Bashi Ja-lut

Dev Hathaway

Every morning, on waking up in a sweat and blinking his eyes, Kudazi would turn to his cellmate and exclaim, “Ah Bajak, we are here,” meaning no longer in another of his terrifying dreams. Bajak would grunt at this old familiarity. After a minute of picking at his little spot on the wall, he would say with barely veiled noninterest, “What, whips again? Beatings with a tire iron?” Over time, Bajak had made a dent in the porous block there by the head of his sleeping board. “All that and worse,” said Kudazi. “He was right here and telling us this was it, when I woke.” Bajak’s reply was “Well, soon enough, friend, you know as well as I,” and he returned to chipping at his spot.
    Sometimes Kudazi would taunt back, “Rub your way to freedom yet, Bajak?” And if his cellmate sounded particularly surly or sour to him that morning he might add, “Your thumb will be past the bone,” which was the usual saying for spending oneself foolishly. Or to sound tough and unfazed, he would try to be witty and insulting. “Hey you must need to take pity on that sad little hand, poor Bajak—why not beat your head on the wall instead?” But Bajak always had a comeback. “Talk about beating one’s head, Mr. Dreamer—Mr. Cuqa.” Cuqa meant noodlehead, which was also what Bajak called the cat that sometimes sneaked in through the food flap in the bolted door and nosed their bread plate. “Kudazi a Cuqa, Kudazi a Cuqa.” Bajak always got the upper hand.
    The truth was they were both afraid of being beaten, and these rituals of complaint and insult distracted them, like anyone held prisoner, with feelings less abusive than fear. And it wasn’t only beatings; as they had heard it, those who were special “detainees,” political prisoners—and how was one to know whether one was or wasn’t?—often had their feet brutally twisted after they were knocked down half senseless, twisted until the ankle or knee, or hip even, separated with a pop. Then, if they had failed to prove dangerous, or perhaps to show they no longer were, some of them were set free. It was said to be the new jailer’s, the cousin of the namidir’s, own perverse way to show that no one would “walk.” Now and then lately they had heard him going to nearby cells. His voice was flatter than the old jailer’s, sharper, like one from the south, where the fiercest fighting was now, and his belt and keys jangled like horse tackle. Of course then they thought of him as colossal.
    But neither Kudazi nor Bajak had actually seen him or had firsthand knowledge of the brutalities. They had sometimes heard the sound of a beating and then screams and whimpers. The young suspect in the next cellblock had called through the grating between the ceiling beams to tell them about the foot twisting.
    “It might not be true,” Kudazi said one day. “We don’t know it is true.” And Bajak harrumphed, “We’ll see.” Kudazi tried again. “Maybe this is a dream,” he gestured. “In one of my dreams, remember, I woke up from a four year’s sleep and was asking everyone what date it was and who was the ruler now and was I really four year’s older. In that dream I couldn’t believe what had happened and then woke up for real.” “Dream away, Noodlehead, was Bajak’s only comment. He scratched at his wall.
    “And I dreamed, you will recall, that the cat came in with a bird, remember? And then what, the cat came in not once but two times with sparrows it had hunted.”
    “Which proves what?” There came a round of automatic gunfire off in the distance, and Bajak’s head lifted.
    “I don’t know,” said Kudazi dispiritedly.
Bajak shifted on his bed board. “Bashi Ja-lut has your number, my friend.” Ja-lut was a child’s game with little bells that Bajak had seized on for a nickname when they first heard the new jailer jingling in the corridor on his visits. He was always quick with name making.
    To Bajak and Kudazi’s shock, the new jailer came to their door one day not long after word of the terrible foot business. They heard his bootsteps first, then the squeak and clinging of his gun belt and keys and other effects. There was some muttering outside, as to an assistant, and then the window shutter was unbolted and “His Mastership of the Bells” appeared. “Who have we here?” he asked immediately, looking them over but speaking to the person they couldn’t see. Kudazi heard their names spoken low in broken dialect. He could tell by the man’s chin that he wasn’t stooping to look inside their cell and so wasn’t as tall as they had pictured. But he had the hard glazed eyes of someone used to his lot and ready to get done with whatever he’d come to do.
