The Testament of Yves Gundron (41 page)

Ruth pulled away from her sister, her head bowed. When she lilted her face to us her mouth was soft, as I had never seen it, and her eyes were bright behind a haze of incomprehension. She looked at us like it was the dawn of the first day of the world. I shivered to see her face so. In a moment, however, her eyes snapped back to life, and she showed us her glorious teeth. “And this,” she said, placing her hand on my daughter's round head, “is Elizaveta.”

Nurit and Eli bent down to greet the child. Elizaveta turned her face toward Ruth's skirt, but held her doll out before her. “This is Pudge.”

“Pudge,” Eli said. “Nice to meet you.”

Nurit said, “She looks like you, sort of.”

“Nay,” I said, “they both resemble my grandmother, Iulia Gansevöort, who came from the sea.” They both regarded Friedl in some confusion. I added, “Friedl's mad,” but it did not unvex their expressions. “Friedl,” I said, “thank you for bringing them, but it's time to be off with you, now.”

She shook her head at me.

“Come on now, off. Go find your Jude.”

“My Jude's gone away with them all.” She looked at the strangers, scratched meditatively at the lid of the inward eye, and started back up the road.

“Where is everyone?” Eli asked. “It's disturbing. We didn't see a soul as we passed through town.”

The cares of the morning rushed back upon me, and I saw by her expression that they had descended in a similar torrent upon Ruth.

“It's awful. I'll tell you everything. But first come in and put your things down and eat.”

Eli regarded me shyly.

“Aye, it's all right,” I told him. “Come in.”

They thanked me as they once more picked up their packs. Ruth held fast to her sister's hand as we walked up the frost-brittle yard.

How news travels in other locales I haven't any notion, but that day it skipped from my mind to my brother's without even a whisper. Thus did Mandrik arrive with three late pears but a few moments after we sat down to our porridge. He did not look any more surprised to see me with three strangers around my table than I was to have them, though he cast a concerned glance toward Adelaïda, who had sat up to take a bowl of broth in bed.

Mandrik bowed low, with the pears held before him like an offering. Eli stood up from the table, looking for all the world like the Prince of the Arab Hordes.

“Mandrik,” Ruth said, “please meet my brother, Eli, and my sister, Nurit.”

“I am delighted.”

“This is one of my dearest friends in the village, Mandrik Gundron.”

“Dit le Chouchou,” he added humbly.

Her “dearest” fanned the smoldering embers of confusion in my breast.

“Please have breakfast with us.”

Mandrik nodded, and took his seat beside me on the bench.

At least when the Archduke had arrived, it had been spring, my fields at the height of their prosperity. Now the farm looked as barren as death; for winter is a small death as sure as spring is the sign of God's resurrection, and fast did it approach. The last of the leaves on the trees were withered and blew wanly in the breeze. There seemed enough of interest, however, to fill the eyes of these strangers, for they looked as greedily about my home as once had their sib.

Ruth said, “You came by boat?”

“And it took forever to find the island,” Eli said, his mouth full of gruel. “But, anyway, now we're here.”

“Where are all the people?” Nurit asked.

Mandrik let out a sigh. “Gone away like the wayward moon when a man has a long night's journey ahead.”

She shook her head and tucked a stray hair behind her ear, as sometimes I had seen Ruth do when she was uncertain.

“There's another village been found,” I told her. “A village like one of your own. And the people of Mandragora are gone off to see the wonders there.”

Nurit watched her sister carefully. “A modern village?”

“So it seems,” Ruth said.

“What will that mean for your work here? That seems bad.”

Eli quietly said, “Gloombox.”

Ruth pushed back from the table and fetched the great skillet from over the fire. “Does anybody want some ham?”

Nurit held her hand over her bowl, and colored when I looked at her quizzically. Such volatile complexions they had, as changeable as weather.

Eli said, “My sister doesn't eat meat.”

“Doesn't eat meat?” said Adelaïda from the bed.

“It was Ragan,” said Elizaveta, “our she-pig.”

“She'll starve come winter.”

