A House Like a Lotus

by Madeleine L'engle

  Almost too beautiful. I ached with unshed tears. Bashemath said suddenly, “Here’s one we all know, and it will be good for all of us to hear it in the various languages of the delegates.” I wasn’t quite sure what I expected, but I was totally surprised when in her smoky voice she sang Silent Night in Masai. She sounded both tender and formidable. When she had finished, she bowed to Frank Rowan.

  “I’ll sing it in Turkish,” Frank said. Although the words were foreign, he still sounded very American. Then he bowed to Norine. The familiar words sounded strange in Chinese, pitched rather higher than we were accustomed to, and with a gentleness I had not felt before in Norine.

  Then came Omio, with his voice like black velvet, the Bakian words coming out softly, like an ancient lullaby. It was amazing how different the same song could sound. I’d been bored with Silent Night from overexposure, so that I could no longer even hear it, and suddenly, in this hot late September night in a cloister in Osia Theola, with the breeze barely stirring, it was alive and new.

  I listened to Omio sing and felt tears come to my eyes, and looked at Vee and she was blowing her nose. I wondered what memories the familiar carol brought to her, and to the others of the staff. What was Christmas like in Kenya? Cameroon? For me, the familiar melody brought back Mother baking Christmas cookies with all of us, even the littlest ones, helping (hindering) her, and the smell of turkey and stuffing, and childhood, when my parents were Olympian and their love could solve all problems and keep us safe, and there was nothing on earth I couldn’t talk to them about.

  I looked around the circle of people; faces were unguarded, and when I saw Millie put her hands over her face, I turned away quickly, feeling that I was violating her privacy, and my glance fell on Frank Rowan and his eyes were bright with tears, and I turned away again, wondering if he was remembering Christmas when his children were little and his wife was alive. I looked at Norine, who sat with her hands tightly clenched in her lap, her eyes closed, no longer the efficient leader, but a woman with her own memories, her own griefs. I had not lived long enough to have learned the coming to terms with life which I felt from these people, but I thought of New Year’s Eve at Beau Allaire when everything had been as shining and beautiful as the Christmas tree, and we had sung carols and played charades, and champagne was sparkling and didn’t hurt anyone—but now I hurt, and I couldn’t get out on the other side of that hurt.

  Vee said (and was it Silent Night that was helping me to think of her as Vee?), “Polly, can you sing it in German?”

  I nodded, and started, “Stille nacht, heilige nacht,” and while I was singing, there were no memories, nothing but the song for these people who were already becoming close to me.

  Krhis said, when I was through, “Sing it in French, Vee. Millie, you’ll use one of the native dialects?”

  Millie nodded, and Vee sang in French.

  When she was through, Millie lifted her voice in her clear soprano, as easily and joyously as a bird. Everybody had sung at least reasonably well; nobody flatted, or swooped, or sang nasally, but Millie’s voice was extraordinary, and we were mesmerized. She sang with a complete lack of self-consciousness.

  I had thought I had the tears well under control. But the pure effortlessness of Millie’s singing made me choke up, and tears slipped down my cheeks. I got up quietly and went to one of the open arches and stood looking at moonlight making a wide path on the sea, then jumped down from the high sill to the sand below, walking along until I came to an ancient-looking tree shadowing the remnants of a wall. I stepped into its darkness and sobbed.

  An arm came around my shoulders, and I was drawn to a lean, masculine body, smelling a musky, pungent smell. It was Omio.

  “I’m sorry—I’m sorry—” I gasped.

  “It is all right. Lo, many of us have brought wounds with us, and Millie’s singing opened them and brought healing tears. Do you have a handkerchief?”

  Omio’s presence stilled the storm of tears. I dug in my pocket and found a tattered piece of Kleenex. “I’m sorry—”

  “It is all right. Norine has provided punch and macaroons, and we’d better go back before we are missed.”

  When we got back to the cloister, everybody was drinking punch from tiny paper cups and munching macaroons. Nobody mentioned my absence.

  Krhis asked, “You like to sing, Polly? Does your family enjoy it?”

  “We love it. We used to sing more when we were all littler and had less homework, but when there are nine people in a family, singing is something everybody can do.”

