Chapter 5 – Kareena
As the weeks at sea dragged on, as their ship slowly made its way back to the Mediterranean1, Tedieous’ memories of distant Spiphica took on an unrealistic agreeability. His quiet town, which he had both privately and vocally ridiculed for being dull and provincial, had become, in his mind, a golden utopia.
There was, however, one bundle of memories that required no subsequent revision as they were already golden. These were of a girl named Kareena.
Kareena had entered his life through an unexpected convergence.
His boss, Olemedes, hired several servants to maintain the storehouse in Spiphica. On his regular trips to drop off pottery, Tedieous had noticed that one of these workers was not a servant or slave. She was only ever seen interacting with the servants or with the shabby storehouse cat named Rhody, an unhappy-looking creature with a milky left eye.
Through other channels, Tedieous was also aware that Olemedes had a daughter named Kareena. On the few times that Olemedes mentioned the name, he did so with great fatigue in his voice.
One day, while Tedieous was absently scrubbing dried clay off his hands, he was struck by the thought that the anonymous assistant and the disembodied name might be one in the same. He froze and considered the possibility. He was convinced that the gods, though messy in their management of the world, would rarely leave such obvious loose ends dangling2.
Afraid of testing this assumption, he did not.
An easily solvable mystery became an ever flowing fountain of anxiety. He prevented himself from ever entering a situation where he would have to confront either the nameless assistant or the bodiless name. His intentional avoidance continued until one unspectacular morning in the doldrums of August, when the stars lingered right into the morning sky, cool winds glided over the countryside, and Tedieous awoke to find he had accidentally baked her cat in his pottery kiln.
The creature had apparently crawled into a larger unfired pithos and had fallen asleep.
He could not believe his misfortune. Reeling from this initial discovery, the realization struck Tedieous that he would have to explain it all to Kareena in person, if she was, in fact, Kareena. That realization came with a sub-realization that his first actual conversation with Kareena would be about the cat and how he had killed it. Realization upon realization crashed into him.
After much delay, one might say a few days' worth of delay, Tedieous forced himself to confront her. The smell in his kiln was not improving with time.
Tedieous slipped into Olemedes' storehouse, an extensive mudbrick structure near the olive orchards. The interior of the storehouse would have appeared spacious were there not stacks of crates everywhere. The floor had a slick coating of spilled oil.
Near the center of the warehouse, in a small crate-free alcove, was Olemedes' assistant and possibly his daughter. She sat at a desk and compared two clay tablet receipts side by side next to an oil lamp.
Tedieous hovered silently by the entrance. He was moments away from turning back when her eyes lifted up. Startled, he hurried over to her desk. He stopped a few feet away from it but continued sliding across the floor until he was right up against it and practically leaning over it.
“Can I help you?” she asked, her eyes already threatening to return to the receipts in hand.
“Hello, Kareena?” he asked.
“Yes?” she replied.
“Hello, your name is Kareena?”
“It is,” she confirmed.
“Oh, good.”
The mystery was over.
“You must be the legendary Tedieous,” she added, a single brow raised.
The mystery was not over.
“You know my name?” he asked.
A divulging expression filled her face as she placed the two receipts on the table and slid them towards Tedieous. He glanced at the carved symbols, but could make no sense of them3.
“Bear with me. I have been filing my father's receipts for years, and this name keeps popping up: Tedieous, Tedieous, Tedieous. Quote from Tedieous. Invoice from Tedieous. Paycheck for Tedieous. Complaint about Tedieous. I keep seeing this stupid name, but then it finally occurred to me. Maybe it's the nameless guy who drops off pottery.”
“There was a complaint?”
“What? Nope.”
“When did you figure this mystery out?” Tedieous asked, blindly pulling words out.
“Just now.”
Tedieous nodded in amazement.
“How does it feel?” he asked.
“What?”
“I mean, is it a relief to finally know?”
“To know what?”
“That I am… myself?”
Kareena shrugged. “Is there a reason you're here?”
“I…”
“Oh right, let me get you your check for last month,” she said.
She turned around and sifted through a stack of clay tablets behind her.
Tedieous’ foot tapped against something on the ground. It was a pet's food dish. He remembered he had come with bad news.
“Kareena.”
“Just a minute.”
“You have a cat, right?”
She switched to a new stack of tablets.
“Rhody,” she called out with her back to Tedieous.
“Rhody, right.”
“I haven't seen him in a while. He has a bad habit of wandering off for weeks.”
“Yeah. The other night he…”
“What did he do? That little rascal is always ending up where he doesn't belong.”
“Yes, he does.”
Kareena turned around and tossed a clay check at Tedieous. He fumbled with it first with his hands, and then arms, then against his thigh, until it finally clattered to the floor.
“Sorry, I thought you would catch that,” she said.
“He's dead,” Tedieous said.
“Who's dead?”
“Rhody.”
With shoulder's stooped, Tedieous told the tale of the fateful morning, three or four mornings ago. His eyes dropped to the floor. When he raised them again, he saw Kareena rise from her seat.
“Did you take him out of the kiln?” she asked.
Tedieous blinked, and then shook his head.
Kareena held her gaze. She tapped the desk with her fingers.
“Listen, I have a lunch break in twenty minutes. Let's go… take care of that.”
That afternoon, they met at Tedieous' workshop. Tedieous opened the small metal door to the kiln and pulled out the fired pithos. Kareena peered inside the vessel.
“Yup, that's him,” she confirmed while pinching her nose.
For the next few minutes, Tedieous dug a hole in his backyard. Kareena dropped the heavy pithos with Rhody's remains into it.
They sat on the ground and gazed at the small grave, neither one speaking for a long while.
“I'm so sorry,” said Tedieous.
“Don't feel bad,” said Kareena.
“Well, that's going to be a struggle.”
“He was a real bastard,” Kareena said while rubbing the soot off her forehead.
“Really?” asked Tedieous.
“Nobody wanted him.”
“Oh.”
“He was the most repugnant creature I've ever known. Great mouser, but impossible to love.”
“Mmmm.”
“Oh, and he was totally blind in one eye. A real life cyclops.”
Tedieous grabbed his leg and hid his face.
“I murdered an unloved, half-blind animal,” he said into his knees.
“You're absolved, okay.” Kareena looked up. “Did you make all of these?”
Tedieous saw her point at a shelf full of painted pottery.
“That's what I do,” he confirmed.
She scanned the shelves. She pulled out one vessel and held it up.
“What's with all the dolphins?” Kareena asked.
“What's wrong with dolphins?” asked Tedieous.
“Nothing, you just seem to like painting them,” she said, eyeing the figures on the side.
“They're beautiful creatures.”
“They're alright.”
“What do you have against dolphins?”
“Have you ever seen a dolphin up close,” she asked.
“No.”
“They're always smiling.”
“Maybe it's just wonderful to be a dolphin.”
“How come you don't paint as many people?”
“People are tricky.”
“Trickier than dolphins?”
“Yeah.”
“I will say, these are a lot nicer than the ones you bring my father,” she said.
“Well, he requests a specific aesthetic.”
“And what's that?”
“As dull and lifeless as possible.”
Kareena placed the vessel back on the shelf.
“Tedieous, cat murdering and dolphin fetishizing aside, I think you're alright.”
- Translator's Note: I believe the modern day term is ‘Walk of Shame’. ↩︎
- Translator's Note: Oh Tedieous, you would be surprised. ↩︎
- Translator's Note: Literacy was only found in a few groups: Scribes, merchants, those who were tasked with keeping records, and a few troublemakers who would learn to read and write simply to etch in unflattering epithets. ↩︎