Chapter 2 - The Garden of Scorn
Purple Thistles
The next morning, Cimmy woke up in a bed. It was poorly put together from scratchy branches, and, truth be told, the ground had fewer lumps, but sleeping in a bed implied injury or illness of some kind, and she couldn’t remember getting sick. She stood up, stretching her limbs to see if there was anything wrong with them, and, as she remembered from when she went to sleep the night before, everything was working properly.
The sun was already high up in the sky and she panicked, wondering how deep her slumber was if she managed to sleep through the customary wake-up rebuke that could raise the dead, but then she noticed that most of the people were still walking around, finishing their morning routine.
She jumped out of bed with an agility that instantly ruled out illness, cleaned herself up to get ready for the day and ran out to find Rahima and ask her what was going on. Her friend was just finishing up breakfast, which, for some reason, was served in a bowl. “Who eats roots out of a bowl?” Cimmy asked herself, because they never cooked the tubers, nobody had the patience to wait another second once the precious food was discovered, and, quite frankly, it was a lot easier to keep the precious food for oneself after it reached the stomach.
“Why is everybody still here? What are you eating?” Cimmy asked, almost simultaneously, and her questions were met by her friend’s puzzled stare.
“What do you mean? It’s only seven o’clock. We’re not leaving for the fields for another half hour.” She then turned her gaze to the empty bowl in her lap with increased bewilderment. “What, you mean porridge? We always eat porridge in the morning, you know that! Cimmy, are you unwell?”
“I’m beginning to wonder,” Cimmy said, unsure. “I woke up in a bed this morning.”
“What’s odd about waking up in a bed?”
“Rahima, what do you remember about yesterday?” Cimmy asked tentatively, because once she started looking around, things were a lot stranger than she realized. The rickety cottages seemed to have been rebuilt overnight, there was even a little gathering round in the middle of the village, with a fire pit and rough woven cots to sit on, but the most shocking revelation of all was the field of purple flowers which started right at the edge of their little community and filled all the rest of the space inside the walls.
“Nothing out of the ordinary, as I recall. Why do you ask?”
“You don’t remember us talking about the purple flowers?”
Cimmy hesitated to ask, because in the light of the obvious, her question seemed patently absurd.
Clearly, the crop of purple thistles couldn’t have reached blooming time overnight, and the fact that she didn’t remember it being there the day before put her memory in question, not Rahima’s.
“Why would we ever talk about this curse upon the land!” Rahima twitched, irritated. “That’s all we ever see, and all we ever have, and all we ever eat, this scratchy excuse of a meal. Sometimes I am so sick of it I would rather eat nothing at all! What’s gotten into you?”
Cimmy didn’t know how to respond, so she said nothing. It now stood to reason that everything around them was made of thistle stalks, which explained the lumpy mattress, and the rough cots, and the thistle seed porridge. She was so mesmerized by the beautiful image of the purple tufts swaying in the wind that she gaped at them, wide mouthed, for minutes, until Rahima shook her out of her reverie.
“What happened to the tubers?” Cimmy couldn’t help ask.
“You mean those horrible bitter roots? Why do you care?”
“That’s what we used to eat,” Cimmy continued, as if in a trance.
“You’re crazy, girl! Why would we want to eat those? They’re disgusting!” Rahima finished up and cleaned her bowl. “Oh, dear! Here they come,” she commented, and Cimmy didn’t have to turn around to know she was talking about Bertha and Josepha. Apparently, some things managed to stay the same after all.
“Well, if it isn’t lazy and friend! No, don’t mind us, princess, we wouldn’t want you to ruin your hands by doing something useful. We wouldn’t want to prevent you from making those ridiculous contraptions of yours.” Bertha started the argument. “Don’t you turn your back on me, you useless rat. Every time I look at you, you are wasting time on something stupid. If I weren’t a God-fearing person, I’d question why we bother keeping you around.”
Cimmy had no idea what ridiculous contraptions she had apparently been working on, but was eager to find out as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, that was not an immediate option, since they were already late for the fields.