    Kudazi found himself growing so nervous that he sprang up from his board and touched his forehead as he addressed the jailer. “Your Honor,” he stammered.
    The jailer’s eyes blinked and focused, and he barked back “Your Honor! That’s a good one.” He rapped on the door with something he was holding, and Kudazi flinched. The jailer asked the other one again who was this—“Which?”
    “Mahpat,” offered Kudazi. “Kudazinan Mahpat. Sir.”
    “Hmmp,” said the jailer. Kudazi saw now that the object in his hand was not a crop or a cudgel but a clipboard, which he was scanning. Bajak was still curled toward the wall but not picking at his spot.
    “Sir, do you know,” piped up Kudazi, his voice going even higher than usual, “do you know dreams make us question our situations, our realities?” He hadn’t even dared to speak, yet here was speech bubbling out of his trembling mouth. Before he knew it he was stepping forward and grasping the sill of the small opening. “In dreams we are more in prison than in prison itself. It is true. And in dreams,” he said, when abruptly the shutter was slammed on his fingers, pinning his right hand. For a second then the shutter lightened in force, and he yanked out his smashed fingers just as it was banged hard again and the bolt slapped back in.
    Kudazi’s hand seared with jolts of pain, and he stooped about in a shuffling circle, holding it by the palm, gasping.
    Bajak rolled away from the wall enough to cast an eye and then just shook his head as he rolled back.
    There were deep whitish gashes across the three middle fingers above the knuckles, from which only a little blood was welling, and the fingers themselves were puffing up blue. When Kudazi tried to move them, only his thumb and pinky twitched, and the fresh shot of pain made him see black for a second. He stood still then, trying to compose himself for some minutes, until he was caught short by sounds in the next cell. There were screams of entreaty and not so muffled pummeling noises, and Kudazi started to cover his ears but realized he couldn’t with his hand. He had to listen to worse screaming that followed and that suddenly leaped to a higher range, then a thump and the grunt of a curse in the jailer’s voice. He found himself staring at his hand, shaking again, and thought with a flash as of another painful jolt—was it a lucky or unlucky thing he had done, a bad…or a good thing?
    What sleep Kudazi had that night was fitful with the throbbing of his hand. He would wake as though not from dreaming, only dozing, but discover some dreamlike oddity that made him unsure of which realm he occupied. Once, he opened his eyes, thinking he heard Bajak picking at his wall, the sound magnified in the dark, but then knew it must be sporadic gunfire at the far outskirts of the city. Another time he thought Bajak was rubbing a finger raw there but then saw in the dimness he wasn’t even on his sleeping board—he was squatted in the corner relieving his bowels. Later on he blinked alert to see the cat hunched and tearing at another mangled sparrow beside the bread plate, but that couldn’t be, could it, as it was night. And as soon as that thought flared and dimmed, he woke thinking he was cradling the sparrow body in his good hand—but no, it was his own hand he was holding, the swollen one.
    Later still a light came on somewhere in the corridor, and the faint scuffing of steps could be made out, coming or going. The light through the gap at the food flap showed the edge of the plate and what looked indeed like feathers there on the concrete. Yes, they were feathers, Kudazi said to himself, sitting up on his second try and kneel-walking toward the door. It took him more attempts to stand, still holding his injured hand.
    Someone was definitely out there, nearby or not he couldn’t tell. And the nervousness came on him all over, the trembling not from the pain but from fear, and before he could make a conscious decision whether to express it with speaking, he was talking again rapidly, like a moth near a taper.
    “Master Your Honor the Jailer,” he said, as one speaking to be barely heard, and took a deep breath. It felt like the first whole, normal breath he had breathed since the day before, at least. He cradled his hurt hand to his chest and continued. “I am a cowardly man. But maybe, a little bit, a braver man after being the foolish man here at the door. Which is, the man I am being again, and which to think of it, is a funny thing to say.” Kudazi paused and listened close but heard no noise in the corridor now, only the tat-tat of rifles. “Anyway, as I was speaking to you, about in my dreams. In my dreaming I am very, very frightened. Even more than here. But I think now I want to tell you a thing, when you crushed my fingers. At that moment, I was not afraid, Your Honor. I was much in pain, but not as much as the other. And it has made me not dream so bad.”
