Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest

11

That was the first living creature seen in the village for many years, since that horrible night when Nehi the Mountain Demon gathered a long procession of animals, from horse to dove, from mouse to sheep to bull, and led them out of the village forever. Some of the parents, without any warning, would suddenly be flooded by a wave of longing or sorrow and begin to imitate animal sounds for their children: the chirping of a bird and the lowing of a cow, the howling of a wolf in the forest, the cooing of a dove and buzzing of a bee and the flapping of a river goose's wings and the croaking of a frog and the whoop of an owl. But a moment later, those parents denied that they were sad, pretended that, in fact, they only meant to entertain their children a bit, nothing more, and insisted that none of those sounds were part of the real world but existed only in fairy tales and legends.

The twists and turns of the villagers' memories were strange: The things they tried very hard to remember sometimes eluded them and hid deep under the blanket of forgetfulness. And the things they decided they'd be much better off forgetting were the ones that would rise out of the forgetfulness as if to deliberately upset them. There were times when they remembered the smallest detail of what had almost never been. Or they remembered what had been and no longer existed, remembered it with pain and longing, but their shame or sorrow was so great that they would decide firmly that it had all been a dream. And they would say to their children: It's just a fairy tale.

Others said: It was just a little joke. That's all.

Some children, when they heard those stories, felt a vague longing for what might have been there once, and perhaps had never been at all. But many children never wanted to hear those stories, or heard them and made fun of their parents and of Emanuella the Teacher: no animals had been seen for so many years that most of the children came to the conclusion that all those moos and coos and maas and meows, all those bzzzes and baas and yaps and quacks, were all just strange inventions their parents had come up with, old-fashioned superstitions that should be tossed away so they could finally live in the real world, because people who live in their imaginations are not like the rest of us, and people who aren't like the rest of us will get whoopitis, and everyone will avoid them, and then it will be too late to save them.

Perhaps only Danir — the jolly, long-legged roofer, favorite of all the village girls, who loved to sing all day with his helpers as they worked on the high, slanted housetops, and liked to stop on his way home and talk to children through open windows as if they were grown-ups, or the opposite, to chat with them as if he himself were still a child, and also liked to whistle tunes in the streets under the windows of the village girls — perhaps Danir was the only one they should ask what was true and what wasn't.

But the trouble was that with Danir and his friends, who gathered around him in the stone square on long summer evenings, you could never ever know when they were joking or playing tricks on you or on each other. And if they did speak seriously, even then they seemed to be joking. Anyone who tried to have a real conversation with them also found himself, for some reason, suddenly speaking in jest. Even if he definitely didn't mean to.

Almon the Fisherman, who nobody listened to because everyone made fun of him, was the only one in the entire village who could teach the children that the real world is not only what the eye sees and the ear hears and the fingers touch, but also what the eye cannot see, the ear cannot hear, and the fingers cannot touch. And it shows itself sometimes, for only a moment, to those who see with their mind's eye and know how to listen and hear with the ears of their soul and touch with the fingers of their mind. But who wanted to listen to Almon? He was a long-winded, almost blind old man who stood there and argued endlessly with his ugly old scarecrow.