Children of God (4 page)

Kanchay chuffed, the breathy laughter kindly. "Not to remember! To fool them! If ghosts come back, they’ll follow the scent, back into the air where they belong. Sipaj, Fia, if you dream of those ones again, you should tell someone," he warned her, for Kanchay VaKashan was a prudent man. Then he added, "Sometimes ribbons are just pretty. The djanada think they’re only decoration. Sometimes that’s true." He laughed again and confided, "The djanada are like ghosts. They can be fooled."

Anne would have followed up with questions about why ghosts come back, and when and how; Emilio and the other priests would have been delighted by the ideas of scent and spirit and congress with an unseen world. Sofia picked up the ribbons, running the satiny smoothness through her fingers. Anne’s ribbon was silvery white. Like her hair, perhaps? But no—George’s hair was also white, and his ribbon was bright red. Emilio’s was green, and she wondered why. Her husband Jimmy’s was a clear and lucent blue; she thought of his eyes and raised it to her face to breathe in its fragrance. It was like hay, grassy and astringent. Her breath caught, and she put the ribbon down. No, she thought. He’s gone. I will not cry again.

"Why, Kanchay?" she demanded then, finding anger preferable to pain. "Why did the djanada patrol burn the gardens and kill the babies?"

"Someone thinks the gardens were wrong. The people are meant to walk to their food. It was wrong to bring the food home. The djanada know when it’s the right time for us to have babies. Someone thinks the people were confused and had the babies at the wrong time."

It was rude to argue, but she was hot and tired, and irritated by the way he talked down to her because she was the size of a Runa eight-year-old. "Sipaj, Kanchay—what gives the Jana’ata the right to say who can have babies and when?"

"The law," he said, as though that answered her question. Then, warming to his topic, he told her, "Sometimes the wrong baby can get into a woman. Sometimes the baby should have been a cranil, for example. In the old times, the people would take that kind of little one to the river and call out to the cranils, Here is one of your children born to us by mistake. We’d hold the baby under the water, where the cranils live. It was hard." He was silent for a long time, concentrating on a knot in her hair, gently teasing it apart, strand by strand. "Now when the wrong child comes to us by mistake, the djanada do the hard things. And when the djanada say, This is a good child, then we know all will be well with it. A mother can travel again. A father’s heart can be quiet."

"Sipaj, Kanchay, what do you tell your children? About giving themselves up to the Jana’ata to be eaten?"

His hands paused in their work and he gently brought her head to rest against his chest, his voice falling into the soft murmur of lullaby. "We tell them, In the old times, the people were alone in all the world. We traveled anywhere we liked without any danger, but we were lonely. When the djanada came, we were glad to see them and asked them, Have you eaten? They said, We’re starving! So, we offered them food—you must always feed travelers, you know. But the djanada couldn’t eat properly and they wouldn’t take the food we offered. So the people talked and talked about what to do—it’s wicked to let guests go hungry. While we were talking, the djanada began to eat the children. Our elders said, They’re travelers, they’re guests—we have to feed them, but we’ll make rules. You must not eat just anyone, we told the djanada. You must eat only the old people who are no good anymore. That’s how we tamed the djanada. Now all the good children are safe and only old, tired, sick people are taken away."

Sofia twisted around to look up at him. "Someone thinks: this is a pretty story for children, so they will sleep well and not make fiernos when the cullers come." He lifted his chin and began again to comb out her hair. "Sipaj, Kanchay, someone is small, but not a child who must be shielded from truth. The djanada kill the very old and the sick and the imperfect. Do they also kill the ones who make trouble?" she demanded. "Sipaj, Kanchay, why do you let them? What gives them the right?"

His hands stilled momentarily as he said with prosaic acceptance, "If we refuse to go with the cullers when it’s time, others must take our places." Before she could reply, he reached down to stroke her belly as he would have his own wife’s. "Sipaj, Fia, surely this baby is ripe by now!"

The subject was officially changed. "No," she said, "not yet. Perhaps sixty nights more."

"So long! Someone thinks you will pop like a datinsa pod."

"Sipaj, Kanchay," she said, with a nervous laugh, "maybe so."

Fear and hope, fear and hope, fear and hope, circling endlessly. Why am I so afraid? I am Mendes, she thought. Nothing is beyond me.

