He, She and It

by Marge Piercy

  Gadi waved her toward the foliage. “I’ll show you.”

  He followed her through the image into the next room, which was in process. Its walls were visible, the hologram generators in place but the construction only half completed. “What will this be?” she asked politely.

  “Anemones and cockleshells. When it’s done, I’ll show you.” He grasped her arm. “Who is she? What is she? Where the hell is she from?”

  “You must ask her. What she wants to tell you, she’ll tell you.”

  He did not let go. “I’m telling you, she’s unique. If I could show her to my boss, I bet they’d cut three months off my exile. What a bad guy she’d make, maybe for the Nova Guards. That’s my first take on it.”

  She reached the house. “Is Malkah back?”

  “Hello, Shira. Malkah is expected within ten minutes. She has left Rabbi Patar’s house to walk home. She intends to stop en route to see if the box is ready for the burial. She asked that you come home as soon as you can. Ilana from the khevrah kaddisah is waiting for her, performing as if there were a body.”

  “I’m on my way,” Shira said, yanking her arm from Gadi’s grip. She started out.

  “I must go too,” Nili said. “These are arrangements we should share.”

  They walked quickly together down the block. “You knew her even less than I did,” Nili said questioningly.

  “I only met my mother nine times. I can’t say truthfully that I loved her, because I never knew her well enough.”

  “We were physically intimate but not emotionally close. I admired her, but I never learned to read her clearly. She kept a distance.”

  “She warned me that this might be our only time together. I feel guilty, as if I didn’t try hard enough.” Shira rubbed her sore eyes.

  Nili shrugged. “How does it matter now? She lived the life she chose.”

  As they climbed the steps of the house, Shira saw Malkah turn the corner. Both women stopped to wait for her. Malkah came rushing along the block, her chin sunk against her chest. Her gaze was cast down, and she was frowning. Halfway to the house, she became aware of them. Shira could tell that Malkah could not see who they were until she had come almost to them. Malkah must have an operation, but Shira hated to bully her into it. Malkah’s vision was clouding.

  “Ah, good, you’re both here. We must sit down and make last plans. At sunset we’ll bury the few remains Nili found. It’s all we have.” Malkah’s face contorted for a moment, as if she might weep. “Danny is making a box for her, but it isn’t finished yet.”

  “What can I do to help?” Nili asked.

  “Maybe dig the grave? Ask Ilana,” Malkah said. They had no undertakers in the town but rather a burial society that laid out the body correctly; however, there was no body, only one charred bone and a few pieces of metal. Still, the burial society had ritually washed the remains and put them into a shroud on a pallet on the floor. Ilana was sitting with the remains, doing beadwork. She was a maker of exquisite jewelry. Shira had three pairs of her earrings, but most of her work was exported to corporate enclaves.

  Finally they could sit down at the kitchen table face-to-face. “Malkah, I hardly knew her. You’re my real mother. But she was your only daughter.”

  “I was so busy when she was growing up. When we’re young, we have babies by caprice. I brought her back from Prague in my belly like a souvenir. When this you see, remember me. I had been happy there, I had loved passionately. Did I ever suspect I was producing an independent strange strong female who would stand in the middle of my life shouting No at the top of her lungs, refusing everything I had to give her?” Malkah began to weep silently.

  Shira ran around the table to embrace Malkah. She stood leaning forward, with Malkah’s face pressing into her waist, while the tears soaked through her shirt. Finally Shira too began to weep, although she had no idea whether she was mourning Riva or responding to her own exhaustion and inner tumult.

  They stood at sunset on the small hill covered with wild grasses and bramble—thorny bushes volunteers hacked back twice a year. The tiny grave had been prepared, sized for an infant, dug by Malkah’s friend Sam Rossi, with his brown curls and sloping shoulders, and by Nili. The remains of Riva were lowered in a simple wooden box, made by Danny the carpenter. Death was an amateur business here.

