The Testament of Yves Gundron (44 page)

“Yves, listen to yourself.”

“I have no pity for her.”

“Perhaps you will visit the world with us, and we will all return, together.”

“I don't know who you've become, Mandrik.”

I listened to his breath a few moments, the miracle of his lungs filling and emptying. “No one,” he said. “Nothing has changed but my happiness.”

And in that I knew how much had changed—how different these fields would be as I walked back than they had been a few moments past. Everything, indeed, had changed, down to the rain and the soil.

“We should go back,” he said, each joint in his body cracking again as he stood. “There'll be a great lot of explaining to do.”

I did not care to move. Better to remain leaning against the rocks as my father had done before me, dreaming of his beautiful mother, her dark hair rippling like the waves. Better to look out at the land, knowing that the labor it required of me would someday kill me. What awaited me in my house and village I did not care to imagine. If it was my fault, this change, I would have given my teeth to retract it.

“You can't stay here,” he said. “It's cold.”

I decided to follow him back. I rose up on my haunches and, leaning on my stick, straightened slowly, painfully reassuming the shape of a man. Without turning, I gave a brief pat to the slippery rocks behind me, and silently bade Iulia make note of all that had passed. My feet, near frozen, yet had the sense to pain me. With the sky bleak and gray, we began our journey home.

These fields mattered nothing at all. For my grandfather they had reached to the outmost edges of the world, the boundaries of the wilderness—past them was nought but the imagination, and the blessed sea which had brought him his bride. Perhaps in the winter I would fashion a harness to work two horses as a team, and come spring
buy a second horse to relieve some of the burden from foul-tempered Enyadatta. The work of the farm would vanish beneath my gaze. With practice, I could spit to the far edge of what I owned.

“You needn't be so angry at me,” he said, his sandals sucking into the mud with a sound that filled me with despair.

“I will give you half this land,” I said, and listened in wonder as the words hung in the air between us.

“I expected some other reply.”

“Half the land. If between us we cannot make do, we can buy from Frith his portion, if he does not first die from the shock of your actions. And if still we cannot make do, we will have to go westward, with our countrymen.”

“Think you, after so many years of meditation, I could once again learn to farm?”

“What's to learn?” I asked him. “You work the land, and she provides.” To think of such a stranger bearing a child with my name—a tall, spindly being, whose mother would coo in her native accent—gave me pause, and a strange thrill.

“I have work yet to do, Yves. And I won't take your land.”

“They won't let you live on handouts anymore.”

“Still and all.”

“If what you predict is true, they won't be here anyway. There won't be farms here anymore. So what will your disgrace matter?”

“Don't talk of it.”

Every inch of us was sodden when we returned to the house; we let off steam at the fire. It was strange to see my household as ever it was—full now of strangers, but functioning, loom and cooking pots working, child carding on the ground, her brown eyes intent upon her wooden comb. My blessed daughter—how could I ever have thought that I might rather have had some nameless, mysterious son, ten years now in the soil, than this miracle, Elizaveta, now before my eyes?

“Yves,” my wife said, dropping the shuttle to the ground and trying to avoid the puddles I made on her clean dirt floor.

“My feet feel better,” It was a foul, insinuating rain; I did not like how it smelled in my clothes.

“Off with it all.” She held a sheet at the ready while I stripped to the skin. I felt a moment's awkwardness before the strangers, but could not make allowance for their modesty. Adelaïda rubbed me down like a
child after a bath. She had completed my new warm shirt, which I accepted gratefully, and provided the patched pants in which I worked in the foulest weather. Mandrik still stood dripping and steaming by the fire. “You're next,” Adelaïda said, holding the damp sheet out. He cast his eyes down as he stepped out of the puddling sandals and disrobed. Did Ruth long to dry him? Did she feel it her right and her due? Nurit and Eli busily looked down—only she looked up without shame. I had little else in the way of clothing to offer my brother, so I gave him my good trousers and a sweater knit from the dark wool of Chornaya and Flick, which he accepted gratefully. Adelaïda combed our wet hair back behind our ears. Standing in an ordinary man's gray trousers and warm knit, he looked like an ordinary man—smoother of hand and of skin than a farmer, but elsewise unmarked. It had been a lifetime since I had seen him without the garb of a holy man, and the vision made me nervous. I watched Ruth watch, which made me more nervous still. Adelaïda brought forth last winter's woolen stockings for us. Burns on my feet or no, I was glad of the warmth. “I imagine you're hungry again? I've got breakfast's porridge, and bread. Perhaps you'll kill a hen for supper, Yves, by way of farewell to our guests.”

“Please,” Nurit said, “don't do it on our account,” and tucked at her neat hair thrice.

Ruth, mopping up the floor with a rag, had obviously not told them a thing.

“We don't want you to think we've been feeding your sister on porridge all these months,” Adelaïda said. In truth we had been, but I could see her point.

“Let's eat, then,” I said. “I've work to do this afternoon.”

Ruth cleaned the table of accumulated debris. Adelaïda, whose sourness hung about the room in the smoke, filled motley bowls and handed out spoons, and they all gathered around. But two bites of the slick substance had not been swallowed before Mandrik, his eyes cast down, said, “Do we not have something to discuss?”

Ruth's tongue tried to work the stubborn food down her gullet as she examined her family's faces. Their dark, innocent eyes reminded me of Elynour's, and I shivered.

“You can't be catching cold now,” my wife said, “or you'll be in bed all winter.”

“I'm not ill,” I said.

“You're shivering.”

