Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (42 page)

“No problem,” she said. “What you
don’t understand is . . . well, there’s a deep undercurrent of sexuality
flowing through every cloister. That may be especially true of the Pachomian
Order because we are merely a centimeter above a lay sisterhood, no pun
intended. In the hierarchy of sisterhoods, we are not especially great, and we
have accepted members who a few of the more esteemed orders might reject. Of
course, a Pachomian sister must adhere to vows of chastity just like any nun,
but prior to taking up the cloth, she need not have been a virgin. So, among
us, we have women with some experience, and that makes men and carnality a more
tense issue, perhaps, than in certain orthodox convents. But when I get so
cotton-picking
coincée
about it, it is I, myself, who is acting the
hypocrite.”

Naturally, Switters had to bite his
tongue to keep from asking Domino if she could be counted among those sisters
with “some experience.” What he asked, instead, after a lacerating lingual nip,
was a question about the role and features of the Pachomian Order.

“Maybe we can discuss that at a later
time,” she said. “Right now, before I go to my work, we must talk about you.
Who are you? What are you? What are you doing here? How did you get here? So
far from the beaten track.”

“May I assume my interrogation is off
and running?”

She smiled, and it was a smile, he
thought, that could raise roadkill from the dead or turn a lead mine into a
Mexican restaurant, yet a smile made more with the eyes than the lips. “You
seem to be much improved, Mr. Switters, although you still look like—how do you
say it?—a thing that the cat has brought home. I don’t mean to pressure you. If
you don’t feel well enough . . .”

“It’s all right,” he assured her,
“although should I die in your custody, you’ll have to answer to Amnesty
International.” Then, before she could protest, and holding to his vow to stop
lying, he jumped right in with the truth, or, at least, an abridged version of
it. “Until six months ago, I was a CIA operative. Central Intelligence Agency.”

“Really? I know, of course, about the
CIA. It has an unpleasant reputation.”

“And largely deserved, I assure you.”
He might have added, “Thanks to corporate-owned politicians and their cowboy
dupes,” but he did not.

“Then why were you? . . .”

“Its unpleasantness, as you put it,
had a purity, a spice, and anarchy that simply didn’t exist in the academic,
military, or corporate sectors, and I hadn’t enough talent for art or poetry.
Besides, it offered an unparalleled, world-class opportunity for corrective
mischief: subverting subversion, if you will, although I won’t pretend my
motives were ever entirely altruistic. But all that’s immaterial now. I had to
drop out of the game last November.”

She glanced at his wheelchair, folded
in a corner, and he knew what she was assuming. He decided not to correct the
assumption. Instead, he told her how he’d recently become involved in a private
humanitarian mission inside Iraq, his old stomping grounds, and how, when it
was over, he, feeling adventurous and having no particular place to be, joined
a band of nomads driving their flocks to summer pasture in the mountains. “We
passed by your Garden of Eden here, and for some crackpot reason I felt a
magnetic attraction to the place. The rest, as they say, is histrionics.” He
shrugged, as if to emphasize the pristine logic of it all.

Whether or not she bought his story he
could not tell. She was quiet, thoughtful, her countenance vacillating between
serenity and fret. “Finish your breakfast,” she said at last. “I’ll come back
for the tray. A supply truck will be arriving in a few days, bringing petrol
for our generator. It can take you to Deir ez-Zur, but I can’t see how you will
depart Syria without the proper papers.”

“Don’t worry about it, Sister,” he
called after her. “Impropriety is what I do for a living.”

Fortified by his first regular meal
in more than a week, Switters attempted a few push-ups and sit-ups on the cot.
It was a wimpy, pathetic display. After lunch, delivered by a French nun who
introduced herself as ZuZu (she was Domino’s age but lacked Domino’s radiance),
he tried again, with greater success. Mostly, however, he rested. He meditated,
he dozed, he read, he drank in the farmyard sounds and orchard smells of the
oasis. Once, a black goat wandered into his room. Almost immediately, ZuZu and
another middle-aged nun arrived to shoo it out.

