Tea Topuria

They had built a house with no balcony and no yard right beside the market. Eliakim had calculated it – 10 steps! That was exactly how many steps you could take during that one time of the day and night when total silence reigned here, and nothing else could be heard.

The market didn’t have one morning – it had three. The first began after midnight, when peasants brought their goods down from the villages in baskets, selling cheaply to merchants. Around the same time, caravans arrived, camels and mules laden with goods. Then came the second morning: animals were settled into the caravanserai, stalls were laid out, and dawn broke. This was the third – the true morning – with freshly awakened customers, shouts from stall to stall, hubbub, and all the minor commotion without which nothing is ever bought or sold anywhere.

As a child, Eliakim would entertain himself by walking the length of the street and then walking it back – backwards. Something like that would happen in the market in the evenings. The caravanners returned to their cities, the merchants to their homes, and the market was left to the homeless and the dogs. They would divvy up whatever spoiled fruit or vegetables had been left beneath the stalls, then curl up right there to sleep. That’s when Eliakim’s tenstep silence would fall again. And then, the camels would come again, the baskets would return, and a new day would begin before the first one had even properly ended.

Eliakim wandered the market rows, bought meat and dried spices, and headed home. He hung a soot-blackened pot in the hearth – then lit the fire beneath it. For some reason, that was his way. Everyone else lit the fire first, then set the pot. But once Eliakim got used to doing things backwards, he never unlearned it. There’d been no one in his childhood to tell him: ‘not like that – like this’.

The door creaked open, and Asa stepped in from the summer heat. He didn’t close it – just stood there on the threshold, watching Eli- akim. He was soaked in sweat, his clothes stuck to his skin, and probably stank too – but Asa was slow-witted. He didn’t notice dirt, and often didn’t even feel when he was hungry.

Eliakim pulled Asa into the room with one hand and closed the door behind him with the other.

‘You hungry?’

Asa didn’t answer.

He opened the lid of the wooden chest, took out a loaf of bread, brushed off the dried flour, broke it, and handed Asa the crust.

‘Eat.’

Eliakim was Zerubbabel’s last and only surviving child. The others had all died at birth. That didn’t surprise anyone on the Great Plain. Women here often gave birth to stillborn babies – some were sent down the river, others buried in the yard. His father wasn’t much brighter than Asa, but he could mend shoes and feed a single child. His mother died during her last labour.

Eliakim had always felt he was different. He thought more than others, and he could do more than others. He had no teacher, but whatever he touched, he grasped by instinct. Word went around that Eliakim was a bastard of the Horde. On the Great Plain, nothing stayed hidden. If something reached someone’s lips, they said it. And still, no one could tell lie from truth – even when the lie was one they’d made up themselves.

‘Think you’re better than us? Your mother had you by a guard of the Horde’, Asa’s mother said – Eliakim was only 10 at the time.

Asa had done something stupid again, and Eliakim was standing there, laughing his heart out.

‘What – did you really think your mother died in childbirth?!’

Eliakim looked around to see if anyone was watching – then bolted for home.

They said that it was the fool Zerubbabel who had killed his wife. No one had seen it, but they said that from the beginning, he had been surprised a healthy child was born. He thought: it has hands and feet, but it must be feeble-minded. When the boy spoke his first word, Zerubbabel looked long into the child’s pale, thoughtful eyes – then pulled a stone from the hearth, went out into the yard, and brought it down on his wife’s head.

When Eliakim was small, he would often watch his father’s hands. He imagined how he had taken the stone, and how he had struck his wife in the head. What had his mother been doing in that moment? Probably grinding grain, and the blood had mixed into the flour. Had she managed to say anything? Maybe she had even called out to Eliakim. He was probably still playing on his bedding, repeating that first word over and over.

Eliakim would often watch the hearth. He would check if a stone was missing somewhere, or if one of them had been added later. It seemed to him that all the stones were loosened – as if it might all come crashing down at any moment. He never said anything aloud. He was always afraid of those thoughts. Once, he even felt ashamed of them.

Zerubbabel was stitching shoes. He had wedged the worn leather between his knees and was turning it with the awl. Nearby lay the small and the large hammer. The heavy iron clamps, the iron plates – into which he’d press the glued soles so the toe wouldn’t open. Eliakim was watching his father’s hands and thinking: why had he needed to take a stone from the hearth, when it would’ve been so much easier to grab one of the irons? Suddenly Zerubbabel looked up. He caught his son’s gaze, met his eyes and said:

‘I didn’t kill your mother, you did!’

Eliakim flinched, as if someone had walked in on him while bathing. His hands even moved to cover his bare body. He fidgeted. Zerubbabel was still watching him, stitching the worn leather with the awl. Eliakim was always like someone wearing an invisibility cloak on the Great Plain. No one noticed what he said or did, and no one understood him. But he had noticed this too: even the most hopeless fool would sometimes seem strangely wise. Suddenly, they would say or do something, and Eliakim would feel like a newborn – naked, like now. Once or twice, he had even covered himself at the pants’ fly. Then he felt even more ashamed and let his hand fall.

Eliakim felt that father didn’t love him. At first, he thought it was because he was a bastard of the Horde – and that’s why Zerubbabel hated him. Often, when walking in town, he would watch the guards closely. They were warriors. In rain or sun, they stood watch over the guests’ tents. Their faces were bronzed and rough. Eliakim would try to guess which one might be his real father. There was one he thought he most resembled, and if he happened to catch sight of him somewhere, it would ruin his whole day.

He was 20 years old when Zerubbabel died. Eliakim found him dead in the morning. He hadn’t been ill, but even so, Eliakim wasn’t surprised. No one lived long on the Great Plain. He shook the white bread cloth clean, wrapped the body in it, and sat down for a mo- ment to rest. The corpse lay on the ground like an enormous shoti – canoe-shaped bread – as if it had just come from the oven. And suddenly, Eliakim understood: Zerubbabel hadn’t really killed his mother. You couldn’t say how or in what way, but he understood it. Exactly as, long before, on a morning just like this, David had looked to the east and understood that the Horde was approaching them from the blue horizon. This was really his father – a man whose wife had perished in childbirth, and who had probably even loved his son. Just a grim man, and that’s it.

Eliakim buried Zerubbabel beside mother, wrapped in flour-dusted linen, and planted a pine sapling above his head. The Horde didn’t allow crosses on graves and in their place, pines were planted – green from winter through summer. He circled the base with stones to keep it steady, and then walked home.

As he washed his soil-coated hands, he thought: he’d never be able to meet father again – probably not even in the afterlife, for they had been too foreign to one another.