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Digging for Fish
I am a watcher. I watch the flies searching for moisture on skin and blue-rimmed empty plates. I watch the black curls on the top of my father's head as he walks across the earth-packed floor, staring down at the worn straps of his sandals. I watch my sister dipping her moon face into a cracked clay bowl to slurp her breakfast like an animal. I watch the dark hole behind the fabric of my mother's cowl where her worn face and the dark stone eyes are hidden.
I say nothing. I've said nothing for years, except a thank you. I watch and do what I hear for I'm a good boy.
The house is full of dust. We breath it into our lungs; it circulates as tiny particles inside the pumping flow of our blood; it thickens us from without and from within. We move sluggishly, conserving energy, saving moisture.
I hear his voice like a rough hand brushing against ancient wood, Mosen, run and get the shovels from the shed, we dig today."
I jump up excited. For me action is always less boring than non-action. My sister turns as I run out. Her head is draped as is the custom and the fabric falls long across her shoulders hiding her severed stumps at her side. My mother's hands toil away attaching remnants of cloth together. Her eyes are always hidden as she works; her pace is furious, yet steady as if she were mending the entire unraveled blanket of the earth.
Outside the sun is still low, barely edging above the high gunnel of our boat, tilted on its keel on the dry bed of the sea like a stranded creature. It's ribs run smoothly in a curve from prow to stern, an arched belly of a sperm whale. I reach the shed and push into a magical world that may have been, a world that was, that was made up through tales and smells and sounds when my grandfather's hands were firmly in the present, when my father's eyes were not contemplating sandal straps, when my sister laughed and tickled me running to bury my face into the fish smell of my baba's trousers, when my mother hummed soft songs to the stars on cool evenings.
The shed is large; large enough to build a fishing boat, mend the nets, carve rudders, and make tools. I watch the particles of dust fly up into the column of light now streaming through the one side window. The skewed patch of sun on the floor reveals curled shavings and chiseled chunks of wood shaped from evolving hulls from another time. The assortment of shapes lie dormant like sleeping bottom feeders left to dry and die. I hear my father's voice, arid like the wind.
" They're resting on the rafters beside the bench, " he shouts.
I look up, smelling the remnants of the fish oil and pine tar, the scent of rags as old as dust and powdered marrow. The shovels hide behind the nets that droop like dead birds trussed up to season in the air. I jump, stretch my fingers to hit the shovel blades dislodging their balance, disturbing the fulcrum point. I jump again and again until they tip and fall into my arms.
" Mosen!"
I hear the impatience in my father's voice and race out the door toward where he is waiting beside the old well, now dry and dead. Today the well is a small impression in the sand, full of stones that once formed its wall. I see the images of another time; my mother hauling water to the lip, the dark cool liquid staining the stones, glittering in the sunlight a sit splashes from the pail's oscillating waves over the sides and onto my sister's smooth bare brown arms. I hold that image clutching it like a smooth stone to my heart, holding it down there in my chest, preventing it from shattering and rising up into my throat.
I hand one shovel to my father. He watches my face as I pass the well. He never looks at the pile of stones that lie like a grave beside him. He takes my hand and I obey. We walk past the original shoreline with its sweeping curve of graduated sediment. We walk beside the pier, dropping below it as we walk out, letting it tower above us like a bridge running out to an empty chasm. I look up and see the sunlight through the empty spaces where planks have been removed to build fences or shore up roofs. I think of how the water filled the space where we walk and look at my father now submerged within himself as we move toward the spot at the end where he feels we can dig and be successful.
At first the sand is light, dusty and loose trailing from our shovels like wispy cascades, dry tears. The shovels rasp through the skin of the earth, shout back at us.
Slowly though a hole emerges, symmetrical, hidden by the mounds of sediment lifted out and raked back from the periphery. We both dig side by side, backs against each other lifting with a rhythm; the arcs of our shovels co-ordinated not to clash. I start to smell the memory of the fresh clean water of the sea locked deep in the layers we cut through; some coarse and pebbled, others smooth and fine like powder, moist and pressed to paste. I want to suck the sand and draw the water out. My father stops when the top of the new well is above his head and says.
" Get the ladder from the shed and a pail with a long rope."
