Tender : Stories

by Sofia Samatar

  Sometimes, like Sheba, I had a headache at first. Sometimes I felt dizzy, even nauseous, but this never lasted long. Creamy sunlight warmed my face. I was sweating. A powerful greenness filled my lungs, as if I were breathing in the color. Miss Snowfall brushed her hands over the plants and told us their names. Beneath the white dress, her legs were dotted with black hair. She waved to the grotto workers, who waved back, silent, swathed in white veils. There was a buzzing sound, and things rustled in the grass. We watched the fish in their pools, we saw a turtle make its way into the water, we stood at the edge of the deer park and cooed at the fawns, we observed the scientists working behind glass, where even Miss Snowfall did not have clearance to go, at the tanks that seethed with life, the lungs of Fallow. Always, at the end, we sat on the grass beneath the trees. Many of our classmates dropped off to sleep, for the grottoes made one drowsy. With slow gestures, Miss Snowfall unbraided her hair and massaged her scalp, as if to allow the warmth to penetrate her skull. Her braids undone, her hair standing up, she looked winsome and very young. She began to tell us stories from the Bible. She spoke of poplar and chestnut trees, and of manna, which is white like coriander seed, and tastes of wafers made with honey. The light of the grottoes filled me to my fingertips—not like a Sunday light, which often accompanied terrifying words from the pulpit, confessions, and scenes of discipline, but like the light of seven days, in the day that the Lord bindeth up the breach of His people and healeth the stroke of their wound.

  Often Lia crept into Miss Snowfall’s lap and curled up there, sucking her thumb. Anywhere else, we would have mocked her for this babyish behavior, and who knows, even Miss Snowfall might have disapproved. But the grottoes enfolded her in their magic circle. I suspect Miss Snowfall knew, though we did not—yet—that Lia was beaten at home, more often and more severely than any of us, even Temar. Whatever the reason, she cradled Lia, murmuring of the aloes and the cedar trees which are beside the waters. Once, sitting very close to them, I discerned beneath the chemical tang of sterilization another smell, secret, rich, and sweet, a stink which I realized came from Miss Snowfall’s feet. At that moment I heard, as clearly as if I had spoken them, the words: Here is the peaceable kingdom.

  This is not the first time I have written something I intend to submit for preservation. I have submitted a number of works, more than I care to remember. All have been rejected. I have submitted dramas, fantastical stories, novels of Old Earth, children’s tales, even hymns. At this point, merely to pass by the archives gives me a queasy feeling. For this reason, I rarely go into town, and if I need something unavailable in Housing, I pick it up from Sister Bundle’s little stand, rather than visiting the stores. It is a terrible feeling to have your work pulped. Brother Chalk at the archives—whom I call Ezera, since I knew him at school—tries to comfort me by telling me that pulped paper makes fresh paper possible, that destruction and renewal is the cycle of life. His remaining hair clumped at the back of his head, his chubby jowls fringed with beard, he is a good man, a father, sympathetic, and one of my best friends. The last time I spoke with him, I thanked God that I had no pencil with me, for I might have succumbed to the temptation to drive it into his hand.

  Outside on the street after I was rejected the walls of the village were crisp, the gleam of the Castle door in the distance extraordinarily distinct. I walked home with the new sheaf of paper under my arm. And I began to write in a different direction, without thinking of the Council. I began to write what I feel is truly worthy of preservation, what I cannot help preserving in my memory. I have no doubt that this writing, too, will be pulped. But I feel at the same time that I am enabling something of Miss Snowfall to hover in the world. The more I write, the more her presence grows, and I am amazed at how much I remember of her, a person I had to a large extent forgotten, first because I was preoccupied with my own problems, and later because the memory of her was so painful. “Put it in the dustyard,” we say, when we mean that a thought or question should disappear. “Put it in the dustyard, Agar,” Temar said to me, the night I saw her spit a tooth into the sink. But lately only these scenes stand out to me, and I kneel, overwhelmed, in the dustyard of memory.

