by Molly Gloss
There was a charged silence, a resonating peace, in which all of them were enclosed: the completeness and consciousness and life of the Meeting. At last someone murmured, or the air stirred in a coherent way, and Humberto’s afflicted body moved slightly finding a new balance against his mother’s breast. His tongue touched his lips silently as if it might be feeling around inside his mouth for more to say. Finally he sighed, and Heza and Leona stirred in the wake of that breath, letting his clumsy weight down on the floor and then sitting themselves, sighing too.
People waited in a long silence. Eventually, Udo Blades’s mother stood. Her lips were moving in a whisper before she had quite got all the way to her feet, as if she spoke out from the middle of something: “. . . we’re in the care of Wisdom beyond our knowing. Are we thinking we are God, then? What is God doing, freed of the obligation to order the waters and the skies?” She looked around at people thoughtfully. “I wonder, what is our ambition, in building this roof? Is this an issue of our trying to manage things? Do we think we’ve got control of everything here, because this place is small and simple and we’re in charge of it? It’s so obvious we’re in control, I guess we may have forgotten we’re not in control. And I wonder if those people on the Earth, because it was so clear they weren’t in control, forgot that they were.”
Ĉejo had lost her leading, by the end, wasn’t certain if she had finally argued for or against their going on living in the Dusty Miller. Was she saying the Miller was a living organism? or a dead mechanical object they were laboriously keeping alive themselves? When he looked out through the open loĝio of his house, across the crowns of the breadfruit trees to the incongruously huge architecture of the Alaŭdo spoke holding up the roof of the sky, his confusion was charged with agitation, excitement: In the uncertainty itself, there seemed an indefinable meaning.
He was surprised when his own body stood up—surprised by the words coming out of his mouth: “If we make a container and put things inside it—what is left out? Are we thinking those things aren’t valuable?” He quickly sat again, his shuddering knees unwilling to hold him.
Verner Bjornson, whose mother was a cousin of Ĉejo’s mother, later stood and said, “People weren’t built in God’s image, eh?” He sat again and then looked around for agreement, but Luizo, also looking around, said that people didn’t understand what Verner meant, and prompted him to get up a second time and explain himself. “Well, it’s this business of the ŝimanas,” Verner said, standing again. “We’re living in a mechanical thing, eh? and we got to work hard to keep it from coming to ruin. People can’t be expected to carry such a burden, can they?—knowing it’s our human intervention prevents the whole world from collapsing. We weren’t meant to be godlike in this particular sense, were we? I wonder if maybe that’s the cause of so many people going insane—the ŝimanas, eh?” He filled his cheeks with air and rolled the little balloons around thoughtfully. He was small, with bulging eyes, and this grimace turned him to a toad. If he hadn’t been saying something weighty, somebody would have teased him for making himself so ugly. When he let the air out of his face, Verner said, “People suffer from this knowledge,” looking around as if this was intended to clear up any last little confusion about his meaning. Then he sat down beside his wife.
Immediately Sven Fuĵino stood and said, “It’s true, there’s no escaping the possibility of apocalypse—people just carry that possibility inside them. But nothing in life is certain, eh? Nothing but the circling round of things.” And he brought up an old Quaker tenet, a belief in the progressive revelation of God’s will through the ages. In order to discover new truths, they must look, each time around, for ways to widen the circle. “New paths around old habits,” someone else said, and Sven nodded.
Between long silences, other people spoke: “This New World is how God created it. What are we thinking? that God’s work needs remaking?” “We ought to be listening to this New World instead of asking it so many questions.” “We ought to be asking whether there’s a place for us there, and what it is.” “If we want to live there, it ought to be on the old terms, eh? as the old Quakers lived, joining our hands to the world God made.”
Gradually, people began to return to Sesilo Hurtado’s leading—that the marginality of the world might be a saving grace—and they followed that leading toward adaptive strategies, ways to live lightly on a fragile land. This time around, no one brought up drainage fields or tillage.
