The Sail
Friday Night
The long days had ended, and in October twilight, the seaside town was folding in upon itself like a dark cloak. On a flat rock outcrop at the north end of town, a few metres above the sand, on one of the three weathered wooden benches that faced west across the great Pacific, a woman sat motionless, watching the sky darken through violet and deep, deep blue, reaching finally toward blackness. Blackness and stars.
The town was small - no more than 400 people lived there, mostly fishing folk or retired loggers, a smattering of craftspeople, on the main street or on one of the two winding side roads, close about in the surrounding woods. It was a village, really, a tourists' gasoline and ice cream stop in summer, a place to take a dip if the ocean was calm and the weather warm, a place to turn around, for there was nothing of interest beyond it. When the rains of winter of winter came, it was all but forgotten. 15 kilometres north, the main street, the highway, turned into a logging road, or rather, a series of confusing and overgrown logging roads. The so-called forest industry had abandoned this stretch of the coast a decade before, when the accessible timber was either protected or gone, and the remaining forest too difficult for even their advanced machinery to cut at a profit.
Ten years after the war, the defeat of Voldemort and the Death Eaters, a handful of witches and wizards could be found here, in a place rather like the end of the world. They knew each other, just as everyone knew everyone else, to some degree or another, in the town, but they didn't constitute a community. Surprisingly, they were assimilated, to greater or lesser degrees, into the small town. An aged American couple, the Bellows, Matthew and Ariana, who had lost both a son and a daughter in the war, lived in an "inaccessible" cabin in the forest not far from the benches. They spent their days "studying" the native flora - that is, taking long walks in the forest and along the beach. In the evenings, perhaps they brewed a potion or two, or listened to music, their medieval and renaissance recordings, a large collection for which they had become known, in certain circles. A young Romanian fellow, quite a gregarious and charming wizard named Ulrik, had taken up residence in the top floor of the general store the year before. Unlike the Bellows, his stay was always going to be temporary. Why he chose to sojourn here before taking up a position in the Romanian foreign ministry was a mystery. Then there was the local, home grown witch, a potter whose work was described in trade journals muggle and magical as both exquisite and exhausting (!?!). She too lived north of the town's centre, but on the main street. Her house rather seemed like a witch's house, what with plants drying under the eaves, the lush greens of her garden, and the air in and around it always smelling of herbs. It was said her parents had given her the house and moved to Florida in retirement.
And finally, the woman on the bench, now seeming a part of the darkness itself, a person-sized patch of night in the light of the half-moon. In some ways, her journey to this place had been the most complex, even though she had, basically, apparated here one day and hadn't left. The townspeople called her the boat woman, when they saw her, and just as quickly forgot about her when she was out of sight. The witches and wizards of the town knew her better, knew who she was and knew a good part of her story. Perhaps this kept them from growing too friendly, but at least they did not forget she was there, living in her house-boat, in a cove sheltered from the Pacific by both a large curve of rock and several small magical protections, a few hundred metres past the town's rather forlorn north-facing signpost. Beyond that signpost a stone's throw from the benches, there were no other residences for a hundred and fifty kilometres.
The Bellows were falling asleep. Ulrik was reading a newly released history of the war, Now! by a pseudonymously named author Art Tufwar. Angie the potter had disapparated to her lover's studio in Athens. On the bench facing the Pacific, a woman who had lost half her family in the war, in one way or another, stirred. Slowly she stood up, stretched her thin legs and arms, and silently and swiftly crossed over the rocky ridge and down into the cove.
The Bellows were asleep. Angie the potter and her lover could hear strains of ancient Greek music wafting up from the warm street below their open window. Ulrik was just getting to the point in the book where her, the boat woman's, name was first mentioned. And in the house-boat rising and falling with the waves and swells, Parvati Patil was thinking it must at last be time to set sail.
The song I sang in my youthful years
Was wretched and so blind
But now I'm into my older years
A different song have I
Saturday Morning
Saturday mornings, during the summer and much of the fall, a small market was set up under canopies beside the general store. Although much was bartered or bought and sold, the greatest value, some would say true value, of the market was social. This was the last market of the season, the last chance for the town to get together as a whole, and not just the last chance to either stock up on or barter harvest. Just about everyone who lived within 25 kilometres had come. The sky was accommodatingly blue and the breeze comfortably warm.
