Читать книгу The Testament Of Yves Gundron - Emily Barton - Страница 12

CHAPTER TWO

THE ARRIVAL

ur ancestors crossed the great body of water that lies between Scotland¹ and ourselves in paper boats sealed with pine sap and loaded nearly to sinking with “figs” and “pomegranates.” They had not got these fruits in Scotland, but in the Great Land across the water they had left generations before. Lack of these fruits was one of our ancestors’ greatest fears for this then-uncharted land, and with good reason: as their ballads record, our soil is too rocky and our winters too cold for anything so soft and sweet to grow here. I have seen drawings of their cherished fruits and of their boats. My brother, the only man among us who has braved the bare horizon and felt the salt lapping of the waves, made such a boat for his wanderings, and reports that he found it comfortable. Countless generations ago we crossed the cold water in order to escape persecution at the hands of infidel prelates who denied the tripartite unity of God, and who murdered all who attested it. Our grandfathers’ grandfathers found this country welcoming enough after the hardships they had suffered—neither too green nor too barren, excellent for the cultivation of grains and sheep, and secluded from the prying eyes of strangers. Here they settled into their old ways, and we have never found reason to wander hence. We know our mountains to the east, our mountains to the west, our mountains to the north, and our mountains to the south, and none of us, save Mandrik, has sought what lies beyond. Indeed, before he set off on his wanderings, the only contact anyone knew of with the world beyond Nnms was my grandmother’s arrival from the depths of the far-distant sea.

Then, two years to the day after the advent of my wonderful invention, the stranger came up out of the east.

My harness had changed Mandragora, the appearance of our environs, and the lives of the people, so much for the better that Father Stanislaus (who seemed well-nigh young enough to tag after his mother on a string) had declared it a holiday, Di Hammadi, which we celebrated in the grove adjoining Desvres’s meadow, from which we could see the distant towers of Nnms.

On that second Di Hammadi, the village children danced about a Maypole decorated with the binding straps of worn harnesses. We adults danced with abandon around the children, for we were intoxicated with the fermented fruits of our orchards and fields, and had been eating the foods beloved of our horses: sugar, carrots, and oats. In addition, of course, we had roasted two pigs and a dozen hens, and brought forth the last of the previous summer’s pickled vegetables. Mandrik shared with the company his first fruits, hard green plums and peaches just begun to ripen, on which the children feasted. We were all dressed in our best clothes, the women with ribbons in their hair. We sang songs of great praise and of great ribaldry. (Dirk von Iggislau, too young yet to know his way with the hops, grabbed red-haired Prugne Martin’s arm and burst into an impassioned rendition of “I’ll Harness you, baby, if you’ll pull my Plow.” Her ripe breast heaved with laughter.) It was the first warm day of April. The crocuses had thrust their blue and yellow heads through the black earth, and the trees in the tepid sunshine were ablush with blossoms and new leaves. I had just finished shearing my sheep and sowing my rye and summer wheat, and was sufficiently spent with the labor to enjoy the festival air completely. My vision grew slow with young beer, but kept circling dazedly around the fair, plump figure of my wife. She was arrayed in her best dress of pale blue linen, which reflected both the heavens and her eyes, and wore the necklace of milky green jades Mandrik had brought back from the Orient and given to my first wife, God rest her soul. Each time Adelaïda smiled I fixed on the fetching gap between her front teeth, and my tongue desired to probe the space therebehind. After perhaps an hour of coveting her thus, I steered my woozy gait toward her and pulled her by the hand out of the dance. What matter if our neighbors saw us wander off? I had made them a holiday, and they, too, had imbibed the hops’ succor. Furthermore, it had been three years since we’d had Elizaveta, and but one bairn had been born to the parish since Advent—a boy child, Tansy Gansevöort’s—so none could fault us for our endeavor.

I led my wife out into the East Meadow, whose long grass lay parched and flattened under the clear, glistening remains of the snow. As we left the grove, we passed Wido Jungfrau lazily watering Desvres’s field with his back to the crowd. “Hail, Yves,” he called out, and I called back, laughing, “Hail.” Just as we came clear of the villagers’ view, we saw, clad all in black and stomping among the puddles, the strangest woman I had ever beheld.

“Oh, excuse me. Wow. Hello,” she said, looking up and down my wife and myself. “Am I glad to see you.” She was tall—a hand taller than I—with short black hair curling wanton and loose only to her shoulders. Her eyes also were black, and her pale skin ruddy from sun and wind. Her smile was broad and immodest, revealing a shock of teeth as white and regular as the pearls on the cover of Father Stanislaus’s Missal. She wore a woolly black shirt unlike any I had ever seen, and some manner of men’s black trousers so slender that I could see each curve of her hips, thighs, and calves, and promptly looked away from all three. Most peculiar of all was the tumor that grew from her back, all reds and purples like raucous spring flowers, and sprouting everywhere shiny protuberances and black tendrils. I tried also to avert my eyes from this abomination, but it drew them thither with its terrible countenance. Now I knew what the people of my grandfather’s generation must have thought when my tall, curl-bedecked grandmother appeared among them. “You have no idea—I’ve been wandering, literally, for days now. I’ve been looking for a certain, for a village, but I lost my compass. I thought it would be the end of me.” Though she spoke English, her accent was broad and flat, and cut through the air like the ploughshare through the sod.

I could think of nothing to say, and noticed that Adelaïda had pulled herself ever so slightly behind me.

“Thank you so much for finding me. Where are we?”

I realized that my grandmother might have excited similar disgust—and that the tones of her voice might have rankled so—and tried to keep down my temper and fear. “The Great East Meadow past Gerald Desvres’s field. Everyone’s in the grove for a celebration.”

She looked about slowly. “And what town are we in?”

“This is the village of Mandragora.”

She stopped still. “Mandragora?”

“That is this hamlet’s name. Yes.” I felt my wife disappear entirely behind me.

Her sharp eyes grew somewhat red. “And what’s Mandragora near?”

“Only these mountains, and the city of Nnms.”

“Neem?”

“Nnms,” I repeated, exaggerating the friction between tongue and teeth.

The stranger turned in a patient, meditative circle, then cast her eye less greedily upon us. “I can’t believe it.”

“What?”

“I’m here. I found you.”

Perhaps in her wandering she had fallen prey to sun madness, which would explain her wild countenance. “Where did you come from?”

“From Boston. I’m Ruth Blum, by the way.” She extended her white, bony hand toward me.

Such intimacy had only ever been afforded me by my wife, and the sight of the hand approaching brought blood to my face. Still, the customs of her country were, as evidenced by her attire, quite different from ours, and her gesture of friendship, despite my native mistrust of strangers come out of the hills, struck my heart. “I’m Yves Gundron, of the third farm past the village.” I could imagine what I looked like to this creature—a solid farmer, a hand shorter than she and bruised by decades of wind and rain, my brown locks in need of a trimming and my shy, buxom wife half hidden behind.

“A great inventor,” Adelaïda, still behind me, stammered.

“And my wife, Adelaïda.”

“What kinds of things do you invent, Mr. Gundron?”

My wife said, “Wonders, absolute miracles, all.”

“1 have improved upon our farm implements. You may call me Yves. Where is it you say you’re from?”

Adelaïda whispered, “The sea, sure. Look how she resembles the paintings of your grandmother.”

I held a finger up to her. Ruth’s face was singularly elastic, and quickly recomposed itself into a half grin that, at its wavering edges, conveyed sadness or confusion. “Boston. I imagine you’ve never heard of it.”

“My brother, Mandrik le Chouchou, is the only man among us who has left the village. He has traveled the world, and never mentioned such a place.”

Her dread tumor creaked and shifted, despite which she let out a sweet, musical laugh. “People say it’s not much of a city, anyway.”

I asked, “What is it like there?” Because surely it wasn’t like here, if she went about dressed that way.

She looked Heavenward for an answer, as if Boston were spread like the stars across the great sky. “I’m not sure what to tell you, or where to begin. I’m not sure what’s the right thing to say.”

“Tell us how things are, and don’t fret about the consequences.”

She nodded, never taking her eyes from us as she thought. “I’ll see if I can explain. It’s not like it is here. It’s a large city, equipped with all the modern conveniences, and with a number of universities, which is how my family ended up there. There are lots of young people, though it’s conservative in some ways, too.” She stopped to regard us, and quieted her tone. “None of which means anything to you, does it?”

“Not a word,” I solemnly agreed.

“I’m sorry. I’ll try to think of a better way to explain.”

Adelaïda, still from behind, whispered, “Does she speak English?”

“I think so, though I cannot follow all her meaning.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Will you stop me, when I’m not clear? I want to be clear.”

“There’s no need to be sorry. You are welcome here, even if we don’t understand you.” I fervently hoped that the emotion thus expressed would follow its expression. “The village is on holiday today, in celebration of one of my inventions. Will you come with us for sustenance and barley ale?”

I think her mood picked up at the mention of the ale, for she thrust her chest forward and resettled the gruesome tumor on her back. “Sounds great, thanks.”

