Tender : Stories

by Sofia Samatar

  “That’s the idea.”

  I was startled by the harshness of her tone. When I left, she made me take the picture. I folded it up and put it in my boot. It was the last time I saw her alive.

  I once heard a beautiful story. I suppose that’s why I write: because once somebody told me something beautiful. I have already submitted all the beautiful stories I know, so I have had to begin on those that are merely luminous. I was at home, washing dishes, when Selemon burst in to find me. He was wretched, panting, so heated with his run the steam came off him. “Hurry, hurry,” he said. He seized my hand and dragged me out into the road where the sky had just crossed over the milky hour of noon. Selemon was working delivery then, and he had left two days’ worth of meds outside Miss Snowfall’s door, because she hadn’t come to the dispensary. Now it was the third day. He had knocked at her door and called and then, thinking she might be ill, he had kicked his way in. Oh, I know what people say. They say Miss Snowfall was weak, unsuited to the grand task of being human, they say she taught children nonsense, anything that came into her head, she had no plans, she allowed an evil spirit to enter into her heart. I know, I know. Old Sister Nimble was standing in the hall and Selemon roared at her to get out, get away. Part of the clay wall had broken off when he kicked down the door, the doorway was jagged, the door itself had fallen in and smashed the lamp. “Help me, help me,” he said, and I understood everything. We climbed on the bed and he lifted the body while I worked at the knot. It was too tight, I had to climb down and find a knife, there was one inside the cold oven. In the hall Sister Nimble was ordering someone about, probably children. “Fetch the bishop,” she cried. I cut the rope and Selemon staggered. Pain is the heaviest thing. I cradled Miss Snowfall’s head as he laid her down. I know what people say but I am saying Miss Snowfall practiced, better than anyone else in the village, our highest value, what we call yieldedness. She yielded and yielded until there was nothing left. In the room we found boxes of meds, potatoes, jars of sour milk. The food was just a few days old, but it was months since she had taken her injections and her body, Yodit told me, was worm-eaten with radiation. Yodit assisted the examining physician who determined that this body was too contaminated to be returned to the grottoes. I know that people consider this the truly unpardonable sin, worse than suicide: the selfishness of withholding one’s body. But Miss Snowfall’s body was truly a humble body, a body of Fallow, one that had given up Earth and submitted to this place. Because she had yielded so fully, she was buried in the dustyard. Very few came. I was there, and Selemon, and a few of her other students. Sister Wheel came, looking tense and strange so far from her own yard, and Miss Snowfall’s brother arrived on his bicycle halfway through the service. He dropped his vehicle in the dirt and stood with the tears running into his beard. He would die himself, only a few weeks later, under mysterious circumstances. He was found in a tunnel, lying on his back with a handkerchief over his face, and the miners said that a ghoul called a Fetch had carried off his soul. The Fetch is a particular legend of the miners: they say she looks like a woman in a green dress, and that some, in the depths of the caverns, have taken her for a flame. Anyway, I heard Deacon Broom had to go out there and reprimand them for their superstition and pray over the place. And now I think I’ve filled this slate to the edge—except, of course, for the photograph of the deer, which I include here, with apologies for keeping it. It’s seamed and worn, but you can still see the searing look in the animal’s eyes, that naked clarity, the look Miss Snowfall wore at the window after school, the expression of one who awaits the blue radiance—deep, pure, and tranquil—that only comes in the aftermath of a conflagration.

  2. Brother Lookout

  There was no open vision.

  I was five years old when my cousin Hana took me to see the Earthman.

  At the time, Hana had just turned fourteen: a sly, romping, adventurous girl, part of a group of friends who had been publicly censured for stealing and wrecking a handcart. Temar and I thought she was marvelous. My mother, I knew, was afraid of her, as she was afraid of her own sister, Hana’s mother, our Aunt Salt. “Watch her every minute, and keep off the tracks,” Mother told Hana anxiously in our kitchen, fastening up my coat.

  “Leave it alone, Diborah,” Aunt Salt said irritably from the sink where she was banging the plates about, cleaning up after the evening meal.

  “Don’t worry, Auntie,” Hana said. “I’ll just take her for a little walk, to the dispensary and back, and then put her to bed.”

