Heshua
My son is blind in one eye. He doesn’t hide the blind half of his sight, and he spends whole days sat by the well, telling everyone who comes to drink from it all the things he’s seen with that unnatural eye, and when they don’t listen, he talks to himself. He’s not ashamed of it; he doesn’t see it, not like I see it; there’s a mist, which moves, and a light too, a pin-prick, a reflection of the desert sun. He doesn’t see it, always looking out, through the mist, never looking at his own reflection in the water. Why doesn’t he cover it like I ask? His good eye is a jewel, hazel, a black stone dropped in quivering sand. But he doesn’t care for the handsomeness of his hazel eye; some days he covers his good eye and walks about blind, saying he can see.
Heshua I called my son, because that was the name of his father’s father, but he is his mother’s son, my son, even when he seeks to be something else; the clear water from the well is beside me, ready for me to drink, and I’m looking at my reflection in the bucket, and I see Heshua, in my high cheekbone and smooth brow. He is his mother’s son, not that rough austere old monkish man that starved himself in search of God and died before his dotage. He’s my son.
Such a delicate boy, but trying to be ‘a man’.
“Endure,” he says. “A man is a man when he can endure.”
“Do your chores,” I say, “and stop looking for excuses.”
The breads are almost done. They’re cooling before me, and I’ve sat working at them twice as long as I should have. Everytime I push a risen bread onto the tray, I should hear the pat-pat of the next, of Heshua’s turning and tossing the uncooked dough, lifting and tilting, with care, with love, with attention. He never did it with attention.
I shouldn’t be doing it alone, but Heshua is nowhere to be seen.
I’ve opened the door. The air is thick with baked bread, filling my nose. It’s dappled with spices. It’s an earthy smell, and warm, and I can still smell the heat of the oven in it. It swaddles the room as a blanket would. The scent of it will make the Episcopal of the monastery abandon his fast and flagulate himself for a week. I don’t much care, not now, because I can see the heavenly scent rising, like fumes, out of my door, caught on the empty desert breeze, up and away across the rocks and sand. I’m praying. The wind will carry it to my son and he’ll hunger for home, and give up his search.The bread his mother bakes will tell him roundly to stop searching for the shadow he saw, and I’ll give him a good slap when he gets home, for worrying his mother so.
*
My mother doesn’t understand. She doesn’t see what I see.
I saw it a moment ago; a black spot on the horizon. It shimmered with the wind, like delicate silk whipped this way and that, but far, far away, where it might be imagination, or a trick of my brown eye. The sheer heat gives everything here transparency, strangely ephemeral for stuff so solid as rock and sand. The spot disappeared when I blinked, but it can’t be gone; one can’t lose sight of something so suddenly.
The track ahead curves into a warren of sharp, broken hills. Then it’s lost from view. I’m not sure if I should still be following this track. I don’t know if the stranger I’m chasing is following the track cut by our forefathers.
The desert is a battleground of hill and valley. The ground rises into seemingly endless ridges of limestone, which give way suddenly in precipices down to smooth and winding river valleys, along which brown and grey dying shrubbery cling to the memory of water, following the soft river bed for mile upon mile. But sometimes the valleys are sharp and bitter, cracked and fissured, lined with broken rock because of landslides, while the hills are seen as soft and rolling, draped with sand.
I do miss the well. I miss what water might do, softening life, softening parched ground. I’ve been gone three days; my skins of water are light, my flesh is stretched over my bones, splitting. I’ve seen no sign of water since leaving the monastery and its well, only the shallow trickle of dead streams, and nothing that can wet the lips like the water from home.
The desperate bunches of desert grasses, sprouting from dry rock, dead white rock, bare and broken rock, they’ve scratched my feet and ankles through my sandals and now the blood is matted and clotted with sand; I’m worried the sand will mingle with my blood. The monks at the monastery say that the desert will infect you. Perhaps it gets into the blood. The desert infects the blood.They say then that no matter what, even were you to tie yourself to your doorposts, you’d be lost in it.
My mother brushes the desert sand out the door morning and night. Not once have I helped. Not once have I seen fit. I let sand get into my bed and it got rubbed into my skin at night whilst I dreamed. Even as I remember this, I find myself rubbing at my brown eye. It stings. I think a speck of sand might have got in.
