Tender : Stories

by Sofia Samatar

  And yet I had said so little. I had done as I’d promised Father: I had shown that the Young Evangelists were foolish, unbalanced, extreme. I had compared them to some of our misguided prophets of old Earth: Jan van Leyden running naked through the streets of Münster, Claas Epp who heretically predicted the day of Christ’s return. It wasn’t my argument regarding the Young Evangelists that had produced the silence, but the impropriety, the sheer unseemliness of the topic. This episode in our history was a wound; the cells of the body sprang into action when it was touched, closing about it, closing it down.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” was my silent refrain as I curled around my despair in bed that night, wracked with sobs I would not reveal by the slightest sound, the cords of my throat swollen and aching with screams that were nothing but air. “I didn’t, I didn’t! I didn’t do anything wrong!”

  Of course, I had known that my choice of subject was a daring one: that was the attraction of it. But I had planned to skirt the abyss without falling in. I had tried to flirt with danger, yet escape its embrace, and everyone had seen through me. I writhed in bed, scalded by shame.

  Now I feel differently. Now Sister Wheel rises up from the dustyard, as clear as if her image were etched behind my eyes. Her big, nervous hands, the flickering lamp, and the dirty dishes stacked in the gloom of the counter seem to hold something immeasurably precious. The windows are covered with blinds shutting out the day. The lamp makes a small buzzing sound as it flickers: there’s a bad connection somewhere. Her face is large, anguished, imploring, the eyes like liquid gems. She tells me that her life is a life of guilt. She tells me this with a reckless openness, something beyond generosity. She’ll tell anyone. Every day she waits for someone to ask. She tells me that she was born with this feeling of guilt, that all the Young Evangelists were, and their inborn guilt led to further guilt, sin upon sin. I’m taking notes. My hand quivers with excitement, the chalk squeaks. I’m in a cave, the closest thing on Fallow to an ancient tomb. Fallow is old, but not ancient; its age has no meaning; its sands and radioactive stones are alien, cold, untouched by human history. But in this kitchen, history is alive. Something has happened here. Once this room was crowded with impatient, warm young bodies. The thick spectacles that had given Brother Lookout his name filled up with fog when he walked in with his Bible under his arm. He also carried a sheaf of papers borrowed from the archives. Laughing, he greeted everyone with the Kiss of Peace. Then he sat on this very counter, his long legs dangling, and read. “The spread of His glorious Gospel . . . the extension of His Kingdom from shore to shore . . .”

  The idea was simple. We belong to Earth, Brother Lookout explained, but we have abandoned it. We have cared only for our own salvation, our removal from the wars that blaze across its suffering continents, our preservation from its plagues and floods. Like the priest and the Levite, we have passed by the dying man in the road. Unlike true Christians, we have given no thought to our neighbors. We have not considered those who have perished since we departed Earth long ago, their souls crying out for peace. How many have been born since our departure who, had they only been alive at that time, would have joined the trek? Are they to be punished simply for being born too late? How can we receive Gabriel’s reports so complacently? Every quarter century produces a catalogue of horrors, yet we sit here—Brother Lookout struck the counter with the heel of his palm—we sit here like the carrion birds, the eagle and the ossifrage, waiting for others to die so that we might inherit the Earth.

  Someone objected that, however much we might want to help the Earthmen, we are unable to communicate with them.

  “Not so,” said Brother Lookout, his eyes gleaming behind his spectacles. And here he called on one of the gathering, a certain Brother Pin, to speak. Brother Pin worked at the Castle. He was a slight, sallow creature; the attention of so many people brought tears to his eyes. Twisting his fingers together, he spoke of the Earthmen who arrived in ships from time to time and were shut up in the Castle.

  A communal gasp, then silence. The room throbbed like a stove. “Tell them,” Brother Lookout said quietly. And, weeping, Brother Pin went on. He said each Earthman to arrive was locked in a room, instructed in our language, and questioned. Eventually, if they survived (and many did not, being worn down from the journey they had made in ships much smaller, though indescribably faster, than our Ark), they were taught the rudiments of prayer and set to work at menial tasks in the bowels of the Castle. Those who refused either work or Christ were shunned.

  “That’s what they do,” whispered Sister Wheel. “They give them suits and enough food and oxygen for thirty days, and shun them.”