Ĉejo went on listening to people talk, but without looking at their faces. Once, he looked at his father. His eye was shut, his head bearing off loosely sideward as if he had been released, finally, from the burden of its weight. Ĉejo had a sudden, excruciatingly vivid recollection of his brother Vilef’s heavy round skull balanced and swaying, a hibiscus blossom on a spindly stem.
It seemed to him that on the day of Vilef’s birth his family had been set afloat above an abyss and had been straining ever since to make out what lay in the darkness below. Now in a flash of apprehension he realized he had never had Udo Blades’s friendship and so never had lost it. And he understood, all at once, that his brother hadn’t changed his life, only shaped it.
On this little eddy, drifting, he lost the stream of people’s talk. Was it Heza’s old voice that he heard finally? a few words, floating, transcendent in their meaning. God’s world, she said. Here we are, re-entering God’s world.
10
Juko
Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.
We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,
We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.
JUKO AND HER neighbor, Filisa Ilmen, helped Kristina from the tub when the old woman complained that the water was too hot, that her thin old skin was letting the heat through to her bones, but then both of the younger women got back in the water—Kristina hadn’t yet become so old that she wasn’t able to put on her own clothes, she told them.
While they went on talking about the man over in Mandala who was a hoarder, Juko watched her mother-in-law stooping over her pants, putting her clean knobby feet in the leg openings, shakily pulling up the trousers around her hips. Kristina’s solidity, her sturdiness, was still in the bones of her broad face and hands, the wiry patch of her pubic hair, the splay of her feet, but she had seemed to shrink in the last years until now her skin was a loose fit, slumping in little shirrs at her breasts and elbows, buttocks and knees. And after the plague had finished with them all, the old woman never had recovered her whole strength. She had always been thin but after the plague her collarbones stood out from her neck in long delicate arches as if they might be the scaffolding of wings, and there was fragility in the sprung bones of her shoulders and hips, in the tender dark cups of her inner thighs as she stood bowlegged getting her pants on. Now her hands rattled the paper as she lofted lines on a drafting board. Other people had to thread the needle when she took up a piece of sewing. She was prone to fall asleep at unexpected times—talking, sitting over a bowl of unshelled beans or a lapful of reading—her chin dropping irresistibly down to her breastbone and her eyes sliding in a secret search behind the closed lids.
At such times, watching the spittle gathering at the edges of the old woman’s mouth and her uncombed hair trembling with her breath, Juko would fall into an impatient, resentful melancholy. Her own mother had died at forty-seven, a bacterial infection of her lungs; her father’s mother had died in her sleep at fifty-three; her mother’s mother, bleeding out from a torn uterus, hadn’t survived her own youngest child’s christening. Humberto’s mother, Leona, was as absolutely lost to her as if she had died with her grandson, Vilef. Juko had thought, in marrying Bjoro she had acquired a mother who was proof against that lineage of early death. She had imagined Kristina still standing flat-footed and erect at ninety, brandishing a cane, going on stubbornly well. Her failing health was an unexpected defeat, a
n offense, but who should be blamed for it?
“When she sweeps up the dust from the floor of her house, her husband gathers it into bowls and keeps it,” Filisa said insultingly, and this made Kristina curl back her long upper lip.
“Maybe he thinks he’ll get enough dirt to grow carrots in.”
With little enough to share, it was their practice to share everything, and this man Rajdaro Furbo was widely known, defined by his selfishness. He stored corn in baskets in his apartment. He was contemptuously tolerated, his family pitied—gossip and scorn were the chief line of enforcement in their lives.
“Does he think he’s living alone?” Filisa gestured with her thumb. “Does he think, if his children are fat, his family is living well?”
Kristina was sliding her feet shakily into her sandals, looking down to find the toe loop, frowning. “I don’t blame him for it; he’s crazy,” she said. “Only I blame his wife, what’s her name, you say? Helena?”
Juko let out a small scoffing breath through her lips, Puh. “For what? For sweeping her house?”
Kristina was shuffling off, sounding the tile floor with her sandals, and she waved a hand irritably without looking back.
