The Testament of Yves Gundron (9 page)

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.