Little Lily. Epilogue

She walked, and the whole world moved with her—obediently, rhythmically, without asking for directions.

Her fragile body remained the motionless center of the universe, and the earth itself spun beneath her bare feet like a red-hot, damp potter’s wheel. From time to time, this wheel brought to her feet ever new scraps of itself—now rich ochre clay, now white coral rubble crumbling into dust, now dark, musty, humus-rich soil smelling of recent thunderstorm rain. And the girl accepted each of these steps as an inevitable gift.

She did not remember how long this journey had been going on. She did not even know if such a dry, calculating word as “how much” existed in this world. Time for her here was neither a straight arrow shot from a bow, nor a closed, creaking wheel; it seemed like a thick, transparent amber resin. In this resin, the flies of the distant past and the light-winged dragonflies of the unborn future were frozen side by side, forever, and any departed moment could be examined in detail up close, simply by holding it up to the light, like a cloudy antique bead.

The sun froze at its zenith when the trail—or that stubborn semblance of it that had not yet managed to become completely overgrown with prickly, piercingly green wild pandanus—turned sharply between two colossal stone boulders. These stones were strangers here. They clearly did not belong to this island: leaned against each other like two heavily breathing, dead-tired travelers, they radiated a deep underground, mineral cold. This cold crept under the skin in defiance of all the daytime heat.

Between the stones gaped a cave.

It did not look like an entrance into a rock; rather, it resembled a deep, ragged, convulsive exhale of the earth itself. From the dark, velvet limestone maw, a cool, tangible draft streamed outward. It smelled of wet limestone, underground springs, primeval moss, and something else—a barely discernible, sweetish and bitter scent. That is how centuries-old archival paper, parchment, dried library glue, and ink smell.

The girl stopped at the very opening. She did not need to make decisions. Everything had long been decided for her by this place itself—its centuries-old weight, its patient, non-human silence. She simply stepped over the invisible boundary between furious light and muffled gloom.

The cave let her in. The darkness descended on her shoulders like a heavy woolen blanket warmed by someone else’s heat. Her eyes took a long time to adjust. At first, there was only a dull, impenetrable blackness in which neither forms nor distances existed. But then, slowly, as a watermark emerges on a soaked sheet of paper, the outlines of a huge, temple-like space with a flat, hard-packed floor began to grow out of the twilight. And at that very moment, an invisible lock clicked barely audibly behind her back—or so it seemed: the sound was as quiet as an old book snapping shut.

The girl reached out her left hand and touched the wall. The porous limestone rock beneath the pads of her fingers responded with a living, underlying warmth. The stone was inhabited. It consisted entirely of other people’s touches, notches, and traces, as if thousands of hands before her had tried to leave their invisible manifestos here.

And she saw the signs. The entire cave was written over from top to bottom.

The lowest, archaic layer had almost dissolved into the stone. These were pale, barely discernible silhouettes of fish and sea turtles, scratched with the tip of a charred stick thousands of years ago, when the sea stood higher and the archipelago itself was just a bare coral reef. The fish swam one after another in the eternal stone water, smoothly and silently, without touching the corners of the rock.

Higher up, right over the fish, someone in other centuries had deeply carved angular, solemn characters. They stretched along the walls in a continuous ribbon, weaving into patterns in which, upon long examination, strange, alluring pictures began to pulsate: a burning signal tower, the thin figure of a girl on a fortress wall, a man running towards the sea, and a huge white bird flying away towards the mainland.

Even higher darkened letters traced in charcoal, ink, and something brown, similar to dried blood. Alphabets replaced one another, the lines tangled. Someone wrote flawlessly evenly, as teachers write on blackboards; someone traced the signs crookedly, with childish pressure and mistakes. Some left on the limestone only a single name, a date, or the mark of a fingernail.

The girl could not read these texts, but her skin, absorbing the age-old dust of these walls, understood everything without translators. These were lists. Endless lists of losses, confessions of love, recipes for barley bread, blueprints of houses, and desperate pleas for saving water. But her fingers, gliding over the rough stone, distinguished something else: where the letters were deep, firm, confident—there the hand was not afraid. Where they trembled, broke off, crumbled under the fingernail—there the hand begged. And where only a thin, almost invisible trace remained on the wall—there the hand simply wanted someone to know: I was here.

In the depths of the cave, in a natural hollow by the far wall, towered books.

There lay old tomes in cracked leather bindings, smelling of tanned hide; scrolls neatly rolled into bamboo tubes and tied with hemp thread; student notebooks with calligraphic flourishes; crumpled scraps of American cardboard and yellowed newspaper clippings. Their pages rustled from the invisible underground draft—quietly and rhythmically, like a well-fed beast breathing in its sleep. And in this rustle, the girl heard one endless, polyphonic, unceasing echo: “Do not forget. Please, do not forget us.”