Angie, saucier than usual, was trading a purely functional, but still tortured and beautiful piece, a large bowl, for smoked Salmon. The sellers, a middle-aged fellow and his wife, seemed to be more interested in finding out about Angie's herbs, but she hadn't brought any to trade, and she was reluctant to talk about her garden. Of course, they knew the value of the bowl, and settled just fine, thanks. There were a number of pans filled with berries, apples, carrots, and parsley on a table near Angie’s, and beside that, a colourful selection of preserves. The town hairdresser cum fortune-teller was offering insight into the future for five dollars, but by her expression, fortune wasn't in the cards for the day. A couple people had set up stalls to sell books and framed pictures, near which Ulrik had parked himself. Others had decided it was as good an opportunity as any to get rid of extra colanders, cutlery, lamps, night-tables, radios, shirts, pants, cans of paint, jars of nails or what have you. Off to the side, a group of fishermen were looking over a large pile of nets and poles and other gear that was selling for next to nothing (according to some) or at highly inflated prices (according to others). The bacon buns and cheese scones one enterprising woman had brought were selling fast, as was another fellow's "early" dark ale, when a witch suddenly walked into their midst and caused everyone to fall silent.
But no, not quite. What did happen was that, while the market was in full swing, as it were, the boat-woman, dressed in a black cloak that reached from her neck to the ground, and wearing a black kerchief tight around her head, her long hair flowing out from under it like a veil of darkness, strode into their midst and, without hesitation, this woman who had never been to a Saturday market before, this stranger they all knew and all forgot about, haggling no more and no less than was expected, began buying things - quickly, purposefully, but not in any way rudely. Began buying food, in fact. From inside her cloak she extracted a large black bag and proceeded to fill it with what fruit and vegetables she could find - all purchased at fair prices. She also bought a few pounds of well-smoked Salmon and several jars of blackberry, raspberry and peach jam. All around her the market continued as it had before she arrived, but more quietly, and few were the eyes that didn't stray toward her now and then, when they weren't staring at her outright. When she had gotten what she needed at the market, she disappeared briefly into the general store, and came out lighter in money but heavier in rice and flour and salt. She walked back to the market with her now quite full bag and sat down in a chair across from the hairdresser cum fortune-teller, who had registered something akin to amazement, but quickly managed to regain some composure.
The fortune-teller looked at Parvati, and made to reach for her Tarot cards, but stopped. Her hands fell to her sides. The two women sat there, looking at each other, oblivious to the market around them, which was not exactly oblivious to them, for some minutes. Unnoticed by the crowd, four figures made their way to the beach, and started walking toward the benches at the north end of town. At last, at the fortune-teller's table, Parvati broke the silence.
"I'm sorry," she said.
The hairdresser did not reply, but seemed unnerved, perhaps unaware of what she had been asking. Then Parvati stood up, gripped her black bag of provisions tight, and walked away from the market, along the bright beach, toward the group of people awaiting her.
Years roll over
Year roll over
And the pleasures
Of the past
Seem so empty
Oh so empty
The Bellows were standing, watching as she approached. Parvati had always thought them quite beautiful, though she could detect a touch of fondness and a touch of sadness in their eyes as she got closer. In spite of her fondness, she hadn't visited them often in their "inaccessible" cabin, and never for very long. There was something painful in their shared solitude that amplified her own, and her visits made her feel she was amplifying theirs. Angie was squatting on the ground, looking out to sea. Ulrik was pacing, and she noticed, whimsically, he had a copy of Now! in his back pocket. Resting her black bag on the ground, Parvati resigned herself to the duty at hand, the inevitable, uncomfortable good-byes.
"We are sorry that you are leaving," said grey-haired Matthew Bellow, as he and his wife stood before her. "Where will you go?" asked Ariana, who stood a foot and a half shorter than her husband. Parvati, to her dismay, couldn't stop herself breaking eye contact and stared across the ocean, as if looking for words there.
"I... I don't know, for certain... I don’t know."
The Bellows extended their hands, and clasped Parvati’s hands warmly.
"Take care, Miss Patil," said Matthew.
"The ocean, Parvati? And what magic? Can you be sure you will find your way?" asked Ariana.
Parvati could make no reply. The Bellows looked around at the other two, who appeared to be ignoring them. Matthew opened his mouth to say something, but there was nothing there. He smiled and took his wife’s hand. They turned and started off slowly toward their house in the forest.
Parvati reached beneath her cloak and pulled out an enchanted quill. "Ulrik," she said. The young man stopped pacing and came over to her. He held out the book.
"Where do you want me to sign?"
