The Judas Rose

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  When the person showed me that the small box made noises like the large one, I stopped rubbing the table and I held my breath, wanting. That person, that has gray in the hair like I do, took my finger and touched it to three buttons on the small box. And again there was a noise that was real, and had all its parts together! And while the noise was there, that person raised a hand of its own and hit the table.

  I stepped back, very fast, in case I would be the next thing that was hit. But the person stood there looking at me, and over and over again did the same two things. Touched the three buttons on the small box, to make the real noise in the air. Hit the table, while the noise was doing. Over and over again.

  I knew it was important. I could feel that. I am not stupid. I knew I must look and wait and think. Was it a new kind of work that I was being taught to do?

  The large person stood still a little time, and moved the face in places, and then took my hand and led me to a chair. Went down on the knees on the bare floor beside the chair. Set the small box on the chair. Touched three buttons—but not the same three buttons. It made a different real and whole noise in the air. And while that new noise was there, hit the chair gently with the hand.

  Oh, my head hurt, I could not breathe! What was it? I could not just stand there, I had to try, I had to do. I reached out my hands, I dropped the cloth that I use to make all the wood shine in the light, and I rubbed that person’s hands with my hands to make them bright, so that I would be able to see!

  We looked at each other. And then that person began to do a certain thing. Sat me down in the chair and put the hands one on each side of my face and looked at me hard. Touched the forehead to my forehead, so gently. Caused the small box to make the noise with its three parts, and tapped the chair with its finger, hard. Went to the table, carrying the box, and caused it to make the other noise with its three parts, and tapped the table hard. Went back and forth, making me stay where I was. The noise; the chair. The other noise; the table. Over and over and over.

  When the magic came, it was like what the lightning does to the sky in the hot time! It was a great crashing and a tearing inside my head, and a great light flashing through me! I understood, oh I understood, I could not be still, I ran! I went to the table, I took the small box, I pushed the three buttons that make TABLE, I ran to the chair, I caused the box to make CHAIR! I did it twice, I did it again! And then I turned to that person, and it was clapping the hands together and its mouth was moving and noises were coming and others came running into the room all together in a great hurry!

  That person took my shoulders and held them, then, and looked hard at me again and took a long breath—we were at the table—and did not move the mouth, but made CHAIR somehow with the mouth all closed, just like the small box. And looked at me, so hard.

  I knew what to do. I knew the magic! I ran to the chair, I took the small box. I made CHAIR with the buttons on the small box. And every single person in the room, every single one, was clapping the hands together!

  Oh, it is true magic, and I understand it. This is what I understand.

  On the small box that I can hold in my hand, there are buttons to push. One for each of the fingers I have and then enough for one of my hand’s fingers more. When you touch the buttons, a real noise comes. And if you press three buttons, or four buttons, one after the other, it is a string of noises that holds together and is a real thing in the air. And then, you see, you have one string of noise like that for each one thing in your head that you want to show to a person. This is what I want to tell you.

  I learned, so fast. There is a string of three that is TABLE. A string of three that is CHAIR. That is APPLE. That is FLOWER. That is HEAD. That is EYE. That is HAND. There is a string of three parts that is LARGE-PERSON, and then if you push one more button to make it a string of four parts it is for showing a SMALL-PERSON!

  Do you see? Do you hear, do you understand? Or are you broken?

  I can know in my head that it is WINDOW, I can push the buttons to make WINDOW, and the person with me will know what was in my head, will go to the window and touch it to show me that we are sharing it.

  It is hard for them, though. I don’t know why. Perhaps it is a way that they are broken. When I cause the box to make a WORD (that means, a string of noises that is a real thing and holds together), often the person will look at a paper in the hand, that has marks on it. Does the paper tell them what the word is? I don’t see how that could be, but if it is not so why do they look? And very often they make mistakes. But I am so patient. I will wait and I will make my word as many times as it takes, until they understand. Because we are sharing it. Oh magic, oh magic, and more and more magic!

  But I am crying now. Because I am wondering . . . the other small broken ones, at the place where I used to be, all the small ones that lasted only a handful of cold times and hot times, that were trying to make words and could only make empty noises. . . . What if they had come here? What if they had had one of the small boxes, as I have? Could they have shared words with other persons, as I share them now? Perhaps they were only broken in the same way that I am broken. Perhaps then they would not have gone to sleep forever, while they were still so small?

  They are sorry that I am crying. They want me to share the why. But I can’t. There are no words on the small box for what they want me to tell them. They are so sorry.

  And I am so sorry. I am so sorry because all the poor small ones are gone, before I can show them how the magic works. It is a sad thing, to go with the new happy things. This is what I want to say to you.

  CHAPTER 16

  “It’s all very well to talk of faith transcending language, and of the pettiness of quibbling over the little touch of sexual gender a language may drag into a sacred text here and there. I do understand, and of course it is only primitive superstition to visualize the Lord God Almighty as either male or female, in the sense that a human being is either male or female. But have you ever considered what very odd images come to one’s mind if one says “The Lady is my shepherdess, I shall not want?” One can just see the dear little creature, with her petticoats flying in the spring breeze, and the big pink satin bow on her crook . . . don’t you think?”

