Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  “Rain falls on everyone; lightning strikes some,” her friend Kanchay observed. “What cannot be changed is best forgotten,” he advised, not with callousness, but with a certain quality of practical resignation that Sofia shared with the Runa villagers of Rakhat. “God made the world and He saw that it was good,” Sofia’s father had always told her when she complained of some injustice during her brief childhood. “Not fair. Not happy. Not perfect, Sofia. Good.”

  Good for whom? she had often wondered, first with juvenile petulance and later with the weariness of a woman of fourteen, working the streets of Istanbul in the midst of an incomprehensible civil war.

  She had almost never cried. Child to woman, Sofia Mendes had never gotten anything by crying except a headache. From the time she was able to talk, her parents dismissed tears as the cowardly tactic of the weak-minded and schooled her in the Sephardic tradition of clear argument; she got her way not by sniveling, but by defending her position as logically and persuasively as she could, within the limits of her neurological development. When, barely pubescent and already hardened by the realities of urban combat, she had stood over her mother’s mortar-mangled corpse, she was too shocked to cry. Neither did she cry for the father who simply failed to come home one day or ever again: there was no particular time to pass from anxiety to mourning. Nor did she sympathize with the other destitute young whores when they cried. She held herself together and did not spoil her looks with a puffy, blotched face, so she ate more regularly than the others and was strong enough to jam a knife between ribs if a client tried to cheat or kill her. She sold her body, and when the opportunity eventually presented itself, she sold her mind—for a much better price. She survived, and got out of Istanbul alive with her dignity intact, because she would not yield to emotion.

  She might not have mourned at all, had it not been for a nightmare in her seventh month of pregnancy, when she dreamed that her baby had been born with blood pouring from its eyes. Waking horrified to the solid heaviness within her, she wept first with relief, realizing that she was still pregnant and a baby’s eyes could not bleed that way. But the dike had crumbled, and she was at long last engulfed by an oceanic sadnesss. Drowning in a sea of loss, she wrapped her arms around her taut, round belly, and wept and wept, with no words, no logic, no intelligence to shield her, and understood that it was this—this terror, this pain—that she had fled from all her life, and with good reason.

  As unfamiliar as she was with tears, it was a terrible thing to cry now, and feel only one side of her face wet—and with that realization, grief became hysteria. Alarmed by her sobbing, Kanchay asked anxiously, “Sipaj, Fia, have you dreamt of the ones who are gone?” But she could not answer or even lift her chin in assent, so Kanchay and his cousin Tinbar swayed and held her, and looked to the sky for the storm that would surely come now that someone had made a fierno. Others came to her as well, asking after her dead and donating ribbons for her arms, as she cried.

  In the end, her own exhaustion saved her when no one else could. Never again, she vowed as she fell asleep, emptied of emotion at last. I will never let this happen to me again. Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.

  The baby kicked, as if in protest.

  SHE WOKE IN KANCHAY’S EMBRACE WITH TINBAR’S TAIL CURLED OVER her legs. Sweating, her face asymmetrically swollen, she disentangled herself from the others and rose awkwardly, lumbering big-bellied toward the creek with a dark chaninchay, newly made from the broad, shallow shell of a forest pigar. She stood for a few moments, then lowered herself carefully, reaching out into the stream to fill the bowl. Kneeling, she dipped her hands over and over into the cool pure water, sluicing it over her face. Then, filling the bowl once more, she waited for the black water to still before using it as a mirror.

  I am not Runa! she thought, amazed.

  This strange loss of self-image had happened to her before; several months into her first overseas AI contract in Kyoto, she was startled each morning to look into a bathroom mirror and discover that she was not Japanese like everyone around her. Now, here, her own human face seemed naked; her dark, snarled hair bizarre; her ears small and inadequate; her single-irised eye too simple and frighteningly direct. Only after she had come to grips with all this did the rest sink in: the slanting, three-tracked scar that sliced from forehead to jaw. The blind, cratered … place.

  “Someone’s head hurts,” she told Kanchay, who had followed her to the creek and sat down beside her.

  “Like Meelo,” said Kanchay, who had witnessed Emilio Sandoz’s migraines and considered headache a normal foreign response to grief. He settled back onto a thick-muscled, tapering tail and made a tripod with his upraised legs. “Sipaj, Fia, come and sit,” he suggested, and she held out her hand so he could steady her as she moved to him.