My sense of smell is worn weak by the same scentless air. There’s never any new scent in the air, but the desert air is never fresh. Now I’ve stopped in my tracks because suddenly there’s something in the air, a lingering warmth, something heavy, cut with spice. It’s unmistakable, the scent of my mother’s baked bread. I can’t help standing where I am, looking over my shoulder. I was thinking of home, now I think of the hands that tossed the dough, the water that moistened it. I close my eyes.
But the desert wind whips in. It snaches the smell away, brings back the blank expanse.
There’s a hollow in the hillside to my right. I creep into the shade, bringing my knees up against my chest, digging into my satchel for dried cake. I eat slowly, muttering to myself. I close my eyes, try to smell it as I bite it, but it’s too dry. I chew quickly, sip some water, then rise and continue on my way.
*
The bread is done. The smell’s gone. The wind has whipped it all away. Now I’ll get up and look outside, to see if he’s returned, as I did yesterday and the day before.
My bones ache and moan. They don’t want to lift me. They think it's time for me to lie down now, forever perhaps. “Haven’t we held you up in childbirth?” they say. “Haven’t we been sturdy for two-score years already? We’re allowed to be brittle now. Where’s the strong son whose marrow is the marrow we gave as a gift?”
I cling to the doorposts as I gaze out. My nails scratch the dry wooden frame. He’s nowhere to be seen.
These doorposts were thrust into the rock by Heshua’s father’s father. He was a strong man. He hewed rock, made brick from water, mud and dust, and lifted his work high above his head. When I was a young girl I watched this man building my future home, though I didn’t know it. I watched fascinated. I saw his old bones moan and watched him ignore their creaks and groans, utterly silent. He expressed himself in stone, revealing what he’d seen of the world in the chiseled contours of rock. He never spoke- never needed to; for him brick upon brick was word upon word, and when he laid down his trowel it was as if he’d paused momentarily for breath. Only when the sun set, and he was drenched with sweat, would he stop and pray. I wish my son spoke as his grandfather spoke.
I watched his son grow old helping his father; only when he’d buried his father and his own bones creaked did he turn around and notice me, the young girl watching from beside the well.
Nothing new has been built since my husband finished his father’s home and died. New things don’t grow often here. The monastery is a thousand years old. I sometimes think the monks are older. The well, older still.
The monastery stands solemn and silent. It hasn’t any pretensions though. Amidst the hugeness of the Idumea, it can stand to no pretense. Its walls rise an inch above my waist; the monks’ stone huts don’t allow them to stand, in defence against vanity; the minaret at its gate has snapped and fallen in two, and it’s been left as a sign for death.
The monastery is silent. The monastery is a shelter for men wanting to hear the whisper of Adonai upon the soundless breeze but fear to look from dawn to dusk upon the emptiness of Adonai’s abode.
I’ll stand a moment here. Surrounding the monastery is the bustle of life. I look upon it from my doorway, at all the things my son cannot see: the bleat of the goats in their endless scuffing and shuffling, the hum of voices, the resounding patter of sandalled steps; here is a sphere of homely cacophony in the desert.
But there is more life than usual. The Badewi have come. Filling the enclave of the well is the huff of their camels, the racket made by their herds, and the clatter of their laughter. They've no solemnity. They’re here to drink our water, and move on. They trade us fine flour from Henia for our water, our life. When they chatter, and when they laugh, I hear the rattle of their sabres. They’re always sharp, their sabres. Before they meet the Episcopal they gather together on the ground and sharpen their sabres with rocks, roughly, loudly, always.
Why don’t they kill us?
I know why. We keep the water from drying up; we watch it, while they wander.
But they might be bored one day and kill us anyway. And what if our watch should lapse? What if a future generation should cease to keep a good eye on the water in the well? If they come and find the well run dry, what will they do?
I go back inside where they can’t see me standing alone. My son still hasn’t returned.
*
I talk to myself as I walk, but sometimes I stop. The silence itself is beautiful. And the lifelessness of the landscape is itself a kind of silence. And the patience, the slow immutable shifting of the sands and the gradual wearing of the rocks, ever so steadily, that too is a kind of silence. The constancy of the desert… No, not constancy, for the desert is never constant; it shifts, adjusts, contracts and expands. But it is perpetual. In its perpetuity, it is as close to silence as any image I can form. You see, I’ve noticed that about the desert: its simplicity, in the unbroken succession of rock and sand, rock and sand- whatever the formation- it forces unity out of one’s thoughts. It’s impossible to think diverse things here. One’s thoughts start to align, narrow, even, to a pinprick, one black speck, and that is God.