  Of course, I knew this. I belong to the generation after Sister Wheel’s, those who have grown up knowing of the Earthmen occasionally coughed up onto the deserts of Fallow. I also know the arguments that justify their treatment, the essence of the Separation Debates. I would repeat these arguments in my presentation at the church. We are the last survivors, humanity’s hope. We are the angel of the church in Philadelphia, who have a little strength, and have not denied His name. We cannot allow the Earthmen who discover us to depart, or, with their miraculous speed, they would surely return to Fallow with an army. Nor can we permit them to enter the village, sowing discord. This position is now set down in our schoolbooks. I learned about it in Miss Snowfall’s class. I remember the curious deadness and remoteness of her face as she led the prayer after the lesson. This prayer was written in the teacher’s book. She spoke the lines, and we repeated them. For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish. Some of us wept. It is hard for children to accept the idea of separation. For the Young Evangelists, it was impossible. They were going to welcome the lost Earthmen to the village. They were going to learn their languages and use Gabriel to send messages back to Earth, inviting everyone who desired peace to our refuge. If Gabriel could not be used in this way—nobody was sure—they would go to Earth themselves, using the Earthmen’s ships. They would cry out like the prophets of old: “Seek ye the Lord while He may be found, call ye upon Him while He is near.” The heat in the room was unbearable. They opened all the windows. Someone began to sing. Harmony filled them, as in a revival meeting. In the coming days, their passion would spread. They would go from house to house, eagerly preaching the truth, demanding others’ support. And they would be victorious. No contrary voice could conquer them. “We were right,” said Sister Wheel, her mouth working. They would receive permission to bring an Earthman down into the village, provided that Earthman accepted Christ. The first one, and indeed the only one they were ever able to bring, was the one I saw that night with my cousin Hana, her great prone body battered by the sands. Her name was unpronounceable. They called her Sister Earth.

  When Brother Lookout was disciplined, it was discovered that he had hoarded a great deal of paper in his rooms. A little paper factory was set up in the kitchen, with two broad vats on the floor and drying screens on the counters. There were more screens underneath the cot where Brother Lookout slept in the musty smell of the slurry composed of kitchen scraps and his own used paper, and stacks of paper were piled up everywhere, a resource that certainly should have been returned to the archives to be pulped or filed.

  Most of these papers are records of what Brother Lookout called his “sessions” with various patients. He was the first and last psychologist in the village. He had discovered the field of psychology as a young man, Sister Wheel told me, during a brief period working in the archives. Later I learned from Ezera that there are several books concerning this science in the archives, but they are kept in restricted files. Brother Lookout’s papers are restricted, too, but Ezera allowed me half an hour with them in a back office. Page after page, in a handwriting that is sometimes small and fluid, at other times larger and strangely angular, as if carved with a knife. There are only ever two speakers: “D”and “P,” the former indicating Brother Lookout, the “Doctor,” the latter hi
s patient for the day. Everything is dated, but there are no names. Apparently, Ezera says, Brother Lookout kept a calendar on which he recorded the names of his patients, a key to the records and the shifting identity of “P.” The charred remains of this calendar were discovered in his stove.

  D: What is your first memory?

  P: Fog.

  D: What is fog?

  P: Something that makes it hard to see, like a veil.

  [P. takes my glasses and smudges them with her thumb.]

  D: And what can you tell me about this fog?

  P: It was autumn, and they were burning the rice fields.

  I wrote these words on my hand. It’s the earliest entry I can link to the Earthman. It’s in the small writing, from the days when Brother Lookout seemed in control of his pencil. Afterward came the big, boxlike writing, as if he were trying to construct a room the words could fit inside.

  I pieced together the story of Brother Lookout over some time, from a number of sources. From Sister Wheel, I learned of his leadership role among the Young Evangelists, although, she added, clasping her hands together on the table, he practically dropped out of the group after the Earthman’s arrival. It was at that point that she and her partner in covenant, whom she referred to only as Rahel, became leaders, holding long debates in the fellowship hall, petitioning the Castle unsuccessfully for clearance, and meeting with the old bishop and then, when a new one was chosen, with Bishop Gloss. “People began to laugh at us,” she said. Her frown deepened; her eyes flashed, roving alarmingly from side to side. “What about Brother Lookout?” I said, to distract her, and she froze.

  “He was—he was with the Earthman,” she stammered at last.

  He was with the Earthman in his rooms behind the archives. She slept in the bedroom. He had made up a cot in the kitchen. Sometimes she was strong enough to come out and sit at the table. She ate the breads and pancakes prepared by the women of the church. At first these charitable women were allowed in. They would leave the food they had brought on the table and sit down with the Earthman for a while. But soon Brother Lookout began to stop his visitors at the door. “Thank you,” he would say, standing in the doorway, taking the food.

  At this point, Sister Wheel lost the ability to follow the thread. She veered away from the story, she went back in time. She told me that Brother Lookout was the middle child in a family of three sons. He was the weakest and the most intelligent. Something in the way she fixed her eyes on mine suggested that she was pleading. “You know how he walks,” she said, demonstrating by swaying in her chair, thrusting her head forward and shaking it in Brother Lookout’s manner. “He used to get like that sometimes, even then.”