“I’m telling you,” Bertha complained to Josepha, under her breath, to be fair, but loud enough to be overheard, “lazy and stupid, that’s the worst combination of all. What for do we need people like these? I’m telling you, and mark my words, if her kin doesn’t straighten her out, I will. She could do with a good thumping.”
A chill ran down Cimmy’s spine when she realized that the gift of roots, which had made her feel so blessed the day before, was gone with that day’s past; nobody remembered it, except for her, and even she, at this point, wasn’t so sure whether it really happened, or it had been a bad dream.
“Great!” she thought. “That sends me all the way back to useless cockroach. Actually, no. I’m a useless rat now.” She wondered what a rat was, and made a mental note to find one, all the while realizing that her kin considered her a burden again now, that she wasn’t the finder of food anymore, and she sulked at the thought. She hated her life, her future, her fate, and most of all, she hated those stupid thistles that had relegated her to the lowest peg on the totem pole again, those worthless scratchy weeds that irritated her skin to the point of bleeding. The admonition was still nagging her mind, so she approached Rahima to whisper in her ear.
“Can you promise me you’re not going to laugh, or think I lost my mind, if I ask you a question?”
“What question?” Rahima replied, without lifting her eyes from the thistles while she picked them. They were cruel little bastards, with their sharp thorns. One couldn’t take one’s eyes off of them for even a second if one didn’t want one’s skin scraped raw. A scratchy twig got to her, regardless, and she winced out of exasperation and pain. “God, sometimes I wish I’d never been born!” She turned to Cimmy resentfully, since the latter was the causative factor of her annoyance.
Now that Rahima was in a rotten mood, Cimmy was even more reluctant to ask her stupid question, but the dice had been cast, so to speak, and now she kind of had to, and therefore she did.
“What is a rat?”
Rahima was furious. Of all the rotten times to pull a prank, Cimmy had to pick this one and make her fingers bleed, so she turned her back to her friend and refused to talk to her for the rest of the day.
“Who’d have thought!” Josepha continued her private conversation with Bertha, loud enough to ensure that everyone in earshot would hear her. “The rat managed to push even this one to her wit’s end! Was bound to happen, sooner or later. Everything she touches is doomed to failure.”
“Now I really have to figure out what a rat is,” Cimmy thought.
She envisioned something disgusting and large, with scaly mandibles and many creepy legs, something poisonous, maybe?
What color would it be, she asked herself. If her empirical observations were any good as a reference, it would probably have to be the same color as the ground, to make it easier to hide, something dark brown, and slimy, maybe, with disgusting eyes all around its head and gooey greenish innards.
She shuddered at the thought, disheartened she would be compared to something so vile, but couldn’t shake the wicked expectation that it was poisonous, which, strangely enough, made her feel a little better.
If one had to be compared to a giant creepy bug, the least one could hope was that the creature wasn’t completely defenseless.
The more she thought about it, the more she wanted to know, so much so that she didn’t even realize her hands were scratched mercilessly by the unyielding weeds, so much so that even Bertha found it in her heart to feel sorry for her, in her own special way, of course.
“This is what happens when you have no brains. Hurts to be you, girl! Thank God I’m not!”
The day was winding down and the scratches on her hands had begun to sting from the irritating thistle juice. Cimmy was worried that the scent of blood might attract that horrible rat creature, whatever it was, and she wouldn’t know how to protect herself from it. What if it was really large, she thought, but then she realized, by the way the villagers talked about them, that they were more a pest than a danger. She hoped she wouldn’t brush against a giant slimy feeler or step on something squishy and shuddered instinctively at the thought.
“Why would God decide to put something so disgusting on this earth, like life isn’t hard enough,” she continued her internal monologue, “I wonder what they eat. Why, thistles, naturally. What else is there to eat, except, of course, us?” She brushed off the possibility that rats would be brazen enough to eat human flesh as something outside of the realm of reason.
Deep in thought, she fell behind the others, whom she could see in the distance, and noticed they had almost reached the village. She didn’t want to be alone in the field after nightfall, dreading that one of those disgusting giant insects could crawl all over her feet and cover them in poisonous slime, so she hastened her stride and startled what she at first thought to be a small tumbleweed from underneath the thorny stalks.
