The River and the Book by Alison Croggon Read Free Book Online

afterwards, the truth is that for a while I liked Jane Watson. While Mizan went upriver to do his trading, she stayed in our village for almost a month, taking photographs so constantly that we ceased to notice it. She lived among us, learning the pattern of our days. She helped to feed the pigs and the sheep, and learned how to open and close the locks on our irrigation channels, and hoed our crops and lit incense at the temple. She taught me some of her language, which meant that later, when I came to the city, I could talk to the tourists and make my living. Each night she sat down with us and ate our bread and salt.
    When Mizan returned, we held a farewell feast. We sang her our most beautiful songs, and she told us how grateful she was for our generosity and our trust. I cried because she was going away, because I would miss her. She had told me so many interesting things about the places she had visited and the country where she had been born. And she kissed me on both cheeks, and said that one day we would see each other again.
    She went to sleep in the bed that I had made for her, and rose with the sun. She washed her face and broke her fast and then we all went down to the River to wave her goodbye. Stepping onto Mizan’s boat, she turned to face us, the pale early sun shining behind her head so she seemed to be wearing a halo of copper. She held her hand high in the air until she vanished around the next bend.
    Later that day, several hours after she had left, we discovered that some time between nightfall and sunrise Jane Watson had slipped secretly into the room where we kept the Book. She had taken the Book out of its old box, which only the Keepers were ever allowed to do, and had hidden it in her bag, and when she left with Mizan, the Book left with her.
    Jane Watson stole the Book. And after that, nothing was ever the same again.

14
    My memories of the days after the Book was stolen are all in fragments. I remember my grandmother’s pale face, her eyes bright with unshed tears, and my father’s mouth, set in a stern, hard line. I remember that a storm blew in from the mountains, and I watched the nut trees thrashing against the luminous yellow sky and the leaves flying off into the darkening night. I remember the endless visitors from the village, a stream of them for days. Everyone wanted to see the empty box, the violated room, everyone wanted to touch the Keeper’s shoulder, as one touches the shoulder of a mourner.
    When they heard what had happened, the brothers Yani and Sopli took their motorboat and headed downriver in pursuit of Mizan. “We’ll get the Book back, don’t you worry!” they said to me, grinning, their dark eyes flashing at the challenge. “We have the fastest boat on the river!” And they spat into the brown waves and chugged off, their wake furling behind them in white wings, and my heart rose.
    They returned three days later, their hands empty, their faces downcast. They had caught up with Mizan at Kilok, a day downriver, and he had been horrified when he heard what had happened. But Jane Watson, perhaps knowing that she would be pursued, had already left Mizan’s boat. She had met an associate, a bald man with golden spectacles who drove a jeep, and they had gone south over the plains, away from the River.
    “I didn’t know,” Mizan told Yani and Sopli. “By the gods, if I had known, I would have beaten that woman within an inch of her life! I would have got it back for you! I am ashamed that I brought such bad luck to your people. But I didn’t know.”
    Yani and Sopli had no way of following a jeep overland, and so they came back home and told us what they had found out. When I saw their expressions, I felt something inside me clench like a fist. The brothers looked crushed and humiliated, as if something in their souls had shrivelled in shame at their failure to bring back the Book. But they didn’t steal it, I thought, and they don’t deserve to feel ashamed. Jane