    He stopped again and couldn’t be sure if there was sound out there. “I do not know how it is for you, but I think you should consider this. Furthermore, I am not saying thank you, no, such as a better man would say. Not that. And would not wish to offer you my good hand if that is not necessary. Thank you—I mean not ‘thank you’.” He stood hunched quietly, then straightened slightly. “One more thing. A request. Not for me but for the sparrows.” He cleared his throat as softly as he could. “We need a string and a bell, for the cat. I thought with your—that you might have such an item.”
    The voice that then spoke shook Kudazi to his quick. “Cuqa,” it muttered, and he nearly fainted before realizing it was his cellmate. Bajak was already rolling back to his wall.
    When Kudazi recovered his breath, he watched Bajak for a moment and whispered, “Yes, I am sure you are right.” Then looked at him again. “Hey, why are you not working at your wall?” he said. There was no movement for his answer, as of a shrug one couldn’t see but only sense.
    Kudazi drowsed a few dulled hours sitting against his wall, his knees drawn up, his now mostly numb hand cupped in his lap. Were there dreams? He couldn’t be sure. In the morning, when daylight from the end of the corridor shed its dim glow and let the two men see each other’s faces, he sat staring at Bajak and tried to recover something of the chatter that had filled his head through his waking and sleeping night. It was as if his mind was going independent of his wishing, like a genya, a spinning top.
    “What is it now?” said Bajak.
    “What is it now,” repeated Kudazi, mimicking and reflecting.
    Soon there were daily beatings on the corridor. With the same crescendo of cries to each, the two cellmates felt sure the horrible foot twisting story was true. And in fact Kudazi and Bajak heard the jailer tell one whimpering wretch he was free to go. “Come on,” goaded the jailer in his flat, menacing accent, and then, cursing in the dialect of the south, he spit out a phrase that Kudazi understood as “good little cockroach.”
    The cat appeared again and again and eventually dragged in another sparrow. This one was huddled into itself, its eyes still beady bright, and Kudazi leapt and snatched it away, using both hands before thinking. He cried out in anguish, anger, and elation all in one. The bird was fine as far as he could tell, just very frightened. He pulled its wings open like a fan, one at a time, and examined its curled pink feet. With his good hand he nested it cozily in his immobile one. Later he took a crumb of dasha bread and wet it with saliva, then presented it to his patient, but to no avail.
    That night he slept fitfully, bird in hand, and dreamed of being in a large open boat in the desert. The boat was rocking dangerously on its keel board in the sand, threatening to capsize. Then his mother and sister were there, holding the sides steady, and the boat was not so large. It was he who was small. “Come on, Kudi. Get out now, Silly,” they scolded. “One goes nowhere in a boat in the sand!” But he was afraid to look over the side, much less climb over. He woke ashamed, then clenched as an afterthought, adjusting his cupped charges—hand and bird—then realized also that he had messed himself in his sleep. This hadn’t happened at first, but once he grew thin and weak and got diarrhea, it could occur in the night without notice. Bajak had it too, but like Kudazi’s his was watery and slight and left a trouser stain that dried soon enough from sitting on the dusty concrete.
    But the dream, his hand, the bird, his bowels—Kudazi felt his spirits slump, and he allowed himself a moment of silent whimpering. It didn’t feel so much abject as just a brief letting go, as when one could manage control and shuffle to the squatting corner.
    “Okay—Kudi,” he said aloud to himself. Bajak shrugged on his board and sank back to sleep. Kudazi stirred himself then and got up one leg at a time, sliding against the wall to support everything. He was stepping toward the door already, with the feeling that it wasn’t really him, or that he was tagging along behind this someone else, someone older and more foolhardy.
    “Master Jailer Your Esteemed Honor,” he said, in a not particularly hushed voice, and let a shiver pass through him and be gone. “Kudazi Mahpat here,” he said. “Resuming our conversation.” He knew no one was there—yet—but continued. While he spoke he thought of the boy in the boat in his dream. He felt now as if he were looking far down upon that scene from some tipsy swooping aircraft, holding on. The nervousness was doing its thing again, he saw now, being like a daredevil for him. It felt so—heady.