She drew closer to witness the wretched fear of a little creature, no bigger than her foot, who was staring at her blankly, waiting for its end. It was covered in soft shiny fur, the color of dust, it had a long pink tail and four delicate pink feet, and it pinned Cimmy with all the apprehension of its two red eyes, round and glossy like polished pebbles. They stared at each other for a while, none of them moving, the little furry creature trying to find a means to escape and Cimmy trying to figure out what it was. For one, it looked like it was made of flesh and blood. She could see its little heartbeat through its skin, it was so terrified, and quite a cute little creature, after one got used to it. She lowered herself slowly, trying to make no sudden moves and hoping the critter wasn’t going to rush past her and disappear. It didn’t. It just stared at her and quivered its long nose, adorned by a luxurious pair of whiskers.
“Friendly,” Cimmy thought, as her new acquaintance came even closer to sniff her fingers. “Are you hungry, little one?” she asked, and then she pulled what was left of her seed hull cake to offer it a crumb. The creature jumped on it, ravenously, and then stared at Cimmy, wondering if there was more. A few generous crumbs later, its tiny belly was full, and it became more curious about the giant provider of nourishment. It crawled on Cimmy’s lap and clambered all the way up to her shoulder, where it stopped, mesmerized by her hair. It didn’t show any signs of wanting to leave, and the night was fast approaching, so Cimmy decided to take it to the village, excited to show Rahima her find and hoping the cute furry creature would put her friend in a better mood.
It was too late when she finally got home, and everybody was already asleep. Cimmy sneaked in her bed in the dark, careful not to dislodge the wrath of Bertha from its slumber, and curled up on the lumpy thistle mattress with her new pet nestled against her belly to keep itself warm.
Rat!
Rat! Rat! Disgusting vermin!” Screams and yells thundered from all around, while Cimmy’s new pet ran erratically for its life, not knowing where to hide from the sudden torment.
The entire village was at the ready, wielding stones, sticks and brooms to annihilate the menace, which eventually managed to make it to the thistle field and get lost from sight.
“What’s going on?” Cimmy asked Rahema, faking ignorance, not very convincingly, because she had watched the whole scene and prayed quietly her new friend would make it to safety before one of those sticks and stones got him.
“Oh, nothing,” her friend shuddered with loathing. “It was just a disgusting rat! Vile creatures!”
“Why do you hate them?” Cimmy asked, trying to look like she didn’t care.
“Do you even have to ask? They eat everything, the filthy vermin, and they carry disease, too. You don’t believe me, but they do. They’d eat the flesh off your bones if you’d let them. What a despicable pest!”
“You mean they eat the thistle cakes?” Cimmy insisted.
“I mean they eat our homes, and our beds, and our food. They’d eat rocks if they could chew them, and they multiply too, ten and twelve at a time. When they get into the fields, there is nothing left behind them. They are more destructive than a brush fire. If you see one, destroy it immediately!” Rahima urged.
“Information which would have served me well yesterday, before I brought that helpless creature here to face certain death”, she thought, peeved at her friend for not being willing to answer a simple question and offended by the disdain she was showing towards a creature which, in her opinion, was harmless.
She turned around to leave and bumped into Josepha, who was still huffing and puffing after the rat chase.
“As I live and breathe, you get rid of a rat and find yourself another. Did a previous engagement prevent you, your majesty, from joining us in our efforts to rid the village of vermin? Answer, louse!”
“I was, aagh…, I was still…” Cimmy mumbled, trying to buy herself time in order to find an appropriate excuse.
“Let me guess, you were working on one of those stupid contraptions of yours,” Josepha said, and now Cimmy really wanted to know what kind of contraptions she’d been working on, and she didn’t have to wait long, because Josepha’s comment provided her with the answer. “I decided to save you the time you’re wasting on them, so I cleared out the lot,” she pointed out to the trash heap at the edge of the village, now eerily bedazzled with the work of Cimmy’s hands. “That should feed a cozy fire easily. At least I can find a use for your wasteful idiocy.”