  He began to tidy her hair, combing through it section by section with his fingers, untangling knots with a Runao’s sensitive touch. She gave herself up to this, and listened to the forest grow quiet in the midday heat. Occupying her own hands as little Askama always had while sitting in Emilios lap, Sofia picked up the ends of three ribbons tied around her arm and began to plait them. Askama had often braided ribbons into Anne Edwards’s hair and Sofia’s, but none of the foreigners had ever been offered body ribbons to wear. “Probably because we wear clothes,” Anne had thought, but it was just a guess.

  “Sipaj, Kanchay, someone wonders about the ribbons,” Sofia said, looking up at him, turning her head to see from her left side. She was a little shortsighted in that eye. A pity, she thought, that the Jana’ata who’d half-blinded her hadn’t been right-handed—he’d have taken the bad eye instead.

  “We gave you this one for Dee, and this is for Ha’an,” Kanchay told her, lifting the ribbons, one by one, his breath perfumed with the heathery scent of the njotao greens that formed the bulk of their diet this week. “These, for Djordj and for Djimi. These, for Meelo and Marc.”

  Her throat closed as she listened to the names, but she was done with crying. It came back to her then that Askama had tried to tie two ribbons on Emilio after D.W. and Anne were killed, but he had been so sick. “Not for beauty, then,” Sofia asked, “but to remember the ones who are gone?”

  Kanchay chuffed, the breathy laughter kindly. “Not to remember! To fool them! If ghosts come back, they’ll follow the scent, back into the air where they belong. Sipaj, Fia, if you dream of those ones again, you should tell someone,” he warned her, for Kanchay VaKashan was a prudent man. Then he added, “Sometimes ribbons are just pretty. The djanada think they’re only decoration. Sometimes that’s true.” He laughed again and confided, “The djanada are like ghosts. They can be fooled.”

  Anne would have followed up with questions about why ghosts come back, and when and how; Emilio and the other priests would have been delighted by the ideas of scent and spirit and congress with an unseen world. Sofia picked up the ribbons, running the satiny smoothness through her fingers. Anne’s ribbon was silvery white. Like her hair, perhaps? But no—George’s hair was also white, and his ribbon was bright red. Emilio’s was green, and she wondered why. Her husband Jimmy’s was a clear and lucent blue; she thought of his eyes and raised it to her face to breathe in its fragrance. It was like hay, grassy and astringent. Her breath caught, and she put the ribbon down. No, she thought. He’s gone. I will not cry again.

  “Why, Kanchay?” she demanded then, finding anger preferable to pain. “Why did the djanada patrol burn the gardens and kill the babies?”

  “Someone thinks the gardens were wrong. The people are meant to walk to their food. It was wrong to bring the food home. The djanada know when it’s the right time for us to have babies. Someone thinks the people were confused and had the babies at the wrong time.”

  It was rude to argue, but she was hot and tired, and irritated by the way he talked down to her because she was the size of a Runa eight-year-old. “Sipaj, Kanchay—what gives the Jana’ata the right to say who can have babi
es and when?”

  “The law,” he said, as though that answered her question. Then, warming to his topic, he told her, “Sometimes the wrong baby can get into a woman. Sometimes the baby should have been a cranil, for example. In the old times, the people would take that kind of little one to the river and call out to the cranils, Here is one of your children born to us by mistake. We’d hold the baby under the water, where the cranils live. It was hard.” He was silent for a long time, concentrating on a knot in her hair, gently teasing it apart, strand by strand. “Now when the wrong child comes to us by mistake, the djanada do the hard things. And when the djanada say, This is a good child, then we know all will be well with it. A mother can travel again. A father’s heart can be quiet.”

  “Sipaj, Kanchay, what do you tell your children? About giving themselves up to the Jana’ata to be eaten?”