Our idyll trounced, my wife and I joined hands and led the stranger back to the clearing in the grove, wherein our neighbors made merry. Perhaps, I reasoned, her oddity was purely one of form, and once we grew used to it we would like her. I hoped this would be so, for I did not like the discomfort she then elicited. I also hoped that discovering her on the day of my festival might be an auspicious sign, despite the cold tremor which tickled my spine when I thought of her tall, strong body clomping through the field behind me.

“How many are you, in the village?” she asked.

“But a few score, counting beasts and babes.”

“All born and raised here?”

“All, aye.”

She walked silent a few paces, then added, “But you say your brother’s been all over the world?”

“To the Orient.”

Children were still dancing at the Maypole, but the elder boys, Ydlbert’s among them, had wrested the straps from the tots, and were now jumping and spinning like heathens. Prugne, her freckled bosom half bared to the breezes, spun about like a top, calling joyfully to the skies. To appease the small ones, Mandrik had hitched a cart to Hammadi, who was festooned in garlands of white flowers and anointed with oils, and drove the children about like so many bushels of potatoes. Their small heads, russet- and flaxen-haired, peeked above the high walls of the cart, blissfully accepting the warmth of the April sunshine and the coolness of the breeze.

“They’re having a Renaissance fair, only they’re not,” Ruth whispered, unintelligibly, behind me.

For a moment I hoped that our arrival would go as unnoticed in the general tumult as our departure surely had but a while before, but a dark, brooding hush soon spread about me like falling snow. The cart ground creaking to a halt, bumping up against Hammadi before it stopped, and my horse stood facing me, her brown head high, her star shining watchfully forward. Soon the whole square was silent but for the wailing of Tansy Gansevöort’s new bairn and the humming of one lone locust, come up too soon from the thawing earth and destined to die.

Miller Freund, his hat perched all the way back on his head, muttered, “Leave it to Gundron to bring such a strange thing home.”

“Friends,” I addressed the assembly, “for the first time in two generations, we have a visitor in our midst. She calls herself Ruth Blum, and speaks English. Do not be frightened. She did wander days and nights in the wilderness before she appeared to me and my wife but a stone’s throw from this grove.”

“What were you doing over there, hm?” Dirk questioned, then stuck the tip of his tongue salaciously through his teeth.

Anya slapped him, and his brother Bartholomew cheered.

Father Stanislaus rubbed the back of his long neck nervously with one hand. “Looks like a sea-thing.”

Wido Jungfrau, who had been known to see the doings of evil spirits in a measure of spoiled milk, took his pipe out of his mouth long enough to say, “Looks like the Devil’s work to me.”

Yorik said, “Nay, in the pictures devils have tails and claws.”

“You never know what’s beneath the clothes.”

“On the contrary, I think I can see it right clear.”

Bartholomew whistled and his younger brothers whooped their praise.

“She may, gentlemen, be no emissary of darkness, but an angel come to reside among us; or, as I think most likely, an ordinary person, come from far off. Who can say? Whatever her purpose, she is as solid of form as you and I.” To demonstrate I leaned my hand against her arm, and she swayed slightly under the weight of her tumor.

Dirk, between two bites of bread sopped in ale, said, “Gundron, I can see everything about her legs.” The boys erupted all around in laughter. One added, “They’re prettier than my mum’s.”

“Silence,” commanded my brother as he approached. The new white robe my wife had stitched him for the occasion shone with its own heat. By now our stranger had begun to hump her back into the terrible growth, weary with its weight or with shame. “I am Mandrik le Chouchou,” he said, inclining his head of clean, soft curls toward her. “Who are you?”

“Ruth Blum,” she said, her voice drawn in small. She was only a bit taller than he was, but had to turn her worried face modestly down to look him in the eye. If I looked strange to her, imagine what a sight was he—his hair as long as hers, his blue eyes glimmering with the light of divine knowledge, his white robe bright as the sun.

“And the city of your birth?”

“Boston, Massachusetts. Cambridge, actually, if you know Cambridge. Across the river. Your brother said you had traveled.”

In the murmuring that followed after her voice died down, my brother bowed three times, then stood with his hands in prayer, eyes closed. All the village waited for his words. “I have heard,” he whispered finally, “of your city. I am most pleased to meet you.”

Had night fallen in a rush right then, mid-afternoon, no greater silence could have damped the festive air. The darkness spread her fingers into our throats and hearts.

Even the stranger shivered at his pronouncement. “I’m glad to meet you, too. And, well. I’m so glad to be in Mandragora.” She looked nervously around. “I had heard a rumor² that your village might be here. I was hoping to find you, praying, actually, but I got lost. You’re not on the map.” She fidgeted back and forth on her feet like a young girl, though by the lines around her eyes I guessed her to be my own age.

“May I see your map?” my brother asked.

“I’m not sure that’s—”

“Beware her trickeries,” said Stanislaus, clearing his throat. “They may be vile.”

“Stanislaus,” Mandrik interjected, “she hasn’t done one frightening thing. Why not trust her?”

“Come up out of who knows where, and so strangely clad? I do not know if she means well or ill—only that we should be cautious until we are sure.”

“When my grandmother arrived,” my brother added, “she, too, was accused of strangeness, yet died a well-respected woman.”

Jungfrau snorted. “In your family, any kind of freak can be respected.”

“Perhaps you’d best feed her,” said Prugne Martin. “She looks a sight too thin.”

But already Ruth was working at a strap across her chest, and when it sprung, it released the awful tumor to the ground with a resounding thud. Bartholomew said, “Mercy.” The crowd instinctively recoiled, but as a gasp escaped me my heart also rejoiced to see the long, gentle curve of her back reaching over the apparatus. Her black shirt fit snugly, and I saw the sweet bumps of an ordinary, bending spine.

“What do you call this?” Adelaïda asked, leaving my side to point one hesitant finger toward what had, a moment before, seemed too dreadful to name.

“My backpack.”

Adelaïda half frowned and sat down at a safe distance from her on the grass. Anya, from the back of the crowd, called, “Be careful, Adelaïda.” What a difference between the figure of my wife and that of the stranger—the one plump, golden, full of sweetness, the other dark and hard, despite her odd beauty, as the Reaper at his grim work.

Ruth worked open a fastener that made a strangely bright sound. Adelaïda startled slightly and drew farther away. Ruth, too, startled, and said, with a shy smile, “It’s only a zipper.” She worked it open and shut a few times. It sang.

An amazing array of objects left the sack—more slender pants, balls of woolly fabric, and many items wrapped in small parcels with a luminous sheen.

Adelaïda sang:

Oh, the stranger came bearing her Backpack,

’Twas the strangest sight I’d ever seen—

“Silence, sister, I pray you,” Mandrik urged her. He bent down reverently to touch a shiny package, his knees creaking though there was no sign of rain.

“That’s a Baggie,” Ruth said, “with granola.”

He leaned closer toward her, a gentle expression upon his lips. “You needn’t tell me the names of things.”

“Adelaïda,” she said, pronouncing it strangely, “asked me what the backpack was.”

“I am not Adelaïda.”

She colored slightly. “I can see that.”

“He’s like an anchorite,” Ydlbert offered, “only not locked up.”

“More like a freak, if you ask me,” Jungfrau interjected.

“I wouldn’t be wise with the holy man,” I warned him.

“What’s the difference between a holy man and a freak?”

“If I knock out your teeth, will that help you understand? Oh, but I forget me, you don’t have any teeth.”

Mandrik clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. His cheeks were flushed. “Do you know nothing, Yves?” he called back to me over his shoulder. “As our sainted father would have told you, wasted breath is wasted breath, and a fool’s a fool.”

Ruth extracted a tightly folded paper and held it a moment in her hands. “I’m not sure I should show you this.”

Stanislaus said, “What do you seek to conceal from us?”

“Nothing, I—”

“For nothing is hidden from the eyes of the Lord.”

She paused, then opened her paper to an absurd breadth, which revealed blues, greens, and browns as vivid as any in God’s creation, and the names of fairy places in an even, minuscule hand. The crowd drew closer, pulled by its beauty as it fluttered in the ripening breeze. “Look. Here’s your island.” She tapped unceremoniously at the paper’s edge. “Here are the mountains, so somewhere in here must be your valley. And nothing.”

Mandrik and Stanislaus knelt over the map, drawing it in with their eyes. “This map is beautiful,” said Stanislaus, “but it is entirely wrong.”

“No,” Mandrik said, “not entirely.”

“Wrong about everything,” he persisted.

“At all events,” my brother concluded, “it is incomplete, and must be removed from public sight.”

“Is that,” I asked, “the sea?”

“And that,” Ydlbert said, pointing at a blob ten times greater than the one on which Ruth claimed we lived, “is that Scotland?”

Mandrik pushed us ever so slightly away. “I will not have you worry about these pictures. As I said, they are not complete.”

Ruth said, “Should I not have shown you the map? You demanded to see it.”

