myself. I wonder whether my whole life is a dream, a story I made up and began to believe because I told it so often.
When I feel poisoned by their strange hunger, I catch a bus to the west, to the shantytown, and walk around the market and listen to the storyteller. I speak to the people who live on the edges, the poor who come from villages far away. They do not talk about what they have lost, because it is too painful, because they have not found the words to say it, because there is no need, because everyone has lost the same things. Sometimes they are coarse and brutal and selfish because they have lost so much, because they no longer even hope, but I do not despise them for that. More often they are kind and generous. They sing the old poems, and they eat out of the common bowl, and in a corner of their shack there is always a shrine to the small gods, even if it is made of scraps of paper and wood and tinfoil. Their children are sharp and bright, and when they grow up, many of them do not keep the gods in their houses. What use are our gods in a big city where no one listens? I think that if they forget their gods they may forget themselves, like so many of the foreigners who visit me: but how can I blame them for that?
The shanty dwellers do not come from my village. Many of them don’t even speak my language. They are caught between one world and another, and they no longer belong anywhere. When I go to visit them, I feel less alone.
6
When I told Mely I wanted to write down my story, at first she said nothing. She stared at me with her cool green eyes and I thought she was laughing at me. At last she flicked her tail. “Why not?” she said. “You are a Keeper. You should have a Book. And you might as well make your own.”
Mely’s comment took me aback. I hadn’t thought of my story as being like the Book, and it seemed disrespectful to think that I could replace the Book with my own words. I wondered then if perhaps I shouldn’t write it, if to do so would be a kind of blasphemy. When I told Mely my thoughts, she flicked her tail again. “You people are strange,” she said. “Someone must have made the Book. It didn’t leap out of a burrow or fall off a tree. So why can’t you make one too?”
“But I don’t want to replace the Book,” I said. “I just want to write down my story.”
“So? It will be a new Book,” said Mely. She was already bored with the conversation. “I’m tired of looking for the old one.”
And so I went to the paper shop in my street and bought a notebook and a pen. The notebook has black covers and creamy white paper with faint blue lines, and the pen has black ink. They were expensive, but it seemed important to buy the proper materials for such a solemn undertaking as writing a new Book.
I put the pen and the notebook on my table in the kitchen. I left them there for days. I didn’t have the courage to make the first mark on the paper, to sully that perfect creamy-white field with my handwriting.
“What if I make a mistake?” I asked Mely.
“How will you know if it’s a mistake?”
“I don’t know anything about stories,” I said. “I will make lots of mistakes.”
I knew it was stupid to ask Mely. What does a cat know about books? But she said, “How can you make a mistake? It’s your story.” And then she fell asleep at once, so I couldn’t ask her any more questions.
That night I opened the notebook and began my story. I have been writing it now for six evenings, and every morning I read what I have written to Mely, because I need to feel I am making it for someone. I know I am not telling things in the proper order, but I think Mely is right: it is my story, so I can’t make a mistake.
And tonight I am remembering how I would walk out of the house at dawn on spring mornings, my feet bare and freezing, because I loved to see the sun on the dew drops that hung trembling from each grass blade.
I thought that the dew on the grass at sunrise