by Molly Gloss
From the threshold of the apartment Kristina said quietly, “I’ve brought a cold soup for that sick child.”
People had told her there was a baby sick with the plague in Luza’s household, and she had made this a reason to come, though she never had known Luza Kordoba more than offhandedly, didn’t know her family at all. The sick child was a pretext. Among the Planning Committees and the business clerks of the Monthly Meetings, there was a mistrust of the balloon reports and a need to hear the weather and the landscape as human eyes had seen it. Her own son Bjoro had told a few things flatly once, and after that sent people away, but Luza had been patiently telling and retelling everything she’d seen. Twice, Kristina had listened to her long, thorough account and was ashamed that she had a compulsion to hear it again. She didn’t know what she expected to get from the repetition except once more a glimpse of her own old bones standing in obdurate cold, her own watery eyes peering toward an unapproachable horizon.
The woman who might have been Luza’s spouse murmured, “Dankon,” smiling slightly, and Luza said to Kristina, looking up, “You are Bjoro’s mother, eh? Kristina? Do you know my wife, Asa? Come in and talk to us, will you.” She gestured over the scattered parts of the motor and grinned. “You can tell us how to get this put back together again, eh?”
Kristina considered her son’s mechanical knack had come from her, but she made a polite mocking sound and said, “You’re thinking I’ve got somebody else’s know-how.” She stepped out of her shoes on the doorsill and came into the house. The narrow galley table was pulled out, littered with rinds of oranges, slime and seeds of pomegranate. She had to pile up bowls in a dirty cooking pot to get a clean space at the edge of it, a place to set down the jar of soup. And then, because she was lately in the habit of making herself helpful in other people’s households, she went on for a minute, gathering up the unwashed dishes. Luza’s wife laughed quietly when she saw her doing this.
“Our mess hasn’t got to do with any of us being sick, eh? Luza’s the only one leans toward neatness in this household, and she was gone a hundred days—this is how we lived. Now she’s got home and she’s not rational, she thinks she’s punishing us, not to pick it up.” Asa wasn’t sheepish. She looked at Luza in amusement.
Luza blew an obscene sound through her lips. “Come and sit down, Kristina. When they have mice making houses in their filthy towels, they’ll pick things up maybe.”
Kristina’s own leaning was toward tidiness—it was all right with her if dust was on a shelf, but she wanted people to put things away in their places. She admired Luza’s unflinching stubbornness. “Well hell, then,” she said, and began deliberately to undo the work she’d done, to put the dirty dishes back where they’d been, and that got the two women both to laugh.
She came and sat down stiffly beside Asa, on the bare floor. The tatami mat in the room was folded up so they could lay out their work on a sheet of plastic, and the floor was hard against her buttocks. She shifted her weight, easing her bony ankles cross-footed.
Luza was getting at the greasy dust in the motor’s little intake, inefficiently poking a twisty rag down each narrow cell of the grid. There were two metal boxes sitting between them with the lids open: One was a tools box and one held a cache of nuts and washers, screws, wire. Asa rummaged in the tools box and got a wrong-sized wrench and tried it against the head of a bolt on a piece of motor that was in her lap. She held the nut on the other end with pliers while she tried another wrench and then the right one and methodically loosened the bolt. Kristina watched this impatiently, without comment. Luza’s doorstep declaration might have meant, Don’t tell us how to get this put back together.
The three of them talked politely about fractious refrigerators, and the view into the legs of the trees, and people’s habits of neatness or of sloppiness. Every little while Asa’s eyes went over to the sick child, and gradually this moved Kristina to forgive her jumbled house. She watched the baby herself. It had been more than half her life since she had sat watching a sick child of her own, but the sweetish smell of fever on the baby’s skin and the whistle of air going in and out of the child’s mouth brought a rush of vivid memory. Olinda had been prone to get infections in her ears, her sinuses, and Bjoro three times had grown cysts in his belly. She hadn’t thought of those baby days in years.
“What is that child’s name?” she asked them.