“What is incomplete,” said the priest, gathering what little pluck he had, “about a map which shows nothing of what is and a copious lot of what isn’t?” How we all missed old Father Icthyus.

“Forgive me, Father,” Mandrik said, with a slight bow of the head. “It was not my understanding that you had ever left this village.”

Two of Ydlbert’s younger sons, Manfred and Jowl, pounced on the map and ran with it crackling in the wind behind them to the Maypole. “Lords of the map!” one cried, pleased to be in possession of the prize. The other children followed to view the wonder. Another of Ydlbert’s sons cried, “All hail the Archduke Mappamondo!”³

My brother remained at the stranger’s feet. “Just as well,” he said, watching the fluttering object go.

Ruth leaned down toward him, saying, “I’ll probably need that back, eventually.”

“All things go to their appointed homes, by and by.”

Adelaïda, peering into the stranger’s eyes, said, “Prugne’s right, we should feed her. We are being most inhospitable.”

“Do you like oats?” Anya asked. “Because oats is what we’re eating.”

Ydlbert nudged Anya gently. “Bring her cheese and fruit.”

“Bring her meat,” Mandrik commanded. “She clearly requires sustenance.”

Anya hoisted her smallest child, whose name I also could never recall, in its sling, and went off muttering, “Crank.”

“Sheep fucker!” came the shrill voice of Friedl Vox, who had yet avoided the gathering, over the assembly. Her aged, disheveled form lumbered into view, and Ruth took a step back. “You can’t hide your sins before God!” Stanislaus blushed past his ears, because it was always him to whom she referred thus.

“Hello, Friedl,” he said.

The outlying villagers moved aside to let her stench pass.

“Death is coming to take you all—sooner or later, he comes! And you stand around listening to this cattle molester, listening to his blasphemy and lies. Look what this stranger brings with her—pestilence and death!”

Friedl Dithyramb was the oldest person in our village—past fourscore years if popular memory served—and had, in her time, borne six children to her husband. All but one had been taken by the same influenza that snatched my family from me nearly whole; her one remaining son, Jude, farmed quietly at the outskirts of town, but had never been able to marry because of her madness, and had therefore banished her from his house. Friedl had lived, then, in a dirt hut by the church as long as I could remember. When first my voice began to deepen its pitch, Friedl ceased to care for her widow’s weeds, until finally they hung about her, tattered and faded, dark gray. Then did she cease to wash, and her white hair hung about her body in fearsome snarls. Her right eye remained clear and blue, but the left, long since blind, turned upward until it shone like a boiled egg. She began to wander the countryside night and day, screaming maledictions and talking in tongues, and she no longer responded to ordinary gestures of kindness. Our spiritual leader then was Father Icthyus, himself quite aged, and one May he followed her about for two nights and two days., regaling her with questions and heaping prayers upon her. Come the third forenoon he grabbed her by the shoulders and shouted, “Friedl! Do you not remember who you are?” To which she replied, her voice crabbed and choked, “Vox Clamantis in Deserto!” Since that time my countrymen had called her Vox, and though they grumbled at the ever-inventive foulness of her tongue, they put out stale crusts when they heard her sharp cries coming up the lane. Some said her bad eye was the sure sign of the Devil’s mark upon her, but my brother spoke differently. “Rather,” said he, “has it turned to look inward—a skill the rest of us most sorely lack.”

“What is this harlotry?” she shrieked, one bony finger imagining it traced the wild line of Ruth’s hair. “Iulia Gansevöort, back from the grave? Do you accept a stranger amongst you?”

“It is a stranger,” Mandrik replied, “but not the one you think.”

“How could I forget the sea’s stench upon her, cursed witch? Banish! Banish! Why do you accept this vileness?”

“Because she’s our first visitor,” I said. “Our first since my grandmother’s time.”

“And it seems our duty as Christians,” said Stanislaus, “to treat her charitably, at least until she proves her thralldom to Darkness.”

“Please,” Ruth said. “I wouldn’t hurt you.” Her face did not remain composed.

Mandrik placed himself between her and Friedl’s pointing. “Friedl, haven’t you anyone else to curse today?”

“You think it’s easy, don’t you?”

Jude, as always, gave up hiding behind his neighbors and went forth to claim what once had been his mother. “Come on then, Mum,” he said. “I’ll give you a pudding if you’ll quit it.”

“Ever trying to distract me from the work of God with baubles and fruits.”

“Aye,” he said.

She looked at the ground, then cried:

Iulia Gansevöort, come from the sea,

Spare us your tricks, my poor family and me!

“Stop it, Mum. Iulia Gansevöort’s safe under her cairn.”

She sighed and followed him off, holding loosely to his sleeve as if it might be diseased.

Mandrik turned back to our visitor. “You’ll forgive us, I hope, the peculiarities of some of our neighbors. Particularly Friedl Vox.”

Ruth arched her mobile eyebrows, but did not otherwise reply.

“This is a great day for my village,” said Mandrik. “On all our behalf, I extend my warm welcome.”

“Thank you.”

“Provided,” Stanislaus interjected, his voice cracking, “you do not prove, as Friedl suggests, demonic in nature.”

“And,” my Uncle Frith added, his barley ale dripping into his beard, “that someone cover her naked body from sight.”

Stanislaus said, “We’ll keep our watch upon her, aye.”

“I’m not a spirit.” She looked down at herself. “And please excuse my clothes. I dressed for the hike; I wasn’t really thinking whom I might offend once I got here. I’ll try to do something about it. I promise you, though, I’m not naked.” No one would be the one to tell her she was wrong, so we scratched our ears, swallowed, and looked around. Stanislaus, against his nature, and as it seemed against his will, recovered enough to bow to her, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Ruth bestowed upon him a frank smile such as none of his parishioners ever offered him. He must have been disarmed, for his wan face glowed with pleasure. When she turned to Mandrik, he also bowed, and smiled at her warmly. “It will be,” he said, “such a pleasure to talk to you.”

She nodded. “And a pleasure to talk to you.” When Anya returned with chicken legs and bread, Ruth sat down cross-legged in the grass and ate with her hands as gracefully as another might eat with his spoon at table. Mandrik seemed pleased at her hearty appetite, and sat down with her to discuss whatever were their topics. The crowd dispersed to more frenzied merrymaking; I left my brother and this stranger in peaceful communion over their black bread. As I walked off, fear rose, unbidden, in my throat. I tried to swallow it or shoo it off, but it would not go. Behind me I heard my wife singing:

Oh, our stranger she knows

She looks strange in her clothes—

With that Backpack upon her

And Zippers that gleam—

Yet she seems to be kind

And to own a good mind,

And our menfolk do find her

As fair as new cream.

The sun set upon my drunken compatriots gorging and rollicking in the grove past Desvres’s field, but I retired home. Yoshu was waiting out by the road for me, and she barked happily, but I was not anxious to see her flea-bitten face. Vringle, the billy goat, and the lambs Squelcher and Norwald all bleated their hellos when I entered the barn, the one place a man is safe to collect his thoughts. I was lonely. It felt sad to know that Hammadi, without me, was still at the ball in her merriment, but I could smell the sweet, warm comfort of her, and I sat myself down in her clean straw. I heard the soft, lovely suck of the lambs nursing at their mothers, and Sophronia’s great, unhurried mouth at work on a parcel of hay. Ragan, our she-pig, snored, as her mate, Mauritius, scratched at the dirt floor. I looked at the writing box Mandrik had long ago given me, which I kept near Hammadi, my other treasure, and wished I knew what to do with it. Little did I know then how soon pen and paper would become my closest companions. When at last the night grew cold—how did the animals stand it without the fire I allowed them only in midwinter?—I retired to my house, built up the fire, and waited in the night’s uncustomary silence for my wife, daughter, and horse to return.

My brother belonged to no order, and worshipped—much to the priest’s annoyance—beyond the confines of Father Stanislaus’s church. He had taken, however, a vow of chastity, daily mortification, and prayer when he reached the flower of his manhood in his seventeenth year. Much had already befallen us—the deaths of our parents, two brothers, and a sister—and while I had taken a wife to ease my misery, he had resolved both to renounce the world and to set off in search of it. His work, he explained—the work of the treatise which soon took him to Indo-China—demanded the full force of his carnal drive. It was what holy men did, after all, and we knew by then that God had touched him, for he saw visions both of the dead and of things to come,⁴ and had already begun his most propitious experiments with trees.

“But,” I warned him, thinking with fondness of the various wonders of my wife’s body (God rest my lovely Elynour’s soul), “you don’t know what you’re missing.”

He did not like what he had heard nights by our fire, and would not squander himself on women and their weird fecundity. “Every time you touch one, out comes another mouth to feed. At least in most families.” He had an ordinary man’s strength of conviction, though he dressed in the robes of a mendicant or a madman.

“How can you say that when so many die, with Clive, Marvin, Eglantine, and both our parents gone off to the other side? It’s a good thing they had lots of children.”