It was impossible for Parvati to tell if the man liked her or hated her, or was just curious about her and her history, but she was certain that, at this moment, he wanted her autograph more than anything. "Oh, anywhere... um... here... page 203... where you are first mentioned... "
Parvati signed her name, without reading a single word of the text, she noted proudly to herself, and Ulrik, seeming quite pleased, wished her well. She didn’t feel the need to tell him that what she’d written would disappear in a day or too. "It’s a bit egotistical," she said to herself, "thinking my signature could be important to someone. Oh well!"
Parvati picked up her bag and started briskly toward the ridge. Angie stood up and hurried to catch her.
"Parvati!"
The boat-woman wasn’t slowing.
"Look, Parvati, I don't know you very well. All I know is what I’ve read, and what people have told me. About you... about…"
Parvati sighed, slowing. If there was anyone she wanted to talk to less than Angie at this moment, she couldn’t for the life of her imagine who it would be. But it couldn’t, apparently, be avoided.
"I wasn't involved in the war..." Angie the potter continued.
"Everyone was involved in the war, whether they were conscious of their roles or not." Parvati had stopped, her irritation obvious, though apparently not to Angie. She glared at the potter.
"Yes, yes, of course. But the war, it wasn't here. Not that I could see. Not really here. I... I need to tell you something." Angie spoke the last sentence as if it were a question.
Parvati turned and began walking toward the cove, as Angie followed. When they reached the top of the small ridge, they stopped.
"I saw one of your friends a couple weeks ago, in Manchester. Or rather, she saw me, I guess you could say. I think she was one of your friends."
"I don’t have a lot of friends," Parvati said.
"It was a bit strange. Mikos and I were in this small pub, just having a bite, watching a game…"
"Football?" Parvati laughed.
"Yeah, football. Is that funny?"
"Well, yes, actually."
Angie seemed impatient, as if she were going out of her way, or performing some onerous favour, so to speak, addressing Parvati at all. "Do you want to hear this or not? You don't seem very interested in what I'm trying to tell you."
"I don't know whether I’m interested or not. Wouldn't I have to hear it first before deciding? Simple logic."
"You know what, Patil? What they say is true. You're a cranky old witch at 29."
"28."
Parvati started walking down the slope to the cove and her boat.
"It was Granger."
Parvati stopped. For a second, she felt as if she were being choked. Her hand instinctively went to the wand in her pocket. The name sent shivers through her, mixed up as it was with fear and horror and sadness. But hearing that name without its proper title, coming from Angie the potter, irked her deeply, more than she'd be willing to admit. Who does this insipid little fool think she is?
"She asked about you. I don't know how she knew me, whether she found me by accident or had come looking for me. I don't know how she knew I lived in the same place as you. Hell, I don't even know how she saw me at all. But she asked about you. How you were doing."
Parvati struggled to keep her emotions in check. She loosened the grip on her wand. "No, this is silly," she told herself. She did indeed want to ask about Hermione, ask about how Hermione had looked, but her urge to dismiss Angie and everything she said, and everything she stood for along with it, was far stronger than her curiosity at that moment. Parvati was aware too that she was not ready to think about any of this yet. She would set sail, and then let it come. Angie would not throw her internal clock off by a second. She walked down to the shore, levitated the bag over to the boat, and got ready to jump.
"I told her you keep to yourself a lot, and stare at the sea," Angie called from the top of the ridge. "I told her to come by and see you. She just laughed and said 'oh, no, I don't think yet.' I should have told her the truth, Patil. I should have told her you'd gone batty."
Swiftly, Parvati turned, only to see Angie's blonde hair disappear over the ridge. "Insufferable, collaborating coward" she wanted to yell, but it came out as a mumble, addressed purely to herself.
Agitated now, the black-haired witch sensed a deep chord of horror sounding below just below consciousness. Days of terrible silence and cacophony, of agonized waiting and of suddenness, of oaths kept and oaths broken, were all muddled together in a swirling panic against which she had set herself every hour of every day, it seemed, since her first panic, her mistake.
"Then let it come," she told herself. "This is the day I have set for the end of exile. This is the day I have set for this ocean, this ocean and this panic to have it’s way."
Saturday Night
With a sense of urgency Parvati set sail that night. She floated the boat out from its cove, and when it was clear of the shore, she removed a number of magical protections from the craft.
"Yikes," she said aloud, feeling the lurch and pull of the swells. "This is going to be interesting."
