The Testament of Yves Gundron (8 page)

“What is this harlotry?” she shrieked, one bony finger imagining it traced the wild line of Ruth's hair. “Iulia Gansevöort, back from the grave? Do you accept a stranger amongst you?”

“It is a stranger,” Mandrik replied, “but not the one you think.”

“How could I forget the sea's stench upon her, cursed witch? Banish! Banish! Why do you accept this vileness?”

“Because she's our first visitor,” I said. “Our first since my grandmother's time.”

“And it seems our duty as Christians,” said Stanislaus, “to treat her charitably, at least until she proves her thralldom to Darkness.”

“Please,” Ruth said. “I wouldn't hurt you.” Her face did not remain composed.

Mandrik placed himself between her and Friedl's pointing. “Friedl, haven't you anyone else to curse today?”

“You think it's easy, don't you?”

Jude, as always, gave up hiding behind his neighbors and went forth to claim what once had been his mother. “Come on then, Mum,” he said. “I'll give you a pudding if you'll quit it.”

“Ever trying to distract me from the work of God with baubles and fruits.”

“Aye,” he said.

She looked at the ground, then cried:

“Stop it, Mum. Iulia Gansevöort's safe under her cairn.”

She sighed and followed him off, holding loosely to his sleeve as if it might be diseased.

Mandrik turned back to our visitor. “You'll forgive us, I hope, the peculiarities of some of our neighbors. Particularly Friedl Vox.”

Ruth arched her mobile eyebrows, but did not otherwise reply.

“This is a great day for my village,” said Mandrik. “On all our behalf, I extend my warm welcome.”

“Thank you.”

“Provided,” Stanislaus interjected, his voice cracking, “you do not prove, as Friedl suggests, demonic in nature.”

“And,” my Uncle Frith added, his barley ale dripping into his beard, “that someone cover her naked body from sight.”

Stanislaus said, “We'll keep our watch upon her, aye.”

“I'm not a spirit.” She looked down at herself. “And please excuse my clothes. I dressed for the hike; I wasn't really thinking whom I might offend once I got here. I'll try to do something about it. I promise you, though, I'm not naked.” No one would be the one to tell her she was wrong, so we scratched our ears, swallowed, and looked around. Stanislaus, against his nature, and as it seemed against his will, recovered enough to bow to her, his Adam's apple bobbing. Ruth bestowed upon him a frank smile such as none of his parishioners ever offered him. He must have been disarmed, for his wan face glowed with pleasure. When she turned to Mandrik, he also bowed, and smiled at her warmly. “It will be,” he said, “such a pleasure to talk to you.”

She nodded. “And a pleasure to talk to you.” When Anya returned with chicken legs and bread, Ruth sat down cross-legged in the grass and ate with her hands as gracefully as another might eat with his spoon at table. Mandrik seemed pleased at her hearty appetite, and sat down with her to discuss whatever were their topics. The crowd dispersed to more frenzied merrymaking; I left my brother and this stranger in peaceful communion over their black bread. As I walked off, fear rose, unbidden, in my throat. I tried to swallow it or shoo it off, but it would not go. Behind me I heard my wife singing:

The sun set upon my drunken compatriots gorging and rollicking in the grove past Desvres's field, but I retired home. Yoshu was waiting out by the road for me, and she barked happily, but I was not anxious to see her flea-bitten face. Vringle, the billy goat, and the lambs Squelcher and Norwald all bleated their hellos when I entered the barn, the one place a man is safe to collect his thoughts. I was lonely. It felt sad to know that Hammadi, without me, was still at the ball in her merriment, but I could smell the sweet, warm comfort of her, and I sat myself down in her clean straw. I heard the soft, lovely suck of the lambs nursing at their mothers, and Sophronia's great, unhurried mouth at work on a parcel of hay. Ragan, our she-pig, snored, as her mate, Mauritius, scratched at the dirt floor. I looked at the writing box Mandrik had long ago given me, which I kept near Hammadi, my other treasure, and wished I knew what to do with it. Little did I know then how soon pen and paper would become my closest companions. When at last the night grew cold—how did the animals stand it without the fire I allowed them only in midwinter?—I retired to my house, built up the fire, and waited in the night's uncustomary silence for my wife, daughter, and horse to return.