  Strange that this dustyard should hold images of such splendor. Miss Snowfall’s bright face, her laugh, her stockings mended poorly because (she said) she was lazy, her wobbling progress through town on her brother’s bicycle when he visited her from the mining camp and loaned her his machine. Miss Snowfall, living in town as she did, had never been granted a bicycle, but at some point her brother had taught her how to ride, and sometimes on Saturdays she appeared, shaky and triumphant, running her usual errands in fine style. She always dismounted with a nervous leap, which sometimes caused the bicycle to fall over, spilling her packages on the ground. Then she would laugh so merrily that whoever was around her laughed too, helping to pick up her things, never embarrassed. Even Sister Wheel, standing outside by her eternal cup of coffee, allowed a faint smile to thaw her face when Miss Snowfall crashed that bicycle, and Miss Snowfall would dust herself off and greet Sister Wheel, as she always did, for she feared no one—on the contrary, she had a special affection for the oddest characters in the village. She stopped to chat with Sister Wheel every Saturday, bicycle or no, though “chat” seems an exaggerated way of describing a conversation with Sister Wheel, who tended to stare at passers-by with an expression of controlled fury before dropping a “Hello!” from her mouth like a stone. Sister Wheel had been a Young Evangelist, and was now what was called “peculiar.” She was often alluded to in sermons on the virtue of moderation. But Miss Snowfall spoke to her naturally, and in response I once heard Sister Wheel reply to her with a complete sentence: “It’s a waiting game, Sister, that’s all.”

  How wonderful it was to see our teacher outside school, to hear her addressed as “Sister” rather than “Miss,” to greet her formally in the street while she twinkled at us with a kind of amusement that failed to conceal her pride in our good behavior. She spoke to our parents, she knew everyone, she greeted our little brother Yonas and laughed when he hid his face in our mother’s neck, she was an ordinary person, carrying ordinary things, syringes, bags of flour, some gum she needed to fix a crack in a table. Meeting her like this, we felt that the marvelous air she breathed, the life she lived, was accessible to us, close. Best of all was seeing her brother in church: a short dark man with a heavy beard who once showed us the knife he kept in the side of his boot.

  Why is it that when I write these memories down, they swell until they seem to contain my whole body? Miss Snowfall and her brother in the churchyard, convulsed with laughter as Bishop Gloss walked by with crumbs in his beard. Bishop Gloss was the most terrifying man in the village, the head of every meeting, a brooding presence at every disciplinary discussion, he had driven Brother Lookout out of his mind, it was said, he had come to our house to reprimand our father for keeping a dirty henhouse. We couldn’t imagine laughing at him even if, at the fellowship meal that followed the service, he had bathed his whole head in soup. But Miss Snowfall and her brother stood frozen with suppressed mirth at the sight of the crumbs suspended in his majestic beard. Tears started from her brother’s eyes; Miss Snowfall crossed her legs just as we did when we laughed too hard. She pinched her brother’s arm harshly, like a child. At that the air came slowly out of his nose with a high-pitched whistle like the sound of the ancient brakes on his bicycle . . . Memories sparkling palely in the dustyard. The way Miss Snowfall lifted her chin when she said to Temar: “You may keep the hat.” The hat, a knitting project, certainly should have been unraveled when it was finished, the thread returned to the box. But Temar had picked out all the black threads with such care, knotted them together so cleverly, even the hair and wire. And Miss Snowfall, with a strange redness around her eyes, said: “Keep the hat.” In the same way she said to me, a year later: “You can be a writer.” Another excessive gesture, the jutting chin, the red, sore-looking eyes. The other children snickered; Temar
ducked her head, embarrassed. But Miss Snowfall said firmly: “Writing is a noble pursuit.” The words sounded awkward, as words do when they have never been said before.

