The Sparrow

by Mary Doria Russell

  "… BUT A PLEASING proportion, an elegant muscularity," the Reshtar was saying. Admiring its neat and graceful compactness, he moved thoughtfully around the exotic body, one hand trailing, his fine claws leaving on the hairless chest thin lines that quickly seeped red beads. He passed his hand around the shoulder and, regarding the curve of the neck, encircled it with his hands, noting its delicacy: why, one could snap the spine with a single gesture. His hands moved again, lightly caressing the hairless back, moved lower, to the bizarre void, the fascinating stillness and vulnerability of taillessness.

  Standing back, he saw that the foreigner had begun to tremble. Surprised at the rapidity of response, the Reshtar now moved to test readiness, lifting the foreigner’s chin and staring directly into the dark unreadable eyes. His own eyes narrowed at the reaction: the head turned quickly in submission, eyes closed, the whole body quaking. Pathetic, in a way, and untutored, but with great appeal.

  "Lord?" It was the merchant. "It is acceptable? You are pleased?"

  "Yes," the Reshtar said, distracted. He looked at Supaari and spoke then with impatience. "Yes. My secretary has the legal work in hand. You may contract the binding with my sister on whatever date seems propitious. Brother: may you have children." His gaze returned to the foreigner. "Leave me now," he said, and Supaari VaGayjur, rendered Founder of a new lineage for his service to the Reshtar of Galatna, in company with the guard who had escorted Sandoz from the seraglio, backed out of the room.

  Alone, the Reshtar circled once more but came to rest behind the foreigner. He dropped his own robe then and stood, concentrating, eyes closed, on the fresh outpouring of scent, more intense, more complex than before. A powerful, stirring fragrance, unparalleled and irresistible. A musk redolent of unfamiliar amines, of strange butyric and caprylic carbon chains, misted by the simple chaste dioxides of shuddering breath and stirred by waves of iron bloodscent.

  Hlavin Kitheri, Reshtar of Galatna Palace, the greatest poet of his age, who had ennobled the despised, exalted the ordinary, immortalized the fleeting, a singularity whose artistry was first concentrated and then released, magnified, by the incomparable and unprecedented, inhaled deeply. We shall sing of this for generations, he thought.

  LANGUAGE, HIS LIFE’S work and his delight, which had failed Emilio Sandoz word by word, now deserted him utterly. Shuddering in violent moronic waves, he could smell the nauseating glandular reek of his own terror. Mute, he was unable even to think the word for the unspeakable joyless rite that was coming, not even when his arms were seized from behind. But when the powerful prehensile feet locked over his ankles and the belly settled in behind him and the probing began, he went rigid with panic and fathomless horror, understanding finally what was about to happen. The penetration, when it came, made him scream. Things became very much worse after that.

  Perhaps ten minutes later he was pulled to an unfamiliar room, bleeding and sobbing. Left alone, he vomited until he was exhausted. He did not think for a long while but only rested, eyes open in the deepening darkness. Eventually, a servant came to take him to the baths. By that time, his life was irrevocably divided, into before and after.

  IN THE QUIET of the Father General’s office, only Johannes Voelker spoke. "I don’t understand. What did the Reshtar want with you?"

  My God, Giuliani was thinking, genius may have its limits but stupidity is not thus handicapped. How could I have believed— Eyes closed, he heard Emilio’s voice, soft and musical and empty, saying, "What did he want with me? Why, the same thing a pederast wants with a little boy, I imagine. A nice, tight fit."

  In the shocked silence, Giuliani’s head came up. Romanità, he thought. Know the act and move ruthlessly when the time is right. "You are many things, but you are not a coward," the Father General said to Emilio Sandoz. "Face it. Tell us."

  "I have told you."

  "Make us understand."

  "I don’t care what you understand. It won’t change anything. Believe what you like."

  Giuliani tried to remember the name of a painting by El Greco: a study of a Spanish nobleman in death. Romanità excludes emotion, doubt. It has to be now, here. "For your own soul, say it."

