The Lying Days Read Free Page A

substitution of “overseas” for “fairyland”) I felt for the first time something of the tingling fascination of the gingerbread house before Hansel and Gretel, anonymous, nobody’s children, in the woods. Standing before the one small window of the native medicine shop I no longer could be bored before the idea of the beckoning witch and the collection of pumpkins and lamps and mice that shot up into carriages and genii and coachmen or two-headed dogs. Not that these dusty lions’ tails, these piles of wizened seeds, these flaking gray roots and strange teeth could be believed to hold tight, like Japanese paper flowers, magic that might suddenly open. Not that the peeled skin of a snake, curling like an apple skin down the window, could suggest a dragon. But the dustiness, the grayness, the scavenged collection of tooth and claw and skin and sluggish potion brought who knows by whomor how far or from where, waiting beneath cobwebs and neglect … the shudder of revulsion at finding my finger going out wanting to touch it! It winked suddenly like the eye of a crocodile that waited looking like a harmless dry log: you did not know what you might be looking at, what awfulness inert in withered heaps behind the glass.
    It was at this moment that a small boy came skipping down the pavement white and unconcerned with a tin pistol dangling against his navy blue pants, and a bicycle bell tringing importantly in his hand. He walked straight past me with the ease of someone finding his way about his own house, and dodged through the Mine boys as if they were the fowls, making up their minds for them when they did not seem to know whether they wanted to step this way or that. He was dark, but his eyes were big and light beneath childishly rumpled eyebrows: he was gone, into a doorway farther up.
    I could not have said why the sight of another child was so startling. He seemed to flash through my mind, tearing mystery, strangeness, as a thick cobweb splits to nothing brushed away by the hand of a man. I was interested now in the native customers inside the medicine shop who were buying roots and charms the way people buy aspirins. I watched one boy who took his money from a yellow tobacco bag and then had a measure of greenish flakes poured into a second tobacco bag. Another was turning a tiny empty tortoise shell over in his hand; I wondered how much such a thing would cost, then remembered that I had no money. It was a charming little mound of brown and amber medallions, so neatly fitted. … Perhaps I could come back and get one someday. I felt a longing of affection for the tortoise shell which was to me a creature in itself; I would carry it everywhere with me, look at the light through its stripy shell the way the light looked through a leaf or the stained-glass window that the Millars had put up to the memory of their son, in the church.
    The boy did not buy the shell. It went back onto the wooden shelf. I pressed nearer the window and made a spy hole with my hand against the rheumy glass to see in better, and as I did so my eye was caught by another eye. Something was alive in the window: a chameleon, crouched motionless and matching on a bundle ofgray-green sticks until then, was making its way slowly up the rib of wood that seamed the corner of the window. Its little soft divided feet, each one like two little slender hands joined and facing outward from the wrist, fluttered for a hold and swayed, feeling the air. One eye in the wrinkled socket looked ahead, the other swiveled back fixed on me. Ah-h! I cried, scratching my finger at the glass and leaning my whole weight against it. I followed the creature all up the window and down again, when it walked across the floor high-stepping over the piles of herbs and objects. Then it stopped, swayed, and a long thin tongue like one of those rude streamers you blow out in people’s faces at Christmas shot unrolled and curled back again with a fly