I saw the stranger this morning, silhouetted by the sunrise. I’m sure now that what I’m chasing is real.
I’ve been running for an hour, but the horizon has come no closer. This salt-flat I’ve entered is immeasurable. Odd clumps of saltbush grow from the cracked earth only to make it all seem flatter, and there are waves of sand that glide like ripples on a plain. I’ve never come this far before; I’ve only seen this bleak feature from afar. From a distance it’s like a dried-up ocean; up close, it’s a vast consuming blight. I shouldn’t have descended. I’m afraid I’ll go mad.
White. Everything is white. It was two days of wandering before I realised that. Even the living brush is white, scoured by the same dust. I realise that the greys tones of the clouds are just another shade of white. While one stares at a blank expanse that refuses to roll away hour after hour, one loses one’s vision for detail. Only stark contrast is clear, a speck of black on the horizon, for example. All else is empty landscape, a meaningless backdrop.
Yesterday I stumbled into a graveyard. The tombstones lay like debree, white like the rocks around them. I don’t know what old tribe those tombs were a monument to. In my twenty-five years I’d never before seen them. The tombs, hundreds of them, were losing the fight to the rough shrubs and rising sand. They were camouflaged with the rest of the desert; I didn’t realise I was amidst them until I was surrounded by them, and I don’t remember leaving them behind.
Since yesterday my brown eye has been in pain. There’s sand in it. I rubbed it thoughtlessly as I walked. It began as as a rough raw pain, then a sharp and stabbing pain. It’s started to run, and the tears are milky.
My water is running out, and I must use it to clean my eye. The soiled water runs down my cheek and dries up before it can drip to the ground.
*
I wash myself with water from the well. The desert glides off me. The grit, the desert disease, its madness, lifts from my pores. I take time to feel the coarseness of the cloth, made soft by water, on my stomach, my thighs. I delight in the patter of water as I ring the cloth. When I’m clean, I pour the dirty water out onto the roots of the date palms that shade my home. When my bucket is empty, I return to the well to refill it. I hope by now my son has learnt the value of the water from our well.
*
The night came fast today. Clouds covered the sunset. The desert is a sheet of black.
A tall juniper bush gives me shelter from the cold wind, and it gave me seeds for my repast. My prayers of thanks escaped as a mist and dissipated.
I take shelter in caves whenever I can, but this night I’m too exhausted to keep on searching. At night I’m hounded by the cries of wild animals: foxes, wolves, caracals. The noise drifts across the stillness, far away and then terrifyingly close. But I don’t see them. I sleep clutching my staff.
It’s the wind that howls tonight, drowning out the thoughts I whisper to myself. The bush cracks and whips with it, and I can’t pull my hood up far enough. I sit, cradling myself. I don’t want to lie down; my blankets are rough, and there’s sand between the fibres. It’s cold, so cold without a fire. I must lie down to sleep, but I know I’ll dream of glowing embers and wake up cold.
My thoughts are cut into by the sound of tapping on rock. It’s the sound of a staff, certainly it is. His staff. It moves laboriously, step by step. I sit bolt upright. With my blind eye I see the black swathed figure; all before my brown eye is black. I strain through the dark to see.
*
The embers are turning pale; it’s time for bed. I’ll stoke them one more time, to feel the heat rise and wash over my face, then fade through the open door where the wind’ll take it across the desert. Heshua will feel it, wherever he is, and he’ll wish himself home. I send it to him with a prayer.
The goats are rustling in their pen. There’s the grind of the rope as someone draws the bucket from the well. It’s late for that. It’s Maryan, my neighbour; she’s always doing her evening ablutions late when the Badewi are here. She hopes they’ll link the water with the life her body might bear, or with the image of her smooth wet skin. And I can hear them, too. They’re laughing, loudly and hoarsely, drunk on our water.
But beyond this I hear the prayer of the monks. The hum is the hum of the desert at night, a hymn to the small voices of the wilderness. It soothes me, for the hymn is not careless of life.
My blankets are soft, the stones of my house are still warm, my is body clean, my mind patient and at rest. The monks’ hymn lulls me to sleep.
