Chapter 177: Nobody, Again

The beach went completely still when Maru brought Iri up the sand.

I want to describe it properly, because I had been imagining it for forty days and I had imagined it wrong.

I had imagined joy. I had seen fourteen years of homecomings and they all go the same way — somebody says a name, somebody stands up blinking, and the people who loved them make a sound and run.

Nobody ran.

There were perhaps sixty people on the beach at Asu, mending nets, gutting fish, pulling boats up past the tide line. They all stopped. They all looked at Iri. And then, slowly, the ones nearest backed away.

An old woman at the top of the beach dropped the basket she was carrying and put both hands over her mouth.

"That's her grandmother," said Maru, very quietly, through Nai. "That's Pela."

Pela did not come down the beach. She stood there with her hands over her mouth, and then she said something, high and frightened, and three or four people near her made a sign with their fingers against their foreheads.

"What did she say?" I asked.

Nai took a long time.

"She asked what the sea has sent back wearing her granddaughter's face," said Nai.

— • —

That was Teru.

For a thousand years they had taught their children that the gap must not be touched — that the grey takes, and nothing comes back, and if something seems to come back it is the sea being cruel. I had heard Maru say it on the other side of the world and had thought I understood it. I had not. I understood it now, watching a grandmother back away from a little girl she had buried in her heart eleven years ago.

Iri started to cry.

Maru said something sharp and fast to the beach. Nobody moved.

And then Iri — eight years old, in a borrowed inland coat, forty days at sea — let go of her mother's hand and walked up the sand by herself, all the way to the old woman, and stopped in front of her, and said a few words.

Pela's hands came down from her mouth.

"What did she say?" I whispered.

"She said, Granny, you still haven't fixed the gate," said Nai, and her voice broke.

Pela sat down in the sand. Then she reached out and touched Iri's face with both hands, very slowly, the way you touch something you're afraid will go to smoke. It did not go to smoke. Iri leaned into it.

And Pela made a sound I had heard ten thousand times on the other side of the world, and pulled the child into her lap, and held on.

That was the first one. Sixty people watched it. About half of them were crying. The other half had made the sign against their foreheads and gone up the beach very fast, and I knew exactly where they were going.

— • —

RECORD. Day 40. Teru. Landing called Asu, west coast, a village of about four hundred. Overcast. Low swell. Iri recognised by her grandmother, Pela, at roughly forty paces. Not accepted on sight. Accepted after the child referred to an unrepaired gate (unrepaired for eleven years, confirmed later). Reception: roughly half the beach in tears, roughly half left at speed to fetch an authority. Lin Bo seasick on arrival. Denies it. Was sick behind a fish rack. — Y.S.

— • —

Nobody looked at me. I want to be clear about that, because I think it was the strangest thing that has ever happened to me, and I have been to the bottom of the world.

Not one person on that beach looked at me twice. A dog came over and sniffed my boots and decided I was nothing in particular and went away. Three children followed Nai around for an hour asking her questions, and when she pointed at me and told them I was the one the song was about, they looked at me, and looked back at her, and laughed, and one of them asked if I was the cook.

"Tell them yes," I said.

"You're not just the—"

"I'm the cook," I said. "Tell them I'm the cook. I make soup. That's what I'm here for."

So Nai told them, and they nodded, satisfied, and from that afternoon on the whole of Asu called me the cook, and I have never once corrected it.

Yun Shu watched all of this from the boat with her book on her knee.

"You're enjoying this," she said.

"Nobody's looked at me in eight hours."

"You're enjoying this," she repeated, and wrote something down, and would not show me what.

— • —

The keeper came at dusk.

She came down the beach with the people who had gone to fetch her walking behind, and the village went quiet in front of her the way a room does for a person whose word is the end of an argument. She was old, older than Pela, very thin and very straight, with her hair cut short like all of them and both ears marked from top to lobe in blue.

"Her name is Kesa," said Maru, beside me. "She keeps the gap."

"What does that mean?"

Maru thought about how to say it. Nai helped.

