Mae broke down. She couldn't speak. Her face was not her own. It was like the laundry she saw in Old Mrs Tung's hands, wrung clean.
She wiped her face and her mouth, and swallowed and kept on.
'That's the roof of the mosque in what is left of Mr and Mrs Ali's house. They are a fine old couple, of our Party of Progress. And there is the Okan house; they are as old as the hills. And I am so happy, because their house is whole, it isn't touched, and all the circular rugs that Mrs Okan weaves herself, with old hands, over candles at night, they will have survived. We can wash them. We can wash them and put them on her floors and it will all be as it was. And next… next to them.'
Mae drew a breath and grew grim. 'Next to that is the house of my dear friend Mrs Ozdemir. You cannot see it. But I can. I can see it as if it had never left, was still there, as if a girl called Sezen still drew at a table, and still fumed at her mother, for being sad and frightened, as if it were still full of corncobs that the family used as furniture because they were too poor to have anything else, with beautiful naked babes and words from the Koran written in crayon on the walls. I can still see it, but that girl died, and they have lost their home. But Mrs Ozdemir's heart is broken and so is her head, and she just sits and rocks and weeps.
'And there is my house, too.
'My house in many ways, because it was my husband's house, and in that house I gave birth to three children. One whole side of it is gone. I can see inside it; it's so familiar, even flooded with sunlight, my bed, and my kitchen. I think I see my own TV in part of the loft, sunning itself. But the barn is full of mud, so I think my beautiful weaving machine will be gone.
'But look at the beautiful new sea. Look at it sparkle. Look how full of hope it seems; look, it has seagulls, who could hate such a beautiful sea? Even if it covers houses – houses where you played as children – even if dear friends are trapped inside, their mouths full of mud. Even landscapes die, and give birth to new ones.
'And here comes the sun.
'See it? It is creeping over the hills, and the terraces, and the terraces are gone. Every spring after harvest, up we all would go, men and women and children with levers and stakes and hammers and pulleys, and all of us, even the ones who hated each other, would stand together and pull up the rocks and hammer in the stakes, to repair the terraces, to hold the earth.
'And that earth, what it did not contain? Our blood and sweat, our shit, our stillborn babies, anything to make it rich and keep it rich. What you see spilled is not mud. It is our blood, our blood of two thousand years – that is why it is so red, and that is why it seems to me that the earth screams. For it is lost now, like a beautiful child that bursts free into danger. It will be washed away, washed away down into the valley, and so much of what we are, will go with it.'
The corner of the room was dark, and Mae was swaying, and the constant fire in her belly gnawed at her. She saw the school high on the hill swamped with mud.
She saw its open door.
Farther down the hill, stumbling over the ruin of Mrs Doh's house, she saw people walking.
'It's Shen!' Mae shouted. 'Oh, the people you see walking – see, that is our Schoolteacher, Mr Shen! We thought he was dead, surely – look at the wreck of our school – but look, he is there. Oh, tell the Haj, tell our pilgrim, that one more of us has lived, and lovely Suloi, she lives, too – beautiful Suloi and her daughters!'
Shen shambled as he walked, everything shaking: legs, arms. But his head was held erect, stupidly high, dumbly proud, as if he had been proved right, as if he had defeated history.
The littlest child – too young to understand, except to wonder – her mouth was open. In the beautiful sunlight, she held out her arms and began to spin.
'She dances,' whispered Mae. 'The daughter dances.'
Mae turned to tell someone that Shen lived. She turned and saw that crowded and silent in the doorway were Kwan and Wing and Sunni and Kuei and Joe and Mr Pin and Mr Ali and others looking over their shoulders.
The room was going darker. Mae heard the sound of children playing in a courtyard. She heard the Muerain, year on year, and the harvest festival and the winter party, and the spring replanting with its songs, and the late- night barking of the drowned dogs.
That's when it came into the room. Mae had seen it before: something dark and whole, something like a dog, loyal in a sense, patient, waiting. Except that it meant the end of everything she had known and loved. The black dog settled in the corner and licked its chops.
Mae sat back onto the bed. She dropped the camera. Kwan walked forward and picked it up.
'The road has been completely washed away,' Kwan said, to the machine. 'We are cut off and have only limited supplies of food.'
'Wait. Look,' said a handsome man Mae once had known.
There was a sound like sheets in the wind, clean sheets being shaken.
'It's a helicopter.' The handsome man spun in joy. 'They have already sent a helicopter!'
'Mae, did you send a message last night?'
Mr Ali came forward with his hat, and Mr Atakoloo and even Mr Masud.
'So,' said Mr Ali. 'You will have to teach us all now, Mae – all how to use it.'
'We will need it,' said Mr Atakoloo. He tried to smile.
But everything was slipping into darkness, closing down. Someone else was dancing.
Old Mrs Tung won.
CHAPTER 25
Progress passed into the hands of the habitual leaders of the village: the Wings, the Muerain, and Mr Atakoloo.
They set about rebuilding Kizuldah. As a blacksmith, Mr Atakoloo was disposed to building shelters of prefabricated metal. Mr Wing knew stone was best. Stone would hold warmth.
'It takes too long to build!' Mr Atakoloo protested, gesturing, puffing out his handsome white moustache.
'If you only have two or three people building. We have one hundred men, with nothing to do.'
'
In the end, they had to build with both metal and stone. The cold came back. Ruined houses like the Dohs' or Mae's had small shelters built against whatever walls were still sound. For this, the stones of the ruined terraces and houses served better than tidy sheets of aluminum. The men and the women carried rocks, in wheelbarrows or in gloved hands. The aluminum sheets formed the roofs. Concrete was poured on top of that to stop them radiating out all the warmth of the fires.
Fifteen families had bought Mr Wang's insurance. Ju-mei, his city clothes gone in the Flood, made a point of giving them their cash himself. He passed them wads of bills to replace their houses, folds, and flocks. They gaped at him in wonder.
So it was that Mae's computer was seen even to provide money. The village people were related to each other and showed solidarity. They shared their payouts, and so the village had money to restore itself.
The TV brought other things. News, for example, that the Office of Discipline and Education had reinstated Shen in his job. The e-mail wished him a productive partnership with Mrs Chung. The Office seemed unaware that there had been a flood.
People temporarily shared their houses. The Kemals and the Ozdemirs found shelter in Ju-mei's house. Mr Wing put up the whole tribe of Pins. The Alis stayed with the Haseems in what was left of their house.
Faysal Haseem had awakened late on the day after New Year, to find much of his house missing. It looked, he said, rather like his own skull felt, broken open and washed away. His garage, his white van, all his tools were