*
My mother doesn’t understand what I’m looking for.
They say the desert gives one the opportunity to see oneself for who one really is. That is why holy men and monks, wanderers and madmen, visit the desert. I was born in the desert. What of me? Was I therefore born mad? Or just born with the sight to see myself for who I really am?
I don’t want to see any more of myself. I don’t want to see God either. No more of the desert. I want to find someone to talk to, someone who knows more than just the desert. The monks, the Badewi, the wandering mad men, my mother- I cannot talk to them; I want to talk to someone who isn’t from around here, a stranger who might learn from the wisdom of the desert, my wisdom. I want to see something that wasn’t born of the desert; I want to talk to a stranger, who isn’t of the desert.
I will talk to the figure in black. I am gaining on him.
I was running because I saw the figure, clear as day, looking out from next ridge of hills, black robe billowing, hood low over his face to keep off the burning light, leaning heavily on his staff. I stopped talking to myself and called out. He turned to me. I started to run. He turned and descended behind the hills.
I ran faster. My infected eye itched but I ignored it. I’d seen how slow he moved; there was no way I couldn’t catch him. It didn’t matter how raw my throat was; it didn’t matter about the blood that collected between my toes; it didn’t matter how much my brown eye seeped, that this dried down my cheek, clotted on the edge of my vision, that it stung, that my vision faded.
I ran regardless.
Until I fell.
I took the slope too fast and fell. My loose sandal caught on a rock. I felt my ankle twist and hot pain shoot up my leg.
I sat on the ground. Around me, the hills joined with the setting sun to cast me in shadow. I massaged my twisted ankle.
The figure has long gone. Now I must walk slowly.
*
My son is wayward. I accept that now. His father had eyes only for stone, and for heaven when his arms could work no more. While he worked, he talked. When he prayed, he prayed aloud. My son listened. When he became a man, he too began to talk. He talked to his father until his father died. He talked to monks until they gave up teaching him silence. He talked to the Badewi until he grew disgusted with how little they had to say.
Now my son is tired even with talking to the desert, with Adonai his Lord. I fear he’ll journey far searching for things that no one here will talk to him about.
I remain silent. There are so many sounds; I need only close my eyes to hear them. The sweep of my broom is rythmic, the thud of the beaten rug resounds, and the drawing of my breath comes fast as I work. Most of all, I love the sound of the bucket rising from the well: the drag of the rope-line against the frame, the wet thump of the empty wood as it strikes the water, the delightful plonk of the full bucket dropped upon the ground, the screech and thud of the stone as it’s hauled back over the hole. Best, though, are all the wet sounds of the water swillinging in the bucket as it’s brought back home.
The tub is scolding, the water bubbling over the fire. It’s large, large enough for all Heshua’s tunics, cloaks, undergarments, trousers, and blankets. It’s bronze, and I borrowed it from Maryan just for this. Maryan is discreet, and she said she’d pray for Adonai to drag my son back home.
I must stop myself beating the paddle too hard against the water in anger. He never wanted to wash the desert from his clothes, not because he was too holy a man, but because he was too lazy a son. As soon as he steps through that door, and as soon as I’ve kissed his brow and removed his sandals, and bathed his hands and feet on the threshold of his home, I’ll beat him round the backside with this paddle until he can never walk out that door again.
I beat him hard the first time he saw that figure.
“I was hunting gazelle,” he said.
I beat him for the lie.
He spoke the truth as we baked bread together. A stranger, he’d seen, overlooking the monastery. He’d clambered up the slope. He’d called. He knew the stranger had heard him. Heshua couldn’t see beneath the stranger’s hood, but he knew their eyes had met. When Heshua made it over the lip of the ridge, the stranger was nowhere to be seen.
Heshua was gone all day; I was worried.
I told my son he was looking with his blind eye again. I told him to cover it, then he’d stop seeing these jinns and desert daemons. My son laughed at me and said nothing. I should’ve realised he’d decided to leave.
His clothes glisten, hanging in the sun. Moisture rises in steam, my anger floats away with it. I pray he feels for a moment the comfort of clean clothes and longs for the garments I’ll hang out, ready for him.
*
Last night I felt something slithering across my stomach. I arose in still dreaming sleep. I looked down, saw silver eyes staring. I remained still, let them gaze.