  Her story began to disintegrate. She told me about the marvelous humor Rahel preserved during her last illness. The way she would describe Sister Wheel’s stews, which grew worse and worse under the stress, as “fearfully and wonderfully made.” “And you know,” Sister Wheel added, as if the connection between the thoughts were obvious, “I was a cart driver. I was the best cart driver in the village.” She carried the most precious things, medicines, plastics, rare wood from the grottoes. “I can’t believe,” she said, “they took my job away.”

  The day she said that was the last Saturday I went to her house. I did not learn, from her, the story of the fall of the Young Evangelists. I remember running outside, chalk and slate rattling in my satchel, and pausing in her yard for a gulp of air. The light slanted toward dusk. The air was saturated with dust; in the distance the Castle door threw down a tremulous golden ray. I did not learn, from her, of the suspicions of the church women, the curious dank smell that seeped under Brother Lookout’s door. I learned only that he loved Earth, that he wanted to save every soul in the universe, that he was a middle child, that he was intelligent, shy, weak, a gifted preacher, that his trousers were always an inch too short, that he studied a lost philosophy, a science of dreams, memories, comfort, and terror. “What is your first memory?” I don’t know. Before I left her, Sister Wheel put her hands over her face. I ran outside, panting. In the sky a ray of gold. It was from Ezera that I learned how the Young Evangelists fell. It was after Temar was lost. I was drowning, gasping for life, and everyone knew it. Ezera, my old school friend, couldn’t refuse me anything. He unlocked a back office and brought me restricted files. Brother Lookout’s papers, the long dialogues between “D” and “P.” Such a strange faith, this psychology. A belief in the power of memory. It is outlawed now, stamped out with the Young Evangelists, shunned like the Earthman who was taken away from Brother Lookout’s rooms, cringing in the metallic light of day. This part of the story I learned from my cousin Hana, who, with a group of friends, ducked out of school early, having heard a rumor of some excitement in town. “She was as ugly as rock,” Hana exclaimed. “Her dress rode up—do you remember that, Yosef? Her dress came up in the middle of the street!”

  “Bullshit,” her husband, Yosef, called laconically from the next room.

  “It did, I tell you!” said Hana, yanking up her own skirt where we sat in her kitchen. Her baby girl, who sat on the floor trying to eat a potato, looked up curiously. “Slabs!” said Hana, slapping her own thigh. “Great white slabs of flesh they were. Ugh! Her legs kept crumpling, and the flesh kept jiggling. But some of the boys said she had nice great shaking breasts, too! I used to run with a nasty crowd, and Yosef was the worst of them!” she concluded, laughing heartily.

  Deacon Broom and Brother Wick, two Council members, pulled the Earthman into the street. They dragged her onto a cart and took her away. And so the Earthman was shunned a second time, and it was decided that Earthmen would never be admitted among us again. Ezera let me see some of the records pertaining to the issue, most of them written and signed by Bishop Gloss. It was Bishop Gloss, too, who spoke at the evening meeting. “And now, O our God, what shall we say after this? for we have forsaken Thy commandments.”

