The Testament of Yves Gundron (18 page)

“Then rest certain God called her by it when he brought her up. Now go.”

“Damn it, man,” Dithyramb interjected, “be thankful for all you have left.”

The solemn words of the Last Rites rose plaintively over the babbling of my neighbors and the pounding of my heart. I pulled my knife from my boot, where it had, miraculously, remained lodged during the tumble, and approached what had, an hour before, been the strong, supple workings of Hammadi, as well known to me as a member of my family. Even over the smoke of the airplane and the sharp stink of my horse's blood, she—her carcass—smelled like herself. I tried to breathe deep of what I would never smell again. I hacked at the strap, and felt faint to see the bones and innards of what had but moments before been as dear to me as life. Horses had died before—they had died frightful deaths—but none had I known so well; none before had seemed so resolutely to possess a soul. As clear as it had been to me when my brothers and sister passed away that they had left their grosser bodies for a more subtle place, so was it clear to me then that what had made my horse dear had traveled hence. My eyes stung as I cut off the straps, which had not bound her strongly enough to keep her with me. The carcass was yet warm, but it did not sing under my touch as even that morning, impatient and imbued with life, it had done.

“Excuse me, Yves,” said the miller, his hat respectfully across his chest.

“Yes?”

“But what do you plan to do with the meat? My wife's been hankering after some good horse, and I'd pay you fair.”

“Hammadi is not for sale,” I managed to say, though my throat was tight.

“But it's not your horse anymore, lad—it's meat.”

“Is there someone else to whom I could bring my grain, come winter?”

“Hang it, Yves, I didn't mean to—”

“Hang it, indeed.”

I brought my brother the strap, and with my knife he teased open the leg of Ruth's trousers while I fetched a board. He bared her white, hairless leg, mottled with a clotting mound of a bruise, to the grass and sky, and my neighbors piled shamelessly around to watch. Speaking to her softly, he gave a great tug at her foot, at which she screamed and her head dropped to the ground. Anya and Desvres's wife were immediately patting her face and hands as Mandrik felt along the ugly welt on her leg. “I think it's straight,” he said, “if you'll bring me the board.”

With the knife he planed the roughest edges from the wood, lifted her leg until the board was flat beneath, and bound her to it with the straps. When the women succeeded in waking her, she looked at the apparatus in terror, her face wet and pale with pain. “For God's sake, Yves, why didn't you step on the fucking brakes?”

“She raves,” said Anya, a son picking lazily at the hem of her skirt. “Someone fetch water.”

“Why didn't I what?”

“Lift her carefully,” Mandrik directed as Ydlbert and Dirk moved her to their hay-strewn cart, “and lay her down with reverence.”

“Step on the fucking brakes.”

Her vituperation stung me though I knew not what she meant. “Step?”

She made a weak fist and banged on the floor of the cart. “You don't have brakes?”

I said, “What is she talking about?”

“It's true,” Mandrik said, climbing into the cart beside her, “but you needn't worry about it now.”

“How do you stop the thing?”

“We try not to go too quickly, and when necessary we turn uphill.”

“I can't believe I didn't notice this.” She shook her head, her face weary. “We've got work to do, Yves.”

Mandrik smoothed her brow and said, “Tomorrow,” and lifted his chin to Dirk to signal the cart into motion.

“And don't bury those people without checking their pockets,” she called, as Thea, hale as ever, bore her away. “We're going to need their wallets.”

Each man carried a small, worn leather case in one of the zippered places on his person. In each such case was a wafer bearing a remarkable likeness alongside a name in perfect lettering—John Boogaerts and Thomas Ulyanov, the strangest appellations I had ever beheld. Also therein were wafers with letters and numbers, papers covered with intricate designs in moss-green ink, and tiny images, no larger than the palm of a child's hand, of people—in the one, a smiling young woman in a rosy chemise, her hair in a halo of curls, and in the other a fat child of indeterminate sex whose cheeks and forehead glistened. Both people sat stiffly before their blue backgrounds like saints, but were depicted with a loving precision no artist's brush could achieve even with the finest paints of gold and lapis lazuli.

