I had my own boat. I’d paddle down the canal. The buffaloes up to their knees in water. Very far in the distance, the train. Words lifted from Brother Lookout’s notes, images that could only have come from her, from the Earthman. Sister Earth. I wrote them on my hand, taking a sentence or two at a time. I thought of how they had been carried to Fallow from a distant planet. They were carried to the Castle and then, when she was shunned, to the surface. Then they came back to the Castle, and then down to the village. And Brother Lookout received them from her in the tiny, musty apartment behind the archives, in the odor of rotting husks. He received so much from her in those isolated days. I see him helping her to sit up, placing a pillow behind her back. I’ve never seen the pictures he drew, I don’t even know if they’ve been preserved. I didn’t ask. I don’t know how D. and P. progressed from speech to touch. I know that he took her words and wrote them down, and I carried them out of the archives as communion wine is carried to the church. I don’t want to spill a drop. The carpets everywhere, in every street. Everyone ate meat on that day, even the poor. What I remember most is the smell of burning leaves mingled with the smell of exhaust. And the old men stretched in the grass beside the road.
Shunned. I see her walking out onto the surface, immediately thrown down and tumbled by the wind. She has to crawl on her belly. Oh, the delicate mask of her helmet. She squirms on, waving her arms in front of her, seeking some sheltering crevice. The dust makes a hard pattering sound on her helmet, the wind roars, she rises to her knees, fighting the storm, she turns to look at the Castle. It rises nobly through the murk, a cold and distant mountain, and watches her mournfully with all its lights.
I think of her weight, her body accustomed to slightly weaker gravity, her long back. This time, she will survive. She will make her way back to the Castle at last, one arm flapping uselessly at her side. She will say: “I repent, I yield.” But what of her second shunning? For a long time I was tormented by the thought of the Earthman sunk in some hole, her chest straining for breath, her face blackening as her oxygen ran out. I used to pray: “O Lord, forgive us.” Then one day I happened to mention her to Aunt Salt. I was visiting my aunt and my mother in the lounge at Elderly Housing. I had brought them some quilting stuff, which delighted them. I sat with them to work at the quilting frame. With age, they had come to resemble each other more closely than ever, and now looked like two gnarled and tufted twins. Aunt Salt still possessed the brighter eye, however, and the quicker tongue. She looked up sharply when I mentioned Sister Earth. I was recalling for the two old women, as an amusing story, the night Hana took me to see the Earthman.
“And she was shunned in the end,” I said with a sigh.
“Nonsense!” snapped Aunt Salt.
I glanced at her, tugging my needle through the cloth.
“She wasn’t shunned. They put her in the grottoes, behind the apiary. She kept bees for twenty years.”
I smiled.
“Don’t grin at me in that foolish way,” said Aunt Salt. “Ask at the grottoes if you don’t believe me. Didn’t I pass her every day for years, on my way to the salt lab? She stood there like an archangel, all in white.”
I will not record the arduous process of getting clearance to the grottoes. Eventually I was admitted, and visited the apiary, where a pair of workers moved through the air with slow, deliberate movements, swathed in white, just as Aunt Salt had said. No, they had never heard of Sister Earth. But there had been, for quite some time, a worker who lived there in the grottoes. One of them gestured toward a nearby shed with a luminous glove. The worker had lived there, in a single tiny room. She was understood to be suffering from some disorder of the spirits, and they took it in turns to bring her a daily meal. She never appeared outside without her full uniform and mask of spotless gauze. She was tall and thin, and did all her work with her left hand. She was the most dedicated of the workers, the most solitary and silent. “Often,” said one of them, “when I arrived in the morning, I would find her already among the hives, a tray of honeycomb in her hand and bees encircling her head like a halo.” They called her Sister Keep.
It remains only to report that I did try to speak with Brother Lookout once, though he had a reputation for never talking sense. It was while I was working on my senior project. I was on my way to revival when I saw his unmistakable silhouette bent over the steps of the dispensary. No time like the present, I thought. “Brother Lookout,” I cried, running toward him. He glanced up, looking both affable and cowed, as if he expected to be tormented and was resigned to it in advance. “I want to ask you about the Young Evangelists,” I said.