  Mother straightened, her hand at the small of her back. Heavily pregnant with Yonas, she looked tired, her face clammy and drawn. Half concealed behind her, Temar stuck her tongue out at me; she was angry because she had to stay behind and help with the preserving. At seven, she was no longer a baby and could work. Hana saw the ugly gesture and grinned. I knew that Hana liked Temar better than me, and determined right there that I would not complain, no matter how far we walked.

  In the end I had to complain, because Hana took me far beyond the dispensary, through the empty streets of the dimly lighted town, through the surveyors’ camp, past the school, into the North District, until I feared she was taking me all the way to the mines. “Come on,” she coaxed, “it’s such a nice night.” And it was, the air a few degrees warmer than usual, the sky set to the cool green glow of preserving season, a glow that would last for half the night. Big vats bubbled in country yards, figures rushed to and fro, the whole world smelled of jam. Still, I felt as if my legs were dropping off. I began to cry, and Hana carried me on her back. “Quiet,” she panted, taking me through a strange deserted yard toward a house on a rise. “Don’t you want to see the Earthman?”

  Bent almost double, she carried me up the slope. We knelt at a lighted window. Others were kneeling there too, and we pressed ourselves between them. “Hey,” hissed Hana, “I’ve got my little cousin here. Let her see.” The others, teenagers, pushed me forward against the pane. The window was made of clear wrap and bowed outward slightly. It was warm from the room inside. I was looking down into a basement. There was a stove, a few people standing around, including the village doctor, a bed heaped with quilts. In the bed lay the Earthman.

  “Is it a boy Earthman?” I whispered.

  “Shh! No, it’s a girl!”

  She was very pale, with white streaks in her black hair. Her face looked creased. Tubes led out from under her quilts and connected her to a kind of stand. On the stand lights flashed and a bag swelled and shrank. If you listened carefully, you could hear the grownups talking around the bed. One was the bishop’s wife, Sister Gloss. “We were happy to take her in, brother,” she said, “but you see how it is. We can’t manage her if she’s fading.”

  “Oh, I expect she has many years yet,” the doctor said cheerfully, the way he had said, when he set my arm: “This won’t hurt a bit.”

  The third person standing beside the bed was cleaning a pair of spectacles with a handkerchief. He was thin, clean-shaven, neatly dressed. He frowned as if considering the doctor’s words. “I’d like to continue my sessions with her,” he said. “Will that be possible at the infirmary?”

  “Very difficult, very difficult,” said the doctor. “Sterilization, you see. But the point is, she doesn’t require that kind of care! Only the occasional tonic. Sister, if you keep the equipment on hand, then whenever—”

  “I can’t be watching her all the time,” snapped Sister Gloss.

  The Earthman whose fate was being decided floated in a deep silence. I tried to guess at the contours of the body underneath the quilts. She seemed taller than ordinary people. Her face was broad and strong; her parted lips formed a bloodless triangle. On the way home, Hana would explain with relish that the Earthman had been shunned. On the surface, her suit had cracked and one of her arms had died. She had repented and returned. At the Castle they had cut her arm off, but it wasn’t enough to stop the ice flowers creeping toward her heart. Eventually, right here in the village, the Earthma
n would die of exposure, killed by the distant moment when her suit had been damaged. It was like a parable about sin. What struck me at the window, before I knew all of this, was the fact that no one was praying. It was the first time I had seen someone so ill and so alone. Only the thin man seemed aware of the Earthman as a kind of person. He put on his spectacles, looping the stems around his ears. “I’ll take her,” he said. “She can stay with me.”

  The teens at the window giggled and shushed one another. The doctor and Sister Gloss exchanged a glance. Then the doctor said: “Well. That would be a help.”

  The thin man nodded. “Have you got a barrow?” he asked Sister Gloss. “She’ll have to be transported with the monitor.”

  “I’ll see,” she said. “We may have loaned it out for the preserving.”

  As she left the room, the audience at the window broke and scattered. Hana clasped my hand as we ran downhill. Walking back through the village she was exuberant; filled to the brim with what she had seen. She didn’t scold when I yawned, she even carried me on her hip. It was then that she told me the story of the Earthman. For a long time this Earthman, whom I never saw again, was a figure of terror for me, a kind of Fetch. The pallor of the Earthman’s skin, her terrible solidity, seeped into my dreams. She seemed to be made of surface. If I craved sensation, I only had to whisper ice flowers in my bed at night and my body would seize up, strangled with fear. When I return to this memory now, however, it’s not the Earthman who startles me, but the thought that the thin man in spectacles, so capable and neat, this man with the steady, reasonable air, is the same person I knew later as the shambling village street sweeper, Brother Lookout.

