mean, a cart with four wheels?”
“Excuse me, Yves, I shouldn’t have said that.”
“But you did, and now you must tell me how such a thing works.”
She cast down her eyes, and answered, in a near whisper, “Two axles. Front and rear.”
Immediately my mind began to chase after the new cart’s design.
“I’m sorry,” she said, still not looking at me. “I shouldn’t interfere.”
“No, it’s an excellent idea.”
Her face, which had started out a pale and impenetrable mask, was growing prettier as it softened. “But if I’m going to study you, I have to leave things how I found them, not tell you how to fix your carts.”
“I appreciate the suggestion—and if you have others, I want to hear them. I am our village’s one true inventor by default, but I do not seek to cling to the title like the ivy to the alder.”
“We’ll see, won’t we, how we work with one another?”
“Oh, aye,” Adelaïda said, “there’s more work than you can dream of. We’d be so grateful for help.”
“Excuse if I’m being stupid, but, Yves, none of this”—she waved her arms to indicate the hearth, our village, the liquid black sky—“none of this is for my benefit?”
“My brother would tell you the whole of God’s creation is to bring you, and you only, to bliss.”
She shook her head. “It’s so hard to believe that this is here. I’ve been imagining it for so long, and then to sit by your fire, talking to you.”
“I cannot imagine imagining my life,” I told her, seeking to stretch my mind around the new idea. “It is all I know.” Never had anyone looked so out of place at my table as she looked, tall and slender, and hunching toward me with interest. “What are your people like, Ruth? Your family, I feel, are not farmers.”
She laughed quietly. “University people. We’re all in the university.”
“Meaning?”
“That we all study something or other—people or books—for our work.”
“A whole learned family? A whole family of people like my brother?”
“More or less. It’s more common where I come from than it seems to be here to devote one’s life to learning.”
“Don’t you miss your people, here on my farm?”
She nodded, and ceased to look at me.
“Sometimes, when I work my farthest fields, the sun sets in the sky as I am alone with my horse, and I think, what if this were the last time, in all of history, the sun were to set so? Then my family would not be here to see it with me. And though I am but a short journey from my home, I miss my hearth, and I miss their faces, with all the longing a man’s heart can know.”
“I can’t explain it. I miss them dearly—my brother and sister and I all live at home, and I’m close to them both, I love them, I don’t think I’ve ever been away from them so long. But everything has changed. And as long as it’s changed, I wanted to find out how things are here.”
For the second time that day our hands met, though this time our hands reached forth at the same moment. For praise God, he gave us the gift of understanding, the gift of knowing what lies beyond the things our words can say. I saw how her home had gone barren and strange with her mother’s death; the departed surely lingered in furniture and corners both. I had not the facility to imagine her home in her strange land, but my heart knew how she felt there, filled with terror each time she woke herself up at night, confused by seeing everywhere the marks and signs—nay, even catching the scent—of the departed. Little did it matter from how far off she had come, for in that moment I glimpsed her soul, and was made humble by her grief. Her words did not make me like her, or make her seem less strange; but they showed me her humanity, which until that moment had sorely lacked.5
She had blankets for sleeping, softer than wool straight off the lamb, and as bright as her backpack in hue. Like the backpack, they fastened shut with a zipper, which Elizaveta worked slowly open and shut, her small face grave with awe. We built up the fire, Ruth combed her wild dark hair, and she bedded down beneath Elizaveta’s hammock, across the room from our bed. I hoped my daughter would not inadvertently water her during the night, but there was nowhere else to put her. She thanked us again for allowing her to stay, and though she did not overtly repent for her odd behavior, the tenor of her voice made her apology clear.
That night as I slept, my brothers and sister came from the place they resided after death, and took up their old, earthly forms, not as they looked when I laid them in the soil, but as they had looked in the flower of their youth and health. Their bodies and clothing were luminous like June clouds, but I recognized the roundness of their cheeks and the curls in their fine hair, and my heart thrilled and danced to the sounds of their voices, which my mind was ever forgetting but which my soul never would. They billowed with the motion of a breeze that blew through a chink in the wall. I tried to express my gratitude for their visit, but they would not remain still enough to accept thanks. Instead, Clive and Marvin, tall like our father and slightly stoop-shouldered from years of toil, stood gleaming at the foot of the bed with a flute and a psaltery, and Eglantine, her golden hair in two slender braids, floated, skipped, and tumbled over me, singing. Her words were as quiet and high-pitched as far-off bells, and I trailed after their meaning as a dog trails after table scraps, greedily and with my whole mind intent. I had only begun to make out her refrain—“Beware! Beware!”—when suddenly I woke. No longer was I the being to whom my sister, only moments before, had sung; I sank heavily into my earthly body, all sweat and palpitations, and fear gripped my bowels and heart. For in the far corner our stranger was crying a soft, steady stream of tears, and though I could do nothing to comfort her, and though I had no real liking for her, I felt myself drawn to the burden of her sorrow, and knew in that moment that some of its terrible weight would become my own. I could not tell my wife of my siblings’ visitations. She would never have consented to stay in a bed where the dead had not only left this world but to which they so often returned.
In the morning I took a torch into the barn. The women were still sleeping, but Yoshu circled eagerly around my legs, and my sensible horse whinnied to indicate that she had been up, and bored, for hours. “I have work to do—will you forgive me?” I asked, tossing her a wormy apple. She shook her head and blew air through her proud, black lips—an equivocal answer at best. I pushed the yelping dog away.
In the corner of the barn nearest Hammadi’s stall, I kept the box Mandrik had brought me from his journeys—finely engraved in dark wood, with a polished stone inlaid in the top. Therein, as he requested me, I kept the pens he had given me, ink he had made me, and a few good chalk rocks. Mandrik gave me the box and the implements in order that I should write with them; but having nothing to say that I could not say aloud, I used them generally to draw on the paper he’d made, no doubt intending it for a somewhat loftier purpose. I took out his hallowed tools, dipped once, then again for good luck, in the ink, and began.
I drew the new cart without a moment’s hesitation or doubt, with-out a single false mark on the paper. The design was so simple I knew it had been God’s original plan, of which all previous carts had been but pale imitations. The two-wheeled cart (already a marked improvement over its predecessor) had its wheels squarely in the middle of the
