Paradise and Elsewhere Read Online Free Page B

beating hard in my chest. A dog growled low in its throat, preparing for alarm. I heard, or sensed the break in the traveller’s breathing in the house next to mine, the rustle of her bedclothes as she sat up. They had agreed to stand back, so that she was not afraid, then to indicate that she must dress and follow them. The light would be snuffed as soon as they emerged, so that everyone’s eyes would accustom to the faint radiance preceding the dawn. My favourite time is just a little later in the day, when the colours are newborn. But just before dawn there is a quite different beauty and other senses than sight come to the fore. Perhaps, I thought, the traveller had not experienced the oasis like that before—shades of black and violet against a yellow-grey sky, the air full of whispers and rustling?
    The seven of them walked between buildings, across the square and onto the network of paths that cross and link our perennially moist fields. The smells of tomato plants, herbs, melons, and compost rose about them. Dew dropped on their feet. No one said anything: the traveller’s vocabulary had not evolved beyond greetings, requests for food and thanks; mainly she relied on facial expressions.
    Within half an hour they were at the sand and within half an hour more they had stopped walking. A slice of sun appeared on the rim of the world. The food and drink were handed over, the shadow play ensued. One cast her arm in a circle, so as to indicate: you may go anywhere! Afterwards, this struck us all as ludicrous and faintly shameful. All together they pointed, then pushed her gently on the back. She understood, certainly, the six of them reported back that morning, but what she did was sit down on the sand. To think, we supposed. To remember where it was she had been going to or had come from? In any case, they left her there.
    Later that day I was hoeing my melon bed. The scent of ripening fruit was overwhelming and the damp rich earth pushed up between my toes. I was thinking rather sadly about the traveller: how confused she must have felt between our first kindness and her sudden expulsion—when I looked up, and she was there.
    In silence, we examined each other. She wore the head cloth we had given her, and the other garment, tied about the waist. She was healthy now, but still not beautiful, I remember thinking: her face and body compelled attention, but it was hard to know how to respond to them; her features, her coarse skin with its odd growths of hair unsettled, rather than pleased. Nonetheless, I felt drawn to step forward and take her in my arms—a gesture of regret and welcome mixed, I thought, but soon I realized that I felt desire, and looked into her face to see if it was the same for her. I could not tell: her expression at that moment was distant, even though I stood reflected in the pupils of her eyes; I saw, too, a kind of determination that was new to me, though as I looked I felt that the shadow of both these things might well have been present in her face all along. The traveller looked away, and stepped out of my embrace. She nodded in the direction of the houses, walked towards them.
    She would not do what we told her to. From that moment on the choice was very stark: we must keep her, or we must kill her; we could not kill her. We knew this, and so did she; everything changed.
    Now, she demanded things of us, rather than waiting for us to offer or set out our position. Land; help carrying the stones, branches and hides to build a house; tools, seed. She demanded, we debated whether to give—but the debate was a limited one, and each time we knew sooner that we would give her what she wanted, and soon it became automatic. When the house was built and the field had been levelled and sown, she began properly to learn our language which she then used to ask yet more of us: to learn our stories, songs, musical instruments… Even then the traveller was not content, and wanted