  I discovered Brother Lookout’s story accidentally, when I was doing research for my senior project. The senior year, taught by Brother Pike, culminated in a presentation for the whole village, at which each student discussed some aspect of one of the Debates. Each of us began by choosing a set of Debates to work on. Temar, who finished school before me, had chosen the Covenant Debates. Selemon chose the Digital Debates. I chose the Separation Debates, and ended up studying the Young Evangelists.

  “Bunch of idiots,” Father said, when I mentioned this at supper.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m going to show that.”

  “I think it’s great,” said Temar.

  Father ignored her, fixing me with a look of exasperation. “Show what? Everybody already knows.”

  After that I stopped discussing my project at the table, but I became, if anything, more attached to the idea. I see now that this had a great deal to do with Temar—that is, with the chance to please her by displeasing our father. Temar had done unexpectedly well, in fact brilliantly, at school, and was now employed in the water mines of the Castle, something which put our father past his patience—not that he had ever been particularly patient with my sister. One would think he would have been pleased with her success: of all the children who went to school with us, she was the only one who managed to get into the Castle, excepting Markos and Elias, whose parents worked there, and whom everyone had expected to take that path. Temar had been expected to work with cows. Now, in the mornings, when she appeared in her narrow jacket with the blue stars on the lapels, our father could not resist a sneer: “Oh, very pretty,” he’d say, or “Oh, very fine,” when she bent down to pull her regulation boots over crisp white trousers. Far from pleasing him, her accomplishments goaded him to fury as much as her “proud looks” and “defiance” had ever done. “Oil and water,” my mother used to sigh, in reference to the two of them, or, more often: “She just has to wind him up.”

  Since going to work at the Castle, Temar had begun to seem distant from me. My senior project brought us temporarily back together. We whispered in bed at night, as when we were little. I told her about the sermons of the young Bishop Gloss, which I’d borrowed from the archives. I described his biting eloquence, the way he compared the Young Evangelists to a leprosy broken out of the burning. “He is a leprous man,” the bishop had cried, “he is unclean; the priest shall pronounce him utterly unclean; his plague is in his head.”

  “His plague is in his head,” Temar intoned, in such a skillful imitation of the bishop that we had to smother our giggles with blankets.

  “It’s sad, though,” she added a moment later, still under the blankets, in the cave warmed by our breath. “The poor Young Evangelists. If they’d been back on Earth, in the Former Days, they might still exist. They could’ve formed their own church.”

  “There’s only one church,” I said—a shocked reflex.

  “You know what I mean. Their own little church. Like they used to have on Earth. All these Debates we’ve had—somebody always has to lose. On Earth they didn’t have that, they had schisms instead.”

  “But a schism is terrible!”

  “I know.” She pulled down the blankets, emerging from our cave, and I followed her into the cold black air of the room. It felt even colder after being inside. I held the blankets close to my chin. “I know it’s bad,” said Temar, “but at least the Earthmen had space. If people didn’t like the way other people were doing things, they could leave. They’d go off over the next hill and build their own church. Brew coffee on Sundays to their hearts’ content. Wear bonnets with strings or without, as they liked. It was a bigger world.”

  “More extreme, though,” I countered.

  “Oh, extreme.” I could hear her smirking in the dark. “Brother Pike’s favorite word.”

  I retreated into silence, as usual. I couldn’t bear fighting with her. And, as usual, she went on arguing alone into the night. She demanded to know what had happened to the lukewarm being spat out of the mouth of God—had we forgotten about that? Now all we talked about was moderation, moderation, the middle path, keeping the balance, biding our time. “We think we’re preserving the church,” she said, “but the Earthmen wouldn’t recognize us. They wouldn’t even recognize our coffee.”

