9.
“All Eastern Europeans are Romanians!”
“No, No, I am Roma, from Romania ”, said Chovihani
eyeing up the long wooden table laden with food and their eight foot giant
host with equal caution while recalling a Roma saying, ‘when all the Roma are gone, Europe will
lose touch with its nomadic past forever’.
“Romanians!” Insisted the giant.
Mitzy had wondered into another fur-partitioned chamber of the ice-cave and was staring up at a jar full of human ears. Chovihani probed further into the dimmed recesses of his
host’s obdurate brain.
“You have been to Romania? I can tell you are a well
travelled man. Remind me, what is its Capital City?”.
The giant stalled, or rather his brain shut down completely
against the onslaught of words; he became suspicious; he sensed a threat but
could not tell whether it was coming from the curious ragged, half-starved
creatures standing before him stealing glances at his food, from a missed
opportunity outside his cave or from the distant knowledge of the horror of his
own internal reality; a crippled messenger completed the course across the
confused forecourt of his mind;
“Romanians!” said the guardian of warmth, food and
polar fur.
Mary Mary, Chovihani and Mitzy had hitched a lift on
the back of the lead narwhal, one of many who had rescued the adventurers and
polar fur explorers from Aissur Yadot, a pernicious multi-tongued monster dashed
into an Olympian vortex the depth and darkness of which could only be fathomed by
the silvery lint of light flashing insipidly against its black walls.
In the ensuing silence,- broken only by a gentle lapping
of water against meter-high walls of blue ice the gentle meandering progress
of narwhals through watery lanes spread
out like fissures in the vast landscape - Mary Mary rode on in splendid wonder.
As more and more Narwhals surfaced from leads opening up it was clear to the
passengers, stunned by the grace and beauty of the gentle giant upon which they
travelled, that it might not be clear which direction some narwhals were
headed.
Chovihani,
whose name in the Roma language means Seer had the gift of a Clairsentient, the
ability to read, or ‘see’ through the palms of his hands the cumulative
history, and future of objects, people and animals. As he cradled Mary Mary
both hands gripping the narwhal’s cork-screw tusk, Chovihani had already begun ‘reading’. The narwhal’s pure clean spirit allowed Chovihani’s
gift of sight-through-touch to not only grasp the momentous song-lines of past and future migrations, bordered then reduced by the Bear, the
Eagle, the Maple Leaf, and the Viking long-boat; ( Russia, Alaska, Canada, and Denmark respectively; Chovihani also ‘saw’ in symbols) ;there was oil on his hands, he was able
‘see’ throughout his body the Narwhal’s journey with all the five primary senses
triggered and the air stank of crude.
The Narwhal travelled through the palms, up through
his arms and spread out into his senses; Chovihani was overcome with a liquid
beatitude, at the same moment the imploding depth of the gentle giant’s feeding
ground compressed Chovihani, then a vertiginous feeling of surfacing followed a
sensation of exploding panic; the cumulative effect of times when long harsh
winters froze over boreholes; the dread and lament of mass drowning was being
keenly felt. Chovihani could ‘see’ beyond the imploding pressure and beauty of
the narwhal feeding grounds and their tragically and more recently frequent seasonal
oxygen privation and the bewilderment of vanishing krill. Suddenly, the vision
clouded over; his body a smooth dolmen of mottled flesh was being hacked from
all sides; all around the blood of slaughter and...here, Chovihani’s emotions
spiked with a horror both repellent and compelling as, in his mind’s-eye the Narwhal’s symbol for human-being stood before
him; a tall lacerated mottled blue bi-pedal whale-corpse.
As they gently plashed and sloshed through the
tundra-canals, Mary Mary was unaware of the sensorial nightmare visions playing
out within the warm man in whose arms she allowed herself to feel safe. Ahead,
she calculated five hundred or more narwhals wending their way across the transmigrating
scene, criss-crossing at newly-opened inter-sections. At these crossroads the narwhals
gathered a while and appeared to Mary Mary to be mingling, the air abuzz with a
volley of clicks, whistles and knocks; an exchange of news and gossip before
each air-kissed the other with their mindful tusks and glided off, a brief glance
behind, like sashaying drag queens freed from an over-crowded dressing room.
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