For ten year Parvati, alone on her boat, often for hours a day, had devoted herself more or less entirely to one task – the sewing of a large sail. As she unfurled it fully for the first time, raising it along the mast, it seemed a simple, black triangle of canvas. But even under the new moon, the fabric seemed somehow alive. Across the canvas, intricate, interconnected patterns slowly began to move. The patterns turned into pictures, tiny, threaded depictions of events Parvati had experienced, witnessed, felt, heard or read about. Twelve square metres of promise and dereliction, of telling and forgetting, of history and future and nothing, all woven together, "as the threads of life and lives in this world are," Parvati would have said, if there were any to say it to.
In the top corner, the moon, of course, not visible now, waxing and waning in time with the lunar cycle. In the day, naturally, it would be the sun. "That is for now, the present, that which is," said Parvati, "but also the timeless, that which is always."
In the corner furthest from the mast, the bottom of the hypotenuse, pointing outwards, as it were, "a cherry tree, or a skeleton, or both," thought Parvati, "signifying transience, the momentary, seeing itself, and also blindness." In that corner there was also wind, and weather, the sound of leaves quivering, waves breaking on the shore, creaking floorboards and rain upon the ground.
In the bottom corner closest to the mast, Parvati as she was, waking or sleeping, looking out or looking in, in her long black cloak or naked, and the sail itself, within which was Parvati and the skeleton or tree and the sun and moon, and the sail, and in the sail inside the sail, another sail, and so on, an infinite regress, an echo. Of this, Parvati was not a little proud. "If one could look along the sails inside sails, not following each one but going directly to the last echo, the last reflection, perhaps they would see everything, their past and their future, all at once. But it is no small task." Parvati laughed. "So long as no one loses themselves in it," she added with a sigh.
Moving toward the centre, a complex pattern of places and events, of ideas and objects, of people, a tiny embroidered world representing her history, her present, the history and present of her friends and acquaintances, the history of the war. Diagon Alley was there, accompanied by the sounds of commerce, Hogwarts and every room in it that she could remember or knew about, her home and her family, both the good and the bad, the whole witch-wizard world, and the world itself. Padma, Lavender, Voldemort, Harry, Dumbledore, Trelawney, Lupin, Dean, Seamus, Ron, Hermione, Fudge, Draco, Luna, Snape… From one side, the past, from the other, the present, for those who had one. And from either side, looked at the right way, a glimpse of possible futures.
In the centre of the canvas, however, just a little separate from all the business around it, Parvati had placed all the events for which she, to some small degree, and her former schoolmates, to a much greater extent, were famous. There were four dragons, ominous and fiery, circling. There were 6 friends, speaking as one. Someone was watching, and another, who had supplied them with a missing key, at great personal cost, stretched awkwardly upon the ground. There was the terrible noise and conflagration where four dragons dove and belched fire simultaneously upon a single spot. There was the midnight outline of Hogwarts, and the black, black forest. Hands, many hands, including hers. Dumbledore’s Army. Blindness. A hundred people running, or standing. Flashes of light in the darkness. Green, red, purple. Silvery strands, whispers. Tears. Laughter. Dancing. There was an archway, shadowy figures at the edge of the forest, a bright room, the hospital. Music. Many flying creatures. Sunlight. Ice cream. Red hair, black hair. Owls everywhere. The world stopping. The stars in the sky. The world turning in silence that surrounds us like the echo of our passing.
The sail was an incredible piece of work, Parvati knew, though all who would see it, she had made sure, would appreciate first the melancholy that held it all together, and then the compassion that made it visible. It was composed largely of fibres and hairs from various sources, but also of essences and memories, of touches and lingerings, of dreams and of hidings. She had collected these from diverse sources a decade ago in 3 months of intense gathering. Sometimes asking people for things, to their amusement or, more often, consternation, often collecting them, not terribly secretly, where she found them, and once in a while absconding with them, but only in circumstances which could be justified by the peculiar form of her meditation, her penance, as it were. The sail represented a vast magic - Parvati had only channeled it, in a manner of speaking, into it’s present shape. As the boat sailed through the night, rising and falling upon the great ocean, the essence of the waves and the darkness, in form and substance, flowed in and out of the tapestry, as if it the sail were breathing.
Seeing it wasn’t going to be like looking at a picture. It was going to be a challenge, a test, a concert, a dream and a gateway, an ocean journey alone, a close, close reading.
"Well, I’m not seasick yet," thought Parvati. Chilled, she went
into the small cabin and curled up on the bunk. She had given up her dreams
also to the sail, for 10 years. Yet, how else would it know where to go? Now
that it was done, however, she almost dreaded sleeping."Then it’s now,
here. Here I am. Useless as struggling against the swells. Just be taken,
that’s what it’s for," she mumbled, and more exhausted than she could
remember being, she was asleep within moments.