  (Langtree Moulineux, Professor of Religious Studies, Midwestern Multiversity, speaking on the newsthology talk show, “Meet the Clergy” . . .)

  “Fathers, I am sorry—it is just as you suspected it might be,” said Sister Miriam; her voice was grave, and measured, as was suitable for speaking of things of this kind. “Of course I am not qualified to say if it is either blasphemy or heresy. But I am very sure that it is not something that you, or Holy Mother Church, would approve of. And if you will allow me an opinion . . .”

  She paused and waited until Father Dorien said that yes, she might express her opinion, and then she went on.

  “It is my opinion that it contains at least the seeds of goddess worship,” she told them, not hesitating at all over the words of condemnation. Her face had the expression appropriate for removing a small dead animal from the hotbox of a flyer, but she did not stammer over the word; she spoke straight out.

  Father Agar’s breath hissed through his clenched teeth, betraying his fascinated interest in what he should not have found interesting, and Father Claude glared at him fiercely. Father Dorien ignored them both, and spoke to the nun.

  “Please continue, Sister,” he urged. “You may dispense, for the duration of this meeting, with the requirement to wait for our permission to speak.”

  “It is my privilege to obey,” answered Sister Miriam, “and I thank you for the courtesy—it will certainly save a great deal of your time. But there’s little more to report, Fathers. The other nuns and I have followed your orders; as you anticipated, we were welcome as guest speakers at the women’s chapel meetings. We had no difficulty obtaining materials for examination, and I have brought you some samples.”

  She laid three microfiches on the table, each in its own sheath, within
their easy reach; and she stood quietly waiting while they inserted them in the readers that hung on black cords round their necks, her hands clasped properly behind her back. They made the sort of noises fussy spinsters make when faced with the private reading collections of healthy adolescent males, and Father Dorien suspected that Sister Miriam was perhaps amused at the variety of clucks and sniffs and snorts that she was witnessing from the end of the table; if so, no trace of that, or of any emotion other than courteous respect, appeared upon her face.

  Dorien was the first to move; he pulled the fiche from the reader with the tips of two fingers as if it were something slimy and decomposing, set it into the comset recess on the tabletop, and pushed the stud that would display a selected page on the overhead screen.

  “I direct your attention,” he said sternly, “to the tenth line and to its translation. Sister Miriam Rose, do you vouch for the accuracy of that translation?”

  “I do, Father,” she assured him. “It has been done morpheme by morpheme. However, some details have perhaps not been made entirely clear. Do you wish me to comment on it, Father Dorien?”

  “Please.”

  “Boóbin Na delith lethath oma Nathanan,” she said easily, reading off the line. “You see that it is easily pronounced, Fathers.”

  “Indeed. As one would expect.”

  “Yes, Father Claude; just as you say.”

  “Please continue, Sister,” Father Dorien directed. “And I will be grateful if my colleagues will refrain from interruption—this is quite difficult enough for the sister without our intermittent comments.”

  “A word at a time, Fathers,” she said, nodding her agreement to the command. “Boóbin: that is the verb, to braid. It has no other meaning, although it has a transparent relationship to the numeral three, which is boó.”

  “Charming!” warbled Agar, drawing the glares of both the other priests at once. “Well, it is,” he insisted defiantly; he knew he was safe from Dorien’s tongue as long as the nun was present.

  “Go on, Sister Miriam,” said Father Dorien harshly. “Please.”

  “Na: that is the subject pronoun, second person singular, with the suffix from the grammatical class designated as ‘beloved.’ Perhaps ‘Beloved Thou’ is the closest I can come to it . . . and it should be noted that it begins with a capital letter to denote reverence as well. Delith: that is the noun meaning ‘hair.’ Human hair. Lethath, next: that is the first person singular pronoun, marked with the possessive and objective case endings. The choice of ‘-tha-’ for the possessive indicates that the reference is to something possessed by reason of birth. ‘Delith lethath’; it means ‘my hair, that I was born with,’ and is the direct object of braid. Oma: that is hand or hands; in this context, it is plural. And finally we have Nathanan: possessive-by-birth, in the pattern meaning beloved and revered, second person singular, and marked for the instrumental case. Referring to ‘Thy (Beloved) hands,’ plus the instrumental ‘with.’ ”

  The priests listened to this torrent of grammatical terminology without difficulty; they knew all about such things from the painful learning of both Latin and Greek, and Fathers Dorien and Agar both had a smattering of Hebrew as well. They sat nodding their heads as she went along, watching the screen, punctuating each chunk of information with a small movement of acknowledgment.

  “And the whole line,” said Father Dorien slowly, “is to be translated ‘Thou braidest my hair with Thine own hands.’ ‘Thou’ and ‘Thine’ being understood as containing in addition the morpheme ‘Beloved.’ Is that correct, Sister?”

  “Yes, Father. Quite correct.”

  “And that is supposed to be the Langlish translation of ‘Thou anointest my head with oil’?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Father Dorien glowered at the line, and glowered at her, and then realized that his display of emotion contrasted badly with her serenity; after all, if anyone here should have been shocked, it was the good sister. Hastily, he composed his face.

