Read Tales and Imaginings for Free Online Page B

crowd.
    It sounded as if the procession was coming at last. People were pushing and jumping to see, and the crowns of the palmtrees lining the ceremonial way were full of children. A boy squeezed through the crowd and stood before me; a dozen big lizards of pleated paper hung around his neck, and two more ran along behind him on strings. By twitching the strings he made the lizards dart at my ankles. One of them ran up the others back as if in copulation, and the boy looked up at me with a doubtful grin. Immediately a man pushed him aside, handed me a peacock feather, and dragged the boy away. The crowd swirled around me. Someone snatched the feather out of my hand. Nit appeared at my side; she put her hands in front of her face, the palms towards me, and said, ‘You come to house, see from window.’
    I struggled after her slim figure, which slipped easily through the crevicesin the swaying mass of people. She stopped in front of a row of pedlars hung about with trays of fruit, and bought from each one. We went down a side-street, and then along an alley between rows of small wooden houses that leaned together. She climbed the steps of the last of these, pushing aside the cane mat that hung in place of a door. ‘Surely the procession doesn’t come down here?’
    ‘Very important street‚’ she said. ‘Everybody come down here.’
    The little house swayed slightly as I stepped into it. The ground floor was hardly more than a wide verandah over the edge of a small canal; I could see water glinting through gaps in the floor and between the bamboo hangings that formed the opposite side of the room. A little boat lay propped on its side in the middle of the floor; someone had broken off in the middle of repainting an eye on its prow, leaving a paintbrush resting in a saucer of red lacquer. There was little else in the room, just a mat in one corner, a few things that might have been bird-cages or fish-traps, and an old gramophone.
    Nit had climbed a ladder into the room above. I lingered a moment, peering out at the motionless water. A row of small boats was moored against the factory wall that formed the opposite bank. Each boat had a roof supported on four poles and made of overlapping leaves like tiles. I could see the boatmen drowsing in the shade, while their womenfolk cooked fish over bowls of glowing charcoal.
    When I climbed the ladder I found that Nit too was blowing smouldering charcoal into a flame. This upper room had no windows , but the wall on the canal side was a screen of fretted wood; drops of sunlight lay in spirals on the floor. I took off my shirt and felt the coolness of the room on my body.
    Nit had bought two of each kind of fruit, and we knelt on thefloor, the basket between us, to eat them. She peeled off the curious geometrical husks one by one and showed me each fragile liquid shape in the palm of her hand: two suns, two stars, two crescent moons. She knelt symmetrically, and when she passed me a little cup of tea with her left hand, her right hand moved slowly in the air as if to preserve this symmetry. Then she put both hands on her knees, palms up, and smiled at me.
    ‘You remember Nit all yesterday?’
    ‘I thought of you very often.’
    ‘You come to dance again?’
    ‘I have to go home tomorrow, I’m afraid.’
    She looked at me in silence for a few moments, and then jumped up and ran to empty the husks out of the basket onto the embers of her little fire; immediately an invisible forest sprang up in the room.
    There was a blanket spread out on the floor in one corner. I lay down among the trembling stops and commas of light, and watched her as she darted to hide our two small cups behind a screen. As she wriggled out of her dress I closed my eyes and lay very still. A few moments later I felt the electricity of her hair touch my cheek, and then the light kiss of her breasts against my body. I put my arms round her as she lay against me, and I held my breath. At first her touch lay