So much of the dust of living is in me, she thought as her tiny craft fled the safety of the shore, that only the magic of the sea can wash it away. Only the magic of the sea, its iridescent brine and faultless indifference, its eternal roar and its unwavering opaline swell, can cleanse me of the dust with which years of living – five such long years! – has caked my little body, my tender spirit.
O ocean!
*
Natasha did grow frightened alone on the sea, and every night as she tightened the rigging and steadied the sail to stay on course she said out loud, watching out at the ocean’s wild expanse, “This is the best place. This place, you, ocean, you are the best place.” And then Natasha crossed her fingers for luck and lay down to sleep and slept. And while she slept the mist people made pictures, and went on making pictures. Gray pictures, blue and sometimes a little gold but more often silver, such were the pictures the mist people made while Natasha in the pea-green boat went on sleeping. And over everything and always last and highest of all were the stars.
*
Natasha sailed and sailed, and the sea was all around her.
As she cast herself to sea, her body swaying like the body of a dog or a rabbit carried down a long river, she gave herself over to visions… During so many nights awash on the swelling bloody heaving feast of the ocean, Natasha saw somewhere ahead of her a solitary candle, its little flame trembling in the darkness like a flag tattered by the seawind.
She saw a blue bird, an ocean-going plover with purple bands at its throat bundled in a nest of uncoiled and mute electric cable, and shreds of plastic and barbs of rusted iron wire. The plover receded before her into the ocean’s distances and its heart beat outside its flattened chest, the raw, red organ tiny as a clover blossom, and as fragile. Then she saw a family, a whole brood of plovers with hearts hung on silver threads outside their chests in nests of wire, with chirruping nestlings, perched and glowing faintly in a violet industrial haze…She saw a forest of trees without roots, tenuous like dominoes, and she saw a black ladder all covered with water, reaching up from the soggy depths into the depthless purple clouds.
As she sailed the water curled up under her hull and slapped everything and shattered like dishes and came glued and unglued and glued and unglued again.
Like this Natasha sailed through nights, across days, and in and out of weeks. As she sailed, the ocean’s grief grew into her veins and salted her insides.
Riverrun, riverruning, these words susurrated in her tiny frame, her pea-green boat, her great escape: you shall not go down the same river twice, Natasha thought, no, history does not repeat itself, not for a five-year-old, for the same river run once is a different, distant river run again in time, and all rivers sooner or later reach the sea, all words sooner or later reach the sorrow of farewell, all children at one time or another see the world is coming to an end.
Sailing on against the tides, under moon or no moon, in days bright as gleaming fishscales, the peagreen boat rolled ever on, her stalwart, solid craft.
Her queen canteen provided her drinking water on request, and her Firestones provided light. By night, she’d set the Firestones in iron cages clamped to the bow and to the stern. She’d flame them on and ask that they give a modest light: enough, by stern, to see the rudder and the rigging and to keep an eye upon the pea-green wake; and on the bow, enough to illuminate any flotsam or sea life that happened in her path.
And mostly, she was not afraid. We came from water, she reasoned, evolved from cyanobacteria to zooplankton to fish to chimps to swimming, sailing little girls, and on water, in water, as water, we roll ever on.
Ever, ever on.
*
While she floated slowly past vast swarms of migrant eels, the drowned went backwards dreaming, drifting by. Under the water she could see them like shreds of newspaper migrating toward some great papier-mâché sculpture in Atlantis or Erewhon. They were like long strands of licorice, black and spiced and wound around some metabolic block and tackle that pulled them unrelentingly toward their mysterious deep sea home. The great nomadic sea-serpents weaving their infinity sign around the antipodes were like shepherds of the drowned of all time.
