A House Like a Lotus

by Madeleine L'engle

  While we were still eating, the bells in the tower began to ring, and we could see people coming in through the gates to go to church. A young woman was carrying a baby in a long white dress; a man in a dark suit, face flushed with heat, had his arm about her. They were followed by a group of beaming people.

  “A baptism!” Vee cried in delight.

  As the people went into the church, most of them turned to stare at us sitting around the breakfast table.

  Omio’s delighted laugh pealed out. “Wait till the rest of the delegates arrive!”

  Bashemath said in her solemn way, “We are already a circus for them.”

  Vee, Frank, and I were the only Caucasians. Krhis was Indian, Norine Oriental, Bashemath and Millie were African, and Omio was—I wasn’t sure—Micronesian?

  Omio wore a brightly patterned garment that was something between a kilt and a loincloth, and an ordinary cotton T-shirt. “At home, in the old days, we wouldn’t have worn the shirt,” he explained to me. He reached out one long finger, pale at the tip, and touched my inflamed eyelid. “Poor Polly, when we go swimming this evening, lo, the salt water will be good for it.”

  Norine passed the warm milk. “After breakfast, Polly, I’d like you to help me in the office. And I have the medicine chest with the witch hazel there.”

  Bashemath said, “You have the papers I want duplicated?”

  Norine nodded. “And I showed Polly how to use the mimeo.”

  When we got to the office, Norine took a bottle of witch hazel from a tiny cooler. She rummaged in drawers until she found a gauze pad, which she soaked with the cold witch hazel. “Hold it to your eye.”

  I had forgotten my eyelid at breakfast. Now I was very aware of the itching and swelling. It was so inflamed that the witch-hazel pad warmed up quickly, and Norine wet it again. It felt marvelously soothing, and I thanked her.

  “Any time you get a chance during the day, wet the pad and hold it to your eye, okeydokey? Now, are you ready?” She pointed at the typewriter.

  “I’m afraid I’ll be very slow.”

  Norine was busily looking through some files. “That is all right as long as you are accurate.”

  I sat down at the typewriter and typed, very carefully, a series of forms of poetry, lines of iambic pentameter, tetrameter, trochaic and anapestic measures. There were examples of meters, everything explained in the simplest way possible. Somehow or other I managed to make a passable stencil.

  Norine looked at it, and nodded. “Okeydokey, now run it off.”

  I managed that, too, though I ended up with purple ink on my fingers and somehow or other got a purple streak down one leg.

  “You can type Bashemath’s stencil this afternoon,” Norine said. “If you try to do too much at once, you begin to make mistakes.” She indicated a wooden file box filled with cards. We were to check over the names and addresses of each delegate, and assign them rooms in the dormitory building, trying to choose suitable roommates for each.

  “I have already picked your roommate, as I told you,” Norine said, “because she is the youngest woman delegate—not yet thirty.”

  Not yet thirty sounded quite old to me.

  “It is best if we put people of different languages together. That way they’ll have to speak English. Here, you see, we will not put Andres, from Brazil, with Gershom, from Angola, because they would be tempted to speak Portuguese. Andres can room with Nigel from Bombay.”

  Norine did most of the choosing, and I stuffed blue folders for everybody, marking their names and room numbers on the cover.

  When we had finished, Norine soaked the gauze pad in witch hazel again, and I was ready for it.

  “You like Omio?” she asked.

  “Very much.”

  “He has great talent. And the Bakian affectionateness. You are acquainted with peoples of different races and colors?”

  “Reasonably. We lived on an island off the south coast of Portugal when I was a child, and we were friends with the Gaeans. And I spent a month in Venezuela and saw a good bit of the Quiztanos.”

  “Omio speaks better English than some of the other delegates, and has no small estimation of himself. Bashemath is an interesting person, a fine educator. There was big trouble for her when she left home for her first conference. While she was gone, her husband’s friends urged him to go back to the old ways and take another wife. When she got home, the other woman was putting Bashemath’s own children to bed. But you have seen Bashemath. The other woman did not stay long.”

  I had seen Bashemath. “It must have been awful for her.”

  “It was. She is required at her university to attend a certain number of conferences, but after that she did not leave home again for two years.”

  Norine was something of a gossip. And I listened. I listened avidly. Was I being like Xan and Kate listening to the Mulletville girls? Not entirely. Norine relished her stories, but she was not being vicious.

  Now she laughed her rather tinny laugh. “Bashemath could certainly frighten me away if she wanted to. She is a real warrior. Now Millie is quite different. She is a dear person, is Milcah Adah. She, too, has been through much grief. All her family died during an epidemic. Millie nursed them, buried them, and by some fluke did not get ill herself. She nursed children who had been taken to the hospital, and it was discovered what a fine storyteller she is. A rare person, if a little sentimental. Here, let me soak that pad again.”

  The cool pad felt so good I would have liked to pat it all over me.

  When I took it away from my eye, Norine peered at me. “The swelling is going down. Are you thirsty?”

  “Parched.” At home there’s always lemonade and iced tea in the fridge.