“I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude,” Nurit said. “And of course we won't be staying the winter. We have to get back.”

Eli said, “I have exams in six weeks.”

Mandrik's smile had quite frozen to his face.

“But you've come from the other end of the world,” I said. “Surely you can't turn right around and go back?”

Adelaïda said, “Yves, we've no place to put them.” Her eyes looked feverish with joy—these strangers, after all, were her deliverance—but it seemed possible that she was merely ill.

Nurit said, “We missed our sister. We wanted to see if she was okay. I mean, if she wanted to get out of here, she couldn't let anyone know.”

“But she's fine, Nurit,” Eli said, disordering with his long fingers the hair she'd so carefully tucked. “I'd like to point out that you've been bent out of shape over nothing.”

“Cut it out. I have not been bent out of shape.”

Ruth said, “I'm fine.”

“I can see that, so we have to head back. Eli has to take his tests, and
I need to make excuses to your department about why you left your undergrads stranded.”

“I did not—”

“You said you'd be back in the autumn, Ruth. It's past Thanksgiving now.”

“I didn't know if I'd find it. I didn't know what I'd find.”

Eli said, “She's not blaming you.”

Ruth closed her eyes briefly. “I know.” When again she opened them she looked between Mandrik and myself, and with a face as clear as rainwater said, “You two don't squabble like Nurit and I do. Do you.”

I felt ashamed, for she did not know the depth of our disagreement the night before, or how much I still suspected her.

“It's just as well you need get back,” Adelaïda said, placing her bowl on the floor and lying back with a sigh. “Once the snow comes, there'll be no getting out until March, and that in the mud.”

She was glad, then.

Nurit turned and cast a pinched smile upon her. “It's sort of too bad, isn't it?” she asked. “I think I might like it here. I'm so glad to be here.”

“As we're glad to have you,” I said. “But my wife speaks truth about the snow. We'll be tight in within the fortnight.”

Mandrik poked with a stick at the perfectly adequate fire.

Nurit coughed delicately into her hand, and said, “Excuse me.”

Ruth said, “Oh, no,” and when I regarded her in alarm, said, “Nurit has asthma,” as if that explained anything.

“I'll be okay.”

Eli placed his hand between Nurit's shoulders. “The boat's not coming back to get us for a few more days. If you think you might want to come back with us, Ruth, you've got some time to decide.”

“Go back with you?” Mandrik said. “She's working.”

Ruth smoothed the surface of her porridge with the back of her spoon. “Working, yes, but who knows how much longer. I've talked to Yves about it, Mandrik. My work here may be done.”

Mandrik's eyes fixed upon mine, willing me to speak, but I found nothing to say. His face was not fully composed. Our table produced only the soft scrape of wooden implements on wooden bowls, the clicks of tongues against the roofs of mouths. Elizaveta looked as if she would melt from the visitors' splendor.

“We have liked very much having her among us,” I at last broke the silence to say.

Ruth's eyes grew cloudy. “Thank you, Yves.”

“If you leave,” Mandrik said, “your work is done for certain. But if you stay, who knows how the course of events will unfold? Who knows what you may see?”

“But I don't want to see it. I don't want to see this shrivel into nothing. I know you're right, I know I should stay until the end. That's why I'm still thinking about it.”

Eli said, “If you left now, you could always come back in the spring.”

“Nobody does research,” Nurit concluded, “snowed under.” She looked to my wife for affirmation, and Adelaïda nodded on her pillow. Nurit coughed.

Ruth chewed thoughtfully. “If I don't stay, how will I know what they do all winter?”

“You could ask, for one thing.”

“It's hardly the same.”

“And who knows,” I said quietly. “Given all that has happened, this winter may be quite unlike any that came before. We must simply wait for our countrymen to return.”

Beneath his breath my brother said, “Lord have mercy.”

The room quieted once again. Elizaveta sidled up to Eli. He opened his eyes wide at her, and she laughed.

“It would be a fine day to see the village,” I offered, “if you want to take the cart. I would accompany you, but I must cover the garden before the hard frost.”

