Sunday's Silence: A Novel

by Gina nahai

  In his absence I roamed the house alone and wondered at the unforgiving order of the objects that filled every room, the silence that ruled not just the house but the entire town, the people who strode past our windows, walking slowly, as if without a destination or hope of ever arriving. I paused before the mirrors and looked at my own, now unfamiliar, image, repeated out loud the words I had learned that day and let their echo—so foreign it made my heart ache—rest in my ears. I touched the hard surfaces of wood and glass and marble in the house and imagined the soft earth, the emerald grasslands I had recently left behind. I imagined my father drinking in a corner of our tent, wondered if he thought of me, if he wished, as I did, that we could undo the past, reach for each other, make peace. I wondered if my mother still painted her hands,

  looked at my own palms and tried to imagine the lines she had drawn there and that had long since faded. I wondered about the snakes in her mind.

  The Professor returned home at exactly ten minutes to seven, having walked the fifty-minute distance from the university, and put his hat on the chair directly next to the front door. In the kitchen he asked that I watch and learn as he prepared our meal—French cuisine, he said, the finest in the world. After dinner he retreated into his study to work, and I went to bed alone.

  He came in late at night, changed in the next room, slipped quietly into bed. Then he lay with his eyes open and stared at the ceiling. Even when he fell asleep he looked half awake, charged to the point of paralysis, afraid of his own thoughts. And he never touched me.

  He kept me in a state of suspended doubt, never declaring his intentions or explaining his acts. He spent hours taking care of the smallest details—the edge of the crease in his trousers, the sharpness of the blade he used to shave his face, the curve in the letters he taught me to write. But he did not address the larger, more important questions—why he had married me, what he expected our life together should be, why, having managed to shape me into the image he preferred, he did not show the slightest intention of claiming a spouse’s rights from me.

  He is a quiet man, my husband. He carries his silence like a box of treasures—secrets resting in the dark, gleaming and radiant and yet full of danger. He used to say that man was created to contemplate and to learn, that too much speech, unnecessary speech, spoils one’s chance for understanding. That’s why he studies dead and dying languages, he claims: to discover the mystery of words no longer spoken.

  That’s why, too, he once took an interest in the phenomenon of “talking in tongues, ” why he started attending church services in areas where he knew Holy Rollers gathered. It wasn’t religion that he pursued or believed in. In all the years I have known him, first, when he denied his Jewishness even to himself, and later, when he secretly embraced it while still hiding it from the world—in all these years the Professor has insisted that God does not exist and that faith belongs to the stupid masses. But he was fascinated by the Church of God and by the principle that one sign of receiving the Holy Spirit was the ability to talk in tongues. Outside the church, people dismissed the practice as the act of lunatics uttering incomprehensible sounds. A language, they said, was defined by its capacity to convey meaning. Anything else was noise.

  The Professor, though, thought differently. As a man who spoke many languages, he knew the mind’s capacity to store words and tongues, then to draw on them at the appropriate occasion. What if, he wondered, the Holy Rollers’ “tongues” were not meaningless sounds, but actual languages—ancient ones no longer comprehensible to ordinary men? What if our subconscious minds were capable of storing language as our genes store physical and emotional traits I What if, in a state of heightened sensitivity, the believers were able to tap into that repository, recapture the memory of tongues spoken by their ancestorsI

  What if, the Professor asked, the Holy Rollers held the key to understanding man’s capacity for language?

  His colleagues at the University heard him pose these questions, and smiled as if to imply that the Professor was strange, that one could not expect much more of a creature who had come from Egypt, or Iraq, or another one of those places that never truly exist for the West. Feeling their condescension, the Professor became more determined to prove the validity of his questions, and so he set out to find Little Sam Jenkins and test his own theories.

  Little Sam, of course, disliked him immediately.

  He disliked all outsiders, it is true, but he tolerated most of them well enough, because he felt he could impress them with his powers of oration and his unwavering faith. Even the hecklers who raided his services often went back convinced they had been in the presence of a holy power. He catered to the reporters because he wanted the fame they could bring him, and accepted the doctors because he enjoyed seeing their baffled faces once they were through examining his snakes and declared that the animals had not been defanged and that their poison was indeed potent. But the Professor was unlike anyone who had ever attended Sam s services, and this alone made him a target and so he was asked to leave, by the church s deacons at first and later by Sam himself. When he went back again, Sam told him he wasn't welcome. The Professor offered to leave his tape recorder and his notebooks in the car, but Sam wouldn 't let him in.

  Returning from that visit, my husband lay on our bed with his clothes on and his eyes open. For a long time, he was silent. Then he said he was going to take me to Sam s next meeting.

  He was going to use me to make his way into the church, hold me before Jenkins like a winning card in a high-stakes game of wills, but it never dawned on him that he was taking me to a place from which he would not be able to take me back.

  He did not believe in putting passion above reason, you see, and it did not occur to him that his wife might do so now that she had been educated and trained and exposed to the ways of civilised society.