Among the stacks of paper, right on the dry earth, in the endless chaos of other people’s losses, lay objects. And among thousands of rusty keys, worn coins, and fragments of bones, her gaze caught familiar outlines: a piece of white chalk, worn down to the very middle… a fragment of a brass shell casing, polished to a mirror shine by long keeping in other people’s pockets… a thin silk thread, cinched at the end with a simple knot… a stalk of wormwood that had preserved the smell of the desert… a dark coin depicting a ritual bowl… and a piece of porous dark clay the size of a child’s fist—with a thin seam from a casting mold and a barely noticeable crack at the very base.

They were not put on display. They simply lay quietly in the general mass of memory, having become part of this huge, breathing world.

The girl squatted down before this treasury of memory. She did not touch the objects—she simply absorbed their presence, losing track of centuries and minutes. Here, under the stone dome, death had no power, because everything that was named and preserved continued to live its quiet, underlying, invisible life.

A ray of the setting sun struck her in the face suddenly, as if calling her by name.

This golden, slanting ray pierced the thick twilight at the entrance, which smelled of red-hot basalt and salt. It glided along the walls, and for one short, absolute moment everything inside the cave came to life: the fish and turtles flared with bright ochre, the charcoal letters filled with a warm amber gleam, and the old photographs acquired a frightening depth. The people in them seemed to flinch, sigh, and freeze again. The light illuminated the white chalk, the copper coin, and the clay shard.

The sun was setting.

The girl stood up and went outside. The evening sun had already touched the horizon, resembling a huge, red-hot copper coin. The whole sky over the wasteland bloomed with a thick, anxious, purple-pomegranate glow, resembling a giant chrysanthemum. The air smelled of cooling earth, wormwood, and the distant, barely discernible smoke of a hearth—that very bitterish, native smell that she knew better than her own name.

She sat on a flat boulder by the entrance, cut through with white veins of quartz resembling lightning frozen in time. The stone accepted her as its own—it was still hot, it remembered all this long morning, remembered that girl who sat here a long, long time ago, wrapping her arms around her sharp knees. The stone asked no questions. The stone simply stored the warmth.

And it was then, just to the left of her thigh, on the most heated cleavage of quartz, that she saw it.

There lay a lizard. A small, ancient dragon, as if cast from malachite chips and liquid, darkened bronze. Its emerald speckles faintly gleamed in the dying rays. It lay absolutely motionless, spreading its speckled belly on the rough boulder, and greedily, trustingly drank the departing sun—with all its scales, with every cell of its small body.

It had no tail.

In the place where a long, elegant scaly arc once extended from the flexible body, now only a short, even, blunt stump was visible. It was covered with young, tender, translucent skin—lighter and cleaner than the rest of the body. The tail did not grow back. It simply healed.

The girl held her breath. Slowly, trying not to make any sudden movements, she reached out her hand, stopping her fingers, stained with chalk dust, an inch from the reptile. The lizard did not move. It only slightly turned its triangular head, and its yellow eye with a vertical pupil looked at the girl without fear—with the age-old, calm indifference of a victor.

And then, from a narrow, warm crevice between the stones, a tiny shadow slipped out into the light. Behind it—another. And another.

Three microscopic, translucent little lizards, no bigger than a child’s pinky finger, cheerfully and fussily ran out onto the hot boulder. Their scales were blue-green, clean, not yet knowing either roadside dust or torn-off tails. They scampered briskly around the large tailless lizard, stepped on its head, tumbled comically off the quartz ledges, and immediately clambered back up, getting tangled and stuck in their own long, perfect, flawless little tails.

The mother did not turn around and did not watch them. She did not need to. She was simply here—warm, alive.

The girl looked at this impossible, tiny triumph of life over decay, and exactly the same green sparks lit up in her eyes.

She lowered her gaze to her left palm. The two pale, faded crescent-shaped scars—the seal of the lizard, its brand—suddenly stopped seeming like a sign of misfortune. They turned into the most ordinary human lines. Lines that are on the hand of everyone who has ever taken chalk in their fingers to write the most important word on a blackboard, or held an axe to build a sturdy home for their children, or embraced a loved one before a long journey.

The girl smiled. Not the way tired adults smile—with effort and hidden sadness, but the way only pure children know how to smile: with her whole face, her whole body, as if this smile were simply another natural way to breathe this air.

The sun completely rolled behind the edge of the earth. The sky thickened, becoming heavy, velvety, and in this deep indigo blue, sharp and clean as crushed ocean ice, stars began to flare up one after another—huge, pulsating, bright, as if someone had generously scattered a handful of glowing coals across the celestial cloth.

The girl did not move. She carefully closed her palm, keeping the last warmth of the departed day in it, leaned back, resting her hands on the solid, reliable quartz, and began to look at the sky. The stone beneath her slowly, drop by drop, gave back the heat accumulated over the centuries.

Everything was exactly as it should be.

The world was.

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