Filisa knew this miser’s wife, Helena, from having served with her on the Pacema Sewage Committee, but she seemed to take Kristina’s point of view without a qualm. She said, nodding, casting her answer toward Kristina, “Maybe she ought to bring those hoarded things out and give them to other people, eh? And if that old shithole gets mad, she can divorce him.”
In a flurry of dim exasperation and bewilderment, Juko thought of saying, A wife can’t be held accountable for her husband’s corn, any more than his sins. But she was following Kristina with her eyes, the old woman already through the doorway and her bent shadow moving across the openwork of the pasado wall, and in a moment she only said bleakly, “Maybe she doesn’t want a divorce.”
Filisa turned her head toward Juko, a canny look. “Well, maybe not,” she said, as if these were weighty words, a pronouncement. Juko’s own marriage was the object of neighborhood gossip and speculation, she knew, and people doubtless were asking Filisa, who was an old neighbor, a friend, for news and judgment. Probably now Filisa would tell people, Juko Ohaŝi doesn’t want a divorce. Oh, she said it was to do with Rajdaro Furbo’s wife, but I could see, it’s her own marriage she was talking about. Juko shifted her weight in the water, looking away from Filisa rudely, stung by the truth in this presumption. Her life had become melancholy and insupportable; her marriage felt broken, unfixable; but she didn’t want to be divorced again.
“Who knows why Helena del Rio stays married?” she said unhappily. It might be my mother-in-law and not my husband that I go on living with, will not separate myself from.
“Well, some families think divorce is a scandal,” Filisa murmured. “Or maybe she thinks, because he’s crazy, it wouldn’t be right to leave him.” She gathered up her mouth. “Or maybe she likes the way he touches her in bed, eh? doesn’t want to give that up?”
Juko had kept silent with her friends and her family about the thing that had happened between her and Bjoro—obscurely, she imagined that if she didn’t speak of it, it might become faraway, equivocal—but she had become impatient in these last weeks, expecting illogically that people would stop making their jokes about sexual matters, out of kindness to her. Yet Filisa Ilmen, heedless, lifted her hands out of the water in order to make a lewd gesture in the steamy air: “Or maybe she likes to be let alone, and Rajdaro keeps her happy by sleeping with his corncobs.” Filisa’s face was round, her nose wide and flat; when she grinned, a crease folded across the bridge of her nose in a childish way. “Or maybe it’s Helena who sleeps with the corn,” she said, laughing, making that childish face, and then Juko was irresistibly drawn into it, delivering an insult common in women’s bathhouses: “Any corncob will do—what’s the use of men, eh?” In the gibe was a small, satisfying loosening, a release from inexpressible bitterness and anguish.
Filisa laughed again, rocking back in the tub so that her breasts broke the water. She floated, eyes closing sleepily, the cups of her ears flooding. Her breasts stood up like the soft brown crowns of earth in a field beset by gophers.
They got away from talking about Rajdaro Furbo, began to trade reports of their children, to gossip about other people’s children, and complain about their parents. That got them started on other things, matters of aging. Women liked to say, when they were old enough to be done with the business of being women they could finally be persons. In their old age women were expected to make a lot of noise, be disapproved, be fearless. Filisa, grimacing, said she always had been loud and disagreeable, and who could stand her if she worsened? As if it were all part of the same thing, she said, “I’m getting to a rough place, myself—me and Leo—between the woods and the fields.” She meant an old axiom, The forest is always waiting at the edge of the fields.
Juko was pierced by a sudden wish to confide in Filisa: to say, I’m at that place myself—in the rough weeds; to say that she had not let Bjoro into her body since the night of the Ruby’s homecoming. But Filisa went on with a flat reporting of the habits of Leo’s that bored and offended her, and gradually Juko’s urge to speak went out of her. Someone on the outside of the pasado wall was shaking a long mat, the person’s shadow moving, bending, swinging arms, in the interstices between the upright bamboo. Juko watched this without seeing it, listening indifferently to Filisa Ilmen’s complaints. Leo shirked small decisions, she said. He habitually asked for answers she had already given. And what was this proneness he had, for making himself scarce when there was argument between his mother and his wife?
