Tender : Stories

by Sofia Samatar

  After school the children would pour out into the yard and then through one of the gates, either through the north gate with the inscription WASTE NOT, WANT NOT, or, like Temar and me, through the south gate, which bore the inscription ARBEITE UND HOFFE. Miss Snowfall also left through the south gate, but not immediately after school. Instead she would stand at the window, half concealed by the curtain, as if she were watching us go, although it also seemed she couldn’t see us, for if we waved to her she never waved back. Temar constructed a romance for Miss Snowfall out of the fact that Mr. Cinders, who taught mathematics to the upper classes, always glanced toward the window of our schoolroom as he bent to pin back the legs of his trousers before mounting his bicycle. But Miss Snowfall never made him any sign either, and so Mr. Cinders cycled home slowly to Unmarried Male Housing, a dreary edifice known as the Barn, to dine (as we imagined) in a hall full of noisy men who made fun of his protruding ears.

  Miss Snowfall did not live in Unmarried Female Housing (known as the Henhouse) but in a room above Nimble’s dry goods dispensary. The Nimble family lived in the other rooms. If you were lucky enough to be sent out after supper to get some sugar or a packet of needles, you could see the silhouettes of the Nimble children romping about in the whitish light that filtered through the blinds. The real attraction, of course, was Miss Snowfall’s window, which gave off a yellow light, and through which no movement at all could be discerned. She was reading, we told each other, she was observing the inner radiance, she was writing letters or drawing a self-portrait. I was admitted to this room twice: once after Temar was lost and Miss Snowfall made me sit in her chair and chafed my hands, and a second time when Miss Snowfall herself was lost, having managed, with typical ingenuity, to hang herself from the light fixture.

  For me, those early school days are infused with a Sunday glow. In fact, the real glow of Sundays, which has inspired so many verses, and which rules our bodies like the hand of a hidden puppeteer, has never made me as happy as the rusty gloom of the schoolroom. On Sundays when I was a child, we would get up early, like everyone else, and rush outside into the intensified light. My mother would always be there before us, seated in her chair in front of the house, her eyes closed, her entire body gilded. We would sit beside her on the squares of roughcloth we called “the outdoor blankets,” careful to keep our feet on them so our scrubbed shoes wouldn’t get dusty, enveloped in a timid silence, not even waving to our friends across the road, who were sitting outside with their own parents. All over the village, a hush. Only the cows broke it, lowing. And my father would appear around the side of the house, his hands clasped behind him, his beard shining, his good shoes tightly encased in galoshes, returning from letting them out to pasture.

  Then we stood and shook out and folded our blankets. My mother snapped shut her collapsible chair. Sometimes she stumbled slightly, saturated, dazed with light. We collected our Bibles and walked to church. Everyone looked dim and hot. A hymn rose, faint but steadily growing, from those who had already arrived. We smiled at each other, at friends, but did not speak. We began to sing. We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing. If we whispered, or looked as if we might step off the edge of the road, our father tapped our ankles with his cane.

  Marvelous light. The white church seemed to pulse. You could feel it taking hold of you, lifting you. At school, Miss Snowfall explained the influence of that glow. We diagrammed the pineal gland while she spoke of the delicate secretions that make us particularly happy on Sundays. “Why can’t we have Sunday light every day?” asked Selemon. Miss Snowfall replied with her favorite question: “What do you think?” Hands shot up; we guessed that too much light, like too much sugar, could make you sick, that it would be wasteful, that God wouldn’t like it. Miss Snowfall erased the pineal gland and drew a line representing the surface of Fallow. She drew its tiny, fugitive sun, with arrows for rays. Squares represented the solar fields; a great opaque blob was our generator, which, she reminded us, has to power everything. It has to keep the reservoir working, the heaters for the pastures, the vast grain corridor, the production labs, the smithy, the workshops, the grottoes. “It has to power these lights,” she said, indicating the orange bulbs in the ceiling. “It has to make air. It has to run the Castle.”