  Norine said, “You have a nice voice, Polly. While we are working in the office tomorrow, we can do some singing as well.”

  Vee announced that she was going for a swim, and did anybody want to come?

  “Sorry,” Frank said. “The walk’s a bit much for my inanimate leg.”

  “Not tonight for me, Vee,” Krhis said. “Now you will find other swimming partners. But I beg all of you, and ask you to emphasize it to the delegates, do not go alone. There are strong tides and undertows. But the water is refreshing, and the walk at night will not be too hot.”

  Only Omio and I wanted to go. I was used to all kinds of undertows, and I felt sticky, and the idea of a swim at night in the Mediterranean was enticing. It had grown dark while we were singing, the sudden, subtropical dark I was used to on Benne Seed. Vee said, “Krhis is right that we should stick together. Polly and I live next door to each other, at the far end of the dormitory building. Let’s meet just outside, at the laundry umbrella, and I’ll show you the way.”

  Omio told us that he was on the second floor, and he’d be ready in two minutes.

  “Make it ten,” Vee said.

  It didn’t take me more than a couple of minutes to get into my suit, so I went out the back door of the building and walked toward the laundry umbrella, which was like an empty tree, with one pair of bathing trunks (probably Krhis’s) hanging like a single leaf. When everybody arrived, it would fill up.

  As I stepped toward it, my foot slid out of my thong and I stepped on a pebble. A sudden pain shot up my leg.

  Just as the sharpness of a broken shell sliced into my foot, as I was running away from Beau Allaire.

  I did not see Max in the morning after Ursula bound my cut foot and made me spend the night at Beau Allaire. I woke around five, dressed, and slipped out of the house. But I no longer wanted to go home.

  It was cool, before the sun was up; little webs of dew sparkled on the grass, which was kept green by constant sprinkling. I walked slowly down the drive because my cut foot hurt, and because the crushed shells crunched noisily. Ursula, I knew, got up early, so I walked carefully, as though that would keep her from looking out a window and seeing me. I was fleetingly grateful that her window, like Max’s, faced the ocean, and not the front of the house with the gardens and the long curving drive. And even if Nettie and Ovid were already in the kitchen, that, too, faced the water.

  The drive wound around until the house was no longer visible. It seemed miles until I got to the road with its smoother surface. I turned and headed toward Mulletville and the causeway. How was I ever going to make it with my cut foot? Periodically I stopped and sat at the side of the road until I had the energy to move on. I did not want anybody in Mulletville to see me, but only the fishermen would be up, and they wouldn’t care. The development people would all still be in bed.

  I heard a car behind me and stepped to the side of the road. The car slowed down and someone called out, ‘Hey, hon, want a ride? Look as if you could use one.’

  It was a boy from Mulletville who went to Cowpertown High, called Straw because of his sun-bleached hair and his stubby, almost-white lashes. He went with a rough crowd, kids who smoked and drank a lot. Why on earth was he up and out so early? He was older than I was; I think he’d had to repeat a couple of years. I’d never had much to do with him, and didn’t want to see him now, and I hoped he wouldn’t recognize me. But he did.

  ‘Hey, aren’
t you Kate’s sister?’

  ‘Kate’s my cousin,’ I said.

  ‘So what’s your name, Kate’s cousin?’

  ‘Polly.’

  ‘Where you coming from?’

  ‘I’m going,’ I said. ‘To Cowpertown.’

  ‘Y’are?’ He lit a cigarette and dangled it in the corner of his mouth.

  ‘To the M. A. Horne Hospital. I cut my foot, and I have a friend there who’s an intern. He’ll fix it for me.’

  ‘You sure looked bagged out. Hop in. I’ll drive you into Cowpertown, as far as LeNoir Street, and maybe you can get another hitch from there. I have a Saturday job at Diceman’s Diner, so I can’t take you any further. I’ll be sacked if I’m not there in time for the breakfast crowd.’

  So that’s why he was up. I got in beside him. I had no choice. I hoped he’d go on enjoying the sound of his own voice. He was, I was pretty sure, one of the guys who’d killed the tortoise. But I needed the ride into Cowpertown. I’d never make it on foot.

