passersby in front of the furniture and antique stores. After a few months, one store owner took me aside and said, “I can see from the way you talk and your bearing that you are a fine young man and willing to work. I want to sell my store. I will teach you and you can buy my store. You have peddled enough. You will pay me weekly or monthly.” That was Wolf Shalzan, a kind man to whom I owe everything.
Myon came home a few weeks later, broke and tired, and we talked it over. We decided to accept Shalzan’s offer. We had no choice. Through the office run by our countrymen, we were able to receive a loan with payments spread out over several years. After I bought the store, Myon also bought a store and we were partners until his marriage.
Many more displaced peoples had arrived in Urlskinder by this time, some of them blood kin and others northern neighbors also forced to flee by the Kalif’s armies. The news spread that we had made more of our lot than most and there arrived in the city dozens of men and women who wished to work for us. Our credit was good, and through small banks we could borrow up to 500 sels to pay back in a year. As most of the newcomers were young unmarried men, we bought stores for them. We also lent them cash money from time to time and so each one lived sparingly and paid back the borrowed money. The result was that we assured all newcomers from Urlskinder that they could eat and sleep with us until they could become established for themselves. That was the beginning and the cause of so many new immigrants to Morrow becoming store owners.
Gradually, our own family made the trip from Urlskinder to Morrow. When our mother arrived with Praidal, our sister, and “Itchi”, our young cousin, our whole life changed for the good. At the place where newcomers were inspected, the officials and doctors would talk to each person in his own language.
Praidal and Itchi were immediately passed through, but mother was held back. It took awhile to examine her eyes. They were fearful of disease brought in by foreigners. We knew this and understood, and were satisfied, and then forgot it. Once, though, much later, when our mother and a few women were talking in Praidal’s house, she told them that at the examination the doctor spoke to her and asked why she had come to the city. When she told them that she had come to meet the Hoegbottons, her children, they then immediately let her through. This was not true, but it shows the pride she took in us.
We had already prepared a house so that Praidal and my mother could live in a certain style. I, not being married, shared the house with them. We were all very happy. Then Praidal got married and my mother went to live with her. I would visit them during the week. Our mother visited us very often in our stores and would take money from us to send to her poor sister, who had moved to Nysimia (a far western province of the Kalif’s Empire) with her husband. Even when we had lived in Urlskinder she felt it was her duty to help her sister, who was poorer than us. My mother, when she went to the market in Urlskinder, would stop on the way home at her sister’s, who had not yet left for Nysimia and had a house full of children, and there my mother would leave some food and then come home. We all knew of this, except for my father, but none of us children ever said a word about it.
Our mother felt quite content for a time. She sent money and letters to her sister and received letters in return, until the beginning of several wars conducted by the Kalif against his own people. The mail from the empire was discontinued abruptly. No more letters arrived from Nysimia and mother became uneasy.
We all assured her that the wars could only last a few months. That is what everyone thought at the time.
But as each month went by, she became more concerned and worried, and she changed completely.
She would sit for hours at a time in her room, often in silence. One evening when we were all sitting in the dining room talking pleasantly, our mother came out of her room upset and tearfully asked us how it could be that they wouldn’t let a letter through from a sister. She asked us to go in force to the Kalif and ask him how he could allow for sisters to be out of touch for such a long time. How could he allow such a thing! Such agony was in her question that we were gripped by more pain than we could bear.
A few days later, we experienced the first death in the family since our arrival in Morrow. Somehow, I will always connect my mother’s distress and this death. Praidal became ill from wheat infected with fungus. Others recovered, but in Praidal the illness became more profound. It made her unable to keep down food and it changed the pallor of her skin so that it became almost clear. After four days, she died.
This was a shock to us. We wept for days. We had survived so much and come so far that I suppose we had thought we could endure anything. Washing her body for burial and knowing the hardship she had suffered in Urlskinder, I could not forget her. It was then, in the cemetery, as I held my mother close to me, that I first grieved for the homeland.
WHAT CAME AFTER
At the present time, all of us original Hoegbottons have multiplied and become intertwined with other families. Because the agents of Frankwrithe & Lewden have been hostile to us, we have had to spread out — to Nicea, toStockton, even, as I write this, to Ambergris. From the nine of our generation, most have gone to their eternity, including my mother, just two years ago. The children and the children’s children do not know who they are and how they came to Morrow. They are here and that is enough for them. They are different than us — sharper and less kind (although they will laugh if they read this).
Some of our people still lived in Yakuda, under the Kalif’s rule, for many years. We did not hear from them, but we used to send money to Yakuda after the wars had ended, each to his own people. One time, we undertook to send a large sum of money through the Kalif’s ministers to Yakuda. We told them it was for everyone in Yakuda, even those who had been resettled there from distant lands and had helped to drive us out. We did this so as to not create any ill-feeling.
I don’t remember the amount of money, but it was a very large sum and they never received it. After a time, one of the leaders in Yakuda — a pale man whose family must have originated far to the West — came to Morrow and we called a meeting. He was a good speaker. He spoke for a long, long time. He said that the Kalif knows better who is in need and that if the Kalif’s ministers did not give the money to the people in Yakuda, then it is certain that it was needed more elsewhere. We were naive. We still had not heard the reports of the atrocities performed in the name of the Kalif, or could know that many of those remaining in Yakuda would be uprooted or killed in the coming months.
After the repressions had subsided, many years later, we tried to find out something about Yakuda and as a last resort sent out letters to the regional administrator for the area. We did not get an answer. Later, we heard a story that the Kalif had dammed the river, flooding the valley. It was strange to hold in our minds the thought of our homeland lost to the river — our homes, our cities, underwater. For years, I told people that this story was not true. But lately, I have come to realize it does not matter. There are no Hyggboutten left there.
Many evenings now, I have a dream. It is probably not a dream so much as a wish. I should like to tell it to my children, but I do not know that it will mean anything to them. I am frightened that it will mean nothing.
In the dream, my brothers and I are riding through the valley we have never seen, up the hills that border the river. Our parents gallop ahead of us and we try to catch up to them. The sun fills the leaves of the trees with shadow. We laugh as we ride, the underbrush lashing against our leather-clad legs. The river is a line of silver light below us. The horses are very fast. And we are happy because we are home.
THE CAGE
I
The hall contained the following items, some of which were later catalogued on faded yellow sheets constrained by blue lines and anointed with a hint of mildew:
• 24 moving boxes, stacked three high. Atop one box stood
