The conciliatory lama lay down the bags of salt and flour and the tea beside the door before backing silently away from the house, gently pulling Enbo and Bunny with him. The three turned around only once they felt they were far enough away. That was when they made the shocking discovery that almost the entire village was gathered in the square too, standing silently in the dripping mist. Even Ler Kymcog was there. So was his mother! As Enbo turned around, his wife pulled Bunny into a tight embrace and began to sob, haltingly.
This was the cue for other women in the crowd to begin their own quiet sobbing.
Every family in the village had brought a little something to give Sangdan and Gela, but above all, they brought their guilty consciences. As a representative from each family silently laid down their offering and turned to leave, their troubled consciences found some measure of solace, but the guilt was very much still there. Despite the lingering shame, each person there felt an indescribable warmth rise through their bodies. As the crowd dispersed, so did the morning mist, slowly. The sun was unmasked, scaling the empty heavens, spreading out a thin layer of warmth below as it pierced the fog.
The people of Ji village didn't go out to the fields at the normal time that day. The school bell that announced the beginning of class didn't ring out either, when it was supposed to. Everyone was as if under a spell, eyes glued to the doorway of the cheapest, most ramshackle house in the whole village. They barely even blinked.
When the last trace of mist had vanished, Sangdan and Gela finally came out. After an absence of many hundreds of days, the sunlight of Ji village once more washed over their bodies and lit up their faces. Though their clothes were old and tattered, they'd washed, and now their faces were clean and bright from the cleansing water of Ji village. Gela was much taller than when he left, and his gaunt face wore a determined, even somewhat savage, expression. As for Sangdan, she was just as beautiful as before; in fact, she was smiling with such brainless radiance that the villagers found it hard to believe that they'd heard her weeping and wailing like an old banshee only a matter of hours earlier.
She let out a delighted little hoot when she saw the gifts piled up by her doorway: there was tea, salt, butter, flour, old clothes, bowls, kitchen knives … among the most delightful items, there was a box of ointment, a bundle of firewood, a bottle of kerosene, and a real lock for her door. The villagers' reward for their generosity was that they once more got to hear her silvery, carefree laughter, a sound that had been missing from the village for a very long time. She kept laughing as she carried her bounty inside, one armful at a time, calling out to Gela:
"Quickly son, come help me!"
She kept calling to him each time she picked up a new load, but Gela ignored her almost totally, his only concession being a slight, involuntary twitch of his whole body. He was sitting in the doorway, holding in his hands the one thing he'd picked up from the pile outside: the lock. He raised his eyes, sweeping his vision over the village which he left a long time ago. Even though the villagers were all watching him from a safe distance, they still avoided his gaze when it fell on them. Everyone was walking on tip-toes and speaking in hushed tones. Submerged in their guilt, the whole village felt like atonement.
The sunlight wasn't fierce that day; it was at a warm glow, laying over the distant mountains in a hazy screen of ever so slightly blue light. When the sun fell on the river, the waters turned almost viscous, while the rocks stayed completely immobile under the light, as if sunk deeply in their own thoughts; whatever those may be. When the sun fell on the ground, even the tiny particles of dust didn't stir; they were tired out from blowing around in the wind, and now they had a chance at respite, they wanted to finally lie down and rest a while.
The sun also shone on the small cluster of stone houses that together made up the grand sum of Ji village. It gleamed off the greyed wooden roof shingles. After reflecting off the roves, the light became heavy and metallic, almost acquiring the solidity of a mundane object. This kind of morning-time lull hadn't been experienced in Ji village for many years; such tranquillity was so rare in the middle of this era of constant, universal, and remorseless flux that a person only had to feel it for its essence to seep deep into their heart. The lull was so tangible, it rippled through the air in the form of some extraordinary kind of sound waves that were of their own making. Truly, this was a grand event, unprecedented for many years before. Cowed by a force greater than he, the leader of the production team didn't dare stick out his neck in the centre of the village square. Instead he cowered away from his usual, loud duty of shouting the summons to work, which went like this:
"Out to work!"
The teacher at the village primary school didn't come out to ring the school bell either. He wasn't from Ji village.
Gela and Sangdan could be seen through their doorway, which was wide open since it still lacked a door. They were pouring hot tea into their new bowls. Bowls full, they hung their heads in a weird silence for a second—when it broke, they finished their meal preparations: putting butter in their tea and retrieving cooked flat cakes from where they'd been roasting beside the fire. Slowly, they began to eat. A sip of tea, a mouthful of flat-cake. They stopped occasionally to lift their heads and exchange slight smiles, looking each other in the eye. Then they would talk for a moment in soft voices before going back to their meal. They ate at their leisure, though their food was the product of charity; the whole village's charity. There was actually something very noble about the way they ate.