  His hands paused in their work and he gently brought her head to rest against his chest, his voice falling into the soft murmur of lullaby. “We tell them, In the old times, the people were alone in all the world. We traveled anywhere we liked without any danger, but we were lonely. When the djanada came, we were glad to see them and asked them, Have you eaten? They said, We’re starving! So, we offered them food—you must always feed travelers, you know. But the djanada couldn’t eat properly and they wouldn’t take the food we offered. So the people talked and talked about what to do—it’s wicked to let guests go hungry. While we were talking, the djanada began to eat the children. Our elders said, They’re travelers, they’re guests—we have to feed them, but we’ll make rules. You must not eat just anyone, we told the djanada. You must eat only the old people who are no good anymore. That’s how we tamed the djanada. Now all the good children are safe and only old, tired, sick people are taken away.”

  Sofia twisted around to look up at him. “Someone thinks: this is a pretty story for children, so they will sleep well and not make fiernos when the cullers come.” He lifted his chin and began again to comb out her hair. “Sipaj, Kanchay, someone is small, but not a child who must be shielded from truth. The djanada kill the very old and the sick and the imperfect. Do they also kill the ones who make trouble?” she demanded. “Sipaj, Kanchay, why do you let them? What gives them the right?”

  His hands stilled momentarily as he said with prosaic acceptance, “If we refuse to go with the cullers when it’s time, others must take our places.” Before she could reply, he reached down to stroke her belly as he would have his own wife’s. “Sipaj, Fia, surely this baby is ripe by now!”

  The subject was officially changed. “No,” she said, “not yet. Perhaps sixty nights more.”

  “So long! Someone thinks you will pop like a datinsa pod.”

  “Sipaj, Kanchay,” she said, with a nervous laugh, “maybe so.”

  Fear and hope, fear and hope, fear and hope, circling endlessly. Why am I so afraid? I am Mendes, she thought. Nothing is beyond me.

  But she had also been—however briefly—joyously Quinn: happy for a single summer of nights and days, the unlikely wife of an absurdly tall and comically homely and wondrously loving Irish Catholic astronomer. And now, Jimmy was dead, killed by the djanada—

  Feeling Kanchay’s fingers working through her hair once more, she leaned back against him and looked across the clearing to the others of his kind: talking, cooking, laughing, tending babies. It could be worse, she thought then, remembering Jimmy’s habitual good-natured response to crisis, and gasping at his baby’s kick. I am Sofia Mendes Quinn, and things could be worse.

  Naples

  September 2060

  SOMETIMES IF HE KEPT STILL, PEOPLE WOULD GO AWAY.

  A lay chauffeur had lived here once. The room over the garage was only a few hundred meters from the retreat house, but that was distance enough most of the time, and Emilio Sandoz claimed it for his own with a fierce possessiveness that surprised him. He had added very little to the apartment—photonics, sound equipment, a desk—but it was his. Exposed rafters and plain white walls. Two chairs, a table, a narrow bed; a little kitchen; a shower stall and toilet behind a folding screen.

  He accepted that there were things he could not control. The nightmares. The devastating spells of neuralgia, the damaged nerves of his hands sending strobelike bolts of pain up his arms. He’d stopped fighting the crying jags that came without warning; Ed Behr was right, it only made the headaches worse. Here, alone, he could try to roll with the punches—absorb the blows as they came, rest when things eased up. If everyone would just leave him alone—let him handle things at his own pace on his own terms—he’d be all right.

  Eyes closed, hunched and rocking over his hands, he waited, straining to hear footsteps retreat from his door. The knocking came again. “Emilio!” It was the Father General’s voice and there was a smile in it. “We have an unexpected visitor. Someone has come to meet you.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Sandoz whispered, getting to his feet and tucking his hands under his armpits. He went down the creaking stairs to the side door below and stopped to gather himself, pulling in a ragged breath and letting it out slowly. With a short, sharp movement of his elbow, he flipped the hook out of its eye on the door frame. Waited, doubled over and silent. “All right,” he said finally. “It’s open.”

  There was a tall priest standing in the driveway with Giuliani. East African, Sandoz thought, barely glancing at him, his flat-eyed stare resting instead on the Father General’s face. “It’s not a good time, Vince.”

  “No,” Giuliani said quietly, “evidently not.” Emilio was leaning against the wall, holding himself badly, but what could one do? If Lopore had called ahead.… “I’m sorry, Emilio. A few minutes of your time. Allow me to—”

  “You speak Swahili?” Sandoz asked the visitor abruptly, in a Sudanese-accented Arabic that came back to him out of nowhere. The question seemed to surprise the African, but he nodded. “What else?” Sandoz demanded. “Latin? English?”

