of things to come,4 and had already begun his most propitious experiments with trees.
“But,” I warned him, thinking with fondness of the various wonders of my wife’s body (God rest my lovely Elynour’s soul), “you don’t know what you’re missing.”
He did not like what he had heard nights by our fire, and would not squander himself on women and their weird fecundity. “Every time you touch one, out comes another mouth to feed. At least in most families.” He had an ordinary man’s strength of conviction, though he dressed in the robes of a mendicant or a madman.
“How can you say that when so many die, with Clive, Marvin, Eglantine, and both our parents gone off to the other side? It’s a good thing they had lots of children.”
“If you don’t have the mouths to feed, you have heartbreak. I can afford neither.”
He had never, to my knowledge, broken any of his vows. Still the community watched him ever to see when his resolve would crack. Wido Jungfrau and our Uncle Frith used him for the butt of every joke; and indeed, none of us knew to what extent his vows emanated from the depths of his soul, and to what extent nothing particularly tempting had happened by to lead him astray. I was only somewhat surprised, therefore, when late that night the dog began barking wildly and my wife came in with the glow of the hops about her and Ruth Blum, too tall to pass through my doorway upright, in tow. My daughter, tagging after her, was half suffocated in her string. Immediately I grabbed the child and freed her arms, though the ale still coursed through my blood.
Adelaïda was watching me closely. “Yves,” she said, “it would not have been right for Mandrik to host the stranger in his house, even though they get on so well; he never would have lived it down. And you know, everyone else is more afraid of her than we, so I brought her home. I hope you don’t mind. She says she has blankets for sleeping.”
“I don’t want to impose on you,” Ruth said. Obviously she had never been in a house before, for her eyes fixed with uncouth interest on objects I had never bothered to notice—the iron kettle, the well-kempt central hearth, a straw hat Mandrik had brought from the Beyond that hung over our bed, some flowered red silk he had also brought back, hanging, our only other decoration, on the long wall by Elizaveta’s hammock.
“What are you staring at?” I asked her, perhaps too sharply.
“Excuse me, I didn’t mean to.”
“No,” I said, “I beg your pardon. It’s an honor to have you,” and trusted, once again, that the sentiment would follow its utterance; an honor, who could say, but if nought else a thing of interest.
“You don’t mind my staying? It’s not an imposition?”
“We will be pleased to have you among us.”
“I’ll be happy to help around here, if there’s anything I can do.”
I nodded—even with the harness, our lives were full, dawn to dusk, with work—but she did not see me, having already turned to settle her backpack in the corner by the upended washtub. Adelaïda sat onto the bed, and Elizaveta pulled her wooden doll from beneath her mother’s pillow to show the visitor. Soon Ruth was kneeling on the floor, touching the doll’s bald head. “What’s her name?”
“Pudge.” Elizaveta grinned and galloped out the door into the night.
“Ruth,” I said. “Please sit down with me.”
She took the bench on the opposite side of the table.
“Tell me why you’ve come here.”
Her black eyes blinked twice, then shone in the light of the fire.
“I have told you already you are welcome in my home and in this village. But I want to know what brought you here.”
Her head shook, willing her low voice to speak. “Like I said, Yves, I lost my compass, I lost my way. I was looking for you, but it’s dumb luck that I found you.”
“And, as you say, Mandragora is quite different from your home.”
She nodded her head, but regarded the table.
“Different how?”
She shrugged her sharp, square shoulders. “Every way you can think of, really. I don’t know how to begin. How our houses look, how we travel, how we dress. The food we eat, how we cook it, how we talk. Everything.”
Her words were vague, but they tantalized like the odor of bread in the oven. “But how?”
Her brows knitted together. They were fantastic, so often did they move. “Yves, you’ve never left Mandragora?”
“We go to the market in town. I told you, only my brother has left.”
“And did he tell you what it was like in the world?”
“Yes, but what he described along the Silk Road—the farms full of cocoons, the rice fields, the steep hats, like that one—seems to bear little relation to you.”
“Where did you say he went?”
“To Indo-China.”
She raised half of her mouth in a smile, which made a solitary dimple. “Is there a Silk Road in Vietnam?”
“Indo-China.” I felt myself growing cross.
“He left here, went directly to Vietnam, and came back again? I don’t follow.”
“Do you malign my brother? Do you contradict his word?”
“No, I’m not maligning him. He’s been really—he seems nice.”
“And yet?”
“I’m trying to make sense of what you’re telling me.”
“As I am trying to make sense,” I said, “of what you’re telling me.”
Elizaveta ran back in, looked about at us all, and went to her mother on the bed.
“Ruth,” I said, more gently, “I want to know why you’ve come here.”
Her forehead wrinkled like the waves of the sea drawn on a map. “Because I’m a graduate student in anthropology.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I study people, Yves. I’m here to study you.”
Her expression was guilty, but I was uncertain why. “You look as if you were ashamed of study.”
“Not at all, no. But I don’t want to—I wouldn’t want to belittle you, by making you my subjects.”
“We’re the subjects of the Archduke,” Adelaïda gently interjected.
“And subject,” I added, “to the will of God. We know our place.” Still her forehead remained vexed. “Something yet troubles you.”
“Sort of. I’m not sure if it’ll make