“Photographs,” Ruth said, waving them away with her hand from her new place in our bed. We would spend the night on her pallet that she might better rest—for when one is to pass into the next world, it is best to do it from a proper bedstead. Mandrik, too, wished to stay, in case the patient needed him during the night, and sat meanwhile on the bed beside her, sponging her brow with a mother's care. “Please, I don't want to see them. It's terrible.”

How full she was of words, and how disdainful of wonders.

“Their families?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. Those poor men.”

“Father Stanislaus will give them a proper funeral. Their souls will be in peace.”

“Sure,” Mandrik said. “If they were Christians.”

Adelaïda gave her a new bowl of a soporific tea and a pipeful of something sharp-smelling Mandrik had brought to ease the pain.

“I don't think you should bury them yet. Wait a day or two. They'll come looking.”

“Who?”

She shrugged her shoulders and closed her eyes. In her homeland, I supposed, people did not always give straight answers.

“If it happens,” Mandrik said, “we'll worry about it then. But the reek of decay waits for no man.”

“How,” I asked, since she was not answering, “do they make such likenesses?”

She opened her eyes again and wrinkled her forehead at me.

“The photographs,” Mandrik interpreted.

“With a machine that makes impressions of light. Because we see everything we see as a result of light. The machine records the subtle modulations.”

“The two of them,” Adelaïda mumbled, pointing bedward. “Not exactly married to plain sense.”

“Does everyone have photographs?”

Ruth exhaled the pungent smoke, which made my head dance. “Hundreds of them. Thousands.”

“You also, then?”

The fire crackled its reply long before she herself decided to. “In my bag, toward the top, there's a red notebook, if you'll bring it to me.”

Her possessions were strange to the touch—the fabrics soft, all sliding from my grasp, and other things as cool and slippery as fish in the summer stream. The book, like all her writing places, was pierced at regular intervals and bound with a neat wire coil—a most practical innovation. One of her ink-filled implements was clipped to the front. “Here,” I said, handing it to her, and hoping that my eyes did not convey the intimacy of what my hands had uncovered.

She rubbed her dry hand along its cover before propping it open in her lap. “Okay,” she said. Adelaïda brought a tallow candle and perched beside me at the bed's edge. Elizaveta, who had swaddled Pudge in newly carded wool and smelled sweet from the oil, climbed gingerly up next to Ruth, steering clear, by intuition, of her injured leg. Inside the notebook she had stashed a pile of images, all larger than the first I had seen. On top was a picture of two girl children, bright with health and wearing identical red dresses. “Me,” she said, “and my sister, Nurit.”

“Where's you?” Elizaveta asked.

Ruth pointed to the child on the left, shorter of stature and wider of eye. “When I was little, like you.”

“You were little?”

“How, exactly, do they freeze the light?”

She tilted the image back and forth, allowing the candlelight to reflect on the smooth surface. “I'm not sure I can explain it, really.” She looked to Mandrik as if he knew the answer, but he shook his head. “It records it on something clear, and you can shine light through it again to print the photograph on special paper.” Surely, I surmised, if she had such apparatus with her, she would have shown us how it worked. She placed herself and her sister beside her on the blanket, revealing another image, of three people before a shockingly white house. The figure on the left was clearly her, and on the right, no doubt, this same sister; between them was a tall, serious young man in a black robe and wearing jewels in his ears—perhaps the custom of her country. Neither woman smiled, though neither looked unhappy. They were so slender, as if someone had stretched them out. ‘That's my brother, Eli. He doesn't usually look so grim, but that was his high school graduation. He's in college, now.”

Did she invent these words purely for my pleasure? They coursed through me like the fire of whiskey on a winter's night. As I was about to point to some black lines, thin as spiderwebs, on her sister's narrow face, she said, “Those are eyeglasses, to help her see. Her vision's bad.” I wanted to blow the Eyeglasses away and look at the face more closely. Mandrik bent down, lips open in concentration, to examine her family's faces.

Next, all in gray like the house by the light of the embers before sunrise, were a woman in a white dress and a man in gray, both looking past their shoulders at something in the distance. The woman looked like Ruth, but younger, or with less about which to worry. “That's my parents' wedding,” she said, and flipped to another image of them, barely clothed such that it made my heart leap, and lying still as the dead on a pale, pocked surface. “Whoops,” she said, “my parents at the beach,” and promptly turned them face down to the sheet. Ruth a child again, bright as a jewel, with one hand in a large bowl and the mother's bare, splendid arm reaching across her shoulders. All three children sun-dazed in vivid grass. The mother, older now, sitting behind a dark
wooden table with her hands folded, her eyes obscured by a sparkling haze. The two young women, bare-shouldered, wrapped in one another's arms, Ruth's grin as wide as the sky and her sister's more hesitant.