And then the ocean was an ocean of ice cream, vanilla with blueberry swirl, or then blueberry with vanilla swirl, a soupy soup of ice cream like you want to play with in your bowl, and then it had rainbow sprinkles of cascading sunlight or chocolate sprinkles where a sudden school or flight of fish darted beneath the shimmering wake or deep creases of purple raspberry swirls in orange sherbet, cold and sweet and then the ocean was a wild patch of mud and you rolled in it like a piggy and then it was dusty and the distant light of the stars sat around on top of it like queen bees who are too good to play with the piggies in the dusty mud and so they fly away.
*
She came to a place in the ocean where it was only light, for days and days it was light until the light hurt, and later to a place where it was only dark and then it was dark for days and weeks, for months. The howling of the wind was like dogs locked in a faraway room.
She saw a light clearing in a jungle, a place where ancient trees grew from soil mounded up in smallish hillocks, and between the trees, brick and stone temples carved with animals and reclining figures, stupas adorned in gold and mirrors, and the sound of birdsong rising above it all. She saw emerging from the temples young monks, thin and graceful, wearing sandals and draped in saffron robes, and they walked lightly, in silence, but each one carried in a breast pocket in his robe a clip of dollar bills, and between the thumb and forefinger each monk drew them out and counted them and then touched his fingers to his lips and then counted them again as if this gesture were in some way his prayer…
*
She sailed and she sailed and as she sailed she told herself stories to stay awake.
She told herself short stories and long, tales of gods and of girls: how an old man with a lame left leg had invented fire, carrying it in a sack on his back from where it originated in a pyre of burning books before time was time; how the Persian chemist Jābir ibn Hayyān invented colorless glass and described it in his book The Color of the Hidden Pearl; how Saint Thomas traveled from the dawn lands of his kinsmen down into Egypt to pilfer a pearl from a serpent sleeping there – how he dressed in the robes of the Egyptians and ate of their food, how he became a slave to their king and slept for forty years, and how he woke to find himself still the son of free men, and how he took the pearl from the sleeping serpent and escaped.
And when the stories wore thin she told whole histories: How the Achaemeninds under Cyrus the Great of Persia joined the old nomad cultures of Central Asia to the imperial civilizations of Egypt, Greece, Rome and Babylon, writing on clay tablets the stories of their origin; how the Assyrians under King Ashurnasirpal II founded the city of Nimrud on an ancient mound and built a palace of boxwood, cedar, pistachio, mulberry, cypress, poplar and tamarisk…how these same people invented farming in the desert, invented writing before there was paper, pen and ink, had magical ways of capturing demons in sealed clay jars with inscriptions on the inside.
How did they manage to write inscriptions on the inside of clay jars? Well, how does a boat float on a sea of H2O?
Natasha hadn’t been to school, so she didn’t know that these stories didn’t matter, and she hadn’t studied navigation, so she didn’t know that sailing in a boat this size, from California to Cancún, was a near impossibility.
So she sailed and she sailed, and as she sailed she told herself stories to stay afloat.
*
In the shadow of an oil tanker she floated unnoticed through the Panama Canal, tropical foliage burning green on either side of her, but she had no hunger for land and she sailed on. And there the sea of memories overtook her.
When she was very young someone had bundled her in a cloth and left her, where? His smell was sharp like metal shavings.
Why did she remember that?
Her father was not Irving, and her mother was not Ophelia.
In her life on land, her California life, she had been tied by steel cables to her mama and dadda. Now the strings were cut and they lay twisted and unspooling like the wires on the plovers.
When she was in her mama’s belly, she had battled with another soul.
What happens is that sometimes there is a confusion. A soul reincarnated sometimes enters a womb already occupied, and there are suddenly two souls in the same baby. Natasha’s mother had felt the thrashing, the tossing in her belly as if a school of herring were in there, or a pair of fighting cocks. When two souls are in the same baby, they fight for possession. The fight sometimes continues after birth, and is called colic. A colicky baby’s very body screams, its little ribcage stretches and heaves as it arches away from the pain, its guts twisted in struggle. Natasha had been like that.