  We walked home through the eternal cold of the village, hands shoved deep into our coat pockets. I thought Selemon, who worked in the pastures after school, and who always smelled vaguely of the shit he collected on a cart, might grumble about all the fuel that goes to the generators of the Castle. Couldn’t they use some of it to light the sky? But Selemon left us as usual at the crossroads, hat pulled low over his curls, giving us a quick wave before trotting off down Granite Road. We walked on with the other children who lived in our district, our breath rising white in the twilight, a tentative, greenish twilight that colored the tops of the houses, a twilight that would last just long enough for us to feed the chickens and bring in the wash before going out at the touch of a distant switch. Temar walked beside me, her chin sunk in the folds of her scarf. I was already taller than she, though nearly two years younger. I could see from her posture, her frown, that she was thinking, and knew from experience that if I spoke to her now I’d get a sharp reply. So instead of talking to her I talked to our parents at supper, cheerfully, volubly, in order to compensate for her silence. And, as usual, she gave me in exchange for this kindness a gift of far greater worth. When we were in bed, when I was sure she was sleeping, she spoke. Into the icy darkness of our room came the words I would not have dared to say, but which perfectly articulated my own feelings, words that fell on my heart with a bursting shock of recognition, reverberating for days afterward: “I hate Sundays.”

  After that I felt oppressed by Sundays, hounded. There was something dreadful about the secret workings of my pineal gland. I considered it a triumph if I could maintain a sour mood in the warmth of the churchyard, among the freshly washed and laughing children. As for Temar, she adopted an outward sign of isolation: It was around this time that she began to wear the shapeless black hat, knotted together from cast-off strings in Miss Snowfall’s classroom, that led people to call her Temar Black Hat. This hat is the reason I am known as Agar Black Hat today, even though I have never worn such an article. I have been left with a phantom hat, a mark. It’s better than nothing. “Fill the slate,” Miss Snowfall used to urge us, “to the edge.”

  She was the daughter of Deacon Brass and his wife, who was known as Sister Brass. Her name was Sara. She received the name “Snowfall” after a fire. She was six years old when the Great Western Fire destroyed nearly a quarter of the village—workshops, granaries, labs, and animals. Seated on her desk in our classroom, swinging one foot, she described these horrors in a calm voice. The raw, piercing screams of chickens and, unimaginably, cattle. Men and women looming in the glow of the sky, which stayed on for three days, and in the blazing light of the fire. Everyone was covered with the earth they were using to smother the flames. They moved frantically and clumsily, figures of mud. Human bodies were dragged from the furnace, some of them still on fire. The ones that wouldn’t stop screaming were carried to the infirmary. Handcarts rushed up and down the tracks, traveling east with bodies, traveling west with enormous piles of dirt, in both cases materializing out of clouds of smoke only to disappear again with a doleful creaking.

  Sara stood at the window, where she had been instructed to pray, holding the blinds apart with her small fingers. The blinds felt hot; her eyes felt hot. And the ashes that began to fall looked pale and cool, like what we know of snow. To the child at the window, the air appeared full of one of the miraculous substances of Earth. “I wanted,” she told us, “to run out and let it fall in my eyes.” “Mother,” she cried, “it’s snowing!” And so she received her gently mocking nickname, becoming known from that day as Sara Snowfall.

  “But the most memorable part of that time,” she told us, “was the color blue.” She had discovered, standing at the window, that if s
he looked at the orange flames in the distance and then closed her eyes, she was treated to a marvelous image of the fire in deep blue. The power of this memory led her to the back of the classroom, to her vast collection of specimens, odds-and-ends, and outright trash, to fetch the color wheel she had made with various powdered minerals fastened to a slate with glue. In accordance with her idiosyncratic, associative method, a drawing lesson followed, and then a lecture on the Age of Disorder, when our ancestors, crazed with longing for the vivid colors of Earth, took to stabbing themselves in the eyes with picks.