Cimmy looked at the strange objects, which she was seeing for the first time, and was heartened by the craftsmanship and the level of detail that the other her, the one she knew nothing about, had dedicated to her passion. It was very hard to tell what purpose those strange objects, no two the same, could serve, and she had to assume there wasn’t any, and that those objects were made just to be looked at.
“Did I spend all this time just on making something beautiful?” Cimmy asked herself, amazed.
She looked around at the dreary surroundings, that were so familiar to her, and concluded the other ‘her’ must have wished for a place to escape ugliness, just like she dreamed of her wonderful garden, and had the gift and the audacity to bring it to reality. She was shocked and humbled, but not sad at the destruction of the artifacts, which, frankly, she didn’t have sufficient time to get attached to, and this made Josepha even angrier.
“At least if you cared at all, I’d understand,” she feigned empathy, to gain herself the support of the villagers, who had started gathering around to enjoy the impromptu show. “You don’t even care about these things you’re wasting my time on! You are only doing this to be spiteful!”
“Maybe that’s not such a bad use of my time, I should do it more often,” Cimmy thought, suddenly outraged that Josepha took it for granted that even Cimmy’s life was not something she could call her own.
Those things were wonderful, and the fact that they served no purpose made them very compelling, in a way Cimmy found difficult to put into words; she couldn’t take her mind off of them, suddenly saddened that in a short while they will be no more. She wondered if her current persona was still able to craft something this beautiful, and promised herself to try the first chance she got.
Of course, given her recent experience, there was no guarantee that she wasn’t going to wake up the following morning in a place where those wonderful objects never existed, but she knew she would keep the memory of them, and thus she could make them again, and again, even more beautiful than before.
This was the second time Cimmy realized she had something of value, something only she could do, and nobody else, something that Josepha didn’t have a prayer acquiring or destroying.
She had been given a gift.
She wondered who had bestowed these blessings upon her, the grace of finding sustenance, the ability to reveal beauty even in the darkest surroundings, and she didn’t find an answer to that question, but now she knew what beauty was, that it didn’t belong to anybody, that it didn’t have any purpose other than itself, and that it was everywhere, if only one knew how to look for it, without a doubt.
Josepha was getting ready to delve into another blathering diatribe, when she was rudely interrupted by Bertha, who marched furiously to the center of the gathering.
“Do you know what I found in this louse’s bed? Rat hair! There was a rat in her bed and she didn’t even notice! How filthy of a being one must be, to not notice a rat crawling all over her?” A few members of the audience gagged and grimaced with disgust. “We can’t allow her to sleep in the house, to bring all of her sloth and disease with her. Enough is enough!”
Several people nodded in agreement, eager not to be on Bertha’s wrong side. God only knew that once the latter’s mouth was unleashed, there was no end to her petty gossip.
“You heard her, girl! Go! Go spend your time in the field, with your lot; much like your vermin friends, you don’t deserve a home! Thank you for the campfire, though. We’ll think of you when we warm ourselves around its ambers.”
Cimmy exchanged a quick look with Rahima, whose eyes were filled with tears, but who looked down, quickly, terrified she will have to share her friend’s fate. She then looked at Bertha, to figure out if the latter really meant her threat, and it was evident that she was expected to go.
“Well,” she thought, “there is one silver lining to this situation. At least nobody is going to hurt me there.”
She turned around and walked towards the edge of the village, slowly at first, and then gaining speed, as if something out there in the field of purple flowers was waiting for her and calling out to her.
When she ventured into the thicket of thistles, she worried that she would be scratched mercilessly, because it was already pitch black and she couldn’t see anything, but the plant world, to which she seemed to have been exiled, didn’t want to cause her any more pain.
She found a bed of flattened plants, large enough for a person to lie down, curled up into a ball on top of it, noted that it was slightly more comfortable than the lumpy mattress, which was made of basically the same material, and she fell asleep.