"When the grey takes someone," said Nai slowly, "the family has a hole. And they want to touch it. Go looking. Say the name on the shore, stand in the water calling. Every one of them wants to." Nai listened to Maru again. "Kesa's the one who stops them. She sits with them until they don't. For fifty years. Every family on this coast, she's sat with."

"So she's a healer."

"No," said Maru, through Nai. "She is the one who tells you to stop hoping. And she has saved more people than anybody alive, because the ones who don't stop go into the sea."

— • —

Kesa stood in front of Pela and Iri for a long time without speaking.

She did not make the sign. She looked at the child very carefully, the way Yun Shu looks at a page, and Iri looked back at her and did not hide.

Then Kesa turned to Maru and said something long and level, and Maru answered, and it went back and forth for a while, and Nai translated in pieces.

"She says it's Iri. She doesn't doubt it. She knew Iri."

"Good."

"She says she wants to know where she came back."

"Tell her the truth. Over there. In a tent. In a land where everyone believes it."

Nai told her. Kesa listened. Then she looked past Maru for the first time, straight at me, the short foreign cook with the green elbow standing at the back.

She said something to Nai, short.

"She says, is that the one?" said Nai.

"Tell her yes."

Kesa looked at me for a long time. I am used to people looking at me. I have had a hundred thousand faces turned up toward me at once. I have never been looked at the way Kesa looked at me, which was the way you look at a man who has walked into your house with a lamp in a room full of gunpowder.

Then she spoke, and Nai translated it one line at a time, and I will put it down exactly.

"You brought one child back, from your country, where your people believe a thing.

"I have sat with nine hundred families on this coast. Every one of them has a gap. Every one of them, in the first year, wanted to stand in the water and call. The ones I could not stop, I buried. Nineteen of them. They called and called and nothing came, and in the end they walked into the sea after the name, because they could not bear that it did not answer.

"Now you come with a child in a coat and tell all of Teru the gap can be touched.

"If you are right, I am glad. If you are wrong — even a little wrong — even right for your country and wrong for ours — then I will be burying people for the rest of my life.

"So show me. Not there. Here. Bring one back on this beach, from this sea, for a Teru who stands on Teru sand. Then I will believe you. Until then the gap is shut, and I will tell every family on this coast to keep it shut, and they will listen to me, because I have earned it and you have not."

She turned and walked back up the beach. The village went with her.

Pela stayed, with Iri in her lap. So did about eleven others.

— • —

They came and sat around our fire after dark, the eleven. Fishermen, mostly. Two young women. A boy of about fifteen who did not say anything and did not take his eyes off Iri.

One of the fishermen spoke first. He was big and grey and his hands were wrapped with net-cuts.

"He wants to try," said Nai. "Now. Tonight. He says he has a son. Four winters ago. He says he'll stand on the sand and say the name, if you tell him how."

I looked at the man. He looked back at me with an expression I have seen on ten thousand faces, and I knew exactly what it was going to cost me to answer him.

"Tell him not yet," I said.

Nai looked at me.

"Tell him the truth," I said. "Tell him it worked for Maru because she said it in a place where everybody believes. Tell him if he stands on this beach tonight and says his son's name, nothing will happen. Not because his son's gone. Because there aren't enough people here yet who think he can come."

Nai told him. It took a long time.

The fisherman did not say anything. His jaw worked.

"Tell him I'm sorry," I said. "Tell him that's the worst thing I've said in fourteen years and I've said some bad ones. Tell him if he says it tonight and nothing comes, that's exactly the thing Kesa's been afraid of for fifty years, and she'd be right, and I'd have done it to him."

Nai told him.

The fisherman looked at the fire for a long while. Then he said one word.

"He says when," said Nai.

"Tell him I don't know," I said. "Tell him I'm going to stay until I do."

He nodded once. He did not leave. He sat by our fire until the small hours with his big wrapped hands round a bowl of bad soup, and in the morning he was the first in line.

His name is Taro. His son's name, he told me nine weeks later, was Ken.