“If you don’t have the mouths to feed, you have heartbreak. I can afford neither.”

He had never, to my knowledge, broken any of his vows. Still the community watched him ever to see when his resolve would crack. Wido Jungfrau and our Uncle Frith used him for the butt of every joke; and indeed, none of us knew to what extent his vows emanated from the depths of his soul, and to what extent nothing particularly tempting had happened by to lead him astray. I was only somewhat surprised, therefore, when late that night the dog began barking wildly and my wife came in with the glow of the hops about her and Ruth Blum, too tall to pass through my doorway upright, in tow. My daughter, tagging after her, was half suffocated in her string. Immediately I grabbed the child and freed her arms, though the ale still coursed through my blood.

Adelaïda was watching me closely. “Yves,” she said, “it would not have been right for Mandrik to host the stranger in his house, even though they get on so well; he never would have lived it down. And you know, everyone else is more afraid of her than we, so I brought her home. I hope you don’t mind. She says she has blankets for sleeping.”

“I don’t want to impose on you,” Ruth said. Obviously she had never been in a house before, for her eyes fixed with uncouth interest on objects I had never bothered to notice—the iron kettle, the well-kempt central hearth, a straw hat Mandrik had brought from the Beyond that hung over our bed, some flowered red silk he had also brought back, hanging, our only other decoration, on the long wall by Elizaveta’s hammock.

“What are you staring at?” I asked her, perhaps too sharply.

“Excuse me, I didn’t mean to.”

“No,” I said, “I beg your pardon. It’s an honor to have you,” and trusted, once again, that the sentiment would follow its utterance; an honor, who could say, but if nought else a thing of interest.

“You don’t mind my staying? It’s not an imposition?”

“We will be pleased to have you among us.”

“I’ll be happy to help around here, if there’s anything I can do.”

I nodded—even with the harness, our lives were full, dawn to dusk, with work—but she did not see me, having already turned to settle her backpack in the corner by the upended washtub. Adelaïda sat onto the bed, and Elizaveta pulled her wooden doll from beneath her mother’s pillow to show the visitor. Soon Ruth was kneeling on the floor, touching the doll’s bald head. “What’s her name?”

“Pudge.” Elizaveta grinned and galloped out the door into the night.

“Ruth,” I said. “Please sit down with me.”

She took the bench on the opposite side of the table.

“Tell me why you’ve come here.”

Her black eyes blinked twice, then shone in the light of the fire.

“I have told you already you are welcome in my home and in this village. But I want to know what brought you here.”

Her head shook, willing her low voice to speak. “Like I said, Yves, I lost my compass, I lost my way. I was looking for you, but it’s dumb luck that I found you.”

“And, as you say, Mandragora is quite different from your home.”

She nodded her head, but regarded the table.

“Different how?”

She shrugged her sharp, square shoulders. “Every way you can think of, really. I don’t know how to begin. How our houses look, how we travel, how we dress. The food we eat, how we cook it, how we talk. Everything.”

Her words were vague, but they tantalized like the odor of bread in the oven. “But how?”

Her brows knitted together. They were fantastic, so often did they move. “Yves, you’ve never left Mandragora?”

“We go to the market in town. I told you, only my brother has left.”

“And did he tell you what it was like in the world?”

“Yes, but what he described along the Silk Road—the farms full of cocoons, the rice fields, the steep hats, like that one—seems to bear little relation to you.”

“Where did you say he went?”

“To Indo-China.”

She raised half of her mouth in a smile, which made a solitary dimple. “Is there a Silk Road in Vietnam?”

“Indo-China.” I felt myself growing cross.

“He left here, went directly to Vietnam, and came back again? I don’t follow.”

“Do you malign my brother? Do you contradict his word?”

“No, I’m not maligning him. He’s been really—he seems nice.”

“And yet?”

“I’m trying to make sense of what you’re telling me.”

“As I am trying to make sense,” I said, “of what you’re telling me.”

Elizaveta ran back in, looked about at us all, and went to her mother on the bed.

“Ruth,” I said, more gently, “I want to know why you’ve come here.”

Her forehead wrinkled like the waves of the sea drawn on a map. “Because I’m a graduate student in anthropology.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I study people, Yves. I’m here to study you.”

Her expression was guilty, but I was uncertain why. “You look as if you were ashamed of study.”

“Not at all, no. But I don’t want to—I wouldn’t want to belittle you, by making you my subjects.”

“We’re the subjects of the Archduke,” Adelaïda gently interjected.

“And subject,” I added, “to the will of God. We know our place.” Still her forehead remained vexed. “Something yet troubles you.”

“Sort of. I’m not sure if it’ll make sense to you.”

“If what will?” It was difficult work trying to follow all her meaning.

“I feel dumb telling you this, Yves.”

“Nay, it seems to go easy enough with your tongue and the words, though they’re not always clear to me.”

At last her brow relaxed, and the lopsided grin passed again across her mouth—the expression reminded me of my brother’s arch humor. “The reason I came here, Yves, instead of going someplace else, is that I felt Mandragora calling; to me.” I had never known such a feeling, but I remembered the fire in my brother’s eyes when the Beyond first beckoned to him. “I’m sorry if that sounds strange.”

“Not so strange,” I told her. “How long did it call you before you took heed?”

She closed her eyes, and opened them again slowly. “I’ve been thinking about Mandragora a long time, since I was a child. I always believed it was here, even though there was no empirical proof. No one knew anything about you, really, but I could feel this place in my bones. And lately I began to feel like it was my duty to come. Like, if I didn’t do it, nobody ever would.”

I felt certain that, if I sat quiet, the whole of her tale would unfold. She worked a fingernail between the boards of the table. “Yves, listen. My mother was in Scotland—on the mainland—once when she was young, and she came looking for you—looking for your parents, I suppose—but she never found the village. She told me story after story, though, about how she thought you did things here, so remote from the world. And nothing ever came of it—she never found you, and she never did what she wanted with her life; she sat around and raised three kids and that was the end of it. She died right before New Year’s, and I began to think that I should come here and do it for her, in her honor.” She worked the nail deeper into the crack, and I wondered if she would be able to extract it when the time came. “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

Death had visited this hearth so frequently that I was almost ashamed to tell her. “Yes.”

She drew out her fingernail and looked down at the table. “I hope you don’t think that’s silly.”

I could not follow her word by word, but I understood the sense of what she was saying. “When my parents died, they left me a farm to tend. If your mother told you to come to Mandragora, I think it right and good that you followed her directive.”

“It wasn’t a directive, exactly. More an idea she put in my head. But thank you.”

I nodded. “And how did you come?”

“I flew to Scotland, and from the mainland I took a boat. There wasn’t a harbor anywhere we could see, there’s no beach, but he moored to a flat rock and let me off. He must have thought I was crazy.”

Adelaïda, sprawled on the bed, repeated, “You flew.”

“And then I went on the boat.”

My hairs bristled like a barn cat’s. “How did you fly?” I asked.

“In an airplane.”

Perhaps she was like my grandmother, then—there had always been stories that this one and that one saw her wafting about the parish, her long hair fluttering behind her on the breeze. My mind crackled like sap in the fire. “Tell me, how does it plane the air?”

“Have you really never even seen one?”

I shrugged. Who knew what she meant?

“Yves, even if you didn’t know what it was, I know you’ve seen one. A thing like a bird, silvery gray, crossing the sky. They fly more smoothly than birds do, and they’re louder.” Her eyes continued to expand until I feared they would devour her face. “They rumble in the air overhead, they roar like thunder, only it’s a steady sound. It grows quieter as the airplane gets farther away. You must have heard one.”

I had seen such a creature, and heard the sound a thousand times; my mind’s ear heard it then. Wido Jungfrau had long since postulated that they were ravenous beasts scanning the countryside for unloved children to eat up, but Wido was fuller of foolish notions than a sated pig was full of slops. When once I asked my brother what kind of bird it might be, he shooed me away, saying, “Call it a bad angel out cruising.”

“I have heard that sound.” The admission felt grave. “And always wondered about the thing that made it.”

Ruth shook her head. “I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t all of this. You don’t even have heat.”

“Yes, we do,” Adelaïda said, waving a sleepy hand toward the fire.

“No electricity, no zippers—tell me, do you lack modern technology, or do you know about it and resist it, like the Amish?”

Adelaïda said, “What are the Amish?”

Rather, I thought, more to the point, I asked, “What is it, exactly, you intend to study?”

“The most basic things about your daily life, your social structure, your agricultural methods. I simply want it all to be documented, preserved.”

I was certain I still did not fully comprehend. “We have our priest, Ruth, but he is only a workaday priest—no great scholar of the ways of God. I am this village’s inventor, my brother its thinker, and the rest of us are ordinary men, working the soil at the price of our lives.”

She shook her head slightly. “I don’t understand.”

“I mean to say that I, and my brother, and even our middling priest, have all the village’s respect for our studies. Surely to have another scholar among us—no matter that her field of study is hardly worth a moment’s pondering—will be a great honor. And however odd your ways, we will try to respect them.”