  The moment had come to shovel in earth. Shira went first. The sandy soil made a hollow drumming sound on the wood. The sound of death, finality, what is no more and can never be again. Malkah stood beside her, her hands trembling wildly, tears coursing down her face. It had become traditional at Tikva to bury the dead at sunset, so they could go outside without sec skins, so that they could touch and hold each other for comfort. Malkah could not lift the shovel. Yod was at her elbow to help her. Finally everyone was filling in the small pit. Shira stood beside the grave and began the Kaddish: “Yitgadal v’yitkadash shamei raba…”

  I never knew her, and she died protecting me.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  A Burning Curiosity

  What I have feared for so long has overtaken us. Riva is lost. Not even a body to mourn over, to bury. I cannot say, “If only I had known how short a time we had,” because I lived always anticipating that loss. I could not demand more of her than she occasionally gave, because she created no channels through which my desires and anxieties could reach her. If I sometimes ask myself whether I did not commit some early error that made love unimportant to her no matter how freely offered, she was what she wanted to be. I am glad that the time the Base was down causes us to work at a mad trot to deliver our systems to Olivacon by August fifteen and to Cybernaut nine weeks later. Yet night comes, the gray time of sleeplessness, when memories rise like languid carp from the depths to feed on my grief.

  I have been remembering the death of my own mother, of the kisrami plague. She was one of the doctors who stayed in what was beginning to be called the Glop then, trying to bring some mercy to the heaps of the dying. They would not even release her body. A handful of ashes from the mass incinerators was all I had to mourn. She had long hair, iron gray (it was a matter of pride with her to leave it gray), worn braided around her head, as I sometimes wear mine now. I had not thought until this moment that it is because of her. The ashes were that color. She was forty-one when she had me, and I must often have been difficult for her, a rambunctious ravenous child.

  I was sitting in the courtyard last night in the dark when Nili suddenly padded down. She stood before me, fidgeting; then she put her hand on my shoulder, saying, “You grieve too much, Malkah. Patience!” She raced back upstairs. I was left disconcerted. I have been a negligent host, I’m sure, but Nili seems able to take care of herself. What did it mean? I felt both rebuke and a kind of tenderness in her, but it doesn’t compute.

  I brood on graves, on stones, memorials. My grandfather eighteen generations back is a man whose tombstone in the Prague graveyard I visited the same day as the tomb of the Maharal and Perl, and placed a little stone in respect for him also. My distant papa is David Gans, also known as David Avsa—“goose” in Hebrew as gans was in German. There among markers where a scissors denotes a tailor and a book a teacher, on David’s are carved the Magen David, the shield or star of David, and a goose. Even the illiterate would know whose grave it was, among all those huddled tipsy jammed-in markers.

  Now, you probably think the six-pointed star is for a Jew, but it was not at that time a common emblem for our people. It was a symbol from kabbalah David secularized, using it for the title of his introduction to astronomy. David had studied with some of the greatest rabbis of his time, including the Maharal, whose disciple he officially remained, but his real conversion was to science. He was captured first by mathematics, then by astronomy, which remained his primary fascination for the rest of his long life, although he also popularized the discoveries of geographers and explorers.

  He was a man who enjoyed being amazed by the new. Some people, you give them something to admire and th
ey want to piss on it, they want to walk away from it because it makes them feel small. David liked to feel astounded, to stretch his mind around new facts, new theories, to knock them around and size them up and study them. Then when he felt he understood, he yearned to explain to others. He loved to explain Jewish philosophy to his Christian astronomer friends, Brahe and Kepler, to seduce them into an understanding of the depth and subtlety of Jewish thought, that they had imagined archaic, already known to them. He loved to explain to the Maharal the work going on under Brahe’s direction outside the city at Benatek, where Gans had spent several sessions working in the observatory. There Tycho Brahe and his assistants were continuing work begun in Denmark. Instead of empty theorizing or proceeding from Aristotle, they were making precise and repeated measurements of the movements of the planets and the stars, keeping meticulous records. This was something new in the world, beginning with observation and only then proceeding to theory. We take it for granted, but it was as new as David thought it was.