“That Fannie,” ZuZu clucked. “She
should pay more mind to her animal.”

“Yes,” said her companion. “Instead
of to the animal in her mind.” They laughed and departed. It was probably
funnier in French.

In midafternoon, he tried telephoning
Maestra. When she didn’t answer, he pulled his computer up onto the cot. Now
that Audubon Poe was far away, it shouldn’t matter if the company read or even
traced his transmission. Mayflower had little reason to be interested in him,
per se, and even if he was, what could the cowboys do to him? Tip off Syrian
authorities that he was in their country illegally? Intimate that he was a spy?
Get him imprisoned or executed? In the old, crazed Cold War CIA, that might
have been a possibility, but these days the company had a different censure and
different methods. It had other fish to fry, its own bare asses to cover.
Unless it believed he could help it get at Poe, whose whereabouts it doubtless
already knew, he would be regarded as no more than a loose cannon with minimum
firepower and no direction. He said a prayer to the satellite gods. He e-mailed
his grandmother.

In less than an hour, she responded.
Maestra was well. There was some unspecified trouble about the Matisse. She was
glad he was enjoying his vacation in “Turkey,” and understood that the Turks
made fine silver bracelets. Was he finally out of that stupid wheelchair?

It was Domino who brought him his
supper. “I’m sorry to be ignoring you,” she said.

“I’m sorry, too.”

She tested his forehead for signs of
fever, and in her hand he sensed a current not unlike the throb of pent-up
music he’d felt in the fingers of Skeeter Washington, only what was pent up in
Sister Domino was of a different order: spiritual, physical, emotional, or a
mixture of the three, he wouldn’t venture to suppose.

“Can we talk?” he asked.

“Later tonight, or tomorrow,” she
said, glancing out the window at the purpling dusk. “Now we have a special
vespers. And, oh, we won’t be turning on the generator for a while, so, I’m
sorry, you’ll have to make do with candlelight if you want to read.” She picked
up the copy of
Finnegans Wake
from its place on the bedside stool. “It’s
an Irish book, isn’t it? Fannie would be thrilled.”

“Only a dozen souls in Ireland have
actually read this tome,” he said, “and I’d bet a crock o’ gold and a barrel o’
Guinness that your Fannie is not one of them.”

About an hour after dark, as he lay
digesting his thin goat stew, he heard singing. This time the song
was
a
hymn, and more than a couple of voices were joined in its vocalization.
“Vespers,” he said to himself. At almost that same moment, he became aware that
an orange glow had commenced to flicker, snap, and waggle against the drawn
curtains of his little window. Inquisitive, he stood on the cot, down near its
foot, and parted the rough cotton fabric. For the next half hour, he was to
gawk at an extraordinary spectacle. The psychedelic porthole aside, no window
he’d ever peered through looked out on a more memorable scene.

The convent chapel, identifiable by
its stunted steeple and crude stained glass, was located at—and connected
to—the far end of the building that apparently served as living quarters for
the sisterhood. The chapel was a good seventy yards, maybe more, from the
infirmary, which was situated near the compound gate. In front of the chapel,
from whose open door the singing floated, there was a small flower garden, and
in that flower patch, amidst poppies and jasmine bushes, a bonfire had been
built.

As Switters watched, nuns—eight of
them in all—filed, still singing, out of the chapel. Each wore her traditional
nun habit, rather than the Syrian dresses in which he’d become accustomed to
seeing them. Joining hands, they formed a circle around the fire,
circumnavigating it several times, both clockwise and counterclockwise. Then
they suddenly ceased singing, broke the circle, and began to disrobe.

Initially, a startled Switters jumped
to the conclusion that the sisters were practicing witchcraft, that he’d
stumbled upon some arcane sect that was combining Catholicism with Wicca.
However, as the nuns, one by one—some eagerly, even vehemently, others with
obvious reluctance—hurled or gently dropped their habits into the bonfire, he
realized that something of a different nature was transpiring here. He couldn’t
guess what the ceremony was about, but it was no eye-of-newt sabbat.