She gave a slight, graceful bow with her head. “As I will try to respect yours.”

“And if you’re interested in matters theological, there’s a great deal you can learn from my brother, and I’m sure the priest will want to share his books and his learning with you, once he assures himself you aren’t the Devil’s minion.”

I was beginning to like her sideways smile. “Is he going to try to convert me?”

“Are you a Christian?”

“Ruth Blum? Of course not. I’m a Jew.”

Though I had heard tell of them, certainly, in my readings from the Bible, I had never before seen one, and wondered if they were all so tall. It certainly explained her accent. “Then it’s quite likely that Stanislaus will try to save your soul.”

“You have to excuse me if I’m rude,” she said. “Please understand how different everything is where I come from. Until this evening, I could hardly imagine such a life, so pared down. You make do without so much of what my people consider basic amenities.”

I looked around at my home, replete with food, tools, good blankets, and a fire. “What amenities am I without?” Then, “Thanks to me and my brother, we harness our horses, and our carts now have two wheels instead of one, and are far more stable, far more efficient. We plow with much larger plows than our ancestors ever dreamed of.”

“Two wheels,” she said, and whistled through her beautiful teeth. “Next thing you know, it’ll be four, and then what.”

“Four wheels?”

“Excuse me, I—”

“How do you mean, a cart with four wheels?”

“Excuse me, Yves, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“But you did, and now you must tell me how such a thing works.”

She cast down her eyes, and answered, in a near whisper, “Two axles. Front and rear.”

Immediately my mind began to chase after the new cart’s design.

“I’m sorry,” she said, still not looking at me. “I shouldn’t interfere.”

“No, it’s an excellent idea.”

Her face, which had started out a pale and impenetrable mask, was growing prettier as it softened. “But if I’m going to study you, I have to leave things how I found them, not tell you how to fix your carts.”

“I appreciate the suggestion—and if you have others, I want to hear them. I am our village’s one true inventor by default, but I do not seek to cling to the title like the ivy to the alder.”

“We’ll see, won’t we, how we work with one another?”

“Oh, aye,” Adelaïda said, “there’s more work than you can dream of. We’d be so grateful for help.”

“Excuse if I’m being stupid, but, Yves, none of this”—she waved her arms to indicate the hearth, our village, the liquid black sky—“none of this is for my benefit?”

“My brother would tell you the whole of God’s creation is to bring you, and you only, to bliss.”

She shook her head. “It’s so hard to believe that this is here. I’ve been imagining it for so long, and then to sit by your fire, talking to you.”

“I cannot imagine imagining my life,” I told her, seeking to stretch my mind around the new idea. “It is all I know.” Never had anyone looked so out of place at my table as she looked, tall and slender, and hunching toward me with interest. “What are your people like, Ruth? Your family, I feel, are not farmers.”

She laughed quietly. “University people. We’re all in the university.”

“Meaning?”

“That we all study something or other—people or books—for our work.”

“A whole learned family? A whole family of people like my brother?”

“More or less. It’s more common where I come from than it seems to be here to devote one’s life to learning.”

“Don’t you miss your people, here on my farm?”

She nodded, and ceased to look at me.

“Sometimes, when I work my farthest fields, the sun sets in the sky as I am alone with my horse, and I think, what if this were the last time, in all of history, the sun were to set so? Then my family would not be here to see it with me. And though I am but a short journey from my home, I miss my hearth, and I miss their faces, with all the longing a man’s heart can know.”

“I can’t explain it. I miss them dearly—my brother and sister and I all live at home, and I’m close to them both, I love them, I don’t think I’ve ever been away from them so long. But everything has changed. And as long as it’s changed, I wanted to find out how things are here.”

For the second time that day our hands met, though this time our hands reached forth at the same moment. For praise God, he gave us the gift of understanding, the gift of knowing what lies beyond the things our words can say. I saw how her home had gone barren and strange with her mother’s death; the departed surely lingered in furniture and corners both. I had not the facility to imagine her home in her strange land, but my heart knew how she felt there, filled with terror each time she woke herself up at night, confused by seeing everywhere the marks and signs—nay, even catching the scent—of the departed. Little did it matter from how far off she had come, for in that moment I glimpsed her soul, and was made humble by her grief. Her words did not make me like her, or make her seem less strange; but they showed me her humanity, which until that moment had sorely lacked.⁵

She had blankets for sleeping, softer than wool straight off the lamb, and as bright as her backpack in hue. Like the backpack, they fastened shut with a zipper, which Elizaveta worked slowly open and shut, her small face grave with awe. We built up the fire, Ruth combed her wild dark hair, and she bedded down beneath Elizaveta’s hammock, across the room from our bed. I hoped my daughter would not inadvertently water her during the night, but there was nowhere else to put her. She thanked us again for allowing her to stay, and though she did not overtly repent for her odd behavior, the tenor of her voice made her apology clear.

That night as I slept, my brothers and sister came from the place they resided after death, and took up their old, earthly forms, not as they looked when I laid them in the soil, but as they had looked in the flower of their youth and health. Their bodies and clothing were luminous like June clouds, but I recognized the roundness of their cheeks and the curls in their fine hair, and my heart thrilled and danced to the sounds of their voices, which my mind was ever forgetting but which my soul never would. They billowed with the motion of a breeze that blew through a chink in the wall. I tried to express my gratitude for their visit, but they would not remain still enough to accept thanks. Instead, Clive and Marvin, tall like our father and slightly stoop-shouldered from years of toil, stood gleaming at the foot of the bed with a flute and a psaltery, and Eglantine, her golden hair in two slender braids, floated, skipped, and tumbled over me, singing. Her words were as quiet and high-pitched as far-off bells, and I trailed after their meaning as a dog trails after table scraps, greedily and with my whole mind intent. I had only begun to make out her refrain—“Beware! Beware!”—when suddenly I woke. No longer was I the being to whom my sister, only moments before, had sung; I sank heavily into my earthly body, all sweat and palpitations, and fear gripped my bowels and heart. For in the far corner our stranger was crying a soft, steady stream of tears, and though I could do nothing to comfort her, and though I had no real liking for her, I felt myself drawn to the burden of her sorrow, and knew in that moment that some of its terrible weight would become my own. I could not tell my wife of my siblings’ visitations. She would never have consented to stay in a bed where the dead had not only left this world but to which they so often returned.

In the morning I took a torch into the barn. The women were still sleeping, but Yoshu circled eagerly around my legs, and my sensible horse whinnied to indicate that she had been up, and bored, for hours. “I have work to do—will you forgive me?” I asked, tossing her a wormy apple. She shook her head and blew air through her proud, black lips—an equivocal answer at best. I pushed the yelping dog away.

In the corner of the barn nearest Hammadi’s stall, I kept the box Mandrik had brought me from his journeys—finely engraved in dark wood, with a polished stone inlaid in the top. Therein, as he requested me, I kept the pens he had given me, ink he had made me, and a few good chalk rocks. Mandrik gave me the box and the implements in order that I should write with them; but having nothing to say that I could not say aloud, I used them generally to draw on the paper he’d made, no doubt intending it for a somewhat loftier purpose. I took out his hallowed tools, dipped once, then again for good luck, in the ink, and began.

I drew the new cart without a moment’s hesitation or doubt, with-out a single false mark on the paper. The design was so simple I knew it had been God’s original plan, of which all previous carts had been but pale imitations. The two-wheeled cart (already a marked improvement over its predecessor) had its wheels squarely in the middle of the load. Though this was simple enough, the cart often tipped when we loaded or unloaded goods. Two axles, one front and one rear, meant a cart bed as steady as a table, whether the horse was attached or no. We would be able to load firewood on the front and flax on the back—it would no longer matter, because stability would inhere in the structure of the thing itself.

I signed my name to the drawing with a flourish, and took off down the road with the ink still shiny and wet. Ydlbert was outside smoking in his underdrawers, recovering from the evening’s debauchery, his balding pate bare to the morning sun as I ran past. “Hail, lad. What ails you?” he cried out to my back.

I could not stop running, but called back, “Brothers and sister came to visit.”

“What, again? Hope the wife doesn’t catch wind.”

“I’m building a new cart.”

“Godspeed,” he said, his voice disappearing into the distance. He was the only one besides my brother I could tell about visits from the dead; the only one who didn’t think such an admission stranger than icicles in May.

The sun was up, but the villagers, after a hard day’s celebration, were still asleep. My footsteps stormed along the road. Five minutes short of my destination, before a stand of oak all bursting into leaf, my brother appeared, streaking along with his cassock fluttering behind him and a sheaf of papers in his right hand. We both stopped, perplexed but smiling, before the trees. “What happened to you?” he asked.

“A new cart. You?”

“A visitation. What manner of cart?”

“Double axle.” I held the drawing out to him. “One front, one rear.”

“Ingenious. Though I wish you’d save the paper for writing.”

“The stranger’s idea. Who visited?”