  I would not want to suggest, especially in light of Miss Snowfall’s fate, that we did not learn the proper curriculum. Miss Snowfall was extremely thorough. Often, when we arrived at school, we would find her poring over the huge books issued by the Council. To do this she wore a special reading lamp strapped to her forehead, advancing through our course of study like a miner. When we sidled in, awed by the sight of the books, she would look up and blind us for a moment with her flaming brow. Then she would switch off the light, and when our vision cleared we would see our own dear teacher, perhaps already pressing her handkerchief to her lips, wearing her customary pleasant and faintly sad expression, only a bit more tired, bowed down by the weight of history. We would take out our slates and Miss Snowfall would stand up and begin her lecture. With an energy and fluency I have rarely seen behind the pulpit, she spoke of the Former Days of Earth, of its bitter atmosphere and boiling seas, its floods, its storms, its wars and conflagrations. She spoke of the Universal Draft, which was, she explained, only the latest and largest version of the many drafts our people had faced throughout history, the innumerable calls to war we had refused, and for which we had been so often imprisoned, ridiculed, tortured, exiled, killed. My heart beat faster; I found myself scratching the underside of my bench with a fingernail, which always has a calming effect on me. Some of the children had tears in their eyes. It was so unfair, this senseless persecution, the pressing into evil of a people who only wished to be left alone. Miss Snowfall described the elders of the community, dignified and austere, holding the little children by the hand, standing outside the prisons in the hope of delivering some bread and comfort to an incarcerated generation. People going by would shove them, trying to make them fight. In one terrible region they tore out the old men’s beards. She spoke of the Great World Conference and the decision to depart, not for a sympathetic country—there was none—but for the stars.

  “And they built an Ark,” she told us, “in the hills of Misraq Gojjam.” She was keen to impress on us not only the heroism of the engineers, but the achievements of the preachers, lawyers, schoolteachers, and bureaucrats who made it possible to save so many. In some parts of the Earth, governments were only too happy to let our people go; in others they strove to block us with laws and tariffs. Sums were raised in wealthy regions in order to help the poor ones, and peaceful liberation campaigns filled the streets. Of course, almost immediately there were disagreements and schisms. Some said only those of our faith should be permitted to join the trek; others said we must take everyone who desired a life of peace; still others argued over our faith itself, its character, its law. Such debates were especially fierce among those who practiced seclusion. Of these, some eventually boarded the Ark, believing that God would prefer them to accept a life dependent on advanced technology, rather than a life of war or a stillness amounting to suicide. Others, Miss Snowfall told us quietly, stayed on their burnt farms, among the cattle who were dying in the dust. In one district they shook out their sheets and curtains for the last time and went to bed, resolved not to rise until Judgment Day.

  The Ark set sail. It was the Age of Drift. We rubbed out our slates and copied the plan of the ship Miss Snowfall drew on the blackboard. “The Age of Loaves and Fishes,” she quipped, and a giggle went round the room, not because the joke was funny but because we needed to laugh. It was true the Drifters made do with almost nothing. For this, we revered them. Generations were born and died on the Ark. The bodies of the dead supported those of the living. For some reason still unclear to us, all the horses perished.

  On the Ark they had a place similar to our grottoes called the Hanging Gardens. They had fish tanks, cages, rows and rows of beds. Most importantly, they had the great monitor Gabriel, which gave them a report from Earth every twenty-five years. Now Gabriel stands at the center of the Castle, where he still delivers his report every quarter of a century, as he did without fail, like a mighty clock, through the Age of Disorder, the cave-ins, the plagues, the fires, the cults, the breakdowns of the sky. “Put on your coats,” Miss Snowfall said. She always knew when to take us outside. The room filled with happy jostling, voices, the drumming of feet. It is estimated that we will be able to return to Earth five hundred years after Gabriel reports a total absence of human life.