*
The soul she wrestled with was the 7th son of a man whose mother had been a serving maid to Tsar Nicholas during the last days of his reign. That woman had fled the winter palace in the pre-dawn hours of February, 1917, as rebels stormed the gates. She was full-bellied with the bastard child of the Tsar. She had been raped.
As the white army and the red battled for possession of Petrograd, St. Petersburg, she took refuge in the cathedral of St. Basil, whose domes some liken to the flames of religious ardor licking heavenward. She remained there until the child was born. Under difficult circumstances – the great Russian famine, the purges, the workcamps – the boy grew to manhood, and bore seven sons of his own. The second Great War came, and the man and the boys were separated, some to the Crimea, some to the Caucuses, some to the Balkans, some to the steppe. All seven, though, were taken by the War.
When Natasha was conceived by sheepherders in Dagestan on the Caspian Sea, her soul was forced into battle with the seventh son, trying to return to earth.
When two souls converge in the womb like this, sometimes one soul is strong enough to drive out the other, and the colic subsides and the baby grows up normal, as if nothing had happened. But in rare cases, the two souls merge, and the child grows up divided, erratic, prone to insanity or genius.
Such was Natasha’s case. The colic drove her parents crazy with grief and fear, and when the baby was six months old, they could take it no longer: they tied her to the belly of a sheep and ran the flock.
A traveling band of Romani found the sheep, and Natasha, and they took her, and when six more months had passed, they found that her wailing was too much: everywhere they went, the police arrived to chase them out due to the infant child’s angry, embattled sobbing. The child was a curse. They tied her in a bundle made of dogbane thread and labeled her “stranger” and left her. But because they knew she was the cursed child of a god, they left her with the best gifts they had in their possession: an ancient firestone and an opalescent, ever-bearing water jar.
With this act, Natasha’s entire lineage vanished from history, as did her physical memory of them. She became an unmoored boat.
*
Away off where the sun was coming up, inching and pushing up far across the rim curve of the big booming rollers, along the whole line of the east sky, there were people and animals, all black or all so gray they were near black.
There was a big horse with his mouth open, ears laid back, front legs thrown in two curves like harvest sickles.
There was a camel with two humps, moving slow and grand like he had all the time of all the years of all the world to go in.
There was an elephant without any head, with six short legs. There were many cows. There was a man with a club over his shoulder and a woman with a bundle on the back of her neck.
And they marched on, going nowhere, and Natasha sailed on, going somewhere.
*
Natasha scarcely knew when she started crying or how many nights it went on. During those nights she lay her head in the bottom of the boat, her tears draining out the scuppers and feeding the ocean’s bottomless grief. The salt water made her sick, but the sails filled with the vast breathing of ancestral ghosts. Blasts of green algal water, sweeter than sour apples’ flesh to boys, cleansed her of her nausea and unburdened her spirit. It swept away her anchor in its swell. Natasha was in the ocean’s night and the ocean’s night was in her, fully and completely.
At dawn the whole sea changed. The sky, black as ink, looked as if a gigantic brush had spread strips of rosy gold over it. The ocean’s iron expanse was gripped by a first gleaming blaze of sunlight, and the spreading shadow of somber green turned to a bright and colorful ribbon of lights. The vapors of day rose up and every blossoming whitecap exuded an aroma, the whole ocean smoldering in fragrance. Here and there, airy transparent clouds shimmered in flashing clumps like dumplings, and the freshest breeze, seductive as the grass of the endless milky steppe to a nomad mare, barely swayed over the tips of the waves, brushing Natasha’s frayed and salt-flaked hair.
All the music that sounded in the sea fell silent and then changed into another music.
The chirp of waking fish filled the water with its animal whisper.
A dark line of distant cormorants was suddenly illuminated in the sun’s rosy-silver light, as if shreds of fiery cloth were flying through the breaking day.
From her pea green boat she could hear their joyful skronk and squawk, and she knew that landfall was near.