“Our brothers and sister.”

My throat began to close with terror and joy. “No.”

“Verily, they came with instruments and singing to help me in my work.”

“They came also to me, singing.”

“Then let us give praise.” He bowed his head, and I bowed mine, and offered my heart’s thanks to the world that brought my siblings back to me.

“Did they tell you beware?” I asked.

“Not exactly. They wrote me some verses. I brought them to show you.” We sat down in the fragrant soil beneath the trees. “I think it’s good.”

The first sheet read:

“In the beginning there was the Light, and the Fire, and from the Light and the Fire came forth the Great Mind. In the First Ages it brought forth Darkness, and from the Darkness did it bring forth Man. From Man did it bring forth that which pertains to Man—Greed, Penury, War-Making, Ugliness, Pestilence, Sorrow, and Death. From Death did it bring forth all the other sundry Creatures, for in Death are they all the same Stuff. From Death came this great, mysterious World, and to Death does it ever and anon return. And when the World itself—yea, every Mite hereon—has returned to its final slumber, then Death, too, will die, and be subsumed into the Great Mind, and then also will the Great Mind become part once more of the Light and the Fire. And in that Age will all Creation begin anew.”

How did my brother, with whom I had sucked on chunks of sugar, have such thoughts? He was as mortal as I, raised by the same parents, three years my elder. But his mind fixed on the infinite while mine fixed on carts, crops, and weather. I suppose that a family with more than one dreamer would be cursed beyond measure; still did I envy the breadth of his mind.

“I wouldn’t,” I said, “let Father Stanislaus see it.”

“No, no.”

“Because he’s not big enough to understand it.”

“Absolutely not.”

Despite that he was in every way my superior, his eyes searched mine for deeper praise.

“It is magnificent work.”

The light in his smile would have repaid any earthly debt. “But do you think it true, brother? Does it make sense?”

“How could I know?”

He nudged my leg with a stockinged toe in his sandal. “Oh, come, Yves. What does your gut say?”

“My gut says it’s hungry, and anxious to build this new cart. And that I wish I had been you, that I had been thus blessed.”

“Nay, Yves. You’re the one with the harness.”

“A harness is worlds different from a knowledge of first things. Will you help me with the cart, anyway?”

“A knowledge of first things is not all in this world.”

“No.”

“You could speak to our brothers and sister, and see if they had anything for you to write.”

Holy man or no, I gave him a fine shove upon the shoulder. “Like what?”

“Any number of things. A ballad? Or a history?”

“Don’t be daft, monkey. Somebody’s got to till the fields.”

He stood and wiped the dirt from his cassock. “And how did you get on with your stranger last night?”

“Somewhat difficult to understand. Adelaïda seems shy of her.”

He nodded. “But she’s lovely, isn’t she?”

“A bit tart.”

“But lovely.”

“Not everything is pen and ink, Mandrik.”

“I’m aware.”

I, too, stood, and we walked at a gentlemanly pace toward my abode, our family home, where he, too, had passed the bumbling days of childhood. We walked in silence a few minutes before he began to mutter, then finally burst into song:

Alms! Alms for your Chouchou

Awakened by Visions,

Now helping his brother

Improve the life of the whole town!6

The housewives were used to his sweet tenor, and began appearing at their doorways with baked apples, cheeses, and hunks of dark bread. They bowed their heads to him as he accepted their offerings into his capacious sleeve. The Widow Tinker, who still cooked as if she had a great family, though her daughters were long since married off, wrapped him a whole leg of lamb in a cloth and bade him Godspeed. When he was sufficiently laden, he held open the cache to me, saying, “Here, have a nosh before we get there.” I accepted a hunk of ripe cheese and a heel of black bread from the alms sleeve—grateful for my brother’s skills, however odd—and dreamed of my new cart as we walked.

Mandrik dumped his booty on the floor of the barn. When Hammadi blew him a welcome, he gave her an apple and a pat on the nose, but turned immediately to help me in my work. With great effort we turned the cart to rest on its bed, the two great wheels creaking with the force of their own revolution. We pried off the axle with an iron bar, and set to work salvaging the nails.

“Mandrik,” I said, “the stranger’s account of her homeland doesn’t tally with your own.”

My brother raised his eyebrows. “And does she hail from Indo-China?”

“No.”

“Well, then.”

I worked on in silence a moment, but I was not done. “And when twice I said to her, ‘Indo-China,’ she said back, ‘Vietnam.’”

“There’s no accounting for the ways of strangers.”

“Mandrik, when yesterday she told you where she was from—”

“From Boston.”

“Yes. Had you really heard of such a place, or did you dissemble?”

He put down his hammer and separated the good nails from those yet to be tried. “Of course I had heard of it, brother. I see no reason to tell her lies.”

“And yet Boston is no place I’ve ever heard you speak of.”

“I heard tell, in my travels, of a thousand thousand places. I will be glad, if it please you, to name you all their names, but it would take a fortnight—”

“Nay—”

“—and a great expenditure of breath. Still, whatever your pleasure.”

“Nay, Mandrik, nay. I see that you’re right.”

Soon our banging and grunting brought both women and my daughter to the barn door, where they stood silhouetted against the bright morning. Ruth was attired in a looser, more modest pair of trousers—a thing that but the day before I could never have imagined remarking about a woman—of a soft, faded blue, and a shirt that covered her with due propriety to the wrists and hips. Dimples of light still shone through her slender legs.

“What happened?” she asked.

“We’re rebuilding the cart the way you said.”

“With four wheels? I never should have mentioned it.”

Mandrik hammered delicately at a nail. “I can hardly believe we didn’t think of it sooner.”

Ruth said, “I’m eating myself with guilt about this cart.”

“Why?” I asked.

She shook her head in a brooding fashion. “I suppose you would eventually have figured it out yourselves.”

“Aye,” said Adelaïda, “Yves is always at his inventing.”

“And,” I added, “I am glad for your inspiration.”

My brother continued with the nails, three light, expert strokes to each head. “Indeed, in every culture there are stories of foreigners and other fanciful beings with strange knowledge. Surely not all the tales of our grandmother can be true; it was her status as an outsider that made her so fruitful a topic. Every culture does this; you are simply our first opportunity, this generation. And we appreciate your fine idea.”

“Are there more cultures,” Adelaïda asked, “than hers, ours, and Indo-China?”

Mandrik smiled. “More than you can dream of. But you cannot see them from here.”

Elizaveta bolted into the yard, and Adelaïda turned to follow her.

“Where can you see them from, then?” Ruth came to sit near us on the ground.

“From the seas, of course, and the imagination.”

“But none of you goes to the sea.”

“I have.”

She waved her hand. “None of the rest of you.”

“Imagination will have to suffice, then, won’t it?”

“Besides,” I said, searching through wood scraps for possible wheel spokes, “the sea is too far. No one wants to go all the way to the sea.”

Ruth said, quietly, “Indo-China.”

Mandrik said, “Indeed.”

“I’d like very much to talk to you about your journey.”

“Perhaps in due time.”

Ruth watched his work, and only on occasion glanced upward at his face. “Whenever you think it’s right.”

“The tale of my travels is longer than Midwinter’s Night, and I wouldn’t want to bore a stranger.”

“Perhaps when I’m no longer a stranger, then.”

“Yes. Ruth,” my brother said, barely looking up at her, “have you any skills? Can you turn a spoke on the lathe, or work with metal?”

“I could learn—I could be useful. I don’t want to be in your way.”

“I was only wondering about your line of work, back home.”

I tossed a stick at him. “She’s my age if she’s a day, Mandrik, sure. What would she be besides a wife?”

“Any number of things.”

“I’m not married,” she said. “I’m not sure I ever will be.”

“Is it because you’re so tall?”

She grinned. “I think of myself as being medium-sized.”

“You must come from a land of giants. Why are you not married?”

“I’ve had boyfriends.”

I’m sure I raised my eyebrows. “More than one?”

“Not at the same time.”

“What was wrong with them?” I asked. “Had they no land?”

“To answer your question, Mandrik—I’m still in school. I’m a grad student.”

“A student of what?”

“Anthropology. Peoples and civilizations.”

He nodded as if she made good sense, his lips pressed tight in concentration. “Well, then. We must be quite a boon.”

She said, “Yes,” then paused. “I am so anxious to learn everything you’re willing to teach me.”

“We will do our best to oblige.”

She stood and brushed nonexistent particles from her clothes. “If it’s no bother, then, I’d like to make notes on your work on the cart. Would you mind?”

I graciously shook my head no.

“Great. Let me get my notebook.”

I felt magnanimous as I watched her return to the house for whatever object she required. “It must be because she’s so tall,” I mused aloud. “Otherwise, what could be wrong with her? She’s quick of mind, pretty enough. Neither markedly pleasant nor unpleasant. Speaks peculiarly, but perhaps they all do.”

“Don’t fret her with questions.” Mandrik hammered away. “I think she has work to do. I don’t think she wants to be married.”