He lifts me out pushing me up on his gritty shoulders with his sandy arms. On the
On the walk back up the sea bottom scorches my sandals and I stop beside the pile of silent stones, the old well. I hear the voices talking to me from beneath the stones; harsh guttural sounds mixed with familiar haunting tones of panic. I rush past them letting them trail off into the morning heat. In the shed I see the pile of coarse coiled rope along the wall facing the house. The light in tiny bars slants through the timber slats along the wall. I crouch down throwing the ropes across my back like a cape and bring my eye to an opening between the salts. I can see a small toe, my mother's toes in a dusty sandal stretching out toward the light. I hear the voices once again, sounds from the far end of a tunnel. I am my father now, buried beneath the coils of rope, heavy like fresh earth upon me, listening, hiding from the sounds. I dare not ask myself questions. I grab the rope and find the pail and return with the ladder on my shoulder. My father speaks to me from the hole, as if in memory he has traded places.
"Where have you been? I could make rope and build a ladder in that time." He is impatient. The need for water makes us all impatient; I can't tell him where I've been, back into the dreamtime when all things changed. He would forbid it all with a look ad a slap, a striking out against himself, a poor soul in need of punishment. I don't speak I watch, and empty pail on pail of sand, one after the other, watching time hauled up and scattered on the ground. We take turns. I descend to dig and fill and he ascends to haul and scatter. Over time we draw apart, a father, a dark strange shape silhouetted against the yellow sky, a son buried in the damp shadows of the hole. I want to get inside his skull and ask him why.
My sister comes. I see her against the light above; holding the yoke designed for her with food prepared and water collected from the night traps. She is a black scarecrow on a cross to me. I ascend. We both with our hands like spoons scoop the lentil stew out of the pot into small bowls.
"Thank you, Mira," I say staring deeply into her dark expressionless eyes. My father looks downward as always and grunts his thanks; his dark curls now moist with sweat and pitted with the excavated earth. We eat in silence. Mira sits on the sand motionless, covered except for her moon face; the yoke free of its burden still across her shoulders, a grim reminder. I imagine that she is reaching out to me from the folds in her shawl, her soft brown arms holding my head gently close to her breast. She rocks me to sleep with a soft humming when the moon is a sliver in a sea of night.
She doesn't reach out to me or speak and when we are both finished she struggles to her feet, turns and ascends the gradual slope of the sea floor up towards the house.
All afternoon we dig falling into the rhythm of the shovel, earth, and pail. I fall deep into my thoughts still wondering why. I'm in the deep well of my memories, the well of lost souls. The new government, the men from the hills close the schools for a while, burn the old books, send my mother home from the hospital where she cared for the dying and the sick. They open the school for me and the other boys in the village but my sister stays home along with my mother, cut off. In the chaos my father sits and waits with the other men, heads down remembering the beauty. The dry trees trail vines of video and audiotape. The tape flaps in the breeze, glinting in the sun, humming strange tunes to which we cannot dance. They take away the rifles and we all sit inside at night hearing the sounds of strange wild animals all loose from the city zoo. They wander amid the city's destruction. If we have rifles which we don't, we can hunt them to sustain ourselves.
My father doesn't speak, but comes up the ladder just as the sky is that perfect blend of blue and red, crisp with black silhouettes that protrude across the shriveled womb of the earth's curtain. We leave the ladder for tomorrow and carry the pail and rope and shovels back to the shed in silence. We pass the stones of the old well and it is as if my sister's arms are reaching up to me and my mother's cries penetrate my soul. My father hurries past, afraid to step upon the shadow of his own grave.
I want to ask him why. I want him to say to me, " Mosen, there will be .....", but I can't formulate the sentence in my mind, a mind that can't push away the past.
The light is gone now and the moon like a bull's horn cuts an arc across the star. We eat in silence as if all our days we will, since they strung the trees with celluloid, unleashed wild animals and sacrificed my sister who doesn't hold me now. The lamp is extinguished and we each sink into the darkness for the night.
My darkness speaks to me of many things. My grandfather touches me with a rough hand that could grasp a fish as round as the trunk of a linden tree. We sit beside one of the great rivers flowing into the sea. I hear the rush of the water; everything is green, my heart is green and happy in the sun. Another time I watch the prow of our boat cleave the green waters into foam; egrets cruise past us on the way to shore. I watch my father and my grandfather winding in the nets, heavy with silver-bellied fish; the air electric with the screams of gulls trailing after us. Over time as I grow stronger, up from the earth like a watered plant, I watch the sea shrivel into a dry husk of sand and toxic salt; I listen to the river beds deposit their trickling insults onto a dried up basin. I look for green and only find a few survivors, tiny red-flowering solianka bushes pushing away encrustations of salt on a gray corpse. Where the cotton-field pipeline leaks, we steal water from the muddy pools that form.