  THAT FIRST DAY in church, I understood nothing of what Sam said, could not comprehend his mountaineer’s accent or the culture and way of thinking that led to the pronouncements he made. But I did recognise the snakes. To everyone else they were the personification of evil, symbols of their poverty, their helplessness, their sense of impotence against the world. To me, they were my mother’s madness come to life, her fears captured and placed in a box.

  I remember walking into church that day and seeing the preacher turn red and flushed the moment the Professor walked up to the front of the men s section with tape recorder in hand. Sam raised his Bible in the air and was ready to attack the Professor with his words when he saw me. Slowly, the Bible came down again. Sam looked from me to the Professor and back. He must have known everyone in the church was watching him. He put his Bible on the pulpit, cleared his throat, and began to preach.

  I sat through the service and all of Sam’s testimony thinking only of the snakes. I remember Sam opened a box and let the first snake wrap itself around his arm like a bracelet, then took it off and wound it around his head like a crown. He looked at me—glassy eyed but alert, his lips drained of color, his ears a bright, angry red. He wanted to see my reaction, I thought, to see if I was frightened, or excited, if I looked away in weakness. When I didn ’t flinch he reached down into the box and took out a fistful of smaller snakes, held his right hand out with the serpents trapped between his fingers and waved them at the church as he talked. The Professor was frozen in his seat, at once terrified and thrilled, wanting to save himself but also to record every observation he made about the worshipers’ behavior and language. All around us people were making loud clacking sounds, and someone in the back had started playing an accordion, but Little Sam was neither talking in tongues nor singing with the rest of the congregation.

  He dropped the snakes from his hand and let them slither toward the church members. Then he unwound the rattler from his head and came toward me. He was walking slowly, holding the snake in both hands with his arms outstretched—an offering, / thought, an invitation. The noise around us died down.

  Adam, I know about se
duction.

  I have heard its silent music, walked its empty, echoing chambers.

  I knew that Sam was tempting me, that he wanted to seduce me with the mystery of his faith, the danger of his actions. I knew this would be a fight to the finish—against the snakes, against him, against my husband who had brought me here for reasons that had nothing to do with faith.

  I reached out and took the snake from Sam.

  I WENT BACK with the Professor every week, and for a while the believers resisted us. But Little Sam wanted me there and his will prevailed over the suspicions of others, and so I was allowed to stay. I was given snakes to handle, and soon enough I managed to make everyone forget my husband and his tape recorder and all the science he had tried to bring to the church. The harder I fought the snakes, the stronger Ifelt and the more the believers brought faith in me.

  Little Sam was pleased with this in the beginning. He took me under his wing, spoke about me in his sermons, pointed to me as an example of how even city souls could be saved. In church, his eyes were always seeking me and his hands were grasping for me, and I could tell he wanted me—that his lust for the flesh had not been subdued by his love of the Spirit— but I stayed away from him and braced for the fight I knew was imminent. The more I resisted, the harder he tried.

  My husband saw this, of course, as did all the others, and after a while he decided he had had enough of the Holiness Church and its practitioners. The “tongues” the believers spoke, he concluded, were nothing but noise. The faith they professed was only the poor man’s opium. My handling the snakes was an invitation for death, one that he could not in good conscience allow. He told me we were not going back.

  For the first time since I had married the Professor, I disobeyed him.

  I told him I liked handling snakes, liked the kindness and friendship that the believers offered one another and that a few of them had begun to offer me. I said I would follow my conscience, whether the Professor approved of my choices or not. I was nineteen years old, I said, and ready to take charge of my own life.

  The Professor sat in his chair and examined me with the same expression he used to read his manuscripts. He was not angry, not perplexed, not even jolted by my rebellion.

  "You re trying to test your strength,” he explained, “and you want to punish yourself for leaving your mother with the snakes. ”

  The next time I heard Little Sam was preaching near Knoxville, I asked Anne Pelton to take me.

  Little Sam did not miss the meaning of my act, of course— that I had come to church without my husband or his blessing— and to him this meant only that I should give my body to him as I had given my soul to his church. For a year, he pursued me. When I refused him, he fought. When it became clear that I would fight back, he went to war.

  He began to tell the believers that I was an unholy woman who had no real faith in the Lord, that I had been sent to church by the devil. He said that I wasn’t a woman at all, that real women would have children in a marriage. He said I was the devil himself, that no one but the devil could tempt men with her looks as I did. Anne Pelton and a few others tried to speak in my defense, but Little Sam was stronger and more determined than the rest of them and so the battle went on.

  I don’t know why I stayed in church those early years. I didn’t deny Sam s accusations, you see. They were true enough, and I had no interest in portraying myself as anything other than what I was. I don’t believe in Jesus and never did; don’t believe in Holiness either. I was there only to fight the snakes. But before / knew it—before / could understand what had happened—I found myself surrounded by loving people whose friendship brought me comfort.

  Sam must have known this. It must have scared him to see me settle among his people so well. One day, in Harlan, he stood up and pointed to me in church, told me I was a temptress and a devil. I had been in his church for three years already. He said I could never come back.