    “This sparrow bird, Master Jailer. He puts me in mind of how it must feel to go free from here like you, when you want. It is, yes, one kind of freedom, I am thinking. The ordinary kind, but to be thankful for, which I am sure you are.”
    Kudazi paused and listened in his mind to what he had said. He looked down at his hands in the dark, then took a deep shaking breath. The shaking he could dispel with a sigh, mostly, and so he sighed deeply and nodded to himself. This time the voice behind him didn’t startle so—Bajak’s. “Please” was all it said, passing for one requesting quiet but carrying a good deal more. Kudazi started to say back—something—when a burst of automatic gunfire and the thump of a mortar round sounded not far away. And then the light came on down the corridor. He licked his lips and looked down in the dark toward the bird, made himself sigh again, and shrugged as if with lightheartedness.
    The steps and the jingling were unmistakable this time and so unnerved him now that a last bit of leftover dribbled in his trousers even as he started jabbering. “Yes, Master Jailer, I was talking about—dreams it was—and just now, the kinds of freedom, of which there are many, as you may know. But of a particular kind you can give my little friend here. Of course, Your Honor, there is that awful sort you…administer to others…which is so great a one that I fear I am not worthy—of that. Sir.”
    Kudazi raised his shoulders and took a breath and went on. “The one I would ask, and a small one is, well two, in two parts, is the delivery of this little ward in my care, for which the usual release will restore him, I think, yes. This sparrow bird I have in hand. The other is, and this is so minor sounding, I am sure, but of importance—not for myself—nevertheless is, well, as I said, a string and a bell for our prison cat—for the sparrow’s future, you understand. Your Honor.”
    Kudazi’s thoughts, which had been trailing after his words as one following along a fast reading with his finger, had caught up and now sped ahead to the thing he saw he would say next. It frightened him so, his anus opened and nothing came out. But not stopping to think if he was equal to the saying, he plunged forward. “In exchange, Your Most Excellent Jailership—I would give you…my other hand.”
    The part of Kudazi that had said this grew taut like a high kite and swayed crazily between resolve and giddiness. The part that was like the younger Kudi tagging along seemed to grab his arm and plead, “What are you doing?” It took him a second to realize it wasn’t his voice but Bajak’s, who was sitting up and pushing with his feet to slide farther back on his board. Kudazi reached toward him with his cupped hands as an explanation, but the gesture felt more like a shrug. “I…,” he said. And then the bolt shot free and the heavy shutter swung open.
    No one was there, not in the opening at least, but Kudazi shook nonetheless. His face and shoulders and arms made almost imperceptible dips and shifts, as though these parts of his body were struggling to create some counter-utterance of their own, some disclaimer. He needed to take a deep breath, but it wouldn’t come. He tried to compose a thought that contained his intentions. He wished to speak—if only he could, if speech could break loose, as it had before, he could lead himself to anything, to any height. “I…,” he said again and took a step toward the door, his eyes on the sill.
    But then evasive notions set in, passing for real and reasonable obstacles: surely he couldn’t hold the bird safely in his bad hand alone; or having to place his left hand on the left side of the sill, the shutter would swing farther this time and close unduly hard; or what if this were a trick and the jailer had no intention of holding to their bargain—did they even have an agreement? But he also knew these were false reasonings and that the jailer, just out of sight, was in effect conversing with him on his terms, as much as saying “I dare you.”
    Kudazi took a half breath and held it and stepped closer. Okay, he thought, okay, if a mortar goes off before I count ten, I will do it now. He strained to listen for one in the on-and-off pitter-patter of rifle exchange and counted. Six, seven, eight, nine. There was none, but he knew he couldn’t let go of his breath so easily and be free of his words. Ten, eleven, twelve. Well there, he thought, he had counted two extra beats and so let go a slow sigh, but still stared at the sill. Then a nearby mortar went off abruptly with a deep “foop” and a not far-off explosion that made him catch his breath hard, and before he knew it, he had drawn his bad hand and the bird to his chest, squeezed his eyes shut, and clapped his good hand on the sill. Please, please, please, please, please, he thought, until he could bear it no more and opened his eyes.