  David is not a man who seizes my imagination as does the Maharal. He isn’t an eagle of the mind. But he’s a very necessary sort of person. You could have picked up David and dropped him in the court of the Great Khan, and once he had learned the language, which he would have begun systematically doing within the first ten minutes, he would have made friends and learned about the culture and started contemplating a book to explain those people to our people. He would have been an ideal traveler in time as well as space. He slid through the cracks Rudolf had permitted to spread through the rigid society of the time. Aristocracy as such meant nothing to David, nor did wealth or power. He would rather sit down in a tavern with a grizzled captain just back from the Amazon than flirt with the most beautiful woman, Gentile or Jew, in Prague, or sit down at the table of Mordecai Maisl or the richest knight who served on gold chargers. His interest flattered and soothed. The roughest, the most arrogant, the prejudiced and the nasty all fell open before him and let him study their adventures and ideas and observations, the gentle and respectful finger of his attention touching them line by line as he would kiss and touch the Torah when called up in synagogue to read.

  Therefore, although Joseph is astonished that, facing destruction, the Maharal would send for David, David himself is alarmed but not surprised. “I’ll leave for Benatek now. I have a standing invitation. I’ll ask Brahe and Kepler to intervene with Rudolf. We should use all channels, revered teacher. We must move fast.”

  “As fast as we can, which is to say, no ways open to us are truly open. We must reach Rudolf.” The Maharal stands at his window looking at the town hall, only a few feet away in the chockablock ghetto. “Take Joseph. Moving about the city could prove dangerous, even to you. He moves more quickly than any of us, and he is the strongest…of all in Prague.” The Maharal’s voice falters for a moment, because he is unable to refer to Joseph as a man in front of David. The lie sticks in his throat like a fish bone.

  Joseph notices. He blinks twice and then follows David. They set out at once for Benatek, six hours to the northeast of Prague, David attempting to educate Joseph as they go. David rides a borrowed horse. Joseph trots alongside, tireless. “Tycho Brahe is a nobleman, Joseph, but he has not been content to spend his life in idleness or in drinking and gaming and hunting. In Denmark, he had an island where he built a splendid observatory. Rudolf lured him here. He pays him—or rather, given the chaos of Rudolf’s finances, he promised Brahe three thousand thaler a year and a subsidy of beer and wine and bread. Brahe has built large precise instruments to study the planets and the stars. He has been most kind to me.”

  “Will they mind my being with you?”

  “They will assume you are my assistant or my servant.”

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  “His second is Johannes Kepler, who is an even better friend to me. He’s German, Protestant like Brahe, and I find his mind superior. Kepler carries the ideas of Copernicus even further, whereas Brahe still attempts to reconcile their observations with the Ptolemaic system the Church backs. Kepler sees the world through mathematics. What do you think, Joseph? Does the sun go around the earth, as everybody now thinks, or does the earth go around the sun, as we now know the other planets do?”

  “It’s hard, standing in any one place, to tell if you are moving or what you are looking at is moving. When I helped a drayman move barrels in a boat, sometimes I felt as if the shore was moving and I was floating at rest.”

  “The idea you have just postulated resembles the theories of Giordano Bruno, who says that observation and ultimately truth is relative to the position from which we observe. The Inquisition has had him for eight years now, torturing him to make him recant. Many people, Joseph, assume you are slow mentally because you are ignorant of many things. But the two are different. One is an inherent weakness, but the other is simply a lack to be overcome.”

  “Chava says I can think, that I’m not stupid. She’s been teaching me to read and write German and Czech and Hebrew.”

  “When you read, Joseph, you can place yourself in history and share in all the thoughts of those who are now dead as well as those now living.”