When she woke up the next morning, she felt something move against her belly; it was her little friend, the rat. It would have been difficult for her to tell whether it was the same rat. They all looked more or less the same, but she had to assume that it was, and that the rat recognized her, since it wasn’t afraid. Her first reaction was to jump to her feet, as she remembered the disgust and the shame, and the stigma attached to somebody willing to sink so low that rats were allowed to roam undisturbed around one’s person, but then she saw the furry creature, shivering in the chill of the morning, stare at her with its beady eyes, oblivious to the disrepute.
It looked so innocent and at ease, here in its own environment, that it made Cimmy giggle.
“I bet your kin isn’t going to chase me out of the field with sticks and stones and try to kill me,” Cimmy said out loud, not caring that talking to oneself in the middle of nowhere was a sure sign of insanity. Maybe gifts and madness did go hand in hand. She reviewed the late circumstances of her life and reached the conclusion that if they were the logical outcome of her sanity, sanity was the first thing that had to go. She continued her conversation with the rat. “Nice place you got here!”
The rat’s snout quivered, stirring a weird dance of its whiskers in the process, and Cimmy had this sudden feeling that it was hungry. She stretched up her hand, careful not to scratch herself, picked a large seed head and shared it with the rat until they were both full.
Everyone Deserves a Name
"You know,” she told her new friend, “now that we have enjoyed each other’s company for a few days it would be fitting that I give you a name, how about...”
Cimmy looked at the rat, who didn’t seem impressed by the solemnity of the moment, while she pondered on the name that would best fit him. It was not something to be taken lightly, a name. It defined a person with respect toone’s peers, and it became part of one, like eye color or gender. She just stopped to acknowledge the fact that she didn’t know whether her friend was a boy or a girl, and decided she didn’t want to know, because it didn’t make any difference.
There was nothing worse than having a mismatched name, she thought, except not having a name at all; she felt bad about not thinking about it sooner. She went through all the names she knew, and none of them felt like a good match, so she said the first word that came to her mind.
“Fay,” she rejoiced. “I’m going to call you Fay. How do you feel about it?” she asked her new furry friend, excited, and her enthusiasm was a bit deflated by the realization that the rat really didn’t have a clue one way or the other. “Well, that’s ok. It matters to me.”
“You know, Fay,” she commented later, munching on a handful of seeds while the rat was working on his, “this is actually not bad: food is plentiful, there is no hassle, no chores, no nasty smells, and I enjoy wonderful company to boot. I’m not going to lie to you, my friend. I don’t know how long this is going to last. If last time gave me any insight, I may wake up somewhere different tomorrow, somewhere all of this might not exist. If so, I’m going to miss you bad, my friend.”
The rat looked at her intently and continued munching on his seeds.
“Thanks for caring!” Cimmy pouted and withdrew into her thoughts.
What of Rahima? She’d been her best friend since she could remember. What if she wouldn’t be there next time? Her anxiety grew, and she started fretting, but since she knew she had no control over the matter, it fizzled out eventually.
She remembered Rahima’s disgust at the dreadful seed porridge, and how she thought she’d rather eat nothing at all, and she was so grateful that this version of her friend had never experienced famine, she didn’t know what it was like to not see food for days, and feel the pangs of hunger, and the weakness, and the shadow of death. People have such trouble empathizing with sorrows they never experienced, and she had to pause to figure out whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe it would have been for the best if she never knew starvation either, and if she could brush it off as something unnatural, that was not meant to exist. Cimmy asked, trying to look like she didn’t care.
She found herself judging Rahima, against her better nature and the love she had for her friend, for despising the nourishing slop which, according to an unbiased standard, was indeed god awful, but was still better than the bitter roots, whose high oxalic salt content made one’s mouth and innards sore pretty much all the time.
“How did we survive on those?” she asked herself in amazement, knowing in her heart, without anyone having to tell her, that there was something toxic in those roots, something that would have caused permanent damage sooner or later.
Whatever her fate, and whatever petty torments Josepha and Bertha devised for her, she was grateful to have been offered a way out of the hell of despair. She didn’t know what she did to deserve it, but maybe it was not about deserving, maybe it was about not letting go of hope.
Beyond Confines
The bad thing about her new circumstance was that she had to move constantly, so that the villagers who were out in the field harvesting thistles wouldn’t run into her. She could hear them now and then, and then she knew she had to find another spot.