“That's exactly how she smiles,” Ruth said. “That's her exact face.”
¹

Mandrik said, “You look happy together.”

She blew a speck of dust from the paper. “She's my best friend.”

Mandrik's eyes searched mine, then turned back to the image.

Suddenly, though there were photographs beneath these we had not yet seen, she closed the book over them and placed it beneath her pillow. “That's my family,” she said, and began to worry her lower lip between her teeth.

Mandrik said, “Show us the others.”

I, too, yearned for the rest of the pile. “I wish I could look at my family, thus. Especially those who are gone now.”

“Which I guess is why we do it, take photographs. Which is darker than I used to think.”

Elizaveta said, “More.”

“No more,” Ruth said. Mandrik again mopped her face. “I miss them so much. It breaks my heart to look at them.” She did not move them before she retired. Just as my siblings appeared to me dancing and whispering of what was to come, so too, I am certain, did hers whisper beneath her head that evening as she sought peace amid her feverish dreams.

Clive came alone that night, without brother or sister, without even the sweet instruments that usually accompanied their arrival. I would not even have known to wake for his coming had his glow not pierced like sunlight my closed eyes. When I regarded him, he was sprawled casually over the pallet on which we slept, but a few inches above it; beneath him the covers glowed. “Tragic,” he said, though his face was too radiant for real solemnity.

“The crash?”

He nodded.

I began to panic. “Their souls—”

“They don't know up from down, a sudden change like that. They're wandering, sleepless and cold.”

“Don't tell me things like that, Clive.”

“It's no need to fear. These things always settle down in the end.”

“Where are Marvin and Eglantine?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Busy. So much news.”

“News of what?”

“So much changing, hereabouts.”

“Tell me what happens to the souls of horses.”

He shook his head no. “Keep your eyes open, Yves.”

“Open for what?”

“Just open.” He began to grow airy and thin.

“Clive, don't leave like this.”

“Rather,” he whispered, “should you bid me joy on my return to bliss.” He left behind a delicious odor, like ripe fruit.

Mandrik, hunched over the table in the light of the dying fire, had watched our whole exchange, and his eyes, doubtless tired from working in the dim light, grew misty.

“You should sleep,” I told him.

“He might have said hello.”

“Perhaps he had other business.”

Mandrik bent his head into his hands and scratched it slowly. “How much business do you really think they have, on the other side?”

“What are you working on?”

“Go back to sleep, Yves, before you wake the women.” He dipped his pen, wiped the excess from the nib, and resumed his rhythmic scratching. Late in the night Friedl Vox came up the road, rending the air like a screech owl with her incoherent cries, but Mandrik did not even look up to catch my eye.

Gerald Desvres, who had a steady hand for carving, traced the letters I stenciled onto two blocks of granite: “John Boogaerts—Fell from the Sky” and “Thomas Ulyanov—Also Fell.” He leaned them against the alder by the wormy pits to which we planned to consign the bodies. Heinrik and Jepho Martin built caskets of pine and good nails. I myself gave winding sheets, for my wife weaves linen softer than any in the
village, and it seemed most likely to provide comfort in the journey to the regions beyond. Dithyramb lent two large shovels. Stanislaus took their strange mangled clothes and promised to commission a great reliquary that we might visit them in church. Ruth could not attend the ceremony for her countrymen—even had she been able to move, Adelaïda had cut her free of the remains of her trousers before we put her to bed—but Mandrik left her with a tankard of water and a basket of fruit. The rest of the village turned out, as well as the Archduke's attache and a great throng from the city of Nnms, who had heard the airplane's impact and the subsequent tales of our disaster, and had come later to investigate. There was no outright weeping, for none of us had known these men, and all had been frightened by their mode of arrival. Our eyes did, however, grow red with empathy, and I shed a few tears for Hammadi. Mandrik, who usually stood near to assist the soul of the departed in its journey, hung back by the cemetery gate, his hands buried each up the opposite sleeve.