  Perhaps this is why my memory of her is illuminated, enveloping: because, as much as we loved her, she dwelt among us like a stranger. I see her standing by the chalkboard, her arms crossed, rubbing her sleeves as if to keep off a chill, her face closed down, inert. Miss Snowfall could not bear discipline. If her pupils interrupted her—Markos and Elias were the worst offenders in our class, scuffling in the back—she simply stopped speaking. She would retreat into herself, go to the window, press her handkerchief to her lips. The first time this happened we were entertained, we wondered how long it might go on, and an evil spirit seemed to seep into the room, the cruel, gloating twin of the spirit of happy permissiveness that surrounded us when we spent whole afternoons building cities from empty jars. The chatter grew louder; Little Yosef laughed his braying laugh. Then Temar got up and strode to the back of the room. “Shut up!” she shouted at the boys. “Yes, be quiet!” I echoed, running up behind her, and some of the others joined in: “Let Miss Snowfall talk!” Temar’s fists were clenched, her whole body shook, the air was charged with unbearable energy, and Elias looked us up and down with his slow gaze, a sneer spreading on his face, and I felt that something terrible was going to happen, when Miss Snowfall shocked us, shattering everything.

  “No, no!” she cried breathlessly, rushing toward us in such haste that her hip banged against a desk. “Don’t, please don’t!”

  She was speaking to Temar and me. Temar’s eyes widened, amazed and hurt, and I felt a pang, for weren’t we Miss Snowfall’s defenders?

  “Don’t, please,” Miss Snowfall repeated, trembling.

  The class fell silent. Gloom covered us. Temar and I returned to our seats. Tears were trickling down my cheeks; I buried my face in my sleeve. When I looked up Miss Snowfall was paging roughly through a book, trying to find her place. She dropped her chalk on the floor, where it broke. Although I could not have expressed the thought at the time, I understood then that she had a horror of the exercise of power, not only the obvious sorts of power—the rod, the shout—but the type we knew most intimately: the power of the group. She had a horror of the downcast eye that waits for others to act, of the elders appearing at houses because someone, claiming to defer to their authority, has summoned them, of the public prayer that flays a member of the congregation in coded language. In other words, a horror of Fallow.

  When Miss Snowfall was removed from her position, I had not been at school for two years. It was a difficult time for my family: Temar was working at the Castle and often refused to come home for the weekend, a source of great tension. As I recall, my sister was not at church when the special prayer for Miss Snowfall was held. I remember the heat of the sanctuary, the windows full of light, the grimy feel of the metal pew as I gripped it and scratched at its underside with a fingernail, discreetly, careful not to cause any noticeable vibration. Of course this sensual memory might have been lifted from any Sunday. From that particular day, I remember a sag of the heart as the bishop announced that Miss Snowfall was leaving the school, a feeling of guilt as he described her errors—the “haphazard” and “unorthodox” methods I had loved—and an immediate anxiety about what Temar would say. Then a long, circuitous prayer. Those in Miss Snowfall’s vicinity were invited to lay hands on her, but I was too far away. I could only see, at the distant front of the church, the rustling bulge of bodies surrounding her until she entirely disappeared.

  Afterward, at the fellowship meal, I remember thinking she looked scrubbed, almost scoured, as if she had washed her face too hard. Her eyebrows were sparse, her hair faded to gray. She gazed down at her plate with her head tilted, wearing an odd little smile. Several of the children were crying and had to be taken away. The truth is, it was a scene of woe. People were greeting each other, shaking hands, finding their seats. Before starting the meal we sang “The Beautiful River”:

  Oh, will you not drink of the beautiful stream,

  And dwell on its peaceful shore?

  The Spirit says: Come, all ye weary ones, home,

  And wander in sin no more.

  O seek that beautiful stream,

  O seek that beautiful stream.

  Its waters, so free,

  Are flowing for thee,

  O seek that beautiful stream.

  The next time I saw Miss Snowfall, Temar was gone. I had been walking for some time. I had set out at dusk, carrying the lantern, and walked along the edge of the pasture all the way to the grain corridor before the light in my hand began to flicker. On Fallow there is always a subtle sense of being closed in. I put my hand on the wall of the corridor; it was freezing. Behind that wall, which reached all the way to the sky, humid air caressed our grain and an intricate irrigation system watered the ground. The water was made at the other end of the corridor and kept in the reservoir. Pipes transported it all over the village. I stood in the darkness, breathing hard. We are capable of such miracles but no one could bring my sister back to me.