I don’t know how long we watched one another. I closed my brown eye and still saw the snake. I wasn’t scared then.
It might have been an hour, it might have been a minute. I held out my hand and the snake glided into then out again over the sand.
I walk on. I rub my eye.
I haven't seen the stranger since I fell, but this morning I found a short trail of the finest sand, pale dust, twisting and slender. Something instinctive informs me that this is the work of the man I seek.
Now that I think about it, this isn’t the first of these piles I’ve met along the way. I follow them now, this trail of dust.
I feel I’m catching up. My eye itches more and more.
I’m tired of walking. I’m tired of my own idle thoughts. I’ve been speaking to the desert and in turn the wind whispers and silences me.
I don’t want to hear God. I’ve been surrounded by God’s voice all my life. I don’t want to see God; I’ve had an eye for God as long as I can remember. No, I want God to listen. I’m tired of speaking to the same dull ears. I want God to hear…
These are idle thoughts, unsuitable for the road I walk. My feet are sore. I must keep my good eye towards the road, not blindly inward.
But my eye is getting worse. I keep on walking, and I keep on rubbing. I saw the stranger again this afternoon, so close, and then my eye began to seep with putrid tears and I couldn’t see a thing.
God, why am I still walking?
It’s happened. An hour ago I put my finger to my eye and drew away a smear of dark puss. I could smell it, sickly. In fear I rubbed harder. I kept rubbing. I am blind.
For a while I kept walking regardless; I didn’t need my eye to see- I felt my way looking with my blind eye and I didn’t stumble.
I’ve used the last of my water. I held the skin up so carefully, to let every last drop hit the mark. Puss and water slid in thick clots down my cheek and stuck in my four-day beard. I can see, vaguely. I feel no better for it. The desert is coated with a faint silver film. What’s near seems shimmering and what’s far is sharp and distinct. I’m walking in a daze, and perhaps that disturbs my senses. A moment ago I had a vision of a glistening city in the desert, a glamorous jewel ringed by two rivers which were strings of pearl. It might be that I’m mad, imagining everything. When I approached, the vision formed into tattered canvas billowing in the wind. Brown cloth and broken tent-pole remained. I approach cautiously, my staff held in both hands.
The tent is nestled into the entrance of a labyrinth, weather-worn valleys which mount up a cliff-face. Even in the glaring sun its twisted paths are dark, the tent half consumed by their shadow.
There’s no one here. I don’t know what else I expected. The blankets within the collapsed tent are buried by sand. Their edges are torn by wolves. I smell the creature that’s claimed them. There are prints in the sand.
But fear is trampled in my search for life. I listen for the slightest sound, a voice. There’s nothing, only the wind. I push aside the last of the upheld canvas with my staff and it sags and falls.
It’s when I see the broken gourd that my heart falters. I rush at it. There’s only the brown stain of evaporated wine, whose sweet smell repulses me. I don’t know why this angers me so. It rides a crest of despair.
My torment is complete, for hidden behind the first corner of the cloven cliff-face is a natural spring built upon by human hands. It’s primitive: hewn rock and a pit fed by a wooden sluice. I couldn’t contain my hope for water and threw myself before it. But the rock has crumbled and the sluice is broken; the pit is dry.
Now I can’t unclench my fingers, or stop my lips from quivering ready to scream. I’d bellow every obscenity I know if my throat weren’t too dry and I didn’t fear how much it would hurt. Still, something tells me the anger won’t last.
I miss my mother. I’m too pathetic a creature for anger, and self pity has depleted my fury. So I’ve crawled back to the skeletal tent, lain down in the blanket that scratches at my skin with sand and stinks of a wolf’s excretion.
The wolf will return and tear me to shreds in my sleep.
*
The bucket I draw from the well is full. The water runs over and soaks into the dust, so I tread carefully, for I treasure the drops I’m losing, am pained to see them shrink and fade in the sun. But my step falters and I spill more. My grief runs over and I can’t contain it in my heart any longer.
My son will not return. I feel, once and for all, he’s been blinded to me.
How much of the desert my son see’s is but the desert of his imagination? Does he see the same as me, with only one good eye? I wish I knew what he saw with his blind eye. When the messiah comes, whom the monks of Adonai proclaim in prayer, perhaps my son will recognise him. Don’t they say the messiah will lead the world to our well?