What would it matter, my garden, if the village were abandoned by spring? But in the meanwhile I loved it, and wanted dearly to look after it, to keep it safe against the cold.

“I'll take them out, then,” Ruth said, finishing her porridge. “We'll be out of your way.”

“A pity,” my brother said, “they could not see our village as ever it was—full of life and energy.”

“I'm sure it's beautiful anyway,” Nurit offered.

They bundled themselves in their fleecy outer garments. Ruth tied the string of her cloak at her throat. “We'll be back before sundown.”

Mandrik pressed his three pears into her hands. “Godspeed.”

We regarded one another before they stuck their heads out the door and shut it heavily behind them.

My ears buzzed in the sudden quiet. In the stillness, I felt inexplicably tired.

Mandrik rested his head on his arms on the table, as if exemplifying in his body the confusion of my mind.

For the nonce I could not worry about Ruth and her siblings, nor even about what my neighbors were doing up over the western ridge, for there was work to do sowing the winter wheat to the summer's fallows and covering the garden with mulch. Adelaïda had deep red wool upon her loom that we might, come the depths of winter, have a new blanket to replace ours that had gone threadbare despite repeated patching; and she worked on it a while at a time, in between returning to bed to rest. As I scattered seeds in the furrows, I surprised myself to realize that I was angry and sad that Ruth might leave us. In days past my mind had teemed with foul suspicions, but in all I had grown used to her presence and her company, and did not relish losing them. Without her, we might be what we always had been, a family on a prosperous farm in a village of farmers, more and less prosperous—or else what Dirk had brought up from beyond would change everything irrevocably. But that was mere possibility, not something we could count on. We should teach ourselves to be accustomed once again to plowing, harrowing, sowing, reaping—the plain old cycles of the year. There was no shame in this life, no lack of work and entertainments; but it had somehow ceased to be enough. I had come to like being watched by this outsider. Each of my actions and words held significance for her in ways I could never hope to imagine. Her secret life—the life in which my life played a formative role—had woven its spell. Without Ruth, for whom would my life have significance? Wives and daughters died too frequently. I dared not hope they would both outlive me.

Come nightfall, her siblings followed Ruth into the yard, and participated in her strange tooth and washing rituals. When they came back in, the other two were shivering, and Nurit's eyeglasses were shrouded in mist. “Ruth,” she said, “you can't stay here all winter. There's no bathroom.”

Ruth shook her head and deposited her stockings inside her boots.
Nurit removed her eyeglasses and Eli the rings from his ears, and they placed their glittering jewels on the table. All three foreigners, fully clothed, lay down on Ruth's pallet on the floor, fitting together like three string beans, speaking softly, as if our daughter were not asleep above them nor we across the room.

“I never dreamed,” Nurit whispered.

“I did. All those stories Mom told. I always wanted to come.”

Their long bodies shifted, causing the mattress to crackle. Nurit's cough drew out like a phrase of a chant, and quieted down again.

“I'm glad one of us believed her.”

“I am, too.”

Eli said, “How come she didn't write the book?”

Ruth sighed. “She said she could only afford to charter the boat for a day. It wasn't enough time. She couldn't find the island.”

“And you?”

“I chartered it for three and, after days of talking with the man, got him to admit he'd heard about this place. But it was folklore, he promised me; I wouldn't find anything.”

Nurit said, “That's what the guy told us, too. But here you were.”

Past their breathing, past my wife's breathing, I heard the cold, mournful wind.

“The day after tomorrow we should leave to meet the boat.”

“Only one more day?”

“Think about coming with us?”

Ruth breathed out through her nose. “Okay. Go to sleep.”

“It's early,” Eli said.

“It's bedtime.”

I saw a faint blue glow over their faces, which was soon gone. “It's eight-thirty, Ruth.”

“Is it?”

“Don't you have a watch?”

“We get up when the sun gets up, so you might as well sleep now.”

Eli, forgetting his whisper, said, “I can't get up at the crack of dawn,” and both sisters hushed him. “Ow,” he said. “That's my face.”