So all day we sit in the half-dark.
I have come to guess a little of what the Child thinks by examining his features, but at no time have we communicated as before, when we spoke to one another in the woods. It is as if the spirit in him that I spoke to then were no longer present. I watch the mouth with its small, broken teeth. He has a way of drawing his lips back over them and taking the breath in sharp as if he were in pain; though he makes the same gesture, I notice, when he is exciting himself, and it is in this gesture that the odd bone structure is revealed, the high cheekbones, the pointed chin, the lines of the jaw. The eyes too I watch. They are very black, and deep set. The eyebrows tilt upward. The hair, which we have washed and cropped a little, is inky black, straight, and coarse in texture, not at all silky or fine, though this may be because he is undernourished or because his spirit is so low in him, or no longer there at all. I have noticed before how the hair takes on the shine or the dullness of the spirit, especially in the ill. He still seems, for all our scrubbing, less than clean. As if the earth has got so deep into his skin that he has taken on its color. It is perhaps dirt in the old wounds that accounts for the brownish scars on his limbs. He is not at all beautiful, as I had imagined the Child must be. But I am filled with a tenderness, an immense pity for him, a need to free him into some clearer body, that is like a pain in my own. I think and think. What must the steps be? How should I begin? Kindness, I know, is the way - and time. To reveal to him first what our kindness is, what our kind is; and then to convince him that we belong to the same kind. It is out of this the he must discover what he is.
But we have begun so badly. How can he possibly think of us as anything but cruel? Which of the beasts would have done this to him? Which of the beasts would hunt him down on horseback, truss him up, carry him away from all he has ever known? Then there is the spitefulness of the boy, who I have decided must be kept away. And the hostility of the women. In the end I must do it all myself. I must, at first, be the only one he has contact with.
I think, strangely, of the wolf in my dream that threatened to consume the whole pool of my being, and begin to be afraid. The weeks pass.
I no longer leave the room now when the women bring his food. At first he was wary, as if perhaps I had set a trap for him as before. He edged towards the bowl, sniffed, examined it, took it in his hands, and all the while as he ate, more slowly than before, watched me over the rim with his deep black eyes, which seemed these times to have points of red. Then when he had cleaned out the last of the stuff with his finger, he rolled the bowl over the floor and dragged himself back to his corner, where he crouched with his knees up, waiting for me perhaps to make some move. Now he eats without being aware of me. As if I were not there. Grunting as he feeds.
I have also brought my straw pallet into the room, and sleep in the corner opposite him. He has got used to that as well. And when I begin to feel again that I have been in contact with him, though it is impossible to know when the contact occurred. It may have been while I was washing him. He submits to that easily enough, though with no sense of his being touched in any part of his real body. It may have been in some chance meeting of the eyes as we pass in and out of each other’s sight. Or it may have been in our sleep, as we move through this room in the same liquid medium, as if floating together in a pool, some casual meeting of one dream with another, a flowing into his sleep, or of his sleep into mine, at some point that the waking mind would not know of. Or in stirring about here, one part of the invisible current I make as I write, as my pen dips in the ink and my hand moves across the parchment, or as I drag the razor over my chin, may have broken against him so that he felt it. Who can tell? But I am certain now that the contact has been made. He no longer whimpers, or rocks back and forth on his knees, making little growls at the back of his throat. He watches. And I begin to believe that something I will have to call his mind has been engaged, and has started to move out into the room. I feel it. It is there after all. It is there. Some process of reaching up out of himself has begun of its own accord. Today, while I was washing him, he laid his fingertips, with a kind of timid curiosity, on the back of my hand, feeling the texture of the skin - then drew back quickly, as if I might object and punish him. The effect was odd and a little frightening. As if an animal had come up in the dark and touched me with its tongue. Is he beginning to feel at last for some notion of his own being? Is it, for him, like touching his reflection in a glass? Has he, I wonder, any conception of what his own body is, what it looks like, what dimensions it possesses, how it displaces its own small part of the universe? Is it his body he must imagine first, and only after that come to a knowledge of what he is? There is an intelligence. I feel it. More and more often now, as I settle into some work of my own, writing for example, I am aware of a separate center of energy in the room that disturbs my thoughts, that sets up eddies that beat like waves of light towards me and break against the edge of my consciousness. The room, I know, is filled with emotions that are not mine only, thoughts, not mine, that lean into the still damp atmosphere of a late morning where I sit scribbling and the boy, taut as a spring, watches out of his corner - the beginnings of a restlessness of mind, of body, that is the stirring in him of renewed life. He is, after all, a child. He needs activity. His body needs to express itself in movement and his mind to reach out and touch and test things.
He has been here now for nearly two weeks. After those first three days when he slept, when his soul tried to bury itself in the earth, and these last days when he has lived in a state of half-sleep, he has begun to move again into wakefulness, into the full alertness of his youth. Yesterday, while I was out of the room briefly, he must have touched my writing materials. The ink was spilled. I sopped it up without giving any indication that I knew he had been tampering with things; refilled the pot; found my place in the roll. And almost burst out laughing to see that his tongue was blue.
Being out of the room again today, I stood just beyond the door frame and watched.
He shuffles across the floor towards the parchment roll and stares at it, pokes at it with his forefinger, then lowers his head and sniffs. How it must puzzle him that the roll still smells of animal hide. Once again the ink fascinates him. He sniffs at that also, but is careful not to spill it. He takes the stylus in his hand, and has been observant enough to grasp it clumsily, but correctly, between thumb and forefinger. He looks pleased with himself. He dips it in the ink, finding great difficulty in getting the pen, balanced as it is between his fingers, into the hole. He crouches over the pot, and there is on his face that look of utterly human concentration that one sees on the faces of small children when they are trying for the first time to draw, or make strokes for writing or thread a needle - the eyes fixed, the tongue pointed at the corner of the mouth and moving with each gesture of the hand, as if it too were one of the limbs we have to use as men, one of our means of pushing out into the world, of moving and changing its objects. Is that perhaps where speech begins? In that need of the tongue to be active in the world, like a hand among objects, grasping, pushing, shaping, remaking? Watching behind the door these first attempts of the Child to handle the objects of his new world, I find my eyes wet with tears. There is something in our humanity, in the slow initiation of the creatures of our kind into all that we have discovered and made - in ourselves and in the world around us - that is always touching like this; one feels it in the first efforts of the child to push itself upright, to push that one step up that must have taken our ancestors centuries to imagine and dream of and find limbs for; or in the first precarious placing of one block upon another to make a little tower, the beginnings of a city. All those ages of slow discovery. Relived by the child in just a few months, as he makes use of experience he can never himself have had, and which must lie latent in him, in the lives under his own of thousands long dead, whose consciousness he has somehow brought with him into the world. How much more moving then to see my Child make the discoveries that will lead him, after so many years of exile, into his inheritance, into the society of his own kind.