  “Very different from the King James,” he observed. “They’ve taken extraordinary liberties.”

  “Yes, Father. It’s not even a close approximation.”

  Dorien steepled his slender white hands before him, the heavy ring with its single square stone catching the light, and looked at his colleagues. In a voice of grim determination he said, “Father Agar, Father Claude—I have had the benefit of a brief prior discussion of this material with Sister Miriam. And I would like you to hear what she has to say about the interpretation of this particular line, which might seem at first to be no more than a glaring example of feminine inability to translate accurately. Sister, please tell them just what you told me.”

  Miriam allowed herself a expression of faint reluctance, and was not surprised when Father Dorien interrupted her opening words to tell her please to sit down, obliging her to begin again. She did as she was told, and then said, “This is an excessively feminine recasting of the line, Fathers, in my humble opinion. First, it was necessary to render the sense of Our Lord performing some act that would be an honor to a human being. And a woman, Fathers—” She cleared her throat, very quietly, and let her eyes fall modestly for a moment. “A woman would not wish to be anointed with oil. That would be a messy procedure, you see; afterward, she would have to wash her hair, and probably her clothing as well, since drops of oil would inevitably trickle slowly down. . . . If God were anointing you with oil, even a very small quantity of oil, you could hardly avoid that. It would not be respectful, or worshipful, to avoid it. That is the first point.”

  Father Claude broke in, his voice almost petulant. “So they replaced it with having their hair braided? Sister, I don’t see it. What is there about braiding hair that could be viewed as an honor? It’s such an everyday, trivial . . . No, I don’t see it at all.”

  Sister Miriam looked down at the gleaming boards of the floor; they were real wood, very old, and they pleased her. And she spoke in such a way that it was as if she were only agreeing to something that Father Claude had been thinking of himself. “When the Son of God washed the feet of His disciples, one wonders if they were not perhaps honored. . . .” She let the words trail off, and added, “Of course, Fathers, the translators are women. One must remember that. And they are theologically without any training at all.”

  Father Dorien picked up the dropped ball on the first bounce, secretly amused, but too well-bred to let it show. “I believe you had finished with your first point, Sister,” he said. “Please go on.”

  “Yes, Father,” she said. “It is my privilege to obey. Well, then! There is the substitution of the act of braiding the hair, which does not carry with it the physical consequences—that is, oil in one’s hair and on one’s person—that anointing does. If I may speak as a woman, Fathers . . . I would consider it an inexpressible honor if divine hands were to braid my hair. It is an intimate service, and one that demands closeness.”

  She saw something on their faces—the beginning of a hint of comprehension, perhaps? Agar had begun to fidget and would be breaking in on her with a speech if she didn’t take the floor quickly.

  “Secondly,” she continued, “and I believe most significant, is the fact that—if you will forgive me for pointing out what you have of course already realized—the braiding of hair is not something that men do in our world. Or know how to do.”

  She let that hang in the air, just under the seventeen-second limit, and then observed politely that of course God knew everything, and how to do everything, but that the point undoubtedly remained clear to the Fathers . . . who must remember the theological ignorance of the women who had written the translation of the line.

  There was that hissing noise again—Father Agar sucking his breath in through his teeth. And Father Claude, to everyone’s astonishment, pounded on the table with his fist and very nearly shouted at her.

  “For these women, then,” he demanded angrily, “the act would have to be performed by a . . . a female god? That’s what you�
��re saying, isn’t it? You’re saying that the reference is perforce to a goddess, aren’t you, Sister Miriam?”

  “Well, Father,” answered Miriam, still looking steadily downward, “they could of course defend themselves against any such charge by pointing out that (a) it is a sin to anthropomorphize God, so that to say that He is male or female is idolatry; and that (b) God has been here since before the Beginning and has seen many a period of human history come and go during which men braided their hair; and that (c) even to suggest that there is some human act of which God is ignorant is heresy.”

  The summary had come so swiftly, and had been so unlike her usual submissive murmurs, that all three men stared at her, startled.

  “Of course,” Miriam added, “none of that is, to my mind, what they were thinking. I believe that the image intended is, unfortunately, the image of a—” She stopped short, and put the fingertips of both hands over her lips, moving her head from side to side, helpless in her distress.

  “The image intended is the image of a goddess,” announced Father Agar gallantly, seeing that she was unable to bring herself to use the word. “A goddess! Sister, you are quite right; the theological subtleties that would constitute a defense would be far beyond their capacities. They would have had to be spelled out by a man, as they were for you. And, dear child—”

  Father Dorien cut in, right across Agar’s bow, leaving the other man sputtering with outrage, but silent. “Let us remember,” he snapped, “that we are not dealing with ordinary women here. These are women who have spent all their lives taking part in interplanetary negotiations, and who are able to provide simultaneous interpreting between Alien languages and the tongues of Earth. It would be foolish to assume that they are incapable of subtleties.”

  “May I remind you, however, Father Dorien—”

  “Father Agar—”