I begin my evening ablutions. I focus on the silk smoothness of my arms and hands when wet. I think about the water on my skin. I’ve set aside some to drink with my prayers, hoping my son will feel his parched throat soften. And from tonight, I’ll pray no more for his return.
*
I saw the sun rising. I haven't died. No wolf has torn me to shreds. My flesh has not shrivelled from thirst and asphyxiated me. I awoke to the sunrise.
I opened my eyes to see a heap of the finest dust dispersing in the wind. Then I left the tent, and now I walk.
Last night is forgotten. I walk.
The labyrinth of the cliff-face lay before me. I have entered.
The white limestone walls that surrounded me were sometimes smooth, sometimes rough. Sometimes they hemmed me in, sometimes they opened into wide valleys. Whenever I freed myself from the warren and saw the open desert, or, in my blindness, felt it’s sweeping wind, I turned and took a different path.
I’d thought the labyrinth would rise sharply to the ridge of hills, too sharply to climb, but it went on, and on. It rose, but steadily, sometimes descending, sometimes dropping in a precipice, but always steadily ascending. The winding fissures through which I walked showed no sign of being about to end, but always ended suddenly, at a corner, to surprise me with the dazzling sun. I’d turn back, and walk as blindly as before.
In time, I slept as I walked, exhausted, lulled by the rhythmic tread of my sandals on solid smooth rock.
I found a juniper bush and feasted on its berries.
I walked for a day, then slept fitfully, cosseted in the rock, wrapped in all my blankets.
I think I was awoken by the sound of birds singing. I wrapped my cloak once more about me and walked.
*
A stranger came to the village today, while I was drawing water from the well. He brought news from afar, rumours of war. He wanted someone who would listen to his news from the cities.
No one would talk with him. I took my water home and used it to moisten the flour for kneading.
The man will return home.
*
A white hart darted across my path and disappeared; life hidden in the most unlikely crannies. Because of it I stopped and looked about. And in looking, I heard shuffling steps, a rasping sigh, and the thud of a body slumping down against a rock.
Then the sound ceased. I turned, but the silence of the desert surrounded me. Nothing can be silenced that suddenly.
I took a corner, then another, hesitantly, dragging my hands along the rock-face on either side, but still I went as fast as my feet would carry me. From my ankle came a firey pain and from my scorched throat a searing pain that strangled me. Trying to call out, I choked and rasped. So I stopped, drew my knife, cut my arm and sucked the blood. But the blood caught in my throat and I released only a rattling gasp.
I couldn’t believe my eyes when I turned the next corner and the walls ran out. I saw not the desert but an open grotto, and the figure of a man, robed in white, leant across the entrance of a shallow cave.
This was not my stranger.
His cloak, which enveloped him like a shroud, was bleached with the sun and layered with dust. His hair was white. His skin was pale grey. His cheekbones I saw through almost translucent flesh and the straggled patches of an ashen beard. His eyes watched my approach without blinking, and they were wan with a fast fading light. He didn’t move; only a an emaciated hand emerged from beneath the coverings and scratched at the sand.
I dragged myself to his side and slumped down. His hand reached to a waterskin beyond reach, and I won’t deny my delight on lifting it and feeling its weight.
Here was my temptation. I might have drained every drop, drowned myself, for in a moment I recognised the worth of this simple element, that I had so long squandered.
I didn’t drink it, of course. This man must live; he must talk to me. I held the skin to his mouth.
When the water wet his lips I saw the faint quiver of joy. The man could hardly swallow; it ran from the sides of his mouth, soaking up the dust on his lips as it went. Only when he choked did he pull his lips away. He closed his eyes and gave the flicker of a smile. With desperate slowness he raised his arm, pressed his hand to the waterskin, and pushed it towards me.
I drank, until I too began to choke. But I drank on, until the water flowed down my chin and the waterskin was empty. Drawing it away I saw the man open his eyes, watching me.
With a voice rough as rock, he asked: “Who are you?”
I told him my name. Then, “Who are you?” I asked.
He shook his head and said nothing.
“But what brought you to the desert, holy man?” I asked.
Again he shook his head. “I... am no holy man. A man of the world… I wore silk and ran my fingers... every morning through gold.”
“You came from the cities?” I asked.
He shook his head again. Impatient for conversation, I leant forward and brought my ear close to his lips, to hear his rasping whisper.
