The Testament of Yves Gundron (12 page)

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.

Our house had never been big enough to afford privacy. Once we began sitting shiva, the house became like a grand eighteenth-century salon, admitting a steady stream of relatives, friends, and well-wishers to lessen the weight of our cares. All I could think of, though, was the work we would have to do when everyone left. There were clothes to be combed through, most too large for me or my sister to wear. Thousands of papers, those that were important stashed in drawers along with thirty years of canceled checks and grocery receipts. My father looked too bleary-eyed for any of this, and had to prepare to give exams come the New Year. Eli's undergraduate career wouldn't be ruined by waiting till next term for his tests; Nurit had long since passed into the hallowed realm of undisturbed dissertation writers, carrel and all; only I, who still had to finish my Master's and face the impossible task of finding a thesis topic—only I was in danger of spoiling my academic career through overassiduous cleaning.

But I was the one whose blood drew me to the task those dark, bitter January days. I separated the precious scraps of her handwriting from the printed dross. Nurit and Eli cared for their work and took refuge in it; I had been dragged into the academic life by the combined weight of all their interests, and I was in no hurry to go back. I felt awful every time I opened one of my mother's journals, but there they were, and I read them through, almost as slowly, it seemed, as she had written them. I lived through her daily worries, what she read, what we did to pain and delight her. And every now and again I caught a glimpse of her as she remembered herself at twenty, with my broad shoulders and dark hair, tramping around the Scottish countryside, dreaming of spirits in the dells, sure of becoming an anthropologist when she returned. I know that she never regretted marrying my father, or having three children before she was thirty—there would have been evidence somewhere in the scores of notebooks—but I could regret it lor her, now that she was gone. I could regret the time she had wasted writing everything down, knowing in retrospect that she would die before her promise came to full flower. I could regret all the things she had invested with usefulness, which had once more become mere things, and useful to no one.

When there were five of us, going about our business, fighting with each other or yelling en masse at the television, the house had possessed its own electricity. My mother had never seemed any more central to it than anyone else. Now, suddenly, there was quiet. As dearly as I loved my father, Eli, and Nurit, none of them passing could ever again make so much difference in my life. Even at Thanksgiving, with my mother in the hospital, it had seemed fine that I should be twenty-eight and living at home—particularly when my thirty-year-old sister was doing the same thing—to save money to finance an education in a field in which I wasn't certain I belonged, and for which I frequently believed I had no real aptitude. I hadn't found my topic yet; hadn't found the thing that drew me. Come the New Year, with its heavy snows, impossible to shovel from our pitted brick walk, it seemed that I had already wasted half my life. All the books I'd read had been a waste of time. I hadn't been on vacation since I'd gone camping with my brother and sister in the White Mountains five years before. I had never left the country.

I began to dream of what my mother had told me, almost as often as I dreamed of her. I began to dream of her remote island in the Hebrides, and reasoned that if I did not have a specialty of my own, at least I could do what she would have wanted to do, if she had had the opportunities I was so willing to squander. Even if it turned out not to please me, it would be enough to do the work in her honor.

So each night as we ate our spaghetti, the only acceptable dish in my father's repertory, or Nurit's concoctions of vegetables and beans. I dreamed of that world. I imagined myself in the places my mother had described to me. I imagined myself her; young and open-eyed, with no idea how much dreariness the future held, how much pain it would cause, and how quickly it would be over.

And then I found this place, stranger than all my imaginings.

⁶
A rare example of a non-rhyming verse.