  "I did not sell myself," Sandoz said in a fierce whisper, looking at no one. "I was sold."

  "Not good enough. Say it!"

  Sandoz was still, his eyes unfocused, each breath coming with mechanical regularity as though carefully planned and executed, until the moment came when he leaned away from the table, put a foot on its edge and sent it crashing over, splintering in the volcanic explosion of rage, scattering the other men to the edges of the room. Only the Father General remained where he was, and all the sounds of the world were reduced to the ticking of an ancient clock and the harsh, laboring breath of the man standing alone in the center of the room, whose lips formed words they could hardly hear. "I gave no consent."

  "Say it," Giuliani repeated, unrelenting. "Make us hear it."

  "I was not a prostitute."

  "No. You weren’t. What were you then? Say it, Emilio."

  Each word separate, the threadbare voice breaking on the last: "I was raped."

  They could see the cost to him, the price of saying this. He stood swaying slightly, the armature of his face demolished by the work of thin, fine muscles. John Candotti breathed: "My God," and somewhere Emilio Sandoz found, inside himself, the black and brittle iron required to turn his head and endure, unflinching, the compassion in John’s eyes.

  "Do you think so, John? Was it your God?" he asked with terrifying gentleness. "You see, that is my dilemma. Because if I was led by God to love God, step by step, as it seemed, if I accept that the beauty and the rapture were real and true, then the rest of it was God’s will too, and that, gentlemen, is cause for bitterness. But if I am simply a deluded ape who took a lot of old folktales far too seriously, then I brought all this on myself and my companions and the whole business becomes farcical, doesn’t it. The problem with atheism, I find, under these circumstances," he continued with academic exactitude, each word etched on the air with acid, "is that I have no one to despise but myself. If, however, I choose to believe that God is vicious, then at least I have the solace of hating God."

  Looking from face to face, he watched comprehension working its way into their minds. What could any of them say? He almost laughed. "Can you guess what I thought just before I was used the first time?" he asked them as he began to pace. "This is rich. This is very funny! You see, I was scared but I didn’t understand what was going on. I never imagined—who could have imagined such a thing? I am in God’s hands, I thought. I loved God and I trusted in His love. Amusing, isn’t it? I laid down all my defenses. I had nothing between me and what happened but the love of God. And I was raped. I was naked before God and I was raped."

  The agitated pacing halted as he heard his own words, his voice almost normal until the end, when it fell away into uncomprehending grief, when he knew at last his own devastation fully. But he did not die, and when he could move again, and breathe once more, he looked at Vincenzo Giuliani, who said nothing, who met his eyes and would not look away.

  "Tell us." Two words. It was, Vincenzo Giuliani thought, the hardest thing he had ever done.

  "You want more?" Sandoz asked, incredulous. Then he was moving again, unable to keep still or silent a moment longer. "I can provide endless detail," he offered, theatrically expansive, merciless now. "It went on for—I don’t know how long. Months. It seemed like eternity. He shared me with his friends. I became rather fashionable. A number of exquisite individuals came to use me. It was a form of connoisseurship, I think. Sometimes," he said, stopping and looking at each of them, hating them for their witness, "sometimes, there was an audience."

  John Candotti closed his eyes and turned his head away, and Edward Behr wept silently.

  "Distressing, isn’t it. It gets worse," he assured them with savage cheer, moving blindly. "Extemporaneous poetry was recited. Songs were written, describing the experience. An
d the concerts were broadcast, of course, just like the songs we heard—is Arecibo still collecting the songs? You must have heard some of the ones about me by now." Not prayer. Christ! Not prayer—pornography. "They were very beautiful," he admitted, scrupulously accurate. "I was required to listen, although I was perhaps inadequately appreciative of the artistry."

  He looked at them one by one, each of them pale and speechless. "Have you heard enough? How about this: the smell of my fear and my blood excited them. Do you want more? Would you like to know precisely how dark the night of the soul can get?" he asked, goading them now. "There was a moment when it occurred to me to wonder if bestiality is a sin for the beast, for that was certainly my role in the festivities."

