David Mitchell - The Cloud Atlas

“A rapist?” I said, and everything about her changed. Her face, her hands, her body, flushed and strained against the cuffs. “You told him Saburo was a rapist? To get yourself out here?”

“What?”

“He told me Saburo raped you. Lily, what does he really know about Saburo?” She clasped her hands together until the knuckles went white. “You told him he was Japanese, a spy, but did you tell him everything about that summer, Lily? Did you tell him everything that he’d find out if he’d gone walking around town today, like me?”

I was ready for her to scream, but what came out was more of a groan-“No.” Then she said, “Louis, don’t do this.”

“What was the baby’s name?” I said.

She looked at me for a long, silent moment, waiting for me to unsay the words, or maybe for history itself to unravel back past the point that there had ever been a war, a Saburo, a long summer under open skies full of light. Then she cried. I closed my eyes, and kept them closed when she finally began to speak.

“He didn’t have a name,” she said. Then nothing. When her voice returned, she went on. “I knew it was going to be a girl. I was going to name her Samantha-Sam, for Jap Sam, who’d been so good to me all that time until he was taken away. Introduced me to Saburo.” She stopped. I could feel her looking at me, waiting for me to open my eyes, but I didn’t. I was too frightened of what I’d done or started. “But it wasn’t a girl. I should have known then! What woman with the kind of sight I supposedly had wouldn’t know what lay inside her, a boy or a girl? Wouldn’t know he was dying?” She stopped again, and it was a minute or two before she started once more. “That little boy, inside me, dying, drowning like I’d thrown him into the sea. And then—” Lily stopped, caught her breath and tried again. “And then, he was in my arms, dead. Bella and the other aunties wanted a doctor or a priest.” I could feel her staring at me. “Keep your eyes closed, then,” she said. “That’s what I want. What I wanted. No doctor, no priest, nobody. Nobody to come say, Lily the half-breed girl, whose parents ran away!’ ‘Lily, who went away last summer with that Jap and came back pregnant!’ ‘Lily who thought she could have a baby on her own, and it came out dead! Look at her! Ha!’” She sniffed and coughed.

“How much did Bella tell you? Did she tell you the story she told me? Bella, so smart. All the aunties, so smart. That’s what they thought. Them and all the elders before them and before them, all of them. And now, they said, don’t cry. Don’t cry.”

And now: the angalkuq. I waited for Lily to tell me about the shaman, but she did something more curious. She told me the story Bella told her, the story she’d wanted to tell me in the forest, the story that Ronnie so startled me with when he retold it yesterday.

There was a boy, a baby boy, and his mother.

But in Lily’s version, in Bella’s version, it is the baby who dies and the mother who weeps. Don’t cry, Bella told Lily, and Lily told me, crying. Don’t cry, or the baby will wake. Don’t cry, or the baby will wake and lose his way to the land of the dead. And then you will have him with you always. Always a baby, always needing you to carry him, soothe him, always making you cry. Mind the story of the mother whose baby died and could not stop crying. The village begged her. Shamans begged her. Her husband begged her. But she would not stop, and the baby awoke, and he never left. Eventually, they all moved away. The other families, the whole village, even her husband. She was left all alone with the baby. You see her tears every summer when the snow thaws and the delta floods.

Lily looked at Bella, still crying, unable to speak. Then what did it mean that her summer with Saburo had been so dry? Bella surprised her: Ever go hunting for mouse food? Lily held her breath, felt the prickling along her arms. Reach down sometimes, and what do you find? Mouse food? The little gnawed roots, shaped like teardrops? Little teardrops. Whose tears do you think those are?

Bella reached over then, Lily said, and tried to take the baby from her. No, Lily said, and then repeated the word, with a hiss. Bella recoiled, shocked and hurt.

Remember the story, Bella said. Remember what happens. The mother’s left all alone. Everyone leaves her.

“It’s just a story,” Lily shrieked.

“Then where’s your husband?” Bella said, and left the room.

THERE WAS NO SHAMAN, no angalkuq from Lower Kalskag in Lily’s story. There was only Saburo, her lover from Japan, who came, and disappeared, later that night. Lily said she had called to him, had sent animal spirits sprinting out across the tundra in search of him, and then there he was. Proof of magic, or love. And those hands: she had loved him for those beautiful hands, and now she knew why. The way they moved the hair from her face, the way they pulled away the bloody sheets, the blankets, slowly, gently, and laid bare the boy. She had not let anyone else hold the baby, and now it seemed obvious why: no one else had hands fit for the task, to hold something that tiny, that fragile, that hopeless. She told him the story Bella had told her, and she loved him all the more for his reaction: he cried. They cried together, and while they were crying, whispered and planned.

Saburo would take the boy away, bury him in a special place in the bush, build him a tiny shrine as he would have done were they in Japan. Lily begged to come with him, but he insisted she rest. He would come back for her, bring some token from the shrine, and then-he would spirit her back to Japan. He didn’t say how.

Days passed. A week, then two. “I was worried, but not scared,” Lily went on. “I thought I had powers, and I thought they were strong, despite everything that happened: something had made him appear, after all. But nothing was making him come back. I went outside one night and listened for him, finally. After a while, I was sure I heard him, very faintly, very far away. In Anchorage. So I went.”

But Anchorage was too “noisy,” Lily said. Once she got there, she couldn’t find Saburo anywhere. In time, she needed money, just to survive, and, once she’d saved up enough, to get back home. Another Yup’ik woman told her about fortune-telling. She didn’t tell her, though, what the men really came to find out-whether you would have sex with them. If you did, they paid you more. And as scared as she was of losing Saburo, as scared as she might have been for what he thought of what she was doing, she kept doing it, because something told her that she was getting closer.

She was: Gurley arrived one night, and she knew immediately that she’d found a link to Saburo. Lily didn’t know what the link was, not at first, but she knew she had to cultivate a relationship with Gurley. When she did, and various details slowly surfaced about his work, such as the balloons (Gurley! Master of secrets!), she knew she’d done right. Eventually, he’d lead her to Saburo.

But after her initial excitement about Gurley’s connection to Saburo, the notion that he would lead her to him began to fade. Not because it seemed impractical or implausible, but because-well, it will sound preposterous coming out of my mouth, so I’ll just quote what Lily said:

“There is an old tradition, from generations ago, that the night after a hunt, the women of the less successful hunters would seek out the men who had been successful, and have sex with them. It was thought they might then pass on some of that power to their own less fortunate husbands. It had nothing to do with love or even sex. It was about doing all you could to make sure your husband, your lover, would bring honor to your family. Gurley was successful.”