There is much to think about. My grandfather lives his whole life until the very end depending on the permanence of things. From the window the sea would sparkle; beneath its waters fish brought him life and work for everyone. He hunted and grew his own tomatoes. Now we can spit cotton but we can not eat it. My father too follows my grandfather to a point when impermanence catches up to him and swallows him and me, all of us.
The pipeline lays like an ugly appendage, intruding and raping us, cutting the two rivers limbs from us, leaving us standing, hiding, helpless, shameful, hollow and hopeless.
In the early morning with the gray light stealing from the darkness my father and I move toward the new well. I go to get the ropes and pail from the shed. Again I see the heavy coils of rope my father hid beneath when the young zealous soldiers full of the new government's ideas, came into our yard. I see the strips of wood forming the wall, his prison, as he watched. I pass by the mound of stones of the old well that he threw me down to save me when they came. I smell its dampness, touch the slippery nodes of rock I climbed upon to watch those young soldiers. I yearn for fish, for water, for dancing, for my sister's embrace, for a glimpse of my mother's face, and for a father I can forgive.
All day we dig deeper and deeper into the floor of the sea. When I am down there is a sense of tunneling toward a new world. Above I shield myself against the corrosive wind that rips up salt and sand into my face. The harshness is of a doomed planet, a wasteland of despair. We dig; the rope and pail connecting us, some strange genetic umbilical cord of memory, mine a clutter of dismembered messages, his an unfathomable pool of darkness to me.
Each day passes as we work together drawing apart, our souls stretched out across a lifetime of pain. Deeper and deeper into the earth we dig, like madmen tunneling to escape. One day when the sky above me is like the circle of the full moon in a night sky, I sink my shovel in as I have done time and time again for two days. The earth falls away, downward and my feet lean sideways at grotesque angles as the water bubbles up around me, and stability falls away. I fall over listing like a sinking ship upon an ocean. I am the sea, frothing up the tunnel of the well, sucking the cold, clear fresh unsalted water through my nose and throat. I feel the flutter of life around me; white silver-bellied fish reclaimed from a dark sanctuary too impossible to believe in.
" Mosen, Mosen!"
The rope is taut. I grip it, submerged in some unconscious world. I feel the motion, rising with the rope, rising with the swell and surging pressure of the water released from its confinement. The moon of light grows larger, wavering and wobbling in the refracted sunshine from above. My father pulls me to the surface like a fish in a net, a net from the past. On my back I cough and spit up water lying beside my father, exhausted from hauling me back to life. I look at him and wonder where he is right now after saving me twice. I wonder where he was that one day for which I can't forgive him.
That one day I watch, my eye peeking through the crevice in the rocks at the top of the well. From the outside, I see through the slats of wood on the shed. I see my father inside, cloaked in rope, watching the courtyard. I hear my mother's screams and watch the soldiers lining up to rape her, one by one on the stone steps at the kitchen door. My sister is silent and out of sight, but soon she is dragged out into the sunshine, kicking her bare legs and flailing her one loose arm. She too is violated as I watch and my father hides. Many deliberate gun shots paced out are heard from the neighbouring houses and other soldiers drag limp bodies, a neighbourhood of old laundry, old rags, into our yard. One soldier, shouting orders, says something about my sister's fingernails, nails she applied the mother-of-pearl polish to the day after her tenth birthday, a gift from our auntie in the city.
I cannot move; my father doesn't move. He sees his dead friends, the men that yesterday he shared cigarettes and vodka with in someone's kitchen late at night without the lantern on. My sister doesn't move; my mother sobs, almost unconscious. I see the shining of the blade in the light of the sun, and I deliberately slide down the wall of the well dropping into places darker than death and imaging now the cuts that hack her arms away, the darkness in the souls of men so fundamentally wrapped up in their own fanaticism that they'd leave her, her arms seeping life like two rivers mingling with the sand. Deep in the bottom of the well I curl like snail and see my father in a cocoon of rope, buried; a dying fetus still alive.