They had been married a long time, she and Leo, their youngest child by now twelve or thirteen. Filisa was at an age celebrated for women’s sexuality and men’s erratic emotionalism. Couples who didn’t divorce at the end of their child-rearing years often ceremonially reaffirmed their marriages then, when fidelity was a more difficult sacrament. It was a recognition of a hard truth: There could be no possibility of allegiance, of faith, without the possibility of choice. Juko understood what Filisa was asking. Should I go on being married to my husband? She understood that Filisa was listening for the answers inside her own mouth.
“Humberto Indergard—he’s marrying, I heard,” Filisa said suddenly. “Has he got so much better, then? I thought he was crippled, his mother had to wipe his mouth for him when he ate. Who’s this woman? Someone his mother chose for him? A caretaker wife?”
“I don’t know,” Juko said in surprise. She had heard from her son that Olava Morgan, the kura, had begun to keep company with Humberto, and she had thought Olava was walking out with him to bear up his weak right side. If they were sleeping in the same bed, Ĉejo hadn’t said. Were they marrying now? She didn’t know. Olava Morgan was a big, beautiful woman, had gotten to be fifty-five or sixty without ever deciding to marry. Maybe Olava wasn’t the woman people were talking about. Or maybe Humberto’s coming marriage was a matter of gossip and rumor. People said it was Humberto’s words that had cleared the way on this question of the New World, and now some religious people might be searching his life for signs and portents; maybe this was a guess that had jumped wide of the mark, something trailing illogically in the wake of wonder.
Filisa’s thinking may have been going down this same way. She said to Juko, “It was God’s voice coming out of his mouth, eh? How else to explain it?” Her body had settled in the tub so that the front of her face was the only part above the waterline, a small, crested island fine-grained as a dune. From between her damp lashes, she peered thoughtfully into the crosspoles of the bathhouse ceiling. “It’s a mystery. The world’s a strange place. We go along imagining it’s ordinary, and then something happens and we’re reminded: It’s all inconceivable, every bit of it. Cockroaches. Bananas. People speaking in tongues. Why the hell ever did we get to thinking it was commonplace?”
Juko’s own faith and practice always had been m
undane. She valued the Quaker way of silence for leading people into scrupulous listening, slow judgment. A few times she had seen a certain power rise up out of the silence of a Meeting and bring speakers to places they never could reach alone, raise them to a kind of eloquence they never had shown before and perhaps never would reveal again, but if she didn’t know what this power of the Meeting was, she always had accepted its presence in the world without presupposing some kind of junction with God. She and Kristina had spent years arguing such questions, all the proofs and rebuttals wrung out of both of them by now. When they had heard of Humberto’s speaking, how all at once he had made himself understood, Kristina had pulled up her mouth, had nodded without surprise. “Music is in you; it awakes and comes out when you’re reminded by the instruments,” she had said firmly, as if this were part of their longstanding argument, a persuasive finding.
“I guess none of us can stand to know it every day,” Filisa said, answering something else. “We’d be crazy, eh? if we always stood balanced at the edge of the mystery, looking out at the world with wide-open eyes. We got to take it in little glimpses through our fingers.”
Juko said, murmuring, “Or send someone else out to look.”
Filisa rocked her head, pushing a wake across the water. “Well, yes. We sent Humberto, eh?”
Juko had been keeping away from Humberto’s sickbed, and telling people it was because of old Leona’s rancor toward her. She didn’t know if this was true. Humberto was someone who’d always been apt to complain about little maladies, her years with him a litany of queasiness, twinges, lesions and loose bowels, and for months after Vilef’s death he had been chronically sick. Now he’d fallen down with a stroke. A few times she had sent along to him, by way of her son, some stupidly trite words of pity and support, but she had not gone to sit with him herself. There was a core in him, of helplessness and pathos, and she was impatient with it—or afraid of it, as a kind of proof of what might be at her own core: an unfeelingness, an indurate heart. But this gossip about his remarriage made her feel anxious and nostalgic. She yearned suddenly to say to Humberto every small thing that had not been said between them. She wanted to say: I once loved you for your perfect acceptance of our imperfect child.