    There were his knuckles, cut across by the corridor light. There was the shutter—which now swung into view, then stopped, then pulled partway back. It happened so fast, the heavy wood appeared to jump closed then stopped short then slammed home hard on the sill—with a choked chopping laugh from the other side. His heart had skipped, and in his mind all the pain reflexes seemed to sing as on cue. But his hand—his hand—why, it had flinched back, quaking, untouched. —Or no, maybe it was his ghost hand, a dream hand, thought Kudazi, as an amputee or sleeper feels. Maybe that was it after all.
    But no, he knew better. His nerve had been bested, tricked in the last instant, like a child made to jump with a sudden choo.
    Once more, now farther down the corridor, the jailer’s curt laugh made an echo.
    The remainder of that night Kudazi sat on his board exhausted and dejected, lost in stray thoughts. Mortar rounds and semiautomatics resounded now and again, like someone testing out a set of drums, punctuating his dreary reverie. At one point he looked down and saw to his confusion that he was holding the bird in his good hand and that one in the bad. But no sooner had he puzzled at this than he thought, No, my good hand is the bad one now. As if on its own it had fled its fainthearted perch, in cowardice. Bird, hand; hand, bird—what did it matter—was there life in any of them? They could be nested earthenware for all it mattered now. These and other such self-pitying imaginings he indulged in through the rest of the night.
    In the morning he found that he had slept a little and that indeed the assembly of cupped objects in his lap weighed themselves down as stone. He lifted the inert stack with his forearms and examined it closely. White hand, blue hand, brown bird.
    The sparrow, he admitted now, appeared to be dead. But of course, as he reasoned it out.
    The growing din of fighting had re-intensified and finally pulled Kudazi away for a moment from his dark mood. There were individual rounds to be heard clearly, and once even shouting and commotion outside the walls. Bajak was lifting himself up clumsily into a standing position and raising his head as though there were a window. He looked over at Kudazi but with eyes that were focused on outside sound.
    At some point in the morning, it became clear that the day’s heel of dasha bread had not been slid under the door, nor did it seem that anyone had been in the corridor. But then there were light footsteps, hurried and halting, hurried and halting, then a voice at the door to the next cell calling low—“Master Kudazi.” He and Bajak looked at one another. Then the caller was at their door. “Here,” blurted Kudazi. There was a moment of vague jostling and then the food flap held up with fingertips and something thrown in quickly on the floor with a sparkle like music, and the footsteps moving away slowly, then quickly.
    “What—,” said Bajak, bending over. Then “Phuuh,” like a chuckle. “Cat bell,” he said, lifting his head. “For you—Cuqa,” and he tossed a sandal thong and brass market bell into Kudazi’s lap.
    “—Who?” said Kudazi. He scooped up the worn thong and bell, making it jingle.
    “What does it matter now, friend?” said Bajak, in a tone that was more like a stranger’s. He stood tall and unstooped now and looked down upon Kudazi. “Don’t you see changes are afoot?”
    Two days and nights passed. Outside, the gun battle raged and reached lulls, renewed and waned. There were more voices, upraised and calling out, but none in the corridor. The Master of the Bells did not once make his rounds, and Cuqa the cat, Kudazi realized, had not appeared in a week, not since bringing in the sparrow.
    On the third day, as Bajak predicted from before the break of dawn, troops of the revolution could be heard inside the prison. “Hajaro! Hajaro!” they shouted at each cell as they worked their way closer—Liberation! Shots were fired into each lock and hinge until the door could be pried open. “A-yah” was the cry when they beheld some of the prisoners. “Medica, medica.”
    Then they were at Bajak and Kudazi’s door. Each stood back huddled by his wall until the blasting and breaking was done. The young soldiers pushed in the door and looked at them standing there and exclaimed, “Bah!—Bedenah,” and shook their heads smiling, saluted jauntily, and took up positions at the next cell down.
    “Bedenah,” muttered Bajak, “okay,” looking about like one who would gather up his valuables to go on a trip. “Ah,” he said, slapping his hips, then turned to Kudazi. “Hey, maybe you brought us good luck after all—you crazy man. So, you going to gather up your—your bird there, and your…ja-lut? You need a medic for that hand, friend.”