“I came from the city,” he answered. He began to cough and I waited, but with a struggle, for I wished to tell this stranger all my thoughts, what I’d learnt, what I would do with the world. “I come from Glamrhôth,” he said finally. “I am here because I saw too much in the world, and those that guard power closely wished to take out my eyes.”
After this he was silent.
And I waited, desperately, for him to ask me my thoughts, what I’d learnt, what I would do. For many, many minutes he was silent. Then he asked me why I was here.
I don’t know how long I spoke then without stopping. The sky darkened. The old man closed his eyes, his breathing softened, and I spoke on.
I ceased suddenly. I had said all I wished to say, all I’d learnt, all I knew. I waited for the man to tell me what he thought.
His eyes remained closed. And as I listened, in the silence I couldn’t hear his breath. I reached out and touched his hand, rough like parchment, with the tips of my fingers. I pressed my hand upon his and drew it back in horror. It didn’t stir. I spoke and he didn’t respond to my words. His breathing had stopped without my noticing, whilst I talked. He was already going cold.
It took me two hours to cover his body with stones. I worked slowly for my grief, and it’s deep into the night now. My hands are still bleeding from having clawed the ground to dig his grave; the ground is too rocky, too hard, and the hole must be deep to keep away the wolves.
Now it’s done I’m sitting, staring at the moon. It’s bright, the sky clear, the stars inexhaustible. I feel bitter, angry at him for not answering my thoughts. My eye stings, worsening. Above, the stars are misting over. Angrily I cover my fingertips with sand and rub it into my brown eye. Star by star, the night sky is fading.
*
A sound has awoken me, creeping into my dreams as if to call me. I heard footsteps descending the slope towards the well.
I rushed to the door without dressing. I’m looking out but my eyes can’t pierce the night. I’m sure I hear uncertain steps above the wind, but is that someone I see there, coming closer?
*
Were it not for my blindness, I might not have heard the sound of water. Were it not for my blindness, I might have seen it sooner.
I felt my way towards the faint trickle. A slither of a stream ran over the rocks, and I felt it through my sandal. Now I’m wetting my raw, cracked hands, and its soothing is a balm.
I put my lips to the rock and I drink.
Out of habit despite my blindness, I glance up and see the darkness surrounding me, clearly. There’s no mist anymore. I see as if both eyes were open. And there, upon a rock, sits the stranger.
Turning, it’s impossible not to stare for a moment in disbelief. I freeze, afraid to move, lest the stranger, wrapped in black like an extension of the night, takes flight and flitters away. The figure is merely an outline against the pearly backdrop of the limestone wall, sat motionless, and were it not for the surety of my searching, I might mistake him for an outcrop of rock.
Tentatively, I’ve sat, a few feet away. I sense the stranger is looking at me, waiting.
I thought the stranger might speak first. I wait, and the silence deepens.
I hoped the stranger might speak. I cannot say the first word.
It’s not shyness that holds my tongue- frustration makes me bold. But I find myself uncertain of all I believed myself desperate to say. The stranger still watches me. My mouth has opened; my breathing has ceased; I sit poised; but I do not speak.
The stranger nods faintly. I don’t want to speak.
I don’t want to speak anymore. There’s nothing worth saying.
I remain silent. And we sit, enjoying this silence, looking out over the desert.
After an hour the stranger rose slowly and left, and the silhouette faded into the night. I’m satisfied that everything worth saying has been said. Instinctively I try to blink away the grit in my brown eye. I must find some water to wash away the sand that’s infected it. I think it would be nice to see clearly again.
*
I’m standing in my doorway, waiting. All the quiet sounds of night surround me. A lizard shuffles by my feet. High up a hawk flutters its wings. Crickets chirp, ceaselessly, from hidden corners. The date palms creak, rhythmically. A fox screams beyond the hills. The sand rustles with the wind. I hear it clearly.
My son is staggering as he comes, as a blind man walks. Without stopping to say a word he’s gone to the well; I hear him draw the bucket. Though it’s only twenty feet away, I can’t see him properly in the dark. But I hear the water sloshing as he rinses his eyes. He still hasn’t spoken, but I don’t want him to talk; I just want to look at him.
I see water running down his cheeks, but his eyes are cast in shadow. I can’t see where he looks, only that he looks southward, away from the desert, without a word to say to me.