  “Both of those. A few others,” the man said.

  “Fine. Good enough. He’ll do,” Sandoz said to Giuliani. “You’ll have to work by yourself for a while,” he told the African. “Start with the Mendes AI program for Ruanja. Leave the K’San files alone for now. I didn’t get very far with the formal analysis. Next time, call before you come.” He glanced at Giuliani, who was clearly dismayed by the rudeness. “Explain about my hands, Vince,” he muttered apologetically, as he started back up to his room. “It’s both of them. I can’t think.” And it’s your own damned fault for dropping in uninvited, he thought. But he was too close to tears to be defiant, and almost too tired to register what he heard next.

  “I have been praying for you for fifty years,” said Kalingemala Lopore in a voice full of wonder. “God has used you hard, but you have not changed so much that I cannot see who you were.”

  Sandoz stopped in his climb to the apartment and turned back. He remained hunched, arms crossed against his chest, but now looked closely at the priest standing next to the Father General. Sixtyish—maybe twenty years younger than Giuliani, and just as tall. Ebony and lean, with the strong bones and deep wide eyes that gave East African women beauty into old age and which made this man’s face arresting. Fifty years, he thought. This guy would have been what? Ten, eleven?

  Emilio glanced at Giuliani to see if he understood what was going on, but the Father General now seemed as much at a loss as Sandoz, and as startled by the visitor’s words. “Did I know you?” Emilio asked.

  The African seemed lit from within, the extraordinary eyes glowing. “There is no reason for you to remember me and I never knew your name. But you were known to God when you were still in your mother’s womb—like Jeremiah, whom God also used cruelly.” And he held out both hands.

  Emilio hesitated before descending the stairs once more. In a gesture that felt, achingly, both familiar and alien, he placed his own fingers, scarred and impossibly long, into the pale, warm palms of the stranger.

  All these years, Lopore was thinking, his ow
n shock so great that he forgot the artificiality of the plurals he had forced himself to master. “I remember the magic tricks,” he said, smiling, but then he looked down. “Such beauty and cleverness, destroyed,” he said sadly and, bringing the hands to his lips, kissed one and then the other unselfconsciously. It was, Sandoz thought later, an alteration in blood pressure perhaps, some quirk of neuromuscular interaction that ended the bout of hallucinatory neuralgia at last, but the African looked up at that moment, and met Emilio’s bewildered eyes. “The hands were the easy part, I think.”

  Sandoz nodded, mute, and frowning, searched the other man’s face for some clue.

  “Emilio,” Vincenzo Giuliani said, breaking the eerie silence, “perhaps you will invite the Holy Father to come upstairs?”

  For a hushed instant, Sandoz stared in blank astonishment and then blurted, “Jesus!” To which the Bishop of Rome replied, with unexpected humor, “No, only the Pope,” at which the Father General laughed aloud, explaining dryly, “Father Sandoz has been a little out of touch the past few decades.”

  Dazed, Emilio nodded again and led the way up the staircase.

  TO BE FAIR, THE POPE HAD COME ALONE AND UNANNOUNCED, DRESSED IN the simplest of clericals, having driven himself in an unremarkable Fiat to the Jesuit retreat north of Naples. The first African elected to the papacy since the fifth century and the first proselyte in modern history to hold that office, Kalingemala Lopore was now Gelasius III, entering the second year of a remarkable reign; he had brought to Rome both a convert’s deeply felt conviction and a farsighted faith in the Church’s universality, which did not confuse enduring truth with ingrained European custom. At dawn, ignoring politics and diplomatic rigidity, Lopore had decided he must meet this Emilio Sandoz, who had known God’s other children, who had seen what God had wrought elsewhere. Having made that decision, there was no bureaucratic force in the Vatican capable of stopping him: Gelasius III was a man of formidable self-possession and unapologetic pragmatism. He was the only outsider ever to get past Sandoz’s Camorra guards, and he had done so because he was willing to speak directly with the Father General’s second cousin, Don Domenico Giuliani, the uncrowned king of southern Italy.