CHAPTER THREE

THE ARCHDUKE

erhaps a week later, as I helped Adelaïda sow a second batch of cucumbers (as the first seedlings had mysteriously withered), a great clattering of hooves and wheels arrived in the yard, followed by a tuneless and impertinent blast on the trumpet. Yoshu went into a frenzy of barking, rolling excitedly from one side of her back to the other in between bouts of her din, and all the naked sheep crowded against one another in the pasture. I stood to wipe my hands, and was shocked to see four liveried servants, wearing tunics and bloomers of red, descending from a cart with the old-fashioned single axle, painted in shocking, swirling patterns of red, blue, and green. Their dapple gray horse shook his fine head. The servants helped the Archduke's attaché, still in his black silk and with beeswax in his mustache, to step lightly on one dusty yellow wheel and down to the ground. He brushed at his fine trousers while the red underlings arranged themselves in pairs. Then the trumpeter, a blond lock falling over one eye, squawked out a second greeting.

“Yves Gundron?” called the attaché.

“Aye, sir—you remember me? I brought the petition about widening the gates.”

His imposing stance relaxed. “Oh, hullo. That was such a fabulous idea.”

“Thank you.”

“Yves Gundron, rumors have reached the fortress that you have made inventions which have not been reported to his Urbanity, that you harbor a foreigner in your home, and that since its arrival the village of Mandragora has been beset by strange occurrences. What say you to these accusations?”

Ruth was crouched on the ground, taking down notes about seeds. “Well,” said I, feeling that if I were a turkey cock I would bulge out all my feathers and strut, “she's a she, sir, not an it. And I have not noticed any unusual happenings.”

The attache's blue eyes twinkled. “Harboring a
female
alien, is it?”

“Aye, sir, in the house with my family. This is she.”

Ruth stood, unceremoniously brushed dirt from her trouser seat, and waved. She dwarfed the attaché, who nervously fingered the narrow tip of his beard. How could she not be tall where she came from? Ruth said, “Hi. Hello.”

The musicians all blushed, and the attaché, averting his eyes, said, “Oh, dear. This is strange enough in itself.”

Thankfully, Elizaveta bounded forth with Pudge, dressed in a washrag, held out in front of her. “This is Pudge,” she said.

Ruth said, “No, Elizaveta.”

The attaché nodded me his approval. “You've taught her English.”

“I already knew it,”

“But her accent is guttural and strange.” The attaché watched her with some disdain as she struggled to attain composure. In sympathy I looked away, and saw the four servants, one absently fingering his trumpet, two looking at the ground, and the last, his gaze out at my ripening fields, scratching his bulbous nose.

“What is this stranger's name?”

“Ruth Blum, of Cambridge, Massachusetts,” we both answered in more or less the same time.

I watched him turn the awkward syllables over his silent tongue, willing the fallible organ to retain their shape for relaying to the Archduke. “Ruth Blum,” he intoned, “the Archduke Urbis of Nnms requests your appearance at the fortress, Market Day forenoon.”

“I'm delighted. Where's the fortress?”

“Is she daft?” he asked me.

How I wished I had not been digging like a pig about the garden. “She's a stranger. How would she know?”

“I suppose you're right.”

“I would be glad to bring her to the fortress, if you like.”

The attaché bowed, and twiddled his shiny mustache. “Perhaps the Archduke could travel abroad to see her.”

“Whatever his desire.”

His hand retreated from his mustache, and both hands parted the long skirts of his coat to rest on his slender, city hips. “Mind if I look around?” As if in illustration of our terrible rusticity, Sophronia let out an ear-splitting moo, and Hammadi, who could generally be counted on to behave, sent forth a roping, yellow stream of urine.

“Not at all.”

He came closer to us, leaned down to finger the budding leaf of a radish, and smiled awkwardly. Then he took rather an aimless walk toward the house, pointed therein, and when I vouchsafed my assent, stooped (though he was well clear of the door) to enter. His four red men relaxed so completely that they were soon upon the ground. Elizaveta tugged at my wife's skirt and said, “Help me make up a song about Pudge.”

Adelaïda said, “You start it.”

Elizaveta gathered herself to her tallest, reached her mouth toward the sky, and began,

Adelaïda watched her with wide eyes, kicked at the dirt, retied her apron strings, and finally said, “Nothing rhymes with Pudge.”