invention.”
“Ydlbert,” his pinch-faced Anya said, as her sons guffawed. “Not on the Sabbath.”
“I call it the harness. It allows me to attach my cart to my horse without strangling her.”
Ydlbert laughed, as he does, with all his soul, and with his great, firm belly heaving. “Oh, well, if that’s it, congratulations.”
“Ydlbert,” I said, “I’m serious. When I used it to tether them together, the horse dragged me, Adelaïda, a bale of hay, and the dog without the slightest strain.”
“Yves,” he said, poking me in my gut—which was only half so ample as his own—“save your fairy tales for bedtime.”
“I’ll bet you three guilders it works.”
Ydlbert raised and drew together his brows. Three guilders was somewhat more money then than it is now—enough to buy a pound of fine sugar or all the cinnamon one’s wife could bake with in a year. “In that case, my friend, I’ll come sec.”
Bartholomew said, “Father, he’s baiting you, sure,” but without enough fire to offend.
Ydlbert lived half a mile closer to town than I did, and parted from his family at the rise that marked off his property from my own; Anya trudged down the gentle slope in the brilliant sunlight, her noisy children following behind like a family of rumple-headed ducks. Ydlbert accompanied us to our farm, and thought, no doubt, that I had prepared him an elaborate joke. Adelaïda took Elizaveta into the house, and as Ydlbert stood with his arms folded across his chest, I brought my horse, whom I could hardly grow accustomed to calling by her God-given name, Hammadi, outside. Since yesterday evening’s exploits, she had begun to stand taller, and her eyes shone with knowledge of her accomplishment. The animals, out grazing in the near field, gathered round to bah and grunt with expectation. Ydlbert helped me drag the cart from the barn, and we pulled it in a wide circle to Hammadi’s rear. I hitched her into her harness, which she accepted this time with joy, attached her to the cart, and repeated the previous day’s successful experiment, this time with Ydlbert the skeptic in tow. When first he felt the forward motion of the cart, he crowed with joy at my invention. “You’ve done better than invent the wheel!” he yelled, tossing his cap into the air and revealing his comical bald spot. “What good was the wheel before we had your blessed harness to make it worthwhile!” Chornaya and Flick, the two black sheep, bahed in unison; God be praised.
My heart glowed with pride; I had brought a new, good thing into the world. I stopped Hammadi’s circuit, and walked to where Ydlbert had hunkered down in the cart. With my hand on his broad shoulder I told him the dearest secret of all. “I named my horse.”
He smiled, uncomprehending; his teeth were worn down from more than thirty years of good use. “What do you mean, you named her?”
I said, “She’s not going to die now. I gave her a name, as we’d name any other thing.”
“What name?”
“Hammadi.” The name still rippled like the faint echo of bells over my ears.
Ydlbert nodded and looked at Hammadi, for the first time thinking of her by her own name. Knowing this gave me joy. “Yves,” he said. “We’ve been friends since childhood.”
“Yes.”
“Please make me a harness, for my horse, also.”
“With pleasure,” I said.
Ydlbert continued to nod, and looked off toward his ancestors’ land. “Then I name my horse Thea,” he said.
“And my three guilders?”
He smiled broadly. “I’ll pay you anon.”
“I don’t want it. Come,” I said, steering him toward the barn to begin on the second harness.
By Monday morning, then, two horses in our village had names. I cannot overstate the importance of this development. In Mandragora, we do not even name our children when they first emerge from the womb; we call them “daughter” or “son” until they have lived a full year. On the first anniversary of a child’s birth, we name it, for by then it has weathered the most difficult season of its life, and we can pray for the child once it has shown us the light of its soul. But in reality children, like horses, die all the time, for the strangest of reasons. Each morning as I wake, I wonder when Elizaveta will be taken from me.
What a mark of our faith, to name our horses as we would name a year-old child. Our neighbors thought we’d gone mad—except for my brother Mandrik, the one man in our village who understands more than the ordinary workings of machines and of God, the one man I defer to in judgment, however odd my countrymen think him. The villagers had not yet witnessed what the harness could do; how could we expect them to believe without any visible sign?
We grow what we need to survive—a crop of wheat, smaller crops of oats, rye, or barley in rotation, and a row of flax in the vegetable garden. My brother keeps an orchard of trees that produce many fruits of his own invention—strange, succulent things of rare colors, which require his constant gentle care and provide one of our chief pleasures. We preserve what we can for the dark days of the year. We give some to the Archduke’s4 household and bring the rest to market, where the townspeople buy the goods to feed their families.
When the horse could bear little weight, we loaded some of the fruits of the land onto our one-wheeled carts, carried the rest in our wood slings, and prayed each minute of the five-mile journey to town. Thankfully, we went to market only once a week, each of us bearing the choicest of his produce, peas, parsnips, or pears. If such a one as Gerald Desvres, who owned a great tract of meadow, had surplus hay, he would bring that to feed the town horses. Ydlbert, who is, after all, a sap, sometimes loaded his cart with wildflowers—then he could load it high, because they weigh almost nothing. His brother Yorik, who bordered the forest, sometimes brought a load of firewood. As the sun rose we began to lead our horses up the road. Mandrik has the best voice among us, clearer than the first birdsong of spring, and so he often accompanied us singing ballads of events in the times of our miraculous grandmother5 sprung from the sea; and when we were lucky, he sang to us from the repertory of his many adventures in Indo-China.6 Those tales, weird and fantastical, filled us with wonder and delight.
The journey to market was grueling, despite that the terrain was smooth and gently sloped. Many a man could be heard saying spells for safe drayage under his breath, especially at the crossroads. Horses always managed to slip free of their burdens—not my Hammadi, mind you, even before she had her name—or lose their shoes. And when finally we arrived at the city, we had to pass single-file through the gate and the fetid streets, which were closed to the sunlight, full of the odors of refuse and garlic. If a townswoman had hung her laundry in the street, the passing horses would knock it down, but it hardly mattered—even on the line, the linens were far from clean, and their descent to the gutter seemed, sadly, a return to their natural state. The younger sons, Ydlbert’s and Desvres’s especially, covered their noses in disgust. We wove between crumbling buildings until we arrived, quite abruptly, at the church steps, where we spread our wares. The horses and carts blocked off most access to the tight, oddly shaped apron of stone, even crammed as they were nearly atop one another, and the residents of the town always cursed us, spilling their slop buckets on us, kicking our horses in the shins as they struggled past.
The townspeople were niggardly with their pennies, but they needed everything we brought them; if we could have produced twice as much, they would gladly have
