Chapter 19

Asin was born on one of the eastern islands of the pre-rain Turkey. The island had not emerged from the new water world; it had never drowned in the first place. The ancestral village of Asin’s grandparents was located on the heights of Masis Mountain in Ararat, North West of Iran. The villagers were people who had fled the crowded, noisy and contaminated cities to live a pure and natural life on the mountains. They had moved there a few decades before the rain. Asin was told many tales about the contaminated cities filled with sickness, chemical and sonic pollution and polluted irrespirable air. Although it was hardly imaginable and understandable for her, she knew that this seclusion had been the root of her existence. If her ancestors hadn’t run off to the mountains, they would not have lived to give birth to her grandparents and so forth. They had retreated in the mountains, isolated from the turmoil of economy, politics, technology and society.

Earthquakes did not bring much damage to their small village, which had light wooden cottages, and they never saw droughts, famine and the collapse of countries and cities. No one drove in and out of the village. The access road to the village had disappeared over time, and there were only less than fifty women, men and children, left in the isolated village. In the early years, some of the youth of the village did not survive the primitive life and returned to the cities. But the born generation, far from the city, had no visions of or memories from the cities, never even thought of returning. But their curiosity about other worlds, besides the world in which they grew up, added a new word to their vocabulary: the Traveller! All the little children in the village wanted to become Travellers. When they grew up, they would go to villages, cities and other countries, and get acquainted with the way of life of other people. But when it was time to go, nobody dared to do that. They would set back and postpone it to the next days.

When the rain began, people of the village built shelters for themselves, their livestock and their farmed gardens, from the wood of the forest trees surrounding the village. The water rose. They had no ships. There was no boat and the third-generation inhabitants of the village had never seen the sea in their lives and had no idea what a boat was. The sea had risen above the foothills, making the horizon of the village tighter and smaller. The inhabitants of the village were afraid. Could the water drown the village in itself? The villagers were scared and feverish from the cold and humid weather. The Feverish children wandered to the new borders of the village with umbrellas and they encountered the strangest phenomenon of their lives: the sea! Every day, the corpses of humans and trees that were rooted out hatched the border between the foothills and the water. The inhabitants of the village were too sick and feverish to be able to collect the bodies from the water or throw them back into the sea.