  My lamp was growing dim. I turned and headed back toward town, where a cluster of lights gleamed out of the dark. It was like a great ship twinkling all along its sides with holiday lights such as I had read about in the stories of Earth. By the time I arrived among those lights I could no longer feel my feet. I stopped and glanced up at a shadow in one of the windows. Someone stood there, looking out. I wondered if the person could see me. Then the figure vanished and the window shone clear.

  I was turning away when a door opened and Miss Snowfall came out into the street. “Who’s there?” she cried, peering into the night.

  “Agar, Temar Black Hat’s sister.”

  “I saw your light go out,” she said.

  I looked down at the lantern in my hand; it was dead.

  “Look at that,” I said. I found it hard to work my lips, they were so cold. “Do you know, I was just standing here thinking about ships. Coming into the village I thought the lights looked like the lights of a ship but they really look the way I think the lights of a ship must look. Must have looked, I mean. Or perhaps they still look that way, on the green seas of Earth, with the seagulls winging overhead. Do you think there are still ships?”

  Miss Snowfall seemed to consider. Then she said: “You’d better come up and charge that light.”

  Her room was surprisingly bare. As a child, I had imagined it stuffed with treasure—a more splendid, more glittering version of her junk collection in our classroom. But it was simple, like anyone’s room. Bed, worktable, chair, gas stove, a lamp shaded with yellow roughcloth. There was a ceiling lamp too, but it wasn’t on. Of course I thought about that later. I thought so much about Miss Snowfall’s room, the big shadows thrown by the lamp, the chair covered with something shaggy, perhaps an old coat, where she made me sit. She knelt and tugged off my boots. Her hair was thin, wide tracks of scalp between the braids. She stripped the quilt off the bed and wrapped it around my feet. There was a photograph on the wall, a ghostly deer among weeds. “Oh, Miss Snowfall,” I said, “my sister has run away.”

  “Yes,” Miss Snowfall said quietly, and a charge went through my chest, everything coming up, my face swelling and twisting from the pressure, the pressure of my rage, this useless rage that had nowhere to go, and I broke, I sobbed in her chair, I bawled like a calf.

  Miss Snowfall pulled off my gloves. She rubbed my hands. When I was calmer, she made coffee. My lantern, plugged into her outlet, had begun to glow. She put a cup of coffee into my hands and sat on the bed with her own, regarding me with frank, unhappy eyes.

  I sipped the coffee shakily. “That’s nice,” I said, nodding at the picture of the deer.

  Miss Snowfall lowered her gaze.

  “I mean, I don’t care,” I added quickly, realizing that the picture could only have come from one of the Council schoolbooks, that it was stolen.

  She looked up at me and smiled. For
the first time, I noticed the tremor in her lips. Her lips jumped and twitched when she was not speaking. I saw how she tried to disguise it by holding her cup in front of her mouth or drumming her fingertips against her chin. I thought of her old habit of pressing her handkerchief to her lips. I wondered if she had always had this tic, or if, when I was a child, it had been only a vague sensation, a premonition underneath the skin.

  I dried my eyes on my sleeve and blinked. “Is it an Earth deer?”

  “Yes,” Miss Snowfall said, turning to look at the photograph. Her cheek quivered, but the rest of her body seemed filled with a deep stillness like the otherworldly stillness of the picture. The deer looked into the room where we were. In the photograph, too, it was night. The deer stood motionless, pale, its perfect antlers etched against the dark. Its eyes were globes of molten light, symmetrical and clear. A night camera had captured it, Miss Snowfall said.

  “It was wrong to take it,” she added, “but I was angry, and I wanted something.”

  “It’s not wrong to be angry.”

  She looked at me with some of the old amusement. “No?”

  “No. Even Job was angry with God.”

  “Yes, but he yielded, he didn’t go about tearing the pages out of books.”

  We laughed, then Miss Snowfall sighed and looked at the picture again. She told me it came from one of the fallow regions of Earth. A place abandoned by human beings because they had poisoned it, ruined it. And slowly, once they had gone, the animals crept in.

  “I guess all of Earth will be like that one day,” I said.