it seems to go easy enough with your tongue and the words, though they’re not always clear to me.”
At last her brow relaxed, and the lopsided grin passed again across her mouth—the expression reminded me of my brother’s arch humor. “The reason I came here, Yves, instead of going someplace else, is that I felt Mandragora calling; to me.” I had never known such a feeling, but I remembered the fire in my brother’s eyes when the Beyond first beckoned to him. “I’m sorry if that sounds strange.”
“Not so strange,” I told her. “How long did it call you before you took heed?”
She closed her eyes, and opened them again slowly. “I’ve been thinking about Mandragora a long time, since I was a child. I always believed it was here, even though there was no empirical proof. No one knew anything about you, really, but I could feel this place in my bones. And lately I began to feel like it was my duty to come. Like, if I didn’t do it, nobody ever would.”
I felt certain that, if I sat quiet, the whole of her tale would unfold. She worked a fingernail between the boards of the table. “Yves, listen. My mother was in Scotland—on the mainland—once when she was young, and she came looking for you—looking for your parents, I suppose—but she never found the village. She told me story after story, though, about how she thought you did things here, so remote from the world. And nothing ever came of it—she never found you, and she never did what she wanted with her life; she sat around and raised three kids and that was the end of it. She died right before New Year’s, and I began to think that I should come here and do it for her, in her honor.” She worked the nail deeper into the crack, and I wondered if she would be able to extract it when the time came. “Do you know what I’m talking about?”
Death had visited this hearth so frequently that I was almost ashamed to tell her. “Yes.”
She drew out her fingernail and looked down at the table. “I hope you don’t think that’s silly.”
I could not follow her word by word, but I understood the sense of what she was saying. “When my parents died, they left me a farm to tend. If your mother told you to come to Mandragora, I think it right and good that you followed her directive.”
“It wasn’t a directive, exactly. More an idea she put in my head. But thank you.”
I nodded. “And how did you come?”
“I flew to Scotland, and from the mainland I took a boat. There wasn’t a harbor anywhere we could see, there’s no beach, but he moored to a flat rock and let me off. He must have thought I was crazy.”
Adelaïda, sprawled on the bed, repeated, “You flew.”
“And then I went on the boat.”
My hairs bristled like a barn cat’s. “How did you fly?” I asked.
“In an airplane.”
Perhaps she was like my grandmother, then—there had always been stories that this one and that one saw her wafting about the parish, her long hair fluttering behind her on the breeze. My mind crackled like sap in the fire. “Tell me, how does it plane the air?”
“Have you really never even seen one?”
I shrugged. Who knew what she meant?
“Yves, even if you didn’t know what it was, I know you’ve seen one. A thing like a bird, silvery gray, crossing the sky. They fly more smoothly than birds do, and they’re louder.” Her eyes continued to expand until I feared they would devour her face. “They rumble in the air overhead, they roar like thunder, only it’s a steady sound. It grows quieter as the airplane gets farther away. You must have heard one.”
I had seen such a creature, and heard the sound a thousand times; my mind’s ear heard it then. Wido Jungfrau had long since postulated that they were ravenous beasts scanning the countryside for unloved children to eat up, but Wido was fuller of foolish notions than a sated pig was full of slops. When once I asked my brother what kind of bird it might be, he shooed me away, saying, “Call it a bad angel out cruising.”
“I have heard that sound.” The admission felt grave. “And always wondered about the thing that made it.”
Ruth shook her head. “I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t all of this. You don’t even have heat.”
“Yes, we do,” Adelaïda said, waving a sleepy hand toward the fire.
“No electricity, no zippers—tell me, do you lack modern technology, or do you know about it and resist it, like the Amish?”
Adelaïda said, “What are the Amish?”
Rather, I thought, more to the point, I asked, “What is it, exactly, you intend to study?”
“The most basic things about your daily life, your social structure, your agricultural methods. I simply want it all to be documented, preserved.”
I was certain I still did not fully comprehend. “We have our priest, Ruth, but he is only a workaday priest—no great scholar of the ways of God. I am this village’s inventor, my brother its thinker, and the rest of us are ordinary men, working the soil at the price of our lives.”
She shook her head slightly. “I don’t understand.”
“I mean to say that I, and my brother, and even our middling priest, have all the village’s respect for our studies. Surely to have another scholar among us—no matter that her field of study is hardly worth a moment’s pondering—will be a great honor. And however odd your ways, we will try to respect them.”
She gave a slight, graceful bow with her head. “As I will try to respect yours.”
“And if you’re interested in matters theological, there’s a great deal you can learn from my brother, and I’m sure the priest will want to share his books and his learning with you, once he assures himself you aren’t the Devil’s minion.”
I was beginning to like her sideways smile. “Is he going to try to convert me?”
“Are you a Christian?”
“Ruth Blum? Of course not. I’m a Jew.”
Though I had heard tell of them, certainly, in my readings from the Bible, I had never before seen one, and wondered if they were all so tall. It certainly explained her accent. “Then it’s quite likely that Stanislaus will try to save your soul.”
“You have to excuse me if I’m rude,” she said. “Please understand how different everything is where I come from. Until this evening, I could hardly imagine such a life, so pared down. You make do without so much of what my people consider basic amenities.”
I looked around at my home, replete with food, tools, good blankets, and a fire. “What amenities am I without?” Then, “Thanks to me and my brother, we harness our horses, and our carts now have two wheels instead of one, and are far more stable, far more efficient. We plow with much larger plows than our ancestors ever dreamed of.”
“Two wheels,” she said, and whistled through her beautiful teeth. “Next thing you know, it’ll be four, and then what.”
“Four