He smiled, his spectacles catching the stray light from a nearby window. I don’t know why my memory of certain people is illuminated like this. Miss Snowfall teetering through the streets on her borrowed bicycle, Brother Lookout’s glasses reflecting the light. Sister Wheel, too—sometimes when I pass the glazier’s workshop I see her so clearly, standing in her yard as if guarding us all from some invisible threat, and it seems right to me that glaziers work there now, creating lenses through which, perhaps, something of reality might be perceived. I remember that Brother Lookout’s face brightened when I spoke to him, and he answered in tones of unexpected vigor. “It is wonderful that you should ask that, sister,” he said, “since only last night I dreamt I was crossing the river on a ferry. I wore a student’s coat—I was certainly on my way to join the seminary—and a heavy woolen scarf against the cold. Although the sky was dark yellow, and the waters rather turbulent, I felt sure that we would reach the other side.”
3. Temar
This world is not my home.
I had hoped to complete these recollections without speaking of Temar at any length. Yet it seems impossible to conclude without telling her story. Caught between the necessity and the pain of writing about her, I have not written anything for weeks. It was yesterday, as I was coming home from a visit with Yonas at the old place, that a solution occurred to me. Yonas had taken me out back to see the hens, and at the sound of their subdued voices and the smell of their feed I was overcome, as often happens, by the memory of the past. Suddenly I saw my sister standing by the coop, with her particular slouch that expressed disillusionment with everything around her, the big black hat casting a lumpy shadow on the wall, and her gaze, sharp, sober, and appraising. She was looking at me precisely as she had the day before she ran away. I remember she told me: “You’re one of the innocents.” The “others,” she went on, clearly classing herself among this group, have only three choices: “Fade, fester, or run.”
As I walked back to Housing, Temar seemed to hang beside me, glittering softly. Her voice blossomed just inside my ear. I entered my room, turned on the lamp, closed the door, and took off my coat and boots. She was still there, like the light on a page. I don’t know why she seemed to me like light on a piece of writing. But for the first time in years, I opened my trunk and took everything out. The good dress, the extra quilt and towel, the half-finished scarves and mittens, the mug stamped “Trust in the Lord” that Father left me when he died. At the very bottom, a sheaf of papers tied up with green thread. It took me a long time to undo the knot. My legs ached from kneeling on the floor beside the trunk, but I wouldn’t get up. It was as if I were caught there, engaged in a struggle with something. This was a battle and I must see it through. I took off the string and smoothed the papers on my lap, I gripped their edges. Jacob wrestled the angel by the waters of the brook and said: “I will not let thee go except thou bless me.” Temar, I thought, I will not let thee go except thou bless me. And I realized that rather than writing about her, I could include her own words in my writing, this long letter she left me and which I have kept in the trunk, hiding it like a sin. Dear Agar I am going away for good. I read it once, then put it away for years. Forgiveness takes so long. I wonder, who is the angel—Temar or me? Which of us has the power to bless? Which will not let the other go?
Dear Agar I am going away for good. I’m
not the writer in the family but I am leaving you this letter to say good-bye. There’s so much I want to tell you so you can understand a little bit and not hate me too much—at least not more than you have to. I couldn’t tell you any of this before because of the Rule of Mary—one of the things I hate the most. We’re supposed to keep everything that happens at the Castle and ponder it in our hearts. Don’t Tell Anybody, is what it means.
Well I never told anybody but now that I am leaving I guess I can. I’m so lonely, I want to take you up to the Castle. I want to take you up on the ladder into the blue hall with the white steps leading up in eight different directions. Look, you’re going up Staircase E. It already smells like salt. You hang up your coat and hat on the rotating rod. It’s amazing how poor the village things look there, how drab and dirty. Through the big windows comes the day. You kneel down with the others and say a prayer. Nobody introduces or leads this prayer, it just happens, it’s a tradition. It feels good to kneel down and close your eyes. Sometimes people put their heads all the way down on the floor. I’ve done that a couple of times. It’s just the day is so big. Especially the first time you see it, it’s hard. It’s the surface. It can make you a little sick. Like going into the grottoes, but different. You feel like there’s nothing holding you down, like God’s going to snatch you right up into the sky. What we call a sky down in the village is not a sky, it’s just a roof. In the Castle you really see the sky. It’s moving and coiling, full of dust. Or sometimes it’s perfectly still, a low pink color or a whiteness that never ends. The really scary thing is that you want to run out in it. That’s why we kneel, I think. We’re trying to keep ourselves down. You’re glad those windows are so thick and protected with layers of clear wrap because you want to burst through, to throw yourself onto the surface. It’s a little bit like looking down a stairwell. You know you shouldn’t jump, you’ll break something, but the pull to jump is so strong. The truth is, people want to fall. Markos used to call it the power of Satan. Sister Glove, our superior, called it vertigo.