  Voelker suddenly moved to the door. "Does it make you want to vomit?" Sandoz asked with thin solicitude, watching as Voelker left the room. "Don’t be ashamed," he called. "It happens to me all the time."

  Sandoz spun back to face the rest of them. "He wanted it to be my fault somehow," he said informatively, looking at each of them, eyes lingering on Candotti’s. "He’s not a bad guy, John. It’s human nature. He wanted it to be some mistake I made that he wouldn’t have made, some flaw in me he didn’t share, so he could believe it wouldn’t have happened to him. But it wasn’t my fault. It was either blind, dumb, stupid luck from start to finish, in which case, we are all in the wrong business, gentlemen, or it was a God I cannot worship."

  He waited, shaking, daring them to speak. "No questions? No argument? No comfort for the afflicted?" he asked with acrid gaiety. "I warned you. I told you that you didn’t want to know. Now it’s in your minds. Now you have to live with knowing. But it was my body. It was my blood," he said, choking with fury. "And it was my love."

  He stopped suddenly then and turned away from them at last. No one moved, and they listened to the ragged breathing stop and hold and then go on in defiance. "John stays," he said finally. "Everyone else: get out."

  Trembling, he faced John Candotti, waiting for the room to clear, Giuliani gracefully sidestepping the wreckage on the floor, Brother Edward hesitating by the door, waiting for Felipe Reyes, white-lipped, to pass, but leaving finally and pulling the door shut with a quiet click. John wanted more than anything to look away, to leave with the others, but he knew why he was there and so he stayed and tried to be ready for what he had to hear next.

  When they were alone, Sandoz began again to pace and talk, the soft awful words pouring out as he moved sightlessly from place to place in the room.

  "After a while, the novelty wore off and it was mostly the guards who came. By that time they were keeping me in a little stone-walled room without lights. I was alone and it was very quiet, and all I could hear was my own breathing and the blood ringing in my ears. Then the door would open and I would see a flare of light beyond it." He paused then, seeing it, no longer able to tell how much was real and how much was dream turned nightmare. "I never knew if they were bringing food or if—if … They kept me isolated because the screaming disturbed the others. My colleagues. The ones in the drawing you saw, back in Rome, do you remember? Someone from the harem must have drawn it. I found it in with my food one day. You can’t imagine what that meant to me. God left me, but someone remembered where I was."

  He stopped then and looked directly at John Candotti, who stood paralyzed, a bird caught by the cobra’s gaze.

  "I decided finally that I would kill the next person to come through the door, the next one who … touched me." And then he was pacing again, the hands rising and falling as he tried to explain, to make John understand. "I—There was nowhere to escape to. But I thought, If I’m too dangerous, they’ll leave me alone. They’ll kill me. I thought, The next time someone comes in here, one of us is going to die, I don’t care which. But that was a lie. Because I did care. They used me hard, John. They used me hard. I wanted to die."

  He stopped again and looked helplessly at Candotti. "I wanted to die, but God took her instead. Why, John?"

  John wasn’t following this. But it was a question he’d had to answer before, asked so often by survivors, and he was able to say, "Because, I suppose, souls are not interchangeable. You can’t tell God: Take me instead."

  Sandoz wasn’t listening. "I didn’t sleep, for a long time. I waited for the door to open and I thought about how I could kill someone without my hands …" He was still standing, but he was no longer seeing John Candotti. "So I waited. And sometimes I would fall asleep for a few minutes, I think. But it was so dark. It was hard to tell when my eyes were open. And then I could hear footsteps outside my cell, and I got up and stood in the far corner, so I could use the momentum, and the door opened, and I saw a silhouette, and it was so strange. My eyes already knew but my body was so primed. It was like—the nerves fired without my telling them to. I crashed into her so hard … I could hear the bones in her chest snap, John."

  HE TRIED DESPERATELY to take the force against his ruined hands, to cushion the shock, but before he could make his arms come up, they’d both cannoned into the stone wall and Askama was crushed by the impact.