As the heavy habits smoked and slowly
ignited, the women watched in their underwear. Most wore knee-length bloomers,
the sort of ultra-baggy shorts that might have outfitted a low-rent hip-hop
ghetto gangster basketball team, and stiff old-fashioned prototype brassieres
that could have harnessed pairs of boudoir oxen. One was in modern bra and
panties. From that distance, he couldn’t clearly recognize faces, but he
thought (or hoped?) she must be Domino. The last of the eight wore bikini
underpants and nothing else, and as firelight twinkled on her far naked
nipples, he thought,
Fannie?

His attention was diverted from
Fannie’s (?) breasts by the appearance in the residence hall doorway of yet
another figure, a tall woman, whose silhouette had a certain majesty. She was
immediately greeted by two sisters, who took her arms and led her, very
gingerly, for she appeared to be old, to the fire.
Masked Beauty?
Switters wondered, although as far as he could tell, she wore no mask.

Two other nuns had gone inside the
residence hall and lugged out a kind of wooden settee. A third went inside and
fetched cushions. Masked Beauty—it
must
be her—stood in front of the
settee and, assisted by the shapely one he believed to be Domino, undressed.
With surprising vigor, she likewise flung her habit into the flames.

After Domino arranged the pillows for
her, she reclined upon the settee, propping herself on one elbow, the better to
view the conflagration, and the pose she then struck was so strangely familiar
to Switters that it gave his spine an electrical shock.

And just then, as Masked Beauty’s
doffed habit erupted into full blaze, he, still tingling, saw by its light that
the thin shift she wore as an undergarment was an equally strange and familiar
shade of strangely familiar—blue.

Silence is a mirror. So faithful,
and yet so unexpected, is the reflection it can throw back at men that they
will go to almost any length to avoid seeing themselves in it, and if ever its
duplicating surface is temporarily wiped clean of modern life’s ubiquitous
hubbub, they will hasten to fog it over with such desperate personal noise
devices as polite conversation, humming, whistling, imaginary dialogue,
schizophrenic babble, or, should it come to that, the clandestine cannonry of
their own farting. Only in sleep is silence tolerated, and even there, most
dreams have soundtracks. Since meditation is a deliberate descent into deep
internal hush, a mute stare into the ultimate looking glass, it is regarded
with suspicion by the nattering masses; with hostility by business interests
(people sitting in silent serenity are seldom consuming goods); and with spite
by a clergy whose windy authority it is seen to undermine and whose bombastic
livelihood it is perceived to threaten.

However, when Domino returned to the
infirmary to find Switters propped up in bed, his arms folded, palms upward,
across the rough sheet, a thick aura of quietude around him, she attributed it
to the fact that he was in recovery from illness and would not have guessed
that he might be trying to steady himself after witnessing, an hour and a half
earlier, Masked Beauty’s startling impersonation of his grandmother’s painting.

As far as that goes, Domino might not
have registered her patient’s meditative air at all, so absorbed was she by her
own cares. Her eyes resembled a serving of salmon sushi, and while their puffy
redness could conceivably have been caused by bonfire smoke, Switters guessed
that she had been weeping. She knew he wanted to talk (though she couldn’t have
known how badly), but she begged off, claiming fatigue.
“À demain,”
she
promised, and then apologized that exhaustion had made her lapse into French.

“Tomorrow’s fine,” he said.

“It’s Sunday, so I will be free all
the day, after chapel.”

“You’ll still have chapel?”

She was momentarily puzzled. “Oh, you
mean after? . . .
Mais oui,
yes, of course we will have chapel.” She
paused. “You watched our brazen ceremony, didn’t you? I saw your silhouette at
the window.”

“I wasn’t intending to spy.”

“Ah, but you couldn’t help yourself:
you’re CIA.” Sensing instantly that she might have yanked a sleeping dog’s
tail, she issued a retraction. “No, please, I’m only making a joke. It would
have been impossible not to notice our. . . . We should have waited until you
had gone away. Tell me, did you find our display to be tasteless?”