  She went again to her little cooler, pulled out a bottle of ginger ale, got two paper cups from the file cabinet. The fizzy coolness helped my thirst but did nothing to dry my sticky clothes. Even my feet were sweaty, and my wet sandal straps had made stained marks across my foot.

  “We’ll work on the table assignments now,” Norine said. “We like to rotate the seating, so that people can get to know each other, and also to prevent cliques from forming. A conference experience like this can produce intense friendships.”

  We put numbers in a small wooden box for the delegates to draw. “This heat wave is absurd, positively absurd,” Norine said. “It’s a good thing many of our delegates come from hot climates. I think Vee feels the heat more than the rest of us, and she’s prone to headaches if she’s overstressed. You have read her books?”

  “I love them.”

  “She is a fine writer. And it takes her mind off her husband.”

  What did she mean? “Is he alive?”

  “Unfortunately.” She looked at me. “This is of course in confidence, Polly.”

  “Okay,” I said uncertainly.

  “He is French, Henri Porcher. There was an American grandfather, I believe, from one of those inbred Southern families, who late in life married a distant cousin in Paris, a singer. There was a latent strain of insanity, violent insanity, in the Porchers. Until ten years ago, Henri seemed free of it. But then he got an encephalitis virus, which evidently triggered it, and he has been institutionalized ever since.”

  “Oh—how awful—”

  “He is in a hospital in Switzerland, and Vee is able to be with us because her sister-in-law spells her. Henri is very dependent on Vee, and if she visits him daily he is less violent. Poor man, he is like a wild animal. I suppose, legally, Vee could divorce him, but Vee being Vee, of course she won’t. Krhis says that in his own irrational way Henri still loves her. She is brave. Now”—Norine was brisk efficiency again—“we have done a good morning’s work.”

  “I know,” I agreed. I was already learning much from the staff.

  At lunch we were served by the younger woman, Sophonisba. Omio whispered to me, “Look at her gold tooth. It’s a status symbol.”

  Millie entertained us with stories, a few from her native Cameroon, others from
different countries, and had us all in stitches. When Bashemath was really amused, her laughter was a deep booming. Frank had a hearty, contagious laugh. Even Krhis was shaking with laughter.

  “The delegates have a treat in store,” he said at the end of the meal. “Now, my dears, it is siesta time, and it is so hot—104° in Nicosia, and not that much cooler here—we will take the afternoon off, and have our meeting after the evening meal instead. I think that will be more comfortable for us all.”

  I walked with Millie along the pebbled path that led to the dormitory building. “You were terrific,” I said.

  She smiled. “When we are listening to stories, then it is the story center of the brain which is functioning, and the pain center is less active. I go into the children’s wards of hospitals, where there are children in great pain. When I am telling them stories they laugh and they cry and in truth their pain is less. Mine, too.” Again she smiled at me, and then at two old men with long hoses who were watering the flowers, and who smiled back, nodding and bobbing, looking curiously at Millie and me and the others coming along behind us.

  I turned on the fan in my room, and I think it did help a little. I changed the water for Zachary’s flowers, then stretched out on the bed with a book, and got up to a gentle knock. It was Vee, with a can of bug spray. “I got this for you from Norine. There’s supposed to be some in each room.”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  “See you anon,” Vee said, and went to her room.

  I finished making the beds on the first floor, and did three rooms on the second floor, then decided to go back to my room for a nap.

  I left the shutters wide open, and while sunlight streamed in, so did the breeze from the sea. Whatever the stinging insects were, they weren’t bad during sunlight. I sprawled out on the bed and slept.

  When I woke up I could hear snoring from the room on the other side of me, not Vee’s, Millie’s. I got up and went into the hall, and all the doors were closed. I walked softly in my crepe-soled sandals, out into the brilliant sunlight. Just walking along the path made me perspire. I went into the office and typed the stencil for Bashemath, suggestions about teaching small children to read and write. When I had finished, sweat was stinging my eyes, trickling down my legs. I went into the compound and the sun blasted at me like a furnace.

  The church bells were quiet, but the doors were open, leading into darkness. I slipped in, standing in the back until my eyes adjusted to the shadows. The light filtered in gently, touching an icon here, a statue of the Virgin there. I sat on one of the stone steps leading down into the nave.

  There was a screen covered with icons dividing the main body of the church from the sanctuary. A little old man was polishing candlesticks, and when he turned and saw me his face lit up with a smile as though he had been expecting me. He came up to me.

  “Come, little,” he said, “come, despina,” and led me down the steps into the church and to a wooden seat hollowed with age. I sat and watched him as he puttered about. He took a sprig of green from a stand in front of a statue, a flower from a vase before an icon, picking here and there, until he had a tiny bouquet, which he handed me, beaming.

  “Epharisto.” I was a little embarrassed. I hoped it was all right for him to give me flowers taken from icons and statues.

  “Parakalo, little, parakalo, kyria.”

  I held the bouquet to my nose, and it was pungent and lemony-smelling.

  He pointed to a statue which I had thought was a Virgin and child, but as I looked more closely I saw that the child wore a crown and carried a cross like a scepter, and that the woman was wearing red velvet. The old man spoke in Greek, and I thought he was telling me that this was Blessed Theola and her vision of Christ.