But she had also been—however briefly—joyously Quinn: happy for a single summer of nights and days, the unlikely wife of an absurdly tall and comically homely and wondrously loving Irish Catholic astronomer. And now, Jimmy was dead, killed by the djanada—

Feeling Kanchay’s fingers working through her hair once more, she leaned back against him and looked across the clearing to the others of his kind: talking, cooking, laughing, tending babies. It could be worse, she thought then, remembering Jimmy’s habitual good-natured response to crisis, and gasping at his baby’s kick. I am Sofia Mendes Quinn, and things could be worse.

SOMETIMES IF HE KEPT STILL, PEOPLE WOULD GO AWAY.

A lay chauffeur had lived here once. The room over the garage was only a few hundred meters from the retreat house, but that was distance enough most of the time, and Emilio Sandoz claimed it for his own with a fierce possessiveness that surprised him. He had added very little to the apartment—photonics, sound equipment, a desk—but it was his. Exposed rafters and plain white walls. Two chairs, a table, a narrow bed; a little kitchen; a shower stall and toilet behind a folding screen.

He accepted that there were things he could not control. The nightmares. The devastating spells of neuralgia, the damaged nerves of his hands sending strobelike bolts of pain up his arms. He’d stopped fighting the crying jags that came without warning; Ed Behr was right, it only made the headaches worse. Here, alone, he could try to roll with the punches— absorb the blows as they came, rest when things eased up. If everyone would just leave him alone—let him handle things at his own pace on his own terms—he’d be all right.

Eyes closed, hunched and rocking over his hands, he waited, straining to hear footsteps retreat from his door. The knocking came again. "Emilio!" It was the Father General’s voice and there was a smile in it. "We have an unexpected visitor. Someone has come to meet you."

"Oh, Christ," Sandoz whispered, getting to his feet and tucking his hands under his armpits. He went down the creaking stairs to the side door below and stopped to gather himself, pulling in a ragged breath and letting it out slowly. With a short, sharp movement of his elbow, he flipped the hook out of its eye on the door frame. Waited, doubled over and silent. "All right," he said finally. "It’s open."

There was a tall priest standing in the driveway with Giuliani. East African, Sandoz thought, barely glancing at him, his flat-eyed stare resting instead on the Father General’s face. "It’s not a good time, Vince."

"No," Giuliani said quietly, "evidently not." Emilio was leaning against the wall, holding himself badly, but what could one do? If Lopore had called ahead…. "I’m sorry, Emilio. A few minutes of your time. Allow me to—"

"You speak Swahili?" Sandoz asked the visitor abruptly, in a Sudaneseaccented Arabic that came back to him out of nowhere. The question seemed to surprise the African, but he nodded. "What else?" Sandoz demanded. "Latin? English?"

"Both of those. A few others," the man said.

"Fine. Good enough. He’ll do," Sandoz said to Giuliani. "You’ll have to work by yourself for a while," he told the African. "Start with the Mendes AI program for Ruanja. Leave the K’San files alone for now. I didn’t get very far with the formal analysis. Next time, call before you come." He glanced at Giuliani, who was clearly dismayed by the rudeness. "Explain about my hands, Vince," he muttered apologetically, as he started back up to his room. "It’s both of them. I can’t think." And it’s your own damned fault for dropping in uninvited, he thought. But he was too close to tears to be defiant, and almost too tired to register what he heard next.

"I have been praying for you for fifty years," said Kalingemala Lopore in a voice full of wonder. "God has used you hard, but you have not changed so much that I cannot see who you were."

Sandoz stopped in his climb to the apartment and turned back. He remained hunched, arms crossed against his chest, but now looked closely at the priest standing next to the Father General. Sixtyish—maybe twenty years younger than Giuliani, and just as tall. Ebony and lean, with the strong bones and deep wide eyes that gave East African women beauty into old age and which made this man’s face arresting. Fifty years, he thought. This guy would have been what? Ten, eleven?

Emilio glanced at Giuliani to see if he understood what was going on, but the Father General now seemed as much at a loss as Sandoz, and as startled by the visitor’s words. "Did I know you?" Emilio asked.

The African seemed lit from within, the extraordinary eyes glowing. "There is no reason for you to remember me and I never knew your name. But you were known to God when you were still in your mother’s womb— like Jeremiah, whom God also used cruelly." And he held out both hands.

Emilio hesitated before descending the stairs once more. In a gesture that felt, achingly, both familiar and alien, he placed his own fingers, scarred and impossibly long, into the pale, warm palms of the stranger.