“Who doesn’t want to be married?”

“I don’t, for one.”

“She doesn’t seem like what you are.”

“You can say ‘mystic,’” he said, the corners of his blue eyes wrinkling with amusement. “It doesn’t hurt.”

“I don’t like the sound.”

“I think it’s the sense you object to.”

“I can’t believe she’s come from the Beyond, and she sits here, talking to us.”

“From beyond the Beyond. You’re lucky to have her, Yves; lucky that my calling precluded her staying with me, and lucky that none else in the village would accept her.”

“Were they asked?”

“No, but I can imagine their response. Have you taken her yet to the cairn?”

“I ran to get you practically as soon as I woke.”

“Take her.”

Adelaïda sneaked into the barn on silent feet, and squatted down beside us, her eyes bright with worry. “That stranger has done some odd things in your absence,” she whispered. “I thought I should tell you.”

“Witchery?” I asked.

She gave a wide-eyed shrug. “First thing, when she woke, she went into the yard with the most magnificent, pearliest cake of soap I ever saw, and spent ages at her ablutions—scrubbing that face like it was laundry, then rubbing herself with unguents about. Then she did something to her mouth with a bright green stick that made her foam like a mad horse and reek of peppermint leaves. Then, when she came back in and I offered her a slice of bread, she held it over the fire until its edges were quite black, and ate it as if it were the world’s finest delicacy.”

Her report seemed cause for alarm, yet my brother kept at his hammering and said, simply, “Toast.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Toast. Burnt bread. There are some peoples, Ruth’s among them, I suppose, who like to eat it. For breakfast.”

Adelaïda looked disappointed. “What about the other things?”

“None dangerous, I think. You should get back to the house before she finds you here whispering about her.”

She stood, sorry, it seemed, to have no cause for alarm, and went out to feed the chickens in the yard.

“You’re sure you’re right about this?” I asked him. “I have a child to protect.”

Mandrik kept unhurriedly at the nails. “She is no danger to Elizaveta.”

When Ruth returned, she sat quietly with a block of the finest, fairest paper I had ever beheld on her lap before her, and asked to know about measurements, the lathe, and the slight bow in the shape of the finished wheel, an improvement we had stumbled upon quite by accident, producing perhaps our third two-wheeled cart, and whose efficacy she did not at first understand. She admired our craftsmanship, which made me proud, and addressed my brother with the shy attitude of respect such a holy man deserved. She fingered the engraved box and pronounced it beautiful, but did not ask to look inside—which I took as a sign of good judgment.

We wrighted two new wheels that day, and the next built and attached the second axle. The next Market Day, we drove the new cart into town, to the never-sated astonishment of our brethren and the natives of Nnms. Cheers erupted as we drove, laden with the first fruits of spring, through Mandragora that fine morning; Desvres, Ydlbert, and our neighbors lauded us as if we had personally sprinkled the ground with the morning’s dew. But as I watched, from aloft, my brother walking alongside the new invention, beaming with pride and answering the many questions with grace, I began to wonder anxiously what I could invent next. And who knew but that all our neighbors’ attention was focused not on our work but on the tall, square-shouldered stranger who rode with her arms stretched along the rear gate and her smiling face pointed toward Heaven.

To attend church Ruth wore her loose trousers and a pale, modest shirt, and wrapped a handkerchief around her throat. She still looked odd, and her legs were still rather too visible, but at least her modified garb might prevent Father Stanislaus from choking. My wife and daughter dressed in their town-bought linen of robin’s-egg blue, so fine it made the petals of the blooming wildflowers look coarse. We climbed into the cart, newly strewn with fragrant hay, and drove to town behind our Hammadi, the wind whistling through her black mane. We arrived as the last bell tolled, and tied Hammadi to the post, where she snorted affably at Ydlbert’s Thea and received a nose to the cheek from Jepho Martin’s gray Gar.

Were I to build a church, I would name as its patron one of the great avenging saints: Michael, I mean, or George. But when our forefathers started a parish, she who drew their hearts was St. Perpetua, no worker of miracles, but a young Roman who, for her faith in the Church, was sentenced to die by a stampede of cows. Since childhood I had puzzled over this choice of patroness, gathering from her story that one should keep quiet about unpopular beliefs and be wary of kine. My brother, however, had a deeper understanding of its import, and wrote a translation of her tale, with an exegesis in which he explained that in Perpetua’s story our forebears must surely have seen the image of their own persecution. Ruth, too, must have been surprised to see our patroness’s name over the door, for as we entered our sanctuary she whispered, “St. Perpetua? Who’s that?”

Elizaveta whispered back, “Someone who died.”

The murals, painted by Cedric von Broleau, were the most vibrant and beautiful thing in our village. To me they were specially dear because of the old rumor that Cedric had fallen in love with my grandmother before she married, and, brokenhearted, painted her face again and again on the walls of his parish church. I believed I saw some resemblance between the saint and my daughter, especially about the dark eyes, which were rare in my family; and, as Friedl Vox had remarked, the paintings bore a passing likeness to our Ruth. Whether the rumors were true or no, I took great comfort in these brilliant scenes of martyrdom; that pale face, with great dark eyes and ripples of dark red hair like the waves of the sea, beckoned and held me. Strange indeed these murals must have seemed to a foreigner, strange the ravening kine. The church, as always, was abustle with bodies, full of chatter and laughter, the occasional sick lamb or piglet brought for blessing, and playing in the hay on the floor with the children. As we entered with our stranger, some of the talk fell to whisper, but Ruth held her head high. We took our customary seat on a bench toward the front, while many, whose families had not been able to donate one, sat or stood on the floor in the rear.

“Where’s Mandrik?” Ruth whispered beside me.

“He doesn’t worship in church.”

“Neither do I.”

“Shh.”

When Stanislaus came in from ringing the bell of which he was so proud, he widened his already wide eyes at the spectacle on our bench, but managed not to make mention of it. For the next hour, he spoke to us of our duties—to obey the Word of God and the Archduke, and wives to obey their men. For the children he gave a sobering tale of a wayward child snatched up by the Dark One’s handmaiden and never returned to his mother’s hearth more. These middling examples of oratorical prowess (how much of Hellfire he might have learned from my brother!) having been got through, he commenced exhorting us in Latin, which none of us understood. Some passages I recognized because Mandrik had pointed them out to me, but much of their import was lost even upon me, the most educated of Stanislaus’s parishioners. The brothers Martin, as always, spoke in low tones of the issues of their various farms; Franz Nethering and his Vashti, still lovely though weathered with age, pretended to hang upon every word; and Dithyramb, despite his best efforts, sat with his head lolled over and snored. Aelfred Laight reeked of the liquor he’d imbibed the night before. Folk leaned against each other and the pillars, that their dozing might be less apparent. I examined the murals. Though I had spent countless hours so engaged since childhood, each Sunday revealed a new fold in a robe or a new glimmer in my grandmother’s eye, and thus did I keep myself from sleeping. Many of the less studious villagers were not as fortunate in this regard, and soon followed Dithyramb in his unscholarly pursuit. Elizaveta and Fatoush, one of Ydlbert’s youngest, soon found each other and began shoving, until their mothers pulled them apart by their strings. Ruth kept turning to look at the people and the statuary, and each movement of her head brought forth titters and shifting of feet. One piglet began squealing for its absent mother, and another urinated near my bench. Against such odds did Stanislaus preach us the word of the Lord. Come Communion we were glad to have something new to do, as well as to stretch our legs, except for Ruth, who refused to be brought to the railing. Instead, she sat on our bench, her big brown boots occasionally in the pig urine, smiled, and bid hello to all who passed. Part of me wanted to feel offense at this disruption, but even an ordinary Sunday was a circus, and I took pleasure in watching my neighbors respond to this new thing. Dirk and Bartholomew bowed so low their foreheads nearly touched the ground; rosy-cheeked Prugne Martin waved shyly; Tansy Gansevöort, carrying her fat new bairn, let her eyes go round as the moon; and Wido Jungfrau simply looked away. But Ruth acknowledged them all with the quiet happiness of a father greeting the guests at his daughter’s wedding, and as they returned from the railing, they all looked at her more warmly. If any man communed with God that Sunday, it is surely a sign of God’s never-ending grace.

Ruth was a stranger, but no more than a fortnight passed before she began to seem one of my own, as ordinary as sodden weather, if no more dearly loved. Her clothing, affect, and manner of speech still gave me a start from time to time, for her habits were unlike any I had known. She used as much water in washing herself as we did to cook, each day ministered devotedly to her white teeth, and, as Mandrik said, “toasted” her bread. “Don’t you know I already baked that?” Adelaïda asked each morning. These peculiarities began, however, to seem a natural part of her presence; and indeed, her presence began to seem as unremarkable as the fire’s. Elizaveta, at her start, had been fragile as a dewdrop on a spider’s web, but Ruth was as strong as history. What could daunt her, if a sojourn alone in our wilds had not? She ate at my table, slept on my floor, peeled potatoes with my wife, spread feed to the chickens, and gallantly shared her warm tub with my splashing daughter, who else would not consent to be bathed. Only four days after her arrival, Elizaveta followed me into the yard and declared, “Papa, I wrote a song.”