  He found himself on the floor, supporting his weight on his knees and his forearms, with Askama crumpled beneath him, her face so close to his that he could hear her whisper. She smiled at him, blood bubbling in the corner of her mouth and seeping from a nostril. "You see, Meelo? Your family came for you. I found you for them."

  He heard the voices then, human voices, and looked up from Askama’s corpse half-blinded by the brilliant light of second dawn pouring through the door. Saw their eyes, single-irised, as frightening to him now as his own eyes must have been to Askama when she first met him. Recognized the look of blank shock and then of revulsion.

  "My God, you killed her," the older man said. And then he fell silent, taking in the jeweled necklace, the naked body decorated with scented ribbons, the dried and bloody evidence of the priest’s most recent employment. "My God," he repeated.

  The younger man was coughing and holding his sleeve over his nose, to filter the stench of blood and sweat and perfumes. "I am Wu Xing-Ren, and this is my colleague, Trevor Isley. United Nations, External Affairs Committee," he said at last. He was almost but not quite able to keep the contempt out of his voice as he added, "You must be Father Sandoz."

  There was a sound that began as laughter, as shocking and outrageous as anything they could see or smell, and ended as something more difficult to listen to. The crisis went on for some time. Even after the hysteria was exhausted, they got nothing sensible from the man.

  "WHY, JOHN? WHY did it all happen like that, unless God wanted it that way? I thought I understood …" His voice trailed off, and Candotti waited, not sure what to say or do. "How long has it been for you, John?"

  John, the sudden shift taking him by surprise, frowned at Sandoz and shook his head, wanting to understand, but not able to follow the train of thought.

  "I figured it out once. Twenty-nine years. I get confused about the time, but I was fifteen and I’m supposed to be forty-five now, I think." The frayed nerves holding him up snapped abruptly, and he sank to the floor. John went to him and knelt nearby and listened, and Emilio wept as he whispered, the words thin and silvery. "See, I know a lot of men make accommodations. They find someone—someone … to help them. But, the thing about this is: I didn’t. And I—I thought I understood. It was a path to God, and I thought I understood. There are moments, John, when your soul is like a ball of fire, and it reaches out to everything and everyone equally. I thought I understood."

  And then suddenly, Emilio wiped his eyes and pulled in a shuddering breath and when he spoke again, his voice was normal and ordinary and tired and, for that reason, sadder than anything John Candotti had heard before. "So, anyway, I was about forty-four, I guess, when it—when … it happened, so it must have been about twenty-nine years." His lips pulled back into a terrible smile, and he began to laugh, the glistening eyes bleak. "John, if God did this, it is a hell of a trick to pull on a celibate. And if Go
d didn’t do it, what does that make me?" He shrugged helplessly. "An unemployed linguist, with a lot of dead friends."

  His face hardly moved, but the tears began again. "So many dead, because I believed. John, they’re all dead. I’ve tried so hard to understand," he whispered. "Who can forgive me? So many dead …"

  John Candotti pulled the smaller man to him and took Sandoz in his arms and held him, rocking, while they both cried. After a time, John whispered, "I forgive you," and began the ancient absolution, "Absolvo te—absolvo te …" but that had to be enough, because he couldn’t say the rest.

  "THAT WAS AN abuse of power," Felipe Reyes hissed. "You had no right—My God, how could you do that to him?"

  "It was necessary." The Father General had left the building, walking swiftly from his office down the long echoing hallway, throwing open the French doors and passing outside to the garden, hoping to pull his thoughts together in sunshine and in quiet. But Reyes had followed him, furious, outraged that Emilio Sandoz had been made to speak with so many witnesses.

  "How could you do that to him?" Reyes persisted, implacable. "Did you get some kind of perverse pleasure from listening to—"

  Giuliani rounded on him and silenced the other priest with a look that froze the words on his lips. "It was necessary. If he were an artist, I’d have ordered him to paint it. If he were a poet, I’d have ordered him to write it. Because he is who he is, I made him speak of it. It was necessary. And it was necessary for us to hear it."