All these years, Lopore was thinking, his own shock so great that he forgot the artificiality of the plurals he had forced himself to master. "I remember the magic tricks," he said, smiling, but then he looked down. "Such beauty and cleverness, destroyed," he said sadly and, bringing the hands to his lips, kissed one and then the other unselfconsciously. It was, Sandoz thought later, an alteration in blood pressure perhaps, some quirk of neuromuscular interaction that ended the bout of hallucinatory neuralgia at last, but the African looked up at that moment, and met Emilio’s bewildered eyes. "The hands were the easy part, I think."

Sandoz nodded, mute, and frowning, searched the other man’s face for some clue.

"Emilio," Vincenzo Giuliani said, breaking the eerie silence, "perhaps you will invite the Holy Father to come upstairs?"

For a hushed instant, Sandoz stared in blank astonishment and then blurted, "Jesus!" To which the Bishop of Rome replied, with unexpected humor, "No, only the Pope," at which the Father General laughed aloud, explaining dryly, "Father Sandoz has been a little out of touch the past few decades."

Dazed, Emilio nodded again and led the way up the staircase.

TO BE FAIR, THE POPE HAD COME ALONE AND UNANNOUNCED, DRESSED IN the simplest of clericals, having driven himself in an unremarkable Fiat to the Jesuit retreat north of Naples. The first African elected to the papacy since the fifth century and the first proselyte in modem history to hold that office, Kalingemala Lopore was now Gelasius III, entering the second year of a remarkable reign; he had brought to Rome both a convert’s deeply felt conviction and a farsighted faith in the Church’s universality, which did not confuse enduring truth with ingrained European custom. At dawn, ignoring politics and diplomatic rigidity, Lopore had decided he must meet this Emilio Sandoz, who had known God’s other children, who had seen what God had wrought elsewhere. Having made that decision, there was no bureaucratic force in the Vatican capable of stopping him: Gelasius III was a man of formidable self-possession and unapologetic pragmatism. He was the only outsider ever to get past Sandoz’s Camorra guards, and he had done so because he was willing to speak directly with the Father General’s second cousin, Don Domenico Giuliani, the un-crowned king of southern Italy.

Sandoz’s apartment was a mess, Lopore noted happily as he picked a discarded towel off the nearest chair and tossed it onto the unmade bed, and then sat without ceremony.

"I–I’m sorry about all this," Sandoz stammered, but the Pontiff waved his apology off.

"One of the reasons We insisted on having Our own car was the desire to visit people without setting off an explosion of maniacal preparation," Gelasius III remarked. Then he confided with specious formality, "We find We are thoroughly sick of fresh paint and new carpeting." He motioned for Emilio to take the other seat, across the table from him. "Please," he said, dropping the plurals deliberately, "sit with me." But he glanced at Giuliani, standing in the corner near the stairway, unwilling to intrude but loath to leave. Stay, the Holy Father’s eyes said, and remember everything.

"My people are Dodoth. Herders, even now," the Pope told Sandoz, his Latin exotic with African place-names and the rhythmic, striding cadences of his childhood. "When the drought came, we went north to our cousins, the Toposa, in southern Sudan. It was a time of war and so, of famine. The Toposa drove us off—they had nothing. We asked, ’Where can we go?’ A man on the road told us, ’There is a camp for Gikuyu east of here. They turn no one away.’ It was a long journey and, as we walked, my youngest sister died in my mother’s arms. You saw us coming. You walked out to my family. You took from my mother her daughter’s body, as gently as if the baby were your own. You carried that dead child and found us a place to rest. You brought us water, and then food. While we ate, you dug a grave for my sister. Do you recall now?"

"No. There were so many babies. So many dead." Emilio looked up wearily. "I have dug a lot of graves, Your Holiness."

"There will be no more graves for you to dig," the Pope said, and Vincenzo Giuliani heard the voice of prophesy: ambiguous, elusive, sure. The moment passed and the Pontiff’s conversation became ordinary again. "Every day of my life since that one, I have thought of you! What kind of man weeps for a daughter not of his making? The answer to that question led me to Christianity, to the priesthood, and now: here, to you!" He sat back in the chair, amazed that he should meet that unknown priest half a century later. He paused and then continued gently, a priest himself, whose office was to reconcile God and man. "You have wept for other children since those days in the Sudan."

"Hundreds. More. Thousands, I think, died because of me."

"You take a great deal on your shoulders. But there was one child in particular, We are told. Can you speak her name, so that We may remember her in prayer?"