My brother belonged to no order, and worshipped—much to the priest's annoyance—beyond the confines of Father Stanislaus's church. He had taken, however, a vow of chastity, daily mortification, and prayer when he reached the flower of his manhood in his seventeenth year. Much had already befallen us—the deaths of our parents, two brothers, and a sister—and while I had taken a wife to ease my misery, he had resolved both to renounce the world and to set off in search of it. His work, he explained—the work of the treatise which soon took him to Indo-China—demanded the full force of his carnal drive. It was what holy men did, after all, and we knew by then that God had
touched him, for he saw visions both of the dead and of things to come,
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and had already begun his most propitious experiments with trees.

“But,” I warned him, thinking with fondness of the various wonders of my wife's body (God rest my lovely Elynour's soul), “you don't know what you're missing.”

He did not like what he had heard nights by our fire, and would not squander himself on women and their weird fecundity. “Every time you touch one, out comes another mouth to feed. At least in most families.” He had an ordinary man's strength of conviction, though he dressed in the robes of a mendicant or a madman.

“How can you say that when so many die, with Clive, Marvin, Eglantine, and both our parents gone off to the other side? It's a good thing they had lots of children.”

“If you don't have the mouths to feed, you have heartbreak. I can afford neither.”

He had never, to my knowledge, broken any of his vows. Still the community watched him ever to see when his resolve would crack. Wido Jungfrau and our Uncle Frith used him for the butt of every joke; and indeed, none of us knew to what extent his vows emanated from the depths of his soul, and to what extent nothing particularly tempting had happened by to lead him astray. I was only somewhat surprised, therefore, when late that night the dog began barking wildly and my wife came in with the glow of the hops about her and Ruth Blum, too tall to pass through my doorway upright, in tow. My daughter, tagging after her, was half suffocated in her string. Immediately I grabbed the child and freed her arms, though the ale still coursed through my blood.

Adelaïda was watching me closely. “Yves,” she said, “it would not have been right for Mandrik to host the stranger in his house, even though they get on so well; he never would have lived it down. And you know, everyone else is more afraid of her than we, so I brought her home. I hope you don't mind. She says she has blankets for sleeping.”

“I don't want to impose on you,” Ruth said. Obviously she had never been in a house before, for her eyes fixed with uncouth interest on objects I had never bothered to notice—the iron kettle, the
well-kempt central hearth, a straw hat Mandrik had brought from the Beyond that hung over our bed, some flowered red silk he had also brought back, hanging, our only other decoration, on the long wall by Elizaveta's hammock.

“What are you staring at?” I asked her, perhaps too sharply.

“Excuse me, I didn't mean to.”

“No,” I said, “I beg your pardon. It's an honor to have you,” and trusted, once again, that the sentiment would follow its utterance; an honor, who could say, but if nought else a thing of interest.

“You don't mind my staying? It's not an imposition?”

“We will be pleased to have you among us.”

“I'll be happy to help around here, if there's anything I can do.”

I nodded—even with the harness, our lives were full, dawn to dusk, with work—but she did not see me, having already turned to settle her backpack in the corner by the upended washtub. Adelaïda sat onto the bed, and Elizaveta pulled her wooden doll from beneath her mother's pillow to show the visitor. Soon Ruth was kneeling on the floor, touching the doll's bald head. “What's her name?”

“Pudge.” Elizaveta grinned and galloped out the door into the night.

“Ruth,” I said. “Please sit down with me.”

She took the bench on the opposite side of the table.

“Tell me why you've come here.”