    Kudazi waved him off and let his eyes range around the cell. “It looks smaller, with the door open.” The guns rang out again as the troops blasted the next door.
    “Ah, well, if you say so.” Bajak was frowning at him. “Come on come on,” he said, seeing maybe some urging was needed.
    Kudazi lifted his dark hand up and down in his light one, thinking what to say. He shrugged. “In time,” he said.
    “In time?” repeated Bajak, his head jerking back and his eyes narrowing. He flipped a palm at him. “Your time—friend,” and was gone out the door.

For the several days and nights since the incident of his left hand, Kudazi had gone over that moment when he pulled his fingers away from the sill. When he was a boy, there was the game the older boys played, hands out, one’s up-facing, one’s down, palms on palms. The gayan’s, the go-er’s, lay beneath and waited for the right instant to try to slap the backs of the gayon’s hands before he could pull them away. Until a miss, the go-er got to go again. Kudazi had been that boy whose hands were slapped over and over until raw and reddened. He had been the one whom the older boys could fool with a flinch or false start—make him draw back—and then as he tentatively brought his hands back in place, whack him even harder. So much he wanted to be cagey and quick, like them, so much to be steeled enough not to fall for that feint. His mother would look at his hands, which of course he would be caught trying to hide. “Kudi,” she would say, “you are too high strung to play that game. With them,” she would add, not to bruise his feelings. Then she’d make him suffer camphor salve, which stung and, worse, let his sister know by the odor what he had done.
    Thinking back, he reasoned, Well then there’s an excuse in this now. But the feelings from back then that the shutter door brought up anew were far from forgiving. Moreover, he chastised himself for letting down the sparrow, and moreover still for being that close to a freedom of such a rare kind—then losing it. Had his hand stayed, had the awful shutter smashed his fingers, would there have been anyone ever freer of his jailers—of his night dreams, his fearful nature, the Master of the Bells? Although this state would have lasted but days, as events transpired, that would not have limited him. He would have walked, a free man. Yet here, no longer confined to jail where so much had been offered and now wouldn’t be again, and having his cat bell simply given to him—by whom, the assistant?—and out of falsely placed admiration or soft sympathy—why this was much less than a gift won.
    As dusk fell that first night of the unlocked prison, Kudazi used his one hand and forearm to wrench the broken door free of its cracked hinges and, by mashing the door-and-shutter against the jamb, knocked loose the shutter. Such an inconsequential piece of planking it seemed, once freed from its hinge, no bigger than a square of lumber one could pick up for a fire saver or a cover for an urn. Standing the door at a slight angle against the wall, he slotted the shutter back in flatways, as a kind of shelf, and adjusted it to level. On it he arranged the sparrow body and the cat bell and thong, to contemplate them. The opening there, as he judged it on this evening, had once been his window but was no more.
    Then he sat down to review further the full meaning of his not yet leaving. “In time,” he repeated, until the phrase grew, like an object stared at until it diverges, into two: one that had served in the moment for replying to Bajak, and one that now let him glimpse, for an expanding instant, the likeness of a different shuttered doorway. This he mused on with a mixture of hope and doubt for the remainder of that night.
    On the morning of his second night alone, someone came scuttling down the corridor. “Master Kudazi,” called a voice, and a scant young man of nervous mannerisms appeared, still wearing the trousers of a guard’s uniform. He was carrying a water jug and a scarf full of dasha ends, which he unrolled while looking about as if someone would catch him.
    “There’s no one else here,” said Kudazi.
    “Oh sure sure, I know. But,” the young man shrugged, “I can still feel him. As can many, I don’t have to tell you. But not you, Master Kudazi, not you. You, you made him…very uneasy.”
    “Well,” said Kudazi, holding out and flexing his white hand.
    “You know he did not sleep well—that night. No no. He cursed you even. ‘That—old—Cat Bell,’ he called you. I tried not to make a single funny noise when he said that, but all he had to do was look at me, in that way he sees everything about you, and hit me with his forearm—here, see. Oh, I got the bell, yes, from my sister’s husband’s shop.”
    Kudazi waited patiently, then looked about and observed, “It is good to learn not to talk-talk-talk—as I am learning only now.”
