麻豆社

The Cloaks of Memory

Saja and Miro sat in the corner of the room, silent and staring, their faces expressionless, their only movement an occasional shudder that ran right through their slight bodies.

Sybel watched them and bided her time. The children ate the food she put in front of them, and went to bed when she asked them. Otherwise, there was no communication.

In their sleep, though, the children talked and cried, and sometimes screamed.

The avalanche that had hit the tiny mountain village had been terrible, no one, not even Sybel, who was the oldest inhabitant, could remember anything like it.

Several houses had simply disappeared in the middle of the night, swept away by hundreds of tonnes of snow. Saja and Miro were the only survivors from those houses. They had been found hundreds of metres below the village, but of the others, and their houses, there was no sign.

Saja was a little luckier than Miro, she, at least had a few fragments - one earring of a pair her parents had given her, a thank you letter her mother had written to another woman in the village, a rag torn from one of her father's worn out shirts which had been in the kitchen, the only part of the house that survived, and other odd bits and pieces.

Sybel had given them to her. But for Miro there was nothing, it was as if his parents had never existed.

Under Sybel's patient questioning, the children began to talk. She learned how they had survived.

Both had woken being deafened by a massive roaring, blinded, not even sure which way up they were, but then, using their arms and legs, they had started to almost swim in the crashing snow, and found themselves on the top of the avalanche, and there they had managed to keep themselves, as if surfing the great, chaotic roaring mass, until they had come to a stop.

Both of them still felt the terrible cold of the avalanche right into their bones, even in front of Sybel's roaring fire, and that was why they shuddered every now and then.

The villagers made the good living they enjoyed from their goats.

They wove warm clothes from the goat hair, which sold very well all over the country. Their patterned cloaks were particularly admired, and Sybel got the two children back to their weaving as soon as she could. As they sat side by side at their looms, she asked Saja what she could remember about the objects she had from her parents.

The earrings, Saja explained, had been a present on her seventh birthday, and she remembered they were the most beautiful things she had ever seen.

She could still feel her mother gently putting them on her ears, and the smile on her face as she stepped back to look.

Wearing them made her feel so grown up. When she looked at the letter, she could almost see her mother's hand making the fine writing, and when she felt the scrap of shirt, she could remember how it felt on her father's back as she hugged him, or when he lifted her up to carry her over the stream.

Then Sybel said one day, "Why don't you take the cloak you're weaving as your own, and sew these things into it?"

Meanwhile, Miro had no objects to talk about, so, as he wove, Sybel asked him about what his parents had taught him.

"Well, of course, my father taught me to weave, and how to make the different patterns, like this one," and he pointed to a herringbone line. "My mother taught me to look after myself, I suppose she taught me how to dress myself, and..."

So he talked about his memories of his parents as he wove, and each memory became attached to the pattern he was weaving as he spoke about it, so that, when he had finished the cloak, he found that a memory of his parents was woven into every part of its pattern.

Sybel said, as Miro held it up, "You should take that cloak as your own, too. You see," she said to both of the children, "your parents are living on in your cloaks and in your memories."

She helped the two put on their new, warm cloaks, and, as they did, they both found that they could no longer feel the cold of the avalanche which, for so long, had gone right to their bones.