The Testament of Yves Gundron (11 page)

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:

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.