Guttural voices come to the rim of the well. The heads of soldiers obliterate the light. They are preparing a tomb for us. My sister's arms fall like feathers toward me. They take so long to fall. They hit my shoulder like soft sticks and I clutch them to my chest and cannot speak. The bodies of my father's friends bounce from side to side as they fall, and cloak me in a cluttered tangle of limbs and blood. I cannot speak or cry. I can hardly breath. I wait and watch my sister embracing me for the last time.
When it is dark and quiet and my sister's arms have fallen into sleep, my father lowers a rope and whispers to me, " Mosen, Mosen. "
My hand finds the rope and my father hauls me, clutching my sister's arms, to the surface. My mother in the kitchen is quiet behind her head covering and my sister lies in a fever, the raw openings that were her arms now sealed with fire and wrapped like little fish in gauze.
That night my father fills in the well with sand and stones and I bury my sister's arms, tiny oyster shell nails glowing back at me under the moonlight.
My father's hand touches me, the first touch since we buried things; bodies, memories. We both look into the new well. I lower the pail and bring the water up to us. The fish frantically thrash the surface. I let my father drink and then I lower my face into the pail. There is no salt. The water is cold and pure and rushes to my forehead as I gulp it down. The water, fish, the new well are all like magic, out of a place of miracles, out of a dream time I'm afraid we are in, sleeping under the weight of heavy coils of rope. My sister and my mother suddenly appear as if like sheep and goats they smell the water. We are all together watching magical fish like tiny messengers swimming. I hold the pail up to my sister's lips. She smiles at me and I can almost feel her hand stroking the top of my head. My mother holds my father and in a frozen moment she lets the fabric fall away from her face. Her hair is long, coiled like rope. It flows out, a river. My sister's smile is like water to my lips; my mother's hair a lifeline out of the darkness.
At first I cannot speak, as I haven't spoken and then, like flashes of fish belly in the water, words form and come bubbling into the dry air.
" Father, Mira, mother."
They all look at me. I am the centre, like the well, the old and the new. I can see that they too carry a bag of memories behind their eyes. I isolate my grief.
" Father, why?"
The "why" is my own internal darkness that expands to consume the universe. He knows what I ask of him and it is as if he has always been waiting for the question.
"Mosen, Mosen."
My name repeated is the beating of my heart.
"Father, father."
My heart flutters with possibilities, impossibilities like silver fish escaping from cavernous depths.
" That day, Mosen, I .... I couldn't move. You saw me. I know. I hid you, a precious jewel, in the bottom of the well, but you still saw me, saw everything."
He pauses and looks down the well. My eyes follow his. The magical silver-bellied fish are gone. They'd left the dream. I don't want to tear my eyes away in fear the water will drain away. My father starts speaking once again and I look up into his eyes, his own dark wells of water.
" Another time, in another place, long before that day they came to our village, other soldiers came. They took away the men and boys. They beat them and cut them open like little goats rather than waste bullets. And they buried them somewhere, in a dried up riverbed or a ditch. They raped the women and let them live, maybe because some violation has its limits in the minds of men, men with mothers and daughters who watch from dark corners in silence without revenge. But boys and men, especially young boys can be living ghosts to haunt you for your crimes. I hid you, Mosen, but sand was trickling through my hand when they came. I couldn't hide us all. They came. Your grandfather's ropes that hauled the nets into the boat saved me, saved you, saved all of us, you see. If they saw me there, they'd have killed me, killed us all."
He paused again. Strands of my mother's hair tugged for freedom in the air. My sister's arms were moving to embrace me. The water sparkled in the light, not a dream.
" Mosen, forgive me, Mosen."
I wait for a long time watching my mother's hair blowing in the warm breeze coming across the floor of the sea; watching Mira smile, feeling her soft brown arms around me; watching the darkness behind my father's eyes drain like a river onto the sand; watching the constant pool of water in the well, the well to sustain our souls, the well to mend the fragments of our lives. I speak for I am a good boy.
" Yes, father."
Mira is hugging me with her head nestled into the flat spot below my collarbone. My mother is kissing the side of my father's neck and running her fingers through his hair. In the corner of my eye I can see tiny silver fish just below the surface of the well.
David Fraser
Email: David Fraser
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