“Really?” I asked. “What kind?” For she had long since been reciting nonsense in imitation of her mother’s odd talent.

She stood firmly atop her tiny red shoes, raised her chin, and opened the petals of her mouth to squawk:

Roof, Roof,

She tells the troof.

My heart fell through my stomach—my brother, in his infancy, had begun with such songs, and it seemed quite an accomplishment for a child but two years named, barely as tall as the wash tub. “That’s a beautiful song,” I said, knowing that my words could not convey the depths of my admiration.

“I did it myself.”

“I’m very proud of you.”

The two dark moons of her eyes examined me for further praise and deemed it not forthcoming before she ran away.

Ruth Blum, spinster native of Cambridge, a world away, inspired my daughter to song. All the admiration that had once been mine for harnessing the horse was now upon her, both for her double-axle cart, which increased capacity and made the carts easier to drive on the bumpy High Road to Nnms, and for her strange and luminous self. I did not mind the attention my countrymen paid her—the time for my own celebrity, perhaps, had passed—but I wondered who this woman was, this emissary from a place beyond the known world.

While we waited to understand her, my wife hesitantly undertook to teach her the basic tasks of the kitchen, and showed her how to card wool. She was not yet skilled enough with her hands to spin or to weave, but she could wind spun thread into an even ball, and when learning a new task, smiled broadly despite the clumsiness of her fingers. It clearly both irked and amused my wife to have so inexpert and yet so dogged a helper; perhaps when our daughter grew, she would be just such a young woman. The more Ruth learned the tasks of the household, the fonder I grew of her; and as I grew fond, I began to wonder, would she leave, and bring back to her country stories as fanciful as those Mandrik told of the Orient, and trail shreds of our hearts and our imaginations out behind her? Who could say if she would like Mandragora enough to remain; and if she did, what that would mean for our village.

¹ I asked Yves how he knew of Scotland, when he had not only never left the island but never left the valley of Mandragora to see the sea. “Do you know the name of your grandmother’s grandmother?” he asked me.

I shrugged my shoulders; I knew it vaguely.

“Exactly so do I know my people’s origin.”

“But don’t you ever wonder,” I asked, “what it’s like there? Don’t you dream of going back to see where they came from?”

His habitual good will lighted up his clear, gray, sun-wrinkled eyes. “To a land from which they barely escaped with their lives? You’re crazy, woman. I’m glad they got out.”

² “I wasn’t always your mother,” my mother told me in the kitchen, when I was eight, and could not grasp that she had ever been my size. “I was a little girl once, and later a young woman.”

“Were you beautiful?” I asked, because that mattered to me. As did blondness, which no member of our clan had ever achieved.

“Beautiful enough. And very free. The summer that I graduated from college, I traveled all over Europe by myself, slept under trees, drank wine at the feet of fountains, you name it. I dreamed of becoming an anthropologist. I was going to spend my whole life sleeping in huts in small villages.” She went on with what she was doing to the vegetables.

“Why didn’t you?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “I married your father, and then I had Nurit and you and the baby.”

I was glad she hadn’t become an anthropologist, but the word began to hold its sway over my imagination. “What was your favorite place?”

She sighed as she thought about it—Esther Blum’s singular sigh, which never conveyed disappointment or disapprobation, a sweet sigh. “When I went to the Scottish countryside, I never wanted to come home. The hills rolled like the sea, and there were beautiful old forests, huge billowy clouds in the sky, old stone fences around the farms. I never was happier anywhere in my life.”

“Why?”

She put her work down and came to sit with me at the table. “Something about the landscape, how somber it was in its beauty. I felt at home.” Even in the glare of the overhead lamp she looked rosy. “You’ll understand someday.”

“1 feel at home here.”

“Then you’re lucky.” She gathered both my hands into hers. “There were tales, Ruthelah, of people on one of the islands off the coast living a very simple life—people without electricity, without anything modern, simply working the land, as people always have. I chartered a boat for a day—all I could afford back then—and I went looking for the mythical village of Mandragora, tucked like an egg into the middle of a nest of mountains, but perhaps it’s no surprise I didn’t find it. I’ve never heard anything else about it, so I guess it was a fairy tale.”

“It’s too bad,” I said.

“Yes, it is.”

“I’ll find it for you,” I told her.

She raised her dark eyebrows at me. I could not wait to be older, and to be taken seriously. “You do that, Ruthelah. You’ll make me so happy.”

She went back to making dinner, but as you can see, I filed it, more or less, verbatim.

³ The father of the current Archduke, Urbis of Nnms; an amateur cartographer and legendary rake.

⁴ I can only conclude that Yves was too modest to see that his congress with his dead siblings was every bit as unique as his brother’s more general traffic with the Beyond, and that his clearsightedness, though of a different nature, was of the same magnitude as Mandrik’s own.

⁵ My house did change after my mother died. I don’t mean the old, faded sheets over the mirrors, the wooden boxes for sitting, strange-smelling foods from other people’s kitchens in their unfamiliar Pyrex and pans. I mean the house itself. Word of her death trickled down the house like rain, from my sister, Nurit, who had the misfortune to answer the phone on her way out of the shower, to me and my father, preparing what would have been a nice breakfast downstairs, to my younger brother, Eli, still asleep in his twin bed in his basement lair. Nurit’s scream, a piercing “No,” shook the house to its nails, and while all the rest of our stomachs drew in in terror, the neighbors called the police. My father took off his glasses, which left bean-shaped red spots on the sides of his nose, and held his arms out in front of him. The blank look on his face terrified me. “Ruth?” he whispered, not approaching me, standing with his arms out, waiting for me to fill them. “Ruthie, come here. Mommy’s gone.” I cried into his chest as I had a thousand times in my life, but that time I was certain of what my arms held—muscle and bone, a layer of fat to soften and protect, a carefully calibrated system of impulses in nerves. I breathed deeply to smell his scent, and realized that though some of it was our family soap, some his shaving cream, there was something in it I would never be able to quantify or keep, something precious: his absolute essence. He was, as we all were, I realized, exactly one breath away from dying, a divide across which my mother, eaten away by cancer and pain and the concomitant fear of death, had so easily slipped.

She had died an hour after dawn, when it must be easiest to leave—in a chill, bright stillness, untroubled by sirens and televisions and daughters hanging on your elbows, begging you not to go. It had also, a few hours earlier according to the weather report, begun to snow; so that when she left, the world behind her was soft and pale. The four of us drove to the hospital in her ratty burgundy station wagon, and it would not hold the road. It used the excuse of the thin coat of snow to wobble and sail, to turn sideways each time Nurit braked. “Easy, easy,” our father whispered, but he was looking out the window, and did not respond to Nurit’s expressions of panic and vituperation, or to her wheezing cough, which worsened each time he chastised her.

The day before, our mother had retained the wispy shreds of her sense of humor, her personality. That morning, she had become wholly body. Her sparse lashes remained, the arch of her black brows, the firm lines of her elegant, bony nose. She had asked me for a manicure earlier in the week, and the nails on the curling hands were still pearly and pink. Her eyes were closed, but all three of us had inherited them, so I could watch her expression of confusion and unrest as I looked to my brother and sister for guidance. Eli, at twenty, was too young for this, and he slouched and brooded, seemingly on the verge of hysterics. Nurit clearly wanted to take charge of something, but in a room with a peaceful corpse, there is nothing to take charge of. Our slightly plump, blue-eyed father, who had always brought levity into our anxious, serious home, perched on the edge of a chair with his eyebrows raised, his eyes dimmed as if with cataract. We said our goodbyes, but mine, at least, were not those I wanted to say—they seemed forced and trivial, more for the living than the dead, as light as air.

Nurit, as always, took care of everything. As Eli and I sat on the living-room floor fingering the contents of our mother’s purse—a few half-shredded Kleenex, a plastic hairbrush, lip balm, baby pictures, fortune-cookie fortunes—Nurit cleaned and made lists. By mid-afternoon the house was spotless for guests, all our piles of papers had been stashed in closets and drawers, food had been ordered, and everyone had been notified. She kept pushing at her hair, although it was pulled back tightly and elongated her narrow face. Her black wire-rimmed glasses made her eyes look bigger, but there was still no sign of tears.

“She’s mourning in her own way,” my father said, but I didn’t understand how.

Eli sat at our mother’s vanity table half the afternoon, methodically looking into her many small boxes of hairpins and beads. No one wanted to disturb him there, though I was jealous that he could probably catch the scent of her on the faded needlepoint bench. When he emerged, near dusk, he had replaced the steel studs with which he’d had his ears pierced with a tiny pair of our mother’s gold hoops. It warmed my heart to think how she would have pursed her lips in disapproval, but instead of telling him, I buried my face against his itchy black sweater and held him.