Ruth put her hand on top of her sister's, and with all the subtlety of the day's now drenching rain, said, “I've decided for certain that I'm not going back with you tomorrow.”

Nurit smiled St. Perpetua's patient smile. “Is there anything we can say to change your mind?”

“I don't think so. Mandrik asked me to marry him. I said yes.”

Adelaïda's jaw nearly dislodged from her face. Nurit and Eli both turned toward the accused, who blushed hot as Hellfire and would not return their gaze. Eli picked at the jewel in his left ear, and Nurit fell into so long and frenzied a fit of coughing that my wife, despite her overall lack of sympathy for the strangers, began to rub her back.

“Does either of you want to congratulate me?”

Eli gave his sister a cup of water, and her cough quieted.

Ruth said, “Are you okay?”

Nurit nodded. Her eyes were red from coughing. She took off her eyeglasses to wipe her lace on her sleeve. “Mandrik,” she said, “I hope you'll excuse me if in any way I'm being disrespectful, but, Ruth, are you sure you've thought this through?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, are you sure you've thought this through.”

Ruth shrugged her shoulders. “It's not about thinking.”

Eli said, “But you know what she means.”

“This is not—Ruth, how will we explain this to our father?”

“From the beginning I told you I might well stay.”

“But staying to finish your research is different from staying forever.”

Ruth shook her head. “Don't you think Dad will be happy that one of us is finally getting married?”

“I don't think this is what he had in mind.” Nurit's face was pinched as if she'd tasted a poisonous plant. “Ruth, this will be a difficult life.”

“In what way?”

“In terms of bare survival.” Her eyes swung anxiously around my home. “Look around you, Ruth. This is not the lap of luxury.”

Eli put out his hand toward me. “Please excuse her if she's—”

“No,” I said, “I understand,” though in truth it wounded me that in her eyes my life should look so stark.

“Nurit, when did I ever want money, or a big house, or anything?”

“Never, Ruth. But there's a difference between not having a big engagement ring and having to chop your own wood so you don't freeze to death.”

Mandrik said, “I will take care of her to the best of my ability.”

Nurit, her eyes still red and wet, held one hand up. In the mist the chimney wouldn't draw, and the room was smoky. Her breath wheezed in her chest. “This will not be an easy life. This will not be the life you grew up with.”

I had been right, then, in my assumption.

“I know that.”

“Ruth,” Eli asked gently, “will this make you happy?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“When was I ever happy? Will you tell me that?”

Her brother and sister watched in a thick silence.

“After Mom died? Was I supposed to be happy after that, when I couldn't swing it before? I never knew why I was doing what I was doing. I never had a passion for anything. And then she died and she sucked my life empty like a vacuum. Now here I am, with a life that means something to me, a purpose, and a person, people, I love. Should I abandon all that?”

All of us, then; she loved us all.

Eli said, “It was only a question.”

“It was not only a question, Eli. Because the truth is that until I came here I never took a moment's joy, a moment's pleasure. I was never happy. Because I was doing what everyone wanted me to do and I never checked to see if I meant it.”

Mandrik was rapt in her speaking; her brother and sister looked somber. Nurit said, “Mom would want you to be happy.”

“Yes,” Ruth said. “And she would want me to finish this work before it's too late.”

“It may be,” Mandrik said quietly, “too late already.”

Elizaveta pulled at my woolen sleeve. “Where's Roof going?”

“Eat your lunch,” Adelaïda commanded. I whispered, “Nowhere. She's staying here.” Her whole tiny body breathed a sigh. What had we done, taking this woman into our home?

“You know how to find me here. If you want to come see me, perhaps next summer, well and good. Maybe I'll go back with you, with Mandrik, so he can meet Dad.”

Said Eli, “L'shana haba'a,” and I knew not what he meant.

“You tell Dad I'm sorry. Tell him I'll see him as soon as I can.”

Nurit muttered, “There's nothing I can say to you. There's no good argument except I want you back.”

Ruth put her arm around her sister's neck and ran her fingers through her lovely black hair. “I wish I could be with you and be with Mandrik both. But I can't.”

“I don't want to lose you.”

“You're not. It's something else.”

Despite my confusion, I felt glad that Ruth would still be around to talk to.

“Please don't think,” Nurit said, “that I disapprove. I know you must be making the right decision. It's hard to get used to, that's all.”

“Nurit, I have work to do; I'm marrying someone I love. There is nothing more I could ask for.”

Nothing was settled, in truth, but we ate our lunch without the cold, hard feeling in our stomachs which makes it so difficult to enjoy a repast. Two generations ago, who would have thought of enjoying food? One scraped survival from the hostile land, and nothing more. If it wasn't rotten, one ate it, in whatever way it was most expedient to cook. Now how accustomed were we to bounty that something as intangible as a bad mood could spoil our digestions? We were becoming pansies all, drooping at the slightest adversity of weather.

Come morning, these two intruders would be gone, borne away to a world I could not even truly picture. Until my neighbors returned from their journey, which was also beyond my imaginings, all would be as ever it had been on my farm, and then would come the changes. But I was ready for them, ready to stand my ground against them.

¹
I left the house the moment everyone fell asleep; I hadn't had a moment since the meeting and my siblings' arrival to talk to Mandrik, and had no idea what he thought of what had happened. It was bitter cold outside, and by the time I reached Mandrik's hut, my extremities were frozen. Nevertheless, I found him sitting on his threshold, his door wide open to the wind. His eyes were closed; when I shouted out his name, he opened them and looked at me crossly.

“Don't you know better than to disturb a man in meditation?” he asked. “But of course you wouldn't. You're leaving.”