are happy in the music, and happy for me, and there is nothing but this moment, and this moment is all spark and dazzle, the whirl of lace and the smell of fresh sweat and neroli and cigarette smoke and coffee. And in this moment I am whole; I have never lost anything.
    And soon we will sit down and order another atrocious wine and Mazita will say, “Here is Anna Irikina, the first poet of the City of the Plains!” And the crowd will be cheering and clapping, and Anna will stand up and walk to the stage, her chin high, and she will raise her hands and silence will fall, and she will say her poem into that listening silence, and it will pierce my heart. It will pierce my heart.

19
    Mely is now a sleek black cat with impeccably white paws, but when she ran into my ankles in a blind, spitting panic in Kilok, she was a tiny ball of fluff with soft claws that could barely pierce the skin of my hands, no matter how she scratched. I picked her up and she opened her pink mouth and hissed at me. Her eyes, still filmed with the blue of kittenhood, were blazing with terror, and her fur was wet with her own piss.
    I had spent a dispiriting morning trying to gather information at the Kilok market. I was not used to speaking to strangers; before I had always met people in my village, where I was an important person, and so I had been treated with respect. That day I began to discover what it means to be an unimportant person. I found it humiliating.
    Because I looked like a river urchin, it was difficult to catch the attention of the traders, who would brush me off impatiently or simply ignore my presence. Even so, I had managed to ask a few people whether they had seen a woman like Jane Watson. One said she had: a fair-skinned woman had bought some almonds from her a week ago perhaps. But she didn’t know where that woman might have gone, and had heard no talk of what she was doing. Another had been told of the woman with the silver camera and red hair, but had not seen her; he said that she was with a foreign man, and they had hired a jeep and gone into the desert. He asked me why I was looking for her, and I told him she owed me money, and it seemed for a moment that he had more to say. But then a customer wanted to buy some of his wares and he forgot about me. When I attempted to start the conversation again he waved me away, not even bothering to speak.
    At least it seemed clear that Jane Watson was not in Kilok, but I hadn’t found out anything at all useful. I wandered slowly back to the boat through the narrow alleyways, not really looking where I was going, and that’s when Mely ran into my legs. I was so surprised I picked her up without thinking, and I held her tightly against my chest as she struggled and spat and scratched. (She is wrong when she remembers that she was too exhausted to scratch me.)
    The last thing I’d expected to find in the lonely alleys of Kilok was a friend. Yet in those first moments, even before I was certain what kind of animal I was holding in my hands, I knew that Mely and I would be friends. Maybe it was just that my heart was bruised and hungry, and this frightened kitten seemed even more abject than I was, and my need flowered out to meet hers.
    In any case, I stroked her until her body stopped trembling, and then I carried her back to the boat and gave her some of the sour goat’s milk I had bought at the market. It didn’t occur to me to do anything else. I thought vaguely that perhaps I could find out where she belonged in the morning, before I went downstream to the next village. But when I woke up and we shared breakfast, it seemed as if she were already part of where I was going. I asked her if she wanted to stay with me, and she stared at me with