Free The River and the Book by Alison Croggon Page B

her mottled blue-green baby eyes and miaowed, and then she rubbed her chin on my hand and purred that loud, brambly kitten-purr. And that was that.

20
    Today Mizan climbed the stairs to my flat, puffing and grumbling, to bring me a letter from my grandmother. For all his hard-fisted bargaining, he has a kind heart: in the three years since I reached the city, he has never failed to visit me in the autumn, after his long trek upriver, to give me news of my village. I am always glad to see his sweaty, pock-marked face. I can’t offer him much for his trouble – a bottle of rice wine, some fresh bread, a meal of fish and dumplings – but he sits in my tiny kitchen on my thin, wobbly chair, Mely purring on his lap, and laughs his giant laugh, tearing hunks of bread with his big white teeth.
    His visits always make me very homesick. I vividly remember other meals, other conversations, when he sat in state beside my mother and father in our house, thumping the table, making his terrible jokes. The first year, when I was still living in the shantytown, he asked me when I was planning to return home, and I didn’t know what to say.
    Mizan tells me gossip and news he gathers from his travels. His journey grows more perilous every year, he says, and he is not sure how much longer he can keep going to my village. Things are getting worse month by month, week by week. He never travels without a gun and he has hired another man to guard his boat from looters and bandits. In one of the provinces in the mountains there is rebellion, and the army was sent from the city to hang the leaders. The people there are poor and desperate. In another the crime lords have taken over, and if Mizan wants to travel safely he has to pay money for protection.
    I know I’m lucky to receive news from home. Some of my friends have no way of hearing from their families: they are tormented that they will never hear if someone they love has died, or is married, or has had children, or is suffering, or is happy. It is an ache in them that they never say. You learn very swiftly not to ask, or you wait until the shadows are soft and dark and the talk has become slow, and then you will be shown the precious photographs, thumbed and fading, of children who are now years older, of wives or husbands smiling at the camera in some far-off happier time. Then there are the photos or locks of hair of those whom they know they will never see again, because they are dead: killed in the accidents of war, or by hunger or disease. Their sorrow is delicate and huge, a cloud that lives inside them that no storm of tears will ever dissolve.
    So Mizan is my angel, my messenger, and I am grateful. I write to my grandmother in the spring, and he takes my letter upriver. I tell her of my search for the Book, and of the friends I have made, and of my flat. I always try to sound cheerful. Her answer arrives in the autumn. She never asks about the Book. She writes a long letter, telling me all the major news of the year: important events, like the birth of Shiha’s twins, and village news, like Sopli’s accident with the axe, which left him with a missing finger, and the latest in the Juta family feud, and how Lila bought a new dinghy. I devour it all as if I am starving. I know my grandmother is trying to sound cheerful as well, and I know too that there is much that she is not saying. Both of us pretend that one day I will come home, and both of us know that I never will.
    When Mizan left, I sat for a long time staring out of the window at the lamplight falling on the fig tree. What would I do if I went back to my village? If I returned without the Book, people would be sorry for me, and I couldn’t bear that. It is much better to be anonymous, to lose myself in the river of the city, this great flow of people as nameless as I am. And now, when I have all but lost hope that I will ever see the Book again, I wonder if I would return even if I did find it. Would it be the same