Screaming; silence; wailing. Another kind of silence. Finally another kind of wailing. A more laborious sound, pacing itself. Then the thready voice of an outraged infant. The absence—Elphie finally notices this, now she’s been alerted—of nocturnal monkey screams. If there’s another absence that she can hear, she doesn’t know that for sure.
She stays in her bed, her hand reaching out to steady Nessa’s swinging cot, as if in stabilizing her sister she might somehow keep the whole world from rocking out of its margins. Nessa sleeps through the commotion that besets the campsite. Should jungle cats sometimes be drawn to the sound of human activity, it will not be tonight.
Toward the morning, Elphie lets go of the rim of Nessa’s basket. She pads to the entrance of their tent and undoes the ties of the flap. In her leather boots she steps out into the predawn. A sky of liquid cobalt above, shadow of black moss below. The mosquitoes haven’t come awake yet. The fire has succumbed to embers. She already knows, somehow, that the new baby will need breakfast. So will everyone else, except for Melena. Little else to be sure of, Elphie stirs the embers, conjuring up sparks of white and scintillant red. Ti’imit has abandoned his post, as she always suspected him of doing.
She turns her back on them all, on all the sorrow and suffering yet to name itself. Perhaps that is the sound of her father crying very, very softly, as if to hide it from everyone. In small steps she circles the tents and lean-tos, the canoes and the campfire and the pitchy cudgels kept on hand in the event of a wildlife raid. She makes her way through the reeds—she can’t tolerate water but, in her boots, she can pick her way through mud—as close to the edge of the river as she can get.
The overgrowth on the opposite bank, a single wall of foliage. The matted perplexity of green-black life. She’d hardly be able to tell it from the black surface of the river but for a line of light, reflected from who knows where, that underscores the shoreline. Like the underlining of a stretch of important text, she might think later. Saying to her: Here, this is the important part. This is the part to remember.
The line is pale white, and because it is etched on the edge of water, it wavers very slightly, delimiting here from there.
As the dawn inches closer, Elphie sees in the water the upside-down reflection of two figures distinguishing themselves from the background. They are moving from right to left on the other side of the water that she can never cross or she would die, too. She cannot see them above as their dark silhouettes are one with the jungle growth, but she sees their upside-down reflections somehow. The polter-Monkey with her mother. The Monkey is leading Melena by the hand.
“Oporos,” she hisses, because she can’t bear to call after her mother, it would be too terrible not to be acknowledged in return, she can’t risk it.
The reflection of the polter-Monkey pauses and lifts a forearm. Elphie can’t see any eyes or any facial expression. Only an upside-down silhouette upon water just slightly lighter in tone. Its gesture is a response to her cry. But the Monkey then continues its job of chaperoning Melena into the past.
The girl looks away from her disappearing mother. When she recovers this memory years later, after its banishment from her mind, this is what she wonders about—perhaps she looks away to avoid the possibility that her mother has already chosen to look away from her. Whoever wields the cudgel first has a momentary advantage.
The pair of them, there and then not. The sky goes a soft, resistant pink, bloodstains in the laundry water. Elphie makes her way back to the tent where her sister swings in midair. In the khaki gloom Elphie pauses upon the mat of stamped grass between their two beds. Nessa is stirring, she is nearly awake. In the lowest voice Elphie has ever governed in herself to date, she starts to sing to Nessa, a song to comfort her, before either one can guess how soundly consolation will be needed.
She begins with baby babble syllables, tarra-ma bersy, tarra-ma bersy, but in the closed air of the tent they sound more like terrible mercy, terrible, terrible mercy.