Luza looked at the baby. “Paŭlo,” she said, and looked down again, watching her own hands working. “My brother’s son,” she said, and after a silence she added, “They have another one. My brother’s wife has taken him—the other boy, Jeno—to live with her mother in Mandala until this plague is finished. She thinks maybe she can keep him from getting sick, eh?—no one’s caught plague in her mother’s house yet.”
Asa lifted her eyebrows without raising her eyes to Kristina, and said, “She should have stayed in her own house, here, with her husband and her sister-in-law. People will be thinking all this shit-talk is reasonable, that the plague is rightly named. Ruby Fever—ha! Luza’s own family believes it, people will be saying now.”
Luza released a thin sound, a hissing, without looking up from her twisting of the rag. “People will say what they want. Some people will say, Luza and Bjoro were in the Ruby with Arda and Hans for twenty days and nobody got sick, eh?” She shook her head. “Shit-talk sinks to the bottom.”
Kristina said glumly, “Sometimes it ought to have a weight tied on to it.” She was ruled, these days, by the feeling of time urgently slipping away from them all.
When the sick baby whimpered suddenly and kicked his legs, Asa pushed the motor away from her lap and took the baby boy into it. His little fingers went straight into his mouth. Asa petted him, her spread hand lifting the fine damp strands of the child’s hair. “So, so, so,” she murmured, rocking on her hips. He lay listlessly with his eyes shut, his mouth loose around the fingers. He went on whimpering dully. Kristina stood up with a soft groan and crossed the room to the sink. Asa said, rocking the child, “Is it fruit, in that soup?”
“I put papaya in it. That’s an easy thing to go down.” She washed a spoon and brought the soup and spoon back to the woman sitting on the floor with the boy clasped to her chest. Asa coaxed the child to take a little, not on the spoon but on the tip of her finger, whispering in his ear.
Luza said, finishing a long thought, “If people want to blame this New World for the plague, they don’t have to be saying it’s a bacillus.” She looked at Kristina. “It’s all the worry and nervous strain puts souls out of balance, and then sickness is let in, eh?” It was an old belief—any kura knew it to be true—and in calmer times most people had faith in it. Kristina believed it herself, and it may have been Luza’s words that made her see suddenly from the edge of her eye the aura of her world, a fluttering of colorless anxiety distilling until it became physical: red streamers. But when she startled and turned her head to look, there were the trees standing windless beyond the open casements, and rising above them a light-pole holding skyward its delicate cluster of globes, illuminating the vault of heaven. She had spent a lifetime striving to glimpse what was in the crack between her world and God’s, but these small epiphanies always came at inattentive moments; they were shadows that vanished when she focused her eyes. She sat down again with painful stiffness and pressed a fist behind her hip.
“It wasn’t sickness my son brought home with him,” she said heavily. “I thought it was grief, eh? horror of those deaths, but people just die badly sometimes, I’ve seen one or two die badly, myself, it wasn’t only that. I don’t know what he brought home inside him—but something, I don’t know, something.” She shook her head helplessly.
Luza said in surprise, “I guess I know what it is, it was in both of us.” Kristina was able to see the tender pale scalp between the individual hairs of the woman’s head—a babyish look. She must have kept her hair cropped short as stubble while on the Ruby, and by now it had begun to grow out in a brist
ly dark corona. But her broad face was dour, intent, considering what she would say. “The weather was bad, and the . . . hugeness. We were afraid.”
She looked at Asa first and then Kristina, frowning. “We killed Peder, carrying him, do you know? Ought to have sat where we were, brought the balloon down along the lakeshore. We didn’t—We should have sat where we were.” She went on looking earnestly from one of them to the other, as if she’d asked a question.
Her face had reddened a little. These were things she hadn’t spoken of in other tellings. “I don’t know what killed Peder, if it was the cold, or the carrying. We should have let the balloon come down there, right there in that damn field of rocks where we were, not carried Peder over the ice to Isuma’s field, he’d maybe not be dead, eh? if we’d done that. But we thought . . .” She gestured blindly, lifting her hand and closing it in a fist, taking hold of something difficult in the air there in front of her—holding her fist out as if it represented the words she couldn’t articulate. “I thought we would die, all of us, if the balloon tore.” Then her voice broke a little and she said hoarsely, “I thought it would be better if Peder was the only one who died.”