  ‘Kate sure is pretty,’ he said.

  After a pause, I agreed. ‘Yah.’

  ‘You don’t look like her.’ He flicked ashes out the window.

  ‘We can’t all be that lucky,’ I said.

  He looked at me instead of the road. ‘Hey, how’d you cut your foot?’ He glanced down. The cut had broken open, and blood was seeping through the bandage. It probably looked a lot worse than it was.

  ‘On a shell,’ I said, ‘a broken shell.’

  ‘Why, you poor little thing.’ He took his hand off the steering wheel and patted my thigh. ‘Hurt much?’

  ‘Some.’ I’d just as soon he kept his hands on the wheel and his attention on the road.

  ‘I got a good first-aid kit. Want me to fix it up for you?’

  ‘No, thanks. My friend at the hospital will take care of it.’

  His hand reached for my thigh again, rhythmically patting. I stood it as long as I could, then pulled away.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ His hand came down hard, and I winced.

  ‘I told you. My foot hurts.’

  ‘Why don’t you let me make it feel better?’ He tossed his cigarette out the window.

  ‘It’s my foot that hurts, not my thigh.’

  ‘You don’t like Straw, hunh?’

  I remembered his face, full of lust for killing, as he battered the tortoise. No, I didn’t like him. ‘I don’t know you very well.’

  ‘Well, now,’ he drawled, ‘maybe Kate’s right after all.’

  ‘About what?’ I should have kept my mouth shut.

  ‘You.’

  If I knew one thing, it was that Kate hadn’t talked to Straw about me. He’d never been one of her dates. He’d never come home with her for dinner. He wasn’t her type. But he came from Mulletville, and he dated Mulletville girls. I pushed away from him as far as possible.

  ‘So what’s Kate’s cousin doing at this end of the island?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘You’ve been at Beau Allaire, haven’t you?’

  I looked down at the blood drying rustily on Ursula’s bandage.

  ‘We know all about those dames at Beau Allaire, and what they do. You’ve been with them. You’re like the way they are, and that’s why you don’t like me.’

  ‘Let me out,’ I said.

  He jammed on the brake, throwing me forward. ‘You really want to get out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t have an attack. I’ll get you to LeNoir Street.’ He stepped on the gas pedal, and his hand came at me again, and I pulled away. ‘What’s the matter, honey? You really don’t like Straw?’

  What arrogance. This guy thought every girl in school was after him.

  ‘You like dames, is that it? Can’t make it with a guy?’

  I shut my eyes, clamped my lips closed. He kept his foot on the gas pedal. The car rocked as he whizzed around a curve with a screech of tires. I didn’t care if it turned over.

  I opened my eyes as I felt the car slow down and we drove through the outskirts of Cowpertown, then onto LeNoir Street with its post office and banks and stores. Again he slammed on the brakes. ‘Here we are.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I feel real sorry for Kate. She’s a nice girl. Norm—’

  I opened the door and jumped out, and the pain shot sharply from my foot through my body into my head, sending yellow flashes across my eyes.

  Straw drove off with another rubber-smelling screech.

  I was still a long way from M. A. Horne, which was at the farther end of LeNoir Street, a good three or four miles, too far to walk on a bleeding foot. I stumbled along, not knowing what to do, until I saw a phone booth.

  I would call Renny.

  I was jerked back into the present as I heard a sliding of sand and stones. Omio came leaping down from the top of the hill, wearing bathing trunks and a short terry jacket.

  I couldn’t stand Straw’s hands on me, but I had liked Omio’s arms around me as I cried under the old tree.

  The door opened, and Omio greeted Vee by handing her a flashlight. “You may need it to warn drivers of our presence.”

  “Thanks, Omio, what a good idea. Half the drivers here are crazy and drive these windy roads as though they were the Los Angeles Freeway. And cars drive English-fashion, on the left, when they’re not in the middle of the road, so we’ll walk on the right.”

  She led us along the path which ran below the balconies of the dorm, and there was the tree I had fled to, and now that my eyes were not blinded by tears I could see how beautiful it was. “What is it?”