He could, but only barely, almost without sound. "Askama, Your Holiness."

There was silence for a time and then Kalingemala Lopore reached across the small table, lifting Emilio’s bowed head with blunt, strong fingers, and smoothing away the tears. Vincenzo Giuliani had always thought of Emilio as dark, but with those powerful brown hands cupping his face, he looked ghostly, and then Giuliani realized that Sandoz had nearly fainted. Emilio hated being touched, loathed unexpected contact. Lopore could not have known this and Giuliani took a step forward, about to explain, when he realized that the Pope was speaking.

Emilio listened, stone-faced, with the quick shallow movement of the chest that sometimes betrayed him. Giuliani could not hear their words, but he saw Sandoz freeze, and pull away, and stand and begin to pace. "I made a cloister of my body and a garden of my soul, Your Holiness. The stones of the cloister wall were my nights, and my days were the mortar," Emilio said in the soft, musical Latin that a young Vince Giuliani had admired and envied when they were in formation together. "Year after year, I built the walls. But in the center I made a garden that I left open to heaven, and I invited God to walk there. And God came to me." Sandoz turned away, trembling. "God filled me, and the rapture of those moments was so pure and so powerful that the cloister walls were leveled. I had no more need for walls, Your Holiness. God was my protection. I could look into the face of the wife I would never have, and love all wives. I could look into the face of the husband I would never be, and love all husbands. I could dance at weddings because I was in love with God, and all the children were mine."

Giuliani, stunned, felt his eyes fill. Yes, he thought. Yes.

But when Emilio turned again and faced Kalingemala Lopore, he was not weeping. He came back to the table and placed his ruined hands on its battered wood, face rigid with rage. "And now the garden is laid waste," he whispered. "The wives and the husbands and the children are all dead. And there is nothing left but ash and bone. Where was our Protector? Where was God, Your Holiness? Where is God now?"

The answer was immediate, certain. "In the ashes. In the bones. In the souls of the dead, and in the children who live because of you—"

"Nothing lives because of me!"

"You’re wrong. I live. And there are others."

"I am a blight. I carried death to Rakhat like syphilis, and God laughed while I was raped."

"God wept for you. You have paid a terrible price for His plan, and God wept when He asked it of you—"

Sandoz cried out and backed away, shaking his head. "That is the most terrible lie of all! God does not ask. I gave no consent. The dead gave no consent. God is not innocent."

The blasphemy hung in the room like smoke, but it was joined seconds later by Jeremiah’s. "He hath led me and brought me into darkness, and not into light. He hath set me in dark places as those who are dead forever. And when I cry and I entreat," Gelasius III recited, eyes knowing and full of compassion, "He hath shut out my prayer! He hath filled me with bitterness. He hath fed me ashes. He hath caused me disgrace and contempt."

Sandoz stood still and stared at nothing they could see. "I am damned," he said finally, tired to his soul, "and I don’t know why."

Kalingemala Lopore sat back in his chair, the long, strong fingers folded loosely in his lap, his faith in hidden meaning, and in God’s work in God’s time, granitic. "You are beloved of God," he said. "And you will live to see what you have made possible when you return to Rakhat."

Sandoz’s head snapped up. "I won’t go back."

"And if you are asked to do so by your superior?" Lopore asked, brows up, glancing at Giuliani.

Vincenzo Giuliani, forgotten until now in his corner, found himself looking into Emilio Sandoz’s eyes and was, for the first time in some fifty-five years, utterly cowed. He spread his hands and shook his head, beseeching Emilio to believe: I didn’t put him up to this.

"Non serviam," Sandoz said, turning from Giuliani. "I won’t be used again."

"Not even if We ask it?" the Pope pressed.

"No."

"So. Not for the Society. Not for Holy Mother Church. Nevertheless, for yourself and for God, you must go back," Gelasius III told Emilio Sandoz with a terrifying, joyful certainty. "God is waiting for you, in the ruins."

VINCENZO GIULIANI WAS A MAN OF MODERATION AND HABITUAL self-control. All his adult life, he had lived among other such men—intellectual, sophisticated, cosmopolitan. He had read and written of saints and prophets, but this…. I am in over my head, he thought, and he wanted to hide, to remove himself from whatever was happening in that room, to flee from the awful grace of God. "Let not the Lord speak to us, lest we die," Giuliani thought, and felt a sudden sympathy for the Israelites at Sinai, for Jeremiah used against his will, for Peter who tried to run from Christ. For Emilio.