There was a silence. But after a while, smiling ruefully, Luza said, “Do you know? the sky on that world begins at your feet? People say you can see the face of God in the way one thing is connected to another, and I think I saw the face of God in that sky, the way it was connected to the ground, the way my body stood inside it!”
Kristina said furiously, the only matter she felt able to speak to, “God is in every place.” The other matter, the culpability for Peder’s death, frightened her in a vague way. She thought, That’s between Bjoro and Luza and their souls.
“In the Miller, God’s face is on the ceiling, eh?” Asa said with a narrow smile, glancing at the other two women across the restless limbs of the baby. Luza laughed, and Kristina after a moment made an appreciative sound with her mouth, Huh, feeling they were loosening something, all of them, coming out of a tangle. “Yes. On the ceiling.”
Her eyes were burning painfully. She sighed and put the heels of her hands against them, rotating her wrists methodically, kneading. A universe of stars wavered briefly in the blackness. Oh hell. Hell. Here it is now, and I don’t have time for lying about sick in my bed.
She stood up with difficulty, pushing on Luza’s shoulder. “This is a hard floor, and I’m old,” she said, and petted the woman’s lustrous cropped hair. “My hair was black, black as that, you know.” She touched her own wild white hair with her fingers, an uncharacteristically fussy gesture. “I never have learned to comb,” she said, grimacing unhappily.
“Oh, I like your hair. It’s thick, and I like the ribbons you tie in it, the colors against the white.”
Kristina accepted this flattery without a reply—Luza was a kind woman. “My house is in Pacema,” she said. “Come and visit me when this damn plague is finished with us all.” She touched Asa’s head too, and the sick baby’s, conscious of a kind of blessing in this gesture, and then put her feet in her shoes and went down the steps of their house stiffly, clutching one of her aching kidneys with her free hand. She went slowly, beginning to shake already like an invalid, round to her own domaro and then to the door of Filisa Ilmen’s apartment.
“Send somebody to tell my son, he ought to take care of his own mother before any damn machinery,” she said tremulously, giving in to misery and self-pity.
Filisa, who had a sister-in-law sick in her own house, said, sighing, looking up from the little galley sink where she ran a bowl of water, “Well, hell now Kristina, I was thinking you’d got by without it.”
It was Filisa’s husband Leo who helped Kristina out of her shoes, her trousers and shirt, waited while she peed, helped her from the toilet, put her into bed. He was a man she always had liked, quiet and sweet-tempered, his cheeks round and florid in a lean face. She was ashamed to be seen by him in this weak state, her thin shanks trembling when she stood up from the toilet, and her embarrassment made itself over into bitter impatience, complaints, petty demands. That’s a good shirt, Leo, don’t be letting it lay there on the damn floor. No, no don’t fold it now, it’s got too dirty, the way you let it lay.
He was matter-of-fact, tolerant. When he stood her up from the toilet and pulled her shorts around her bony buttocks he said mildly, “Worst thing, eh? The way the pee stinks.” She clutched him gratefully, though she was helpless to stop being petulant. “Oh hell, pinch your nose closed if you can’t stand it, Leo, it’s a damn little thing to complain about.”
When he unfolded her bed and let her down onto it she groaned quietly and turned her back to him, clasping the thin bedsheet. She heard him clattering, dragging over the little table, arranging things within her reach. “Can you sleep?” he asked her, and when she muttered resentfully he pretended not to hear it, his hands fussing, letting her hair free of its red ribbon tie. His fingers raised a thrill across her back, something to do with fever or with anile foolishness. “I’ll come back in a while. Or somebody will. They’ve sent off for Bjoro, eh?” He patted her shoulder and went away.
