Growing up under the crushing weight of this negative admiration, which sometimes became pity and even sometimes acclamation, almost like he was being hugged (as in "after all is said and done, him is one a wi"), he might have been able to bear all this—for cruelty and ambiguity were never an exception in our part of the world, but a rule—and even the daily surveyance, the intense look under the microscope, the two-faced giving of succor for the wounds so cruelly inflicted, he might have accepted as in their own way a kind of love.
But in the end, when he went away, it was not because of any of this but because of another trouble altogether, which made us inseparable and kept us apart. Yet I think the two things—his lack of skin and this other trouble—were one and the same, sides of the same basic coin. Judas silver.
It is only left to say that my part in all of this—to tell you what happened to us, in the way it happened—was always fated, though when we began, it was not only Moshe, but both of us, who could not speak.
It is totally fitting that we met and fell in love on our first day of school.
Chapter II
"Sit," she commanded without speaking, patting the bench beside her, her uniform skirt spread out around her like a queen's robe. The stiffly starched navy-blue pleats made him think of a peacock's feathers. Their preening matched her hair, which was done up in short, fat plaits and decorated excessively in the fashion of the time, with a fantastical array of ribbons and clips.
Many years later, when he was in art school, he saw a portrait of Queen Elizabeth the First in peacock costume, and he thought that he had been right about her even then, all those years ago. She did resemble a queen, in the way she carried herself. But he adored her more as a goddess than a queen. Yet the most thing was, she was his friend.
Obedient to her command, he sat, taking care to leave enough space between them so he wouldn't mash her pleats. He wriggled himself into a comfortable position, still sucking on his right thumb and without removing his left hand from under his shirt where it was kneading his navel, as it always did when he sucked his thumb, the perfect coordination of comfort that he had known in all of his six years. The two of them were suck-fingers.
She sucked her left index finger, her right hand feeling her navel under her skirt which was rucked up in the most unladylike manner in the midst of its queenly spread. The middle pleats would no longer be immaculate when she got up from the bench. She sucked the tip of her finger daintily, like an upper-class lady sucking on a pipe pretending it was only a pose. He, on the other hand, stuck his entire thumb in his mouth, and bunched his hand so that two fingers could fit up his nostrils. It was a sign of their two personalities: he wanted everything immediately, viscerally; she ambushed and claimed everything in a more circuitous way. And yet he was timid and held his wants in secret even from himself, and she was tallawah and fearless, with horned hair and bold, flashing eyes.
They came here every recess to watch the chickens.
"Dah one-deh deh call egg," she announced, again without speaking, pointing to a large Dominican hen that had detached itself from the clutch and was strutting around the coop, making the familiar rhythmic noise in its throat, like coconut husk being rubbed on a grater. It meant that the hen was about to lay. "That one is summoning eggs."
Arrested, the two children leaned forward, their eyes glued to the disturbed hen. The other hens ignored her, sitting sleepy-eyed on their own eggs or pecking desultorily at the feeding troughs in the hope of dislodging some overlooked grain of corn or slice of coconut from the morning's feeding. From his perch above the ground the rooster flapped his wings, once and again, his eyes bright and expectant as they followed the hen.
"Shi go lay," the girl said again, inside her head, and the boy heard her as always. He heard her voice filled with triumphant satisfaction. She removed her right hand from its secret encounters with her navel and pulled her uniform tunic in close, so that it no longer described a distance between them. Then, as if this action initiated a tacit code, they began inching across the log, he to the left, she to the right, until they were touching at shoulder and thigh. Then her hand went back in her navel and they settled again, absorbed, with the deaf-ears concentration of which children are capable. Their silence, secret and companionable, fell like a wrapped sheet around them. The hen slowed down, looking for a place to sit.
Behind, the schoolyard was abrasive with noise, but they hardly noticed: the din came to them like a rumor from a far country, vague and distant. This was their secret place, this coop on the edge of the school grounds pungent with the smell of chicken waste—pee, feces, sometimes offal. The big boys, the ones who after years in school still could not read or write, were charged with feeding the chickens morning and evening before and after school, but otherwise the coop and its vicinity were out of bounds. Nobody except Moshe and Arrienne minded, because nobody else was interested in chickens, of which the district children saw plenty everywhere. Some had chickens of their own, specially assigned for them to take care of, pets that would later be ruthlessly butchered for the family pot.
Moshe and Arrienne routinely broke the rule, and were routinely punished. In the beginning he cried because she got beaten and he did not. She was a big, tall girl, larger than her seven years, with Maroon features. She was fierce and refused to cry, no matter how many and how hard the blows the headmaster, the man-teacher, inflicted. Moshe, on the other hand, could not be touched. At the slightest stroke of the cane his skin broke and gushed blood, which even in those days could bring a court case or the police, if your mother was Rachel Fisher, a cantankerous woman even by Tumela standards.
Then, for some reason, the man-teacher stopped beating her and the two of them began to receive the same punishment. And since this more often than not included staying in late to clean up the classroom (this was sometimes punishment for recalcitrants, more often duty for the whole class, when there were no recalcitrants to punish), they did not mind. Or rather, she did not mind since punishment of any kind meant little to her, and he had learned to welcome this punishment because it meant they would be set free after all the other children had gone. Then they could walk home alone, without fear of the ridicule that he dreaded. She wasn't bothered by the ridicule. She would simply fight to defend him from it. But she felt it was okay too, to walk home without fighting, if one didn't have to.
The hen had found a corner that suited her, and was sitting. The children grew tense with excitement, their heads stiff and close together. The rooster, who had spun around like a weather vane following the hen's every movement, turned around on his perch, flapping and squawking in her direction.
But the hen was taking a long time. She lay quiet and unmoving, her bottom cocked, her eyes closed, as if she were asleep.
The children were growing tired of the waiting, afraid that nothing would happen before the bell for end of recess rang. Without a word spoken and in exact coordination, they began kicking the space beneath the bench, to and fro, their upper bodies rocking in unison with the movement, the habitual choreography of twins who communicated in their own secret ways. Without speaking, they sped up the movement, never taking their eyes off the hen or their fingers from their sedate communication with their belly buttons.
They were trying to hypnotize the hen into doing their will.
Straining, he directed the force of his will toward the hen. Please. Please.