  The only castles Joseph has ever seen are Hradcany and Vysehrad, imposing, massive, fortified. This is more of a country house, built on a hill overlooking the Jizera amid vineyards and orchards. The lowlands along the river are flooded, but the road to the castle stands dry. The plum trees sway in frothy bloom below them; the hum of bees rises to the road, along with the splashing of oars where some peasants are crossing a drowned meadow. Inside the courtyard, carpenters are hammering, their helpers sawing and carrying wood. Masons are pounding on stones, dressing them. They enter past scaffolding and the chaos of walls demolished and under construction, past a wall painted by a previous tenant with scenes of hunting and warfare.

  When Joseph first sees Tycho Brahe, he cannot help staring, until David pokes him sharply. His first thought is that the nobleman is an artificial being like himself but made of metal, for right in the middle of his nose there is a hole in his skin through which Joseph can see silver and gold within. But David mutters to him when Tycho is leading them effusively into his observatory, “He lost the bridge of his nose in a duel years ago. Don’t stare!”

  Tycho is a big man, heavily built, florid and fleshy, with close-set eyes and a close-clipped dark beard, crossed by a much longer swooping mustache, his large head set on a stiff white ruff like a cabbage on a plate. He talks loudly and quotes his own Latin poetry, of which Joseph understands not a word, although David smiles and nods and makes some rejoinder in Latin. That causes Tycho to give him a bone-shaking slap on the shoulder, the many rings on his fingers glinting. “Yes, we keep owls’ hours here,” Tycho thunders. “This afternoon is our morning, and we don’t retire until the sun rises.”

  Tycho shows them machines for taking readings of the positions of the stars and planets. Johannes Kepler has just emerged from a large mural quadrant. He is a thin dark bony man, radiating energy and nervous discontent. His beard hangs like a bristly mourning wreath around his small mouth. His forehead is high, the hair already receding around a widow’s peak. His features are sharp and delicate, his eyes soft and expressive. He hunches forward, perhaps to see, as he seems nearsighted. He shows David a notebook written in spidery script, full of numbers, and David and Johannes chat about Mars as if gossiping about a difficult mutual friend. Another star, Tycho announces, has been precisely observed and measured, and now it, too, will be added to the great map they are creating. Joseph notices that David calls Kepler Johannes but addresses Tycho formally.

  Joseph waits for David to tell Kepler or Brahe about the crisis facing the Jews of Prague, but instead David follows the men through chambers crowded with strange measuring devices and clockwork automata. Brahe has a hidden system of bell pulls that enables him to summon the servants without visible means. The rooms are full of drawers and doors that open if you press a panel, of little wind-up dolls that strike chime
s or raise and lower other instruments. Tycho likes to wear the air of a magician, but he is not one, Joseph thinks scornfully. He plays with dolls, Joseph thinks, but I was made by real magic. Time is leaking away. He yearns to seize the men and shake them into talking sense. They are squinting into this eyepiece and that one. They are poring over notebooks in which Joseph, looking past David’s thin shoulder, can see nothing but signs for the planets and columns of numbers. Why had the Maharal imagined that David’s visit here could do them any good whatsoever?

  “But Giordano Bruno has been killed, David,” Tycho Brahe says. “Hadn’t you heard? He was publicly burned alive in Rome for heresy. I had a letter two weeks ago.”

  David winces, recoiling a step. Everyone wears for a moment a shuttered look, as in each man’s head he contemplates that mode of dying. “It’s a hazardous business, imposing truth. The Maharal says we can never arrive at truth if we fear discussion. We must attack falsehood, but only after we have given it leave to speak.”

  Kepler looks cautiously around. His voice is soft. “My own grandmother was burned as a witch, a contrary and ill-natured woman, but the only witchery she knew was how to curse with a foul tongue and how to brew up a few herbs for a fussy stomach. These are dangerous times. New astronomical theories make the Church as nervous as Bruno did. He was accused, among his other ideas, of believing in the theories of Copernicus. And being influenced by the kabbalah. Only Rudolf protects us from attack here.”