Her black eyes blinked twice, then shone in the light of the fire.

“I have told you already you are welcome in my home and in this village. But I want to know what brought you here.”

Her head shook, willing her low voice to speak. “Like I said, Yves, I lost my compass, I lost my way. I was looking for you, but it's dumb luck that I found you.”

“And, as you say, Mandragora is quite different from your home.”

She nodded her head, but regarded the table.

“Different how?”

She shrugged her sharp, square shoulders. “Every way you can think of, really. I don't know how to begin. How our houses look, how we travel, how we dress. The food we eat, how we cook it, how we talk. Everything.”

Her words were vague, but they tantalized like the odor of bread in the oven. “But how?”

Her brows knitted together. They were fantastic, so often did they move. “Yves, you've never left Mandragora?”

“We go to the market in town. I told you, only my brother has left.”

“And did he tell you what it was like in the world?”

“Yes, but what he described along the Silk Road—the farms full of cocoons, the rice fields, the steep hats, like that one—seems to bear little relation to you.”

“Where did you say he went?”

“To Indo-China.”

She raised half of her mouth in a smile, which made a solitary dimple. “Is there a Silk Road in Vietnam?”

“Indo-China.” I felt myself growing cross.

“He left here, went directly to Vietnam, and came back again? I don't follow.”

“Do you malign my brother? Do you contradict his word?”

“No, I'm not maligning him. He's been really—he seems nice.”

“And yet?”

“I'm trying to make sense of what you're telling me.”

“As I am trying to make sense,” I said, “of what you're telling me.”

Elizaveta ran back in, looked about at us all, and went to her mother on the bed.

“Ruth,” I said, more gently, “I want to know why you've come here.”

Her forehead wrinkled like the waves of the sea drawn on a map. “Because I'm a graduate student in anthropology.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I study people, Yves. I'm here to study you.”

Her expression was guilty, but I was uncertain why. “You look as if you were ashamed of study.”

“Not at all, no. But I don't want to—I wouldn't want to belittle you, by making you my subjects.”

“We're the subjects of the Archduke,” Adelaïda gently interjected.

“And subject,” I added, “to the will of God. We know our place.” Still her forehead remained vexed. “Something yet troubles you.”

“Sort of. I'm not sure if it'll make sense to you.”

“If what will?” It was difficult work trying to follow all her meaning.

“I feel dumb telling you this, Yves.”

“Nay, it seems to go easy enough with your tongue and the words, though they're not always clear to me.”

At last her brow relaxed, and the lopsided grin passed again across her mouth—the expression reminded me of my brother's arch humor. “The reason I came here, Yves, instead of going someplace else, is that I felt Mandragora calling; to me.” I had never known such a feeling, but I remembered the fire in my brother's eyes when the Beyond first beckoned to him. “I'm sorry if that sounds strange.”

“Not so strange,” I told her. “How long did it call you before you took heed?”

She closed her eyes, and opened them again slowly. “I've been thinking about Mandragora a long time, since I was a child. I always believed it was here, even though there was no empirical proof. No one knew anything about you, really, but I could feel this place in my bones. And lately I began to feel like it was my duty to come. Like, if I didn't do it, nobody ever would.”

I felt certain that, if I sat quiet, the whole of her tale would unfold. She worked a fingernail between the boards of the table. “Yves, listen. My mother was in Scotland—on the mainland—once when she was young, and she came looking for you—looking for your parents, I suppose—but she never found the village. She told me story after story, though, about how she thought you did things here, so remote from the world. And nothing ever came of it—she never found you, and she never did what she wanted with her life; she sat around and raised three kids and that was the end of it. She died right before New Year's, and I began to think that I should come here and do it for her, in her honor.” She worked the nail deeper into the crack, and I wondered if she would be able to extract it when the time came. “Do you know what I'm talking about?”

Death had visited this hearth so frequently that I was almost ashamed to tell her. “Yes.”