You’re going down a hall. You have a blue tab on your jacket because you work in water and you follow the blue arrows on the walls. The smell of salt grows stronger, the air heavier, your hair springs. It’s hard for me to tell you what you see. Like the church, I guess I can say. The high ceiling and the light. There’s scaffolding you can climb on, but you have to be careful. Everything’s dripping. It’s very warm. Salt crystals have formed underneath the tanks. You can feel the distant vibration of the drills. My job was cleaning. I cleaned the fixtures, the tanks, the walls, the floors, the hallways, the windows. You probably thought I was doing something more exciting. I’m sorry for letting you think that, now. I wasn’t a scientist. I carried a bucket and rags. I wore gloves because the solution can rot your hands.
You can imagine—after some time—the empty halls—the stillness of the tanks—the hums and clanking making the stillness even deeper—the routine, knowing what time the inspectors come, and Sister Glove—yes, the routine—after a while you start to break it. You start to know the blue arrows. You can turn left instead of right, following a red or green arrow, and catch up with the blue ones later on. There’s a moment when you’re in the wrong hallway, following the wrong arrows, you know you’re lost, you’re going to get caught, and everything stiffens. Your chest is so tight it’s like being pinned to the darkness of that hall. The smell. Something cooking—you must be near the kitchens. And maybe a laugh comes down the tunnel, or voices, somebody singing, and the excitement is so much your knees shake. Then you come into a grayish light, gasping. It’s a blue hall. You’re so relieved. You know exactly where you are. Everything softens now, and it’s a kind of happiness. It doesn’t last long. Something pierces it. Regret . . .
My defiance, Father used to call it. That feeling of longing. It made me strange, I know. Mother used to ask me: Why do you wind him up? I was so sorry to hurt her, I’d cry as if the world was ending while she dabbed my ear or bandaged a cut on my elbow. That was in the cool room. I know you were waiting outside, so maybe you heard. It always seemed funny to me that that was where everything happened. The cool room was where Mother brought the disinfectant and towel to clean you up and it was also where Father sent you when you were really in for it. The smooth hard floor and the jars on the shelves. The sliver of a window up near the ceiling, partly covered with tarp. A piece of sky. The freezer where I hit my head. The pile of potatoes where I fell. They rolled everywhere. Believe it or not, me and Father both started laughing.
This isn’t what I meant to write but I guess it’s all the same thing, really. My life. A feeling of being pierced. I used to cry so much and I used to hate you, and Mother, and even little Yonas, because none of you had that feeling. Of course I hated Father most of all, even though I believe he had the feeling too, maybe even worse than me. I hated him and I loved him, like David loved and hated Saul. I used to imagine Father as Saul and myself as the boy David. I was the Lord’s anointed and Father was chasing me to kill me, he was pursuing me into the wilderness of Ziph and the wilderness of Maon. I’d pray: Let not my blood fall to earth before the face of the Lord; for the king of Israel is come out to seek a flea, as when one doth hunt a partridge in the mountains.
Maybe my trouble was the power of Satan. Maybe it was vertigo. Whatever it was, it pierced me. I felt it even in the Castle. That made me sad enough to die, because all the time I’d been thinking, if only I could get into the Castle, everything would change. It did seem changed for a little while. There was a happy time, but it didn’t last. Soon it was just blue arrows, a bucket, and gloves. The long blank halls, the glaring sky, the maddening feeling of something better happening somewhere else. It was like an itch. I felt myself getting quieter. I knew it wasn’t good, but I couldn’t help it. Every day the same low chime, the signal for lunch. In Water we had our own dining hall. Sandwiches came on a cart. Sister Glove ate carefully, primly, her hands covered with scars. And Markos would make jokes with me about cows. He kicked my feet under the table. Once he cornered me by the tanks and tried to kiss me. I dashed him with my whole bucket of solution. I didn’t hit his face, but not for lack of trying. It was good he was wearing a suit. And then we’d go home for supper, for prayers, for Saturday shopping, for church. Do you see what I mean? I’d seen everything, and that’s all it was. I told myself: that’s it, there’s nothing more. But I knew there was something more. I believed in it like I believe in God.
Tender : Stories Page 25