  At last she too fell silent. She wriggled a little closer to me, so that I would feel her warmth and know she was not angry. For all her sharpness, my sister had a great delicacy of manner. Soon her breathing lengthened; she was asleep. I began to drop off too, thinking of Brother Pike, of his scrawny, excitable limbs, of the way he did, in fact, dislike anything “extreme,” of the classroom, the benches, the curtainless window letting in the low gray sky, of the tinge of green in the air before the bell rang, the thudding of boots, of Selemon’s curls, the graceful curve of his lip, the intense shyness of his eyes, his voice, his tenor voice at the youth revival meeting, the way our voices mingled, sharing a timbre despite the difference in our ranges, of the slow walk home, the whiteness of the road, and just as I was drifting off my sister’s words came back to me, the word “coffee” must have come back, for otherwise I cannot account for the turn of my thoughts, and with a jolt that made my eyes spring open I realized what I was going to do. I would speak with Sister Wheel.

  She lived in a low mud house near the center of town. She was a widow of sorts: she had once been in covenant with a woman who had died of cancer. With her steel-gray hair, her profile slowly collapsing from loss of teeth, she ought to have been moved into Elderly Housing. But a strange aura of remoteness surrounded Sister Wheel, as it had Miss Snowfall, too, making it impossible for anyone to speak to her on the matter, and she kept that little house until her death, when it was torn down and replaced with a larger building housing four families and a glazier’s workshop. This building occupies not only the site of the house, but also the bare, stony yard where Sister Wheel was accustomed to stand for hours. Her rickety metal table is gone, her apparently untouched cup of coffee, her whole atmosphere of gloomy agitation. This atmosphere only exists now in the memory of a few people. I am one of them. I remember the superstitious tingle as I stepped into her yard, an act which, according to the stories we exchanged in childhood, would turn one into a pillar of salt.

  As a protective talisman I carried a loaf wrapped in a cloth. “
Good morning, Sister,” I said, advancing with a show of bravery. “I’ve brought you a little loaf from Sister Stalk.”

  Sister Wheel, true to form, fixed me with burning eyes and barked: “Hello!”

  I had feared that Hello more than anything; once it had passed, I felt better, though my heart still fluttered. I stepped closer to her and set the loaf on the table. Strengthened by thoughts of Miss Snowfall, who had once gotten a whole sentence out of Sister Wheel, I said: “I’m Agar. I’d like to ask you about the Young Evangelists.”

  It was Saturday; the town was full of people; bicycle bells jangled behind me, and children chased each other, shouting; but it was still horrible when Sister Wheel, who had been looking down at the loaf, turned toward me as if electrified.

  “The . . . Young!” she whispered.

  “Yes. It’s for my senior project. I’m Agar, the daughter of Brother—”

  “Shh! Come inside.”

  “What?” I said. I had never known Sister Wheel to be anywhere but out in her yard, from morning until night. Now, however, she was picking up her cup of coffee and the loaf I had brought for her with surprising swiftness. “Bring the table,” she commanded over her shoulder. And I took it up and followed her to the door, and into the house.

  The story she told me emerged in fits and starts over a number of Saturdays. She spoke in difficult bursts, like a clogged pump. I took notes on my school slate, which I later transcribed in the classroom onto the precious paper provided for senior students. These notes developed into the presentation I delivered in the fellowship hall, my voice frighteningly magnified by the speakers, my body limp and trembling as I spoke into the thick silence that greeted my introductory words: “The Young Evangelists.” The silence of a large group is extraordinarily solid. I felt as if I’d been buried alive inside a wall. Rows of faces watched me from the tables where, on Sundays, we ate our fellowship meal in noisy comfort. The silence was not distant, but close, excruciatingly attentive, lying in wait for me, alert for any mistake, and it had a burning quality, too, the heat of the shame of my parents who sat with lowered eyes, my father rhythmically clenching and unclenching his fist. Writing this I grip the seat of my chair with my free hand, I scratch it with my nails. Temar was not there. I had undertaken an act of defiance for her and she had not come, she was at the Castle. Oh, how I hated her! Tears stung my eyes, the sound of my own voice cracking filled the hall, reverberating unbearably back through my body, and I rushed toward the end of the presentation, jabbering more and more quickly until I could step away from the podium at last. To stop talking, to join the silence around me, was an immense relief. And yet that larger silence was not mine. On our way home, no one said a word. As we entered the house, Father was overcome and shoved me so that I banged my head against the wall.