Connecting worlds
An excerpt from ‘The roots of the world’ #1
Today, I will keep my promise and share an excerpt from my new book, The roots of the world.
What kind of book it is, exactly? Hm. Thank you for asking.
I don’t particularly like the word children’s book. The best stories are always timeless and ageless. They might have a minimum threshold (an age below which you’re too young to understand the story) but they don’t have a maximum one. Sometimes, you can appreciate all the layers a writer has worked into a narrative only when you are well into adulthood. So I will say that this book, just like its predecessor De serres van Mendel (Mendel’s greenhouses), is a story for sensitive souls aged 10 to 110.
The roots of the world is a book about the intersection point where worlds meet.
In one of them the girl Reya and the old man Mendel inhabit an immense complex of domes and greenhouses. The greenhouses hold lakes and mangrove forests, deserts and swamps, tropical woods and much, much more. In this giant, glass-domed biotope the worlds are stored — literally, in botanical form: a multiverse of seeds, flowers and endless possibilities.
In another layer of reality, we encounter Robin, a boy who used to live with Reya and Mendel in the greenhouses for a while and became Reya’s best friend while he was there, but who can’t recall anything of his time with them anymore.
He has returned to the place where he belongs and he has grown up the proper way: part of a two-parent family in a desert village where everyone, adults and children alike, are put to work on the scrap site, dismantling objects for valuable metals as soon as they are sufficiently handy to do so.
When the book opens, Robin is twelve years old. He gets flashes of the greenhouses in his head. Who is this girl he sees — her name’s Ree, he guesses — dancing amidst the plants? She is talking to to him, interrupting his life whenever she feels like it. And what is he supposed to make of that bizarre talent he seems to harbor in his hands, that enables him to have things fall apart almost of their own accord, a talent that according to some he would be wise to hide?
In Reya’s world, a disaster takes place: the greenhouses are contaminated with a plague-like illness. Even Mendel himself becomes dangerously ill. Reya has to leave her safely vaulted world in order to find help. At the same time, Robin is looking for a way to return to the place he truly longs for.
With last week’s column in mind, I could share an excerpt from the catastrophe in the greenhouses now: a force of nature swiping away all certainty from under Reya’s feet like a tidal wave, forcing her out of her comfortable, familiar world. But I won’t. We are facing more than enough of that kind of unhinging as it is, nowadays. So I will take you with me along another storyline in the book, to something we need far more of right now: the moment when Robin, descended all the way down into the cave of the ancestors, to the deepest hall that still shows their paintings on the walls, and with Ree’s voice as a constant companion in his head, starts to understand what the power in his hands is actually for: telling his own story, by connecting worlds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kprl0CECykA
The roots of the world~ excerpt
Robin makes for the natural alcove in the wall of rock, a deeper, sloped curve he hadn’t noticed until now. The alcove is one giant collection of hands, prints in all shapes and sizes, black and red and orange and grey and every hue in between. It’s almost like they are waving at him. As if an entire people in the deepest corner of the cave has wanted to say: we were here.
We were here. And we still are. For you see us.
– That isn’t me, Ree whispers. It’s them.
Robin walks over to the alcove and stops, a hand’s width away from the wall, raising his fingers, hesitating. ‘If I touch the rock now, do you think could I feel them?’
– I believe you could, Ree nods.
No matter how massive the walls around him, down here the rock-face seems nothing more than a veil. On the other side, a world not unlike this one is stretching out, events unfolding and moving away from this very spot, spreading out like ripples on a surface of water or a tree’s growth rings slowly expanding from the core.
Robin rests his palms on the surface of rock.
Come, young weaver. Feel us, and find yourself. This is where everything begins again. For as long as there is one who can read the lines, the story will continue to be told.
The warm glow surges through Robin’s body, and soon it starts to flow back from his body to the rock, too. It doesn’t take any effort, it’s as natural as breathing. And he can feel the cave slowly revolve around him, a galaxy of stone, a universe of rock.
What is stone but time coagulated? What is time but countless layers of life, deceased, sunk, compressed and once again brought to light?
One after the other, the drawings on the walls light up, their shapes glowing and flowing, shaped in the current of the rocks by hands like his own, hands that knew how. They tell of worlds in grains of sand, of civilizations coming and going, of the dream of a single flower, of stars strewn like pollen across the nocturnal sky.
Some tales sound faint, old and distant. Others are clear like bells, fresh and close by. All of them vibrant and very much alive, in different layers of the rock than the one he himself is on.
– On another growth ring of the tree, Ree laughs, along another bend of the same spiral. Or on another spiral crossing this one. She is dancing across the walls, from image to image.
If two spirals of light intersect, could you cross over from one to another? Could you travel from one layer of sediment-packed rock to a deeper one, as if they were strata in an atmosphere, revolutions in a galaxy, and perch in the place your heart is longing for?
Robin can’t tell how far he goes, or how long this moment lasts. He understands now that time and distance can not only be measured in length, but also in depth.
In his pocket he suddenly feels his birth stone glow. He takes it out and knows what he is going to see. The warm light meandering through the pebble is exactly the same as the one flowing through the rockface.
Whoever made you, he muses, was just like them.
Ree gently wraps her arms around him.
– Just like you.
This column is one of a series originally written and performed in Dutch for The Saturday Night Shuffle, a Radio Lede program by Jan Huib Nas. I also get to choose the music that accompanies the column.