  He beamed on me again and pointed to the lower section of the church. “Cave. Eight hundred, eighteen hundred old, kyria.” He switched back to Greek, and I kept nodding at him, catching words and phrases about Theola and truth, and he gestured urgently toward the cave.

  I followed him and stood in the entrance to the cave, peering into darkness. Was it here that Theola gave people the truth about themselves? Max had said that Theola was gentle and did not give people more than they could bear.

  I stood there, and the only truth to come to me was that I was still in the darkness of confusion, about myself, and everybody. I allowed Zachary Gray, whom I had known only a few days, to be complicated and contradictory. Why couldn’t I allow it in anybody else? Why couldn’t I allow it in myself?

  “Kyria? Despina?” The old man was looking at me anxiously.

  “Epharisto.” I smiled at him and turned away from the cave and returned to the wooden seat he had first offered me.

  “Parakalo.” He picked up a candlestick and polishing rag. I sat there for quite a long while, holding the little bouquet to my face. There was something healing about the pungent smell. Then the bells began to ring, so I got up and left quickly, waving goodbye and thanks to the old man, and wandered across the courtyard to the cloister.

  Omio was there before me, in the refectory section, sitting at a table and writing in a notebook, with another book beside him. He looked up and beckoned to me. “I promised I’d show you this.” He pointed to the big notebook and pulled out a chair for me, watching me while I leafed through the pages.

  He had set down in this book the stories of his people, first in Bakian, then in English. The stories were lavishly and beautifully illustrated in bright watercolors. Many of his paintings and sketches reminded me of Max’s notebooks. Max would love this book of Omio’s.

  “Why does this man have so many wives?” I looked up from a story of a man with seventeen wives.

  He laughed. “Seventeen is, lo, excessive, is it not? But to have more than one wife was the old way. On Baki there used to be many more women than men, so the kindest thing to do with all the extra women was to marry them. Every Bakian woman had a family to care for, and to be cared for by. My grandmother was, lo, my grandfather’s fifth wife, and the most beautiful. The children—there were many—thought of each other as whole brothers and sisters. If a woman did not have enough milk after childbirth, there was always another to suckle the baby.” He smiled his merry smile.

  “We were lucky on Baki.” He put his hand down on the book, his long forefinger with the delicate pink nail pointing to a picture of a baby being held by a white man in a dog collar. “In some places the missionaries made the men get rid of all but one of their wives. Do you think Jesus would have wanted that?”

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t show much concern for the leftover wives.”

  “In Baki, the missionaries who came to us were warm of heart, and said only that when the children grew up, each, like my father, like me, should have one wife only. And this made reason because, with, lo, the new medicines they brought us, fewer male children died, and there were no longer many women needing men. They —the missionaries—wanted the women to cover their breasts, but they said little to those who went around as usual. They believed that, as time went on, we would move into their ways.”

  “Did you?”

  He smiled. “We are still moving. The missionaries who came to Baki understood that differences need not separate. But they were followed by others, the military people, for instance, and their families. Some of their ways were good ways. But there were ways, too, which we did not understand.”

  There was a tightness in his face which I had not seen before. “Tell me—”

  Omio looked at me with his dark eyes, which were usually so merry but now were simply dark, the pupil hardly darker than the iris. “I’m not sure you will understand.”

  “I can try.”

  “Our ways are so different.”

  “Please.”

  “On this far island of Baki there came, lo, many Australian and many English people. We felt very fortunate when my father got a job working in the big military hotel they built. These people called themselves Christian, you understand.”

 
I did not.

  “Although many people, my family included, welcomed them, they did not think they had to treat us as they treated each other. When my father displeased them in any way, they beat him. One time they beat him so that he bled on his back, and then salt was rubbed into him. My mother bathed him and bathed him, making more blood to come to wash away the salt, and then took him down to the sea because the salt in seawater is healing. But I heard his screams.”

  I looked down at the open page to hide my horror; he had painted birds and butterflies, vivid and happy. “How could you be Christian, then?”

  He put his hand down on mine. “Oh, I think we could be. I think we were Christian, lo, long before the missionaries came, although we did not know to call it so. We knew only that the maker of the great whale came to us and was part of our lives, and the missionaries called this person who loved and cared for us by the name of Jesus. And we were glad to have a name for the part of the maker we had not known by name before.” He turned the page, and there was a painting of the statue which had become so familiar to me at Max’s, the stone carving of the man laughing in sheer delight.

  If Max had ever told me that the statue was Bakian, I had forgotten. Seeing it in Omio’s book was like the slap of a rough ocean wave. I had last seen the statue in Max’s arms as she ran down the stairs after me.

  Omio said, “The missionaries who were our friends called it the Laughing Christ. Some of the others called it a heathen idol.”

  “Oh—Omio …” From Omio’s painting it was evident that the actual statue was much larger than Max’s copy, but the loving delight was the same. Had Max put the statue back on the landing? I looked at the joyous face and pressed my hand against my mouth to stifle a sob.

  I hardly heard Omio. I was hearing, seeing, Max.