  It was the end of the Separation Debates. Sister Wheel sat with her face in her hands. I ran outside, chalk clacking in my satchel. In our schoolbook it said simply, “The Earthman could not adjust to life in the village. The Young Evangelists confessed their error and were reconciled with the church.” That was how I would end my presentation. Now I stood in Sister Wheel’s yard, drinking in the chilly air. The light slanted. It was preserving season, and there would be a long pale night, shadows etched on all the roads. I was young. Sometimes it’s hard to remember how very young I was. Strength coursed through me to the ends of my fingertips. I would never be a bitter, dried-up woman like Sister Wheel, or pace the streets all day like Brother Lookout. I would go home, feed the chickens, eat my supper, bring in the wash, and go to the youth revival meeting to pray and sing, to stand beside Selemon, to kick his ankle when he kicked me, to pass a slate bearing a caricature of the youth leader, Sister Small. More and more, I see this writing project as a kind of rescue. I don’t want to forget the dimness of the sanctuary, how different it looked at night without the Sunday light streaming through the windows, how different it sounded with so few of the pews filled. When people ran in late their footsteps echoed. Sister Small was stocky, harassed, with straggly brows and a shiny nose. Only a true spirit of sacrifice could have induced her to put up with us as we tussled and writhed with laughter. Anything could set us off. Elias stood up and, for no reason, cracked Ezera across the head with his hymnal. Yodit’s stocking tore. “Oh, pins,” she said. Even the hymns made us laugh, the boys winking as they boomed out the line: “Here I raise my Ebenezer.” Naomi was my best friend then. I pinched her thigh when she made me laugh too hard; she drove her fist into my hip. The world was made of her soft brown body, the slippery pew, the shadow of Selemon’s cheek, the odors of coats, cowshit, boots, a child’s sickness cleaned up long ago. Holy smells. The deacon dragged the Earthman to a cart. Bishop Gloss stayed upstairs in Brother Lookout’s room. “The brother remained defiant,” he wrote. He recorded everything he found in the rooms: the hoarded paper, the vats of slurry,
the burnt calendar. “The brother could not be persuaded to see his error,” the bishop wrote. “It was necessary to bring him before the congregation.” It was necessary to bring him to evening meeting, which the children did not attend. It was necessary to display some of his papers. It was necessary to display the drawings of the Earthman and the drawings of the Earthman and Brother Lookout together. It was necessary to display the drawing of Brother Lookout with his hands tied and the plastic tube that was used to do the tying. After revival, we would go to somebody’s house to help with the preserving or the hog killing, if there was one. Sometimes one of us knew where to go, sometimes we merely followed the sound of voices or the mouth-watering odors of sugared fruit and smoke. Always there were places to get lost along the way. There was a recess in the alley between the infirmary and the dyeworks. There was a shed with a broken door behind Brother Blunt’s. The best place was the old surveyors’ camp, with its trackless wastes, its sheltering piles of stones. In the camp you had the feeling of standing at the edge of the world. There were caves, too: you could go in and touch the wall where the village ended. We were supposed to stay out, because of the radiation. “I don’t care,” I said. Selemon pressed me to the wall and his hat fell off. It was necessary, wrote the bishop, to display the bruises on Brother Lookout’s wrists, to remove his shirt and reveal the stripes on his back. At this point, the brother began to show himself more tractable: he stopped demanding to know the whereabouts of his partner in sin. Unfortunately, he still refused to pray or to repent. Hands were laid upon him, and the people began to sing. The caves at the surveyors’ camp were the site of such intricate negotiations. Can I undo this clasp? Yes. This one? No. Selemon took off his shirt, his breath smoked, I feared he would freeze. He had the body of a waterbird of the grottoes. So graceful, shivering, thin. At last, wrote the bishop, the brother repented. The poison of the Young Evangelists was removed from among the people. “They knew,” whispered Sister Wheel before I left her. “They planned it all. They knew something would happen. All they had to do was wait.” At the time I didn’t know what she meant. I slipped out of her kitchen and into the yard, where the light was changing, the Castle door diffusing its golden ray. That night I would go with Selemon to the old surveyors’ camp. A rescue project, yes—that’s what this writing is. I know I’ll be accused of trying to stir up dust from the dustyard, but it’s not true. I want to save everything, everyone. I understand the Young Evangelists, who wanted everyone to be saved. And Brother Lookout sweeping the streets of the village so carefully, collecting what we, even we, who prided ourselves on our frugality, let fall in the course of a day: threads, bits of chalk, needles, hair. From gazing beyond the sky he had turned to peering at the ground but he was still what he had been, a collector whose first impulse was to preserve. He was the one who gathered the black threads for Temar’s hat. Boys used to push him down, seize his bag of trash and empty it in the street. “Look out, Brother Lookout!” I want to save everything, pick up every hair from the dirt, save the boys too, their chapped cheeks, their fresh and panting breath, these boys who would grow into men who disciplined others and ruled the village with a heavy, brutal, joking confidence. “We’re at our best,” Temar once remarked, “when the generator is broken.” The men had worked on the generator for twenty-four hours. The women kept fires going around them, heated gloves and boots, conjured up steaming bowls of potato soup. Afterward Father laughed so hard in the kitchen with our uncles, remembering who had fallen, who had dropped a wrench on someone’s head. He fell asleep at the table, his face soft and golden like a child’s. Temar put her finger to her lips and knelt to untie his boots . . . This was Temar, who only a few days later, sitting at supper with a swollen lip, said brightly: “You know, there’s one thing I don’t understand! How can a man call himself a pacifist while he beats a girl with a hose?” Yonas burst into tears. Father stood up. He seized Temar by the hair . . . And Brother Lookout died in the old surveyors’ camp, lying frozen in a shallow depression almost like a grave. It was the third time he had run away, I learned from Lia, who used to work at the desk in Elderly Housing. When they moved his bed out, they found the floor underneath it covered with writing. He had been collecting verses from the Bible. Strange verses—“and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them,” “then thou shalt take an awl, and thrust it through his ear unto the door.” As if he were assembling the pieces of a secret message. He only got as far as the first book of Samuel, ending with the words: “And the word of the Lord was precious in those days; there was no open vision.”