For this reason she liked to keep her accommodations to a minimum, but she couldn’t resist the temptation of making more of those beautiful objects, which really served no purpose, but she made them small enough that she was able to wear them on her person.
Occasionally she reached the wall and got infinitely frustrated that it restricted the area she could go to, and it made her retrace her steps and travel in circles, getting nowhere.
She knew all about the garden by now, there was no joy of discovering something new, no unearthed treasure to be found, just more of the same bland mix.
Since she had time, she circled the compound, looking for an exit, and found none, a fact she already knew, and she was blown back by the thought that in her entire life she never once questioned the logic of being kept in an enclosure without a gate, where both resources and learning where limited and devoid of choice.
The only logical explanation she could come up with was that some of her ancestors, way back when, built this coop to protect themselves from whatever wicked nightmare was lurking outside, and the knowledge of the world beyond was lost to the unintended consequences of having one’s means of survival limited in a way that inevitably led to them gradually diminishing to nothing.
“This is horrible!” Cimmy thought. “Maybe Josepha and Bertha wouldn’t have grown this mean if they weren’t so desperate from living in hell. I mean, maybe they would be, but certainly not about food. Nobody should be mean about food. It is beneath the dignity of any human being.” She was very young, and contemplated what another twenty or thirty years of this life would do to her. Maybe in that dark and miserable future, she and Rahima would live to replace Bertha and Josepha, and assume their entitled attitudes and become heartless. “I’ve got to get out of here! I don’t want to become this, I don’t want to live like this. Surely there must be a way past this wall, it doesn’t go to the sky.”
She spent many afternoons twisting ropes out of scratchy strands of thistle, while Fay watched her, indifferent; her fingers hurt and bled, but she didn’t care.
She wasn’t sure how a rope would be of any use but kept working anyway, perfecting her craftsmanship, until the ropes turned out smooth, even, and flawless.
When she reached mastery, she started embellishing them with tiny artifacts and flowers. She tried throwing them over the wall, a task as illogical as it was ineffective, because there was nothing to hold them in place on the other side, and they couldn’t bear witness to what they had seen either. She tried knotting rocks to their ends, and in this way she discovered the fundamental principles of pulleys and weights, and learned that she was heavier than the rocks. She counted her blessings for not having them fall on her head when the rope snapped back, and was about to give up when Fay, before she could grab him, climbed the rope with admirable agility and disappeared to the other side of the wall.
“No, Fay, come back!” Cimmy whimpered behind him, suddenly distressed by the loss of her companion. She didn’t know how much the rat meant to her until he was gone. What was she going to do now without him? “The selfish ingrate! I must be out of my mind to try to fashion a relationship with a rat. They only act on instinct. He couldn't care less if I live or die!”
She sat on the ground, suddenly defeated, and cried for a long time, until the salty tears started to irritate her cheeks and make them sting. That night she slept in the field all alone, and the field felt much colder and a lot less welcoming, as it was supposed to feel to somebody conditioned from birth to only survive inside a tribe.
To her great joy and surprise, Fay was back in the morning, and had brought with him what looked like a strange fruit, in a color that Cimmy instinctively knew must be yellow. It was strangely shaped, like a squat little vase with a long stem, surrounded by delicate gills. It was soft, moist, and cool to the touch, even in the blazing sunlight. While Cimmy held it in her hands, looking at it from all angles and trying to learn as much as she could about it, Fay climbed down her arm, took a good bite out of the fruit and chewed it slowly, to demonstrate what it was for.
Cimmy’s cloud of helplessness and defeat returned when she faced the fact that the rat was better suited at foraging for food and a lot more willing to take risks for a desirable outcome.
“No wonder we’re all starving to death and living like this! Sometimes I wish I was born a rat!”
She contemplated that thought for a second, while munching on her unexpected treat, and because life hadn’t been exactly predictable lately, she started worrying that tomorrow she might wake up to find her wish had come true.
“Well, Fay can’t make rope,” she consoled herself with one of the advantages of having opposable thumbs. Fay looked at her, unimpressed, and finished his last bite of fruit.