She struggled over onto her other hip, out of a childish need to see what he’d brought next to her bed. There was a bottle of water standing on the table, cloudy, drifting shreds of lemon, and a shallow bowl with a wet bit of sponge, maybe meant for cooling her face. At the edge of the bed he had put an empty pot for peeing into, and papers for wiping. She had a sudden longing for an orange, and resented Leo for not thinking of it. With difficulty, she lifted on an elbow and drank two swallows from the water bottle, her mouth burning, the tepid water a brief ease. She closed her eyes, let her body settle heavily on the mat. I don’t have time for lying in bed, she thought fretfully, but fell at once into the vague dissociation at the borders of sleep.
“Panja,” her son said. She wrenched up suddenly and clung to him, helpless even to control her tears. “Oh. Oh. This damn plague,” she cried irritably. For only a moment, she had thought he was a little boy whimpering feverish and she his mother, sitting up drowsing beside his bed. But then she knew who was sick, who sitting by the bed, and his calling to her out of childhood with that old babyish name, panja, seemed a vaguely dreadful sign. What did he think—that she was dying? “Will you get me an orange?” she asked him impatiently, and she stopped her tears with her fingertips jabbed against her burning eyelids.
He went away and came back. “Here. Kristina,” he said, crouching beside her bed. He began to peel the orange in his hand, piling up the little saucers of rind on the edge of the table. The piece he fed her was a mass of tasteless pulp; she pushed it around with her tongue and swallowed stubbornly. Her mouth was coated and sore, she’d lost interest in food. When he held out another finger of fruit she grimaced and looked away.
He put his hand against her cheek and then her forehead. She was parched, fever-ridden. Beneath her skin, behind her eyes, a dry fire was burning, and his cool hand sliding across her face was intensely comforting. “Do you want me to bathe you?” He was patient and kind but detached, a manner he took on when he tended to the sick—his first wife Hlavka’s chronic asthma had inured him to invalidism.
“Let me have some water to drink,” she told him.
He held the water bottle while she swallowed. Her own fingers curled shakily around her son’s hands. When she let her head back onto the bed again, she said, complaining weakly, “Oh hell. I don’t have any time for being sick just now.”
“No,” Bjoro said indifferently. He began to bathe her limbs with the wet piece of sponge, drawing an arm and then a foot out from under the bedsheet. Her skin was tender, crawling with feeling, the cool wash delicately painful. She watched her son’s face. He was forty-seven, had a long sloping bony brow, wide and thin mouth, not her husband Aŭgustino’s look nor her’s, but a family homeliness that had been in her own mother’s face and an uncle’s. There was no little boy in that look anywhere, and since he had come home in the Ruby there had been a d
efeat, an unknowability, a core of anger, a miserable unhappiness. Her eyes began to tear slowly, watching him, and in the blur she received a gift, saw him a lanky child again, with pale hair sticking up straight along the crown of his head.
“I want to see that world,” she said, breathing out harshly. This had been at the edge of her consciousness for days, a numinous whispering that unexpectedly, suddenly, became coherent. A shudder went along her skin like a loosening of clothes: Her body’s understanding of something still inarticulate, something that transcended language. I want to lie down on that earth and embrace it.
Her son went on sponging her skin. “I have seen it,” he said contemptuously. Her own feeling was nonrational, beyond arguing, but she said, clasping his wrist, “God’s face!”
He looked at her in incomprehension. He was angry, anguished. “There’s no God in that world, Kristina, I have seen it! I felt when I was standing between the ground and the sky in that world, I was nothing, unremembered. There was so much space, air, emptiness, distance, and no meaning in it, eh? Where was God? When I was in that world, what I saw was—” He threw her an urgent look, flourishing his hands, grappling with something. “I don’t know! What did the mountains mean? What were their names?” His eyes filled with sudden tears. “There was a wind!” he said wildly, as if that explained everything.
Kristina became inexplicably tearful herself. She was surprised and ashamed when the words that were in her mouth turned and came out banal. “We can’t know all the meanings of things,” her mouth said, and the sound of her voice shamed her too, seeming only flat and stubborn.