Sofia Samatar - A Stranger in Olondria

“Where are we?” I asked the slight, grimy youth who was holding my hand.

He shrugged. “Somewhere in the Quarter.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No,” he said, looking at me as if I had asked an odd question, though there was blood mixed with the dirt on his brow and hair. We sat at a table with some of the others on wooden chairs strengthened with twine, and the girls, moving as silently as witches, brought us wine and teiva and held out their hands which we pressed with coins, and then melted away, yawning, into the gloom. “I need a drink,” said the boy who sat opposite me in a trembling voice. Tears welled up in his eyes, though he was smiling… The others patted his back, and one of them said, “Yes, by the gods, I’ve a dragon’s thirst!” and there was a light pattering of laughter. Outside, in the streets, beat the music of fifes and drums, the continuing festival, which we had stepped out of, if only for a moment; and I found myself wishing fervently, with desperation and sadness, that these strange youths would let me remain among them.

We were young and had been through a fire, and so we were shy.We did not exchange names, but after a time we began to behave like young men, and our talk grew louder in that dim room where pork and rabbits crackled above the hearth and the drowsy girls went dragging their feet. Our eyes shone; a boy took a violin from against the wall, removed his boots, and began to play, cradling the instrument; when the meat was done we ate it ravenously, grease on our lips, and the strength it gave us was potent like that of the wine. I found myself in an earnest conversation with two of the youths, explaining things to them I had not known myself, connections between the poets I had never seen before, a clear architecture rising out of excitement and teiva . The youths who listened were students at the School of Philosophy, and they argued eagerly, with fiery humor. They rolled cigarettes for me and we bent close together, smoking, their eyes alive and sparkling in the dimness. I had answers to all of their contradictions; they looked at me admiringly, they laughed, they began to call me the Foreign Professor. And I felt myself at the height of human bliss as I protested, “No, not foreign. I’ve been raised on the northern poets…”

The night brought music. A band from the festival invaded the café, armed with raucous pipes, guitars, and swollen drums, filling the room with a reek of sweat, demanding money and wine, releasing a deafening, jaunty cacophony of sound. The whole room glittered with girls, perhaps the same ones who had served us earlier, but now they wore long earrings and shrieked with laughter, and the young men caught them and whirled them about the floor in popular dances, their shadows huge in the redness of the firelight. The music called in a troupe of Kestenyi dancers from the street, who were greeted with ragged cheers from the drunken students—they were lithe young men with rouged cheeks and hats that were round at the brim and square on top, made of the piebald skins of goats. They wore long purple tunics that reached to their boot-tops and were slit at the sides to show their voluminous embroidered trousers, and they skipped wildly on their heels and toes, their bodies motionless from the waist up, their faces fixed in sublime hauteur. I watched everything through the deep, resplendent mists that surrounded me, watched the rise of an arm, the toss of a head, watched even the shoulder of the girl who had come to sit on my lap through a starry haze—it was cool to the touch, as if made of enamel. She turned her head to look at me. I was happy and exhausted, feeling as I had felt on the open sea: as if the world had drowned and something new had taken its place, a ringing brilliance, fathomless and transparent.

The cool girl moved her lips, saying something I could not hear. I told her that no, she was not heavy at all. My desire for her had no beginning; I felt it had always been there, blind and torrential like my desire for the city. She took my arm and led me into the rooms, the elusive corridors, the hanging stairs, the ineluctable darkness, into a room with walls as thin as if they were made of cardboard, where a single candle winked crazily in the gloom. There was music from downstairs. I believe the girl was talking to me, but I could not understand anything she said, not until she drew close to me and I heard her voice distinctly as she whispered: “Cousin, this is what the gods eat.”

I awoke to glare and silence. And then, beyond the silence, sound—the sounds from the street which I realized had awakened me, sounds of talk and footsteps, a burst of laughter, the whine of a door, the scrape of a wooden table across the pavement. My mouth was dry, but I felt no pain until I tried to move, and then I began to ache in every limb, the agony concentrated in my skull, which throbbed rhythmically as if in time to the ringing of my ears. With the pain came the realization that I was in a strange room, and that the silence of the room was the first thing I had heard, a blankness that made me uneasy because it was not like other silences: it was the dead sound of abandonment and squalor. I opened my eyes. I lay on a narrow pallet that smelled of ammonia and mice, wearing only my shirt, on a floor of wooden slats that had long ago been green, in a very small room dazzlingly lit by the sun. There was no sign of the girl, and no sign that the room belonged to anyone. I sat up, groping weakly for the trousers lying over my feet. I saw my boots against the wall, but my waistcoat had disappeared, and I soon realized that my purse was gone as well. The single pearl button that had once closed the throat of my shirt had been removed, plucked away with a surgeon’s skill.

Trembling, my body clammy with a poisonous film of sweat, I opened the door and limped into the hall, a twilit region down which there echoed a shriek of coarse laughter. A door opened to my right, and a girl stumbled out. She slipped and fell, naked but for a green shawl clutched about her, turning her back to the wall, screaming with laughter, facing the open door at which she yelled: “Don’t you do it!”—and a pair of slippers was flung at her from inside. I stood, swaying, sick with rage, wondering if it was she, and about to demand the return of my belongings, when she looked up at me and shouted in a flatly insulting tone: “ Vai! If it’s not the camel of Emun Deis.” Her own witticism sent her into transports of braying laughter. I turned away, walking unsteadily down the hall, refusing to believe that this could be my companion of the previous night, and lacking the strength for a fight.

As I turned a corner I nearly walked into one of the Kestenyi dancers, who stood urinating calmly against the wall. He wore the long split skirt but was missing the trousers underneath, and the front of his skirt was looped up over his arm. He was very tall, and he turned to stare at me with his hot black eyes, a stare of vivid and terrible attentiveness which made me stop short, looking back at him, my heart racing. He looked like one whose thoughts are not those of others. There was something in his eyes, a look both vacant and profound, which made me certain he was no mere lunatic; his gaze of inspired singleness of purpose, combined with his handsome, bestial face, gave him a look of precise evil. I opened my mouth but could not find anything to say to his stare. At last he shook himself and released his skirt, which swirled below his knees, a voluptuous and dusky purple, and turned away, swaggering down the hall.

“Horrible!” I whispered, unable to help myself. I was now shivering violently with fever, and the ringing in my ears had grown into a persistent whine. I moved on down the empty passage. This hall seemed narrower, more constricted than the others, and it was quiet, as though at the center of the building. I was shaken by my encounter with the dancer and glanced back often, making sure that I was not being followed. Soon you will be outside, I told myself, but I did not believe it, no longer believed anything that I told myself, no longer believed that there had been sunlight, festivals, screens of poplars beside a canal. The air was dancing before my eyes. A stairway opened in front of me, and I shuffled down, trying to cling to the wall, which was smooth and cold and offered me no support; and at last, overcome by exhaustion, I sank to my knees and leaned back against the stairs, my mind reeling in the stillness.