  I WENT HOME dejected, and began to wonder if I had come to the end of my hope—the place from which my mother could not escape and that had driven her mad with anguish. I had given myself to the Professor thinking that the road that led out of the East might lead away from regret, given myself to the church thinking that the signs the believers followed might lead to wider, more open passages. All those years traveling along the streets of my mother's dreams, alone but for the memory of her need, I had told myself that the price I paid for the journey was worth the prospect of arrival. But my marriage to the Professor had only brought me to a house full of silence, and my battle with Sam Jenkins had ended in defeat, and so I thought that I must start again—a new page with new lines, and this time, I would draw them all myself.

  I told the Professor I wanted a child.

  It was an outlandish notion, because he and I had never made love in all the time we were married, and because he was already old—fifty-five in 1959—with no desire to act young. The very suggestion of a child made him shudder in disbelief, then stare at me as if to try and fathom my motivation.

  He told me that my desire for a child was unreasonable and incorrect. He said I was trying to absolve myself of a misplaced sense of guilt toward my mother, that I wanted to compensate with a child for the loss of the church.

  He said this with a tinge of anger, as if trying to contain his alarm at my request, and then he looked away, slightly past my face and into a void where I knew I was not allowed.

  I waited a few months, then asked again.

  He said that this was a request he would never be able to grant, that he expected me to defer to him without question. He

  acted as if I had crossed a line drawn in blood—a wide, red border across which I was not allowed.

  I told him I was adamant, that I had lived by his rules for six years and wanted to create some of my own.

  He said it was in my best interest not to perpetuate an argument I was not going to win, that he had given the matter deep and analytical thought and did not need to explain further.

  He said that having children was a choice and not an obligation, that at any rate, a woman with madness in her genes was best advised not to procreate.

  “Any child of ours,” he said, “any creature made of our blood, will be doomed from the start. ”

  I knew he was talking about more than my mother’s illness, that he feared a greater demon, was hiding from a bigger foe. Suddenly I wanted to know what it was that he had kept from me all these years—what deep and driving secret he was guarding with this silence. I asked him why he had never married before, why he had not wanted children even in his youth. I asked why he had spent twenty-five years in Europe only to abandon his life and start again in America, why he had never kept in contact with anyone from his past, why he had come to the East, a place so far from his new home, to search for a wife. The more I asked, the more he refused to answer.

  So I crawled into bed, naked to the waist, and asked again.

  WHEN he FOUND out I was pregnant, the Professor pleaded with me to abort. He took me to a doctor in town, showed me the office which was clean and sanitary and private, and asked the doctor to explain to me how the procedure would be done quickly and with little danger, how no one but a nurse would know what had happened in that room, how afterward I would have years to conceive again if I wished. Coming back from the doctor’s office, the Professor stopped at the McClung department store across from the library, and told me I could buy anything I wished, anything at all as long as I agreed not to have the child.

  My daughter had blue-black hair, purple eyes, Arab skin. She looked like those pictures you see of exotic children in foreign places with names you can’t pronounce, those girls with the piercing eyes and striking features who capture a photojournalist’s imagination and end up on the cover of magazines that write about countries you never knew existed.

  When she was born the Professor came into my room at the hospital and brought a bouquet of violets, a jug of water, a silver mirror, and a gold coin. In an
other world—the one he thought he had left behind—the water symbolized a clear conscience, the mirror stood for luck, the coin represented wealth. He stood by my bed and stared at the baby far too long, then caressed her tiny face with the side of his finger. He was sad but not angry, resigned but not resentful. He had done his best to keep her from being born, done his best, once he realized I was not going to lose her, to keep himself from being drawn into our world. Now that she was here, he accepted her without bringing faith in her presence.

  “Give her a name,” he said, “that you can easily forget.”

  I did not buy into his prophecy, did not think for a moment I was going to lose that child.

  I nursed her until she was a year old, let her sleep in my bed even after she stopped looking for me at night. I let her follow me into every corner of the house, let her talk to me until her voice filled every silence the Professor had so carefully created. He was back in his own universe by then, reading ancient manuscripts and learning new tongues, trying his best to remain oblivious to his child. I saw him only during our morning lessons and then at night, when he sat alone to eat in the dining room while my daughter and I played upstairs.

  I would take her hands into my own and place them on my eyes.

  “Make a wish,” I would say, “and I will imagine it to life.”

  She died when she was five years old.

  It WAS FALL. We were burning leaves in the yard. My daughter wore a long dress and no shoes. I was watching her from the kitchen, saw her go up to look at the flames.

  I remember thinking I should stop her.

  “Come back,” I thought, and I went to the door to call her.

  She was singing a tune, petting Mrs. Roscoes cat that had wandered into our yard. It was a quiet afternoon and the sky was clear, and I loved looking at her, loved seeing the beautiful, blessed creature that she was.

  The cat walked away. My daughter made a half turn to follow it. The hem of her skirt caught fire.