  Mornings of childhood. The rush to get up, despite the biting chill of the floor, in order to be the first to use the water, and how often Temar, just as I thought I was winning, slipped in front of me and slammed the door of the bathroom in my face. The water, slick and gray with soap. Using Temar’s old water was better than using my parents’, which I would have to do if she spilled it (as happened more than once), for my parents’ old water was speckled with tiny hairs. Down the stairs, taking the last three steps at a jump. Wan kitchen light. Injections, my mother’s fingers warm, the needle cold. Only babies cried at their injections. Our little brother, Yonas, still cried, and Temar hushed him: “Father will hear you.” Then the potatoes with beet syrup, spoons clattering on plates. Coats and hats. As we ran out, Father was coming in from milking. No matter how wildly we hurried, we never escaped without meeting him, his great cracked hand extended, his mournful black eyes that seemed to read our thoughts. “Good morning, Father,” we chorused, and shook his hand. Then down the path and over the gate, never bothering to open it but swinging up over the rails. The sky was blue-green, Sheba and Naomi were running to meet us, and in the distance the roar of the smithy had begun.

  Through the village, looking both ways for handcarts before we crossed the tracks, passing the Nimble store, the dispensary with the glass lamp in the window, the workshop where the door was propped open and looms already clacked, the desolate stretch of ground in front of the archives where Brother Lookout was sweeping. All day he swept the village streets with his funny sideways walk, his head subtly shaking as if he were always saying no, turning up a surprising amount of garbage, much of which found its way to Miss Snowfall’s classroom, where it was used in projects or simply gathered dust. We ran past Brother Lookout, we ran even faster past the house where Sister Blunt had died and her husband had covered all the windows with roughcloth, we flew past Sister Wheel, who was always standing in her yard beside a table on which she had placed a cup of coffee, we cut through the old surveyors’ camp, avoiding the piles of rubble, always wary of the boys who sometimes hid there to throw stones, and then other children were joining us, smelling of jackets and burnt potatoes, and it was now, we were climbing the hill, we were at school.

  The door of our classroom stood wide open, and Miss Snowfall leaned against it, arms crossed, smiling. The bell clanged, rung by Little Yosef, the headmaster’s nephew. And perhaps we would go in, sit down, and take out our slates, or perhaps by the time the last notes of the bell died away we would be on our way down the hill in two orderly lines. For Miss Snowfall believed in what she called “experiential learning.” There were many days when we never set chalk to slate. Instead we walked all over the village, into the archives, the smithy, and the weaving workshop, where we bruised our fingers trying the machines. Together we pumped the handcarts and rode up and down an abandoned stretch of track. We visited the metal dome of the Zeitgeber, and were given a lecture on chronobiology by Brother Barter, who stammered whenever Miss Snowfall looked at him. We visited the clearance shed, where Sister Singer, who was as slim, sharp, and restless as Miss Snowfall was round and solid, gave us a special pink gum, which,
she said, they chewed at the Castle, and allowed us to crowd up to the window and look at the Castle door. “How does it open?” Sheba asked. “From the inside, my love,” said Sister Singer, peering up herself at the silver disc in the sky. “They open it up and send down whatever they want. And when the people go up, the ones that work there, they send down a ladder for them.”

  Filled with the image of Brother Bell and Sister Glove, the parents of our classmates Elias and Markos, ascending to heaven on a ladder like a pair of angels, we filed out into the grainy afternoon air to end our school day at the grottoes. This was Miss Snowfall’s favorite place; indeed, she often joked to us that she had become a teacher only so as to secure a pass to that paradise. We made more trips to the grottoes than anywhere else. At the entrance we had to leave Markos, who suffered from allergies, in the care of the doorkeeper, Brother Flint, a cheerful old man with a worn gray hat whose pockets were full of finger puppets in the shape of animals, which he made out of cast-off clothes. I believe his whole menagerie must have come from the same garment, for the little pig, the little sheep, the swan, and even the bumblebee had been sewn out of identical black cloth, and looked so much alike that only Brother Flint himself could tell them apart. I always hurried into the front hall so as to see as little as possible of Markos, who would have to spend the next hour being entertained by these puppets, and whose misery as he watched us go was palpable. In the sterilization chamber I felt as if the stinging jets were scouring off my guilt.

  In the room beyond we all put on the dresses of white paper. Already we could feel the air of the grottoes. Sheba said it gave her a headache. In the next room we met the boys and put on the dark glasses. Then we walked out into the grass.