    The young man broke into a smile and bridged his fingertips against his chest.     “That’s me all right. I—okay, right. —Some dasha?”
    “No thank you, not today,” said Kudazi. “Some water perhaps.”
    The young man said the whole jug was his to keep, but Kudazi begged off and took only two swallows. “Tomorrow then,” said his visitor.
    “No. I do not believe I will be ready tomorrow,” he said.
    “Not ready tomorrow—ah,” said the young man. He looked up at the door and the shelf of the shutter with its arrangement of keepsakes. “You will—live here—Master Kudazi?”
    Kudazi reflected a minute. “For a time.”

His days and nights were spent mostly chastising himself, for such…determination. For it seemed to him that when he was too aware of deciding to stay he was only building up his little martyrdom. In such moments he thought, on the contrary, that to walk out the door and in so doing give up everything he had lost, and not remain in hope of recovering some remnant of that opportunity he had failed, would be easily as pure as the freedom he had so anxiously, so devoutly sought. In the next moments he would quietly rail against such insistence on purity, on piety, seeing how this choice, like others, only confirmed the role of pride in his strivings. Two or three days he devoted to weighing just these considerations, of leaving versus staying—back and forth, back and forth, like a worry stone. And on the day after, as a kind of penance for being attached exclusively to self-interest, he denied himself any thought that pictured a doorway.
    On one of the days that the young man returned, now barely speaking, to offer him his water and perchance a bit of bread, he saw him rolling not only his head slowly side to side, as was become his habit then, but also the brass bell, which softly chinked in the palm of his good hand. Some weeks later the young man found him one day with the bell tied about his neck, where thereafter it would stay.
    Indeed weeks upon weeks had been consumed in that decision, in choosing at last to deny himself the delicacy of music in his unproven palm. It would hang from his neck to warn him of what risky luxuries and indulgences he might give in to, in the guise of an anchorite’s life—and to admonish his younger self, which often still tagged eagerly after him at the prospect of any imagined opening, not to be consumed with hopes. To stand merely in the possibility of a doorway, undeserving and wishing nothing—that, he told himself, might prove a starting point.
    This and pursuant meditations on having and not having, of being worthy and unworthy, of contemplating and not contemplating, came to occupy nearly all of his time, until, over some passage of months, he gradually envisioned and acclimated to a small confined space between such alternatives, to further guard against the treachery of desires and reasons. By then, as was becoming his practice, he kept his good hand clasped night and day about the bell on his neck, that it might not frivolously sing to him, and for periods of more thorough denial, he tried disallowing as well the syncopation of rocking and nodding, of even sleep and wakefulness.
    Only infrequently now did he recall particular memories of the world before his arrival here, and when they did appear, images of mother and sister and others, he closed his eyes to them, in deference, as they dissolved. One came to him unbidden once, of no account at first, of the time he had been taken prisoner. He had been loitering by the roadside after a day’s work running crated fruit to his uncle’s wealthier customers and was dreamily swishing a long reed in the dust, talking to himself as he watched the wispy grain-head make disappearing patterns. The soldiers—he had been aware of them hurrying by, herding new prisoners with their hands bound behind them, and he had gazed at their bindings for a moment before being distracted again by his switch. Suddenly he’d felt someone staring at him and looked up. A uniformed guard had broken off from the column and was striding purposefully toward him. Some paces away, he stopped and waved a hand weapon and snapped his fingers—“You.”
    In this manner, he understood, he had been called. Then that being known, he embarked upon its eventual forgetting.

Word of the hermit of the war jail spread over time. The curious would come, hushed on entering the corridors of the old compound, their eyes adjusting in the ruins. They would stand at his cell, knowing instinctively not to speak or dare enter, and be unperturbed at his failure to acknowledge them. He was known then mostly as the populace viewed his names, in the manner granted to strange personages—One-hand Man, Keep of the Door, Master of the Bell—though hardly any knew the story. For those who observed the duty of bringing him water or a crust of dasha and sat silent during their visits at his doorway, it was always and simply Bashi, or Master.

“Bashi Ja-lut” appears in our Autumn 2004 issue.