  “A fig sycamore. I don’t know how old it is, but hundreds of years. It’s the most beautiful tree I’ve ever seen, and I keep trying to write poems about it, but thus far they elude me.”

  The moonlight turned trees and branches to silver. “Full moon, day after tomorrow,” Omio said.

  Vee started downhill. “Careful. It’s rocky and rough, and we don’t want any sprained ankles.”

  Below the monastery complex we came out on a road that ran through the lower part of the village. There were a few shops, closed for the night; what looked like a small bank; a taverna, with people sitting outside, laughing and talking. Music came from within, and light spilled out onto the road.

  “Osia Theola is on its way to becoming a resort,” Vee said, “since the old resort towns, like Famagusta, are now Turkish. If I were a millionaire I’d buy Osia Theola and save it from the tourists—as well as the Turks; it’s anybody’s guess as to who’s the most destructive.”

  I said, recalling Max’s teaching, “Poor Cyprus. It’s always being taken over and ruled by somebody. The Italians were here before the Turks, and the Turks before the English, and now in the north the Turks have come again.”

  “That’s the way of the world,” Omio said. “Baki has always been prey to stronger, less peaceable peoples. Now there are more Australians and English than Bakians.”

  “And yet England,” Vee said, “was overrun by Vikings and Normans. The Picts and Angles and indigenous inhabitants were ruthlessly wiped out. Genocide isn’t new to this century.”

  We turned off the main village street onto a dirt road which ran past more tavernas, narrowed to a path cutting through walls of high grasses, and turned sharply at a boatyard. The sea was on our right. “Not far, now,” Vee said, “and we’ll come to a good place to bathe, beyond the village, but before the hotel, where it’s too crowded for my liking. I’ve found an unused bit of beach. There’s a wide band of stones between the sea and the sand, and I’ve been trying to move them aside to make a path to the water, but they keep washing back.”

  “You’ve been here awhile?” Omio asked.

  “For a week, resting. Doctor’s orders, and orders I was happy to comply with. I’ve slept and swum and worked on my new novel with no interruptions or outside pressures.”

  So she was writing a novel. I wished I dared to ask her what it was about.

  Omio and I followed the path s
he had made through the stones. I slipped and almost turned my ankle, but Omio caught me. The stones were not very big, and they were rounded from water, but they were still uncomfortable to step on. Although the cut on my foot had healed, the stone near the laundry umbrella had reminded me that there was further healing needed, and it seemed that I could feel the skin stretching around the scar as I stepped into the water.

  Omio dropped down and swam out, cleanly, barely tossing up spray. Vee and I followed. The water was cool, not cold, just right for getting cooled off. The sky was misty with stars.

  “Don’t go too far out,” Vee called. “Krhis is right about the undertow. This is one of the safest places, better than the beach up at the hotel.”

  Omio was a superb swimmer, like most island people, but he turned around and came back toward us, then veered off and swam parallel to the land, up toward the lights of the hotel. I would have liked to swim with him, but thought it would not be courteous to Vee, who swam well but not quite as well as I did, since I’ve been in and out of water all my life.

  She stood inside the stones, shaking water out of her ears. “Good thing we’ve both got drip-dry hair.”

  Omio had turned again and was swimming back. “He’s a nice lad,” Vee said. “I’m glad he’s here early. You’ll enjoy him. He’s been through a lot, and he holds no bitterness. You’ll find that’s true of most of the delegates. I suspect Norine will fill you in on some of their histories. It’s probably one of the most varied groups we’ll ever encounter, geographically, physically, every way.”

  Omio had swum back to us and was running through the shallow water with great leaps, splashing silver spray.

  “What energy!” Vee exclaimed. “Why can’t you bottle it and give some to me? Come on, kids, we’d better go on back. Breakfast’s at seven-thirty and we all need our sleep.”

  I felt comfortably cool after the swim, but the walk back to the dormitory building was all uphill, and I was sweating again by the time we reached the monastery. At Beau Allaire, Max has a white coquina ramp going over a jungle of Spanish bayonets and crape myrtle, down to the beach. At home we run along our cypress ramp over the sand dunes and across a lovely long stretch of beach. At Osia Theola we were going to have to work for our swim.