by Molly Gloss
“When did you eat, eh? Are you hungry?” his mother said, and made a movement as if she might be drawing her feet under her. Juko murmured something and stood up, put on the lamp in the galley, and Kristina settled again with her fists sprouting long fingers of beans. Bjoro stood in the doorway of their sleeping room, watching his wife heating soup, shredding cabbage, putting a thin knife to mushrooms and leeks. When she looked at him, he kept his eyes on the blade of the knife.
“People are worrying about you,” Juko said. From the edge of his stare he could see his mother’s face in a gathered-up frown, and between Juko’s straight eyebrows a shirring of pleats. But the other members of his family had gone. What should he understand from that? That some people had become impatient, waiting for him to be over his suffering? He shook his head. Then he said, “It was all right,” without knowing what he meant. The crowd of people at the dock? Peder’s dying? Isuma’s?
Juko, with the edge of one hand, swept the greens to his bowl, poured the soup over, brought the bowl steaming to the low table. “Bjoro,” she said, reaching for him. “Come and eat.” She had a gentle tone of voice, and her eyes touched him lightly as if he had become fragile. He sat on the floor with his knees under the table and ate Juko’s soup. It was an unspeakable luxury after weeks of pastes and reconstituted freeze-dry. The two women watched him eat, their faces smoothing out, evidently taking pleasure in it. When he had emptied the bowl, Juko stood and filled it up again.
Bjoro said, trying to smile, “It was almost the worst thing, the bad edibles.”
Kristina nodded firmly. “You can bear anything if you have good food,” she said. This wasn’t true but it had truth in it, and his mother doubtless believed it; she was someone who always would bring bread to a mortafesto, soup to the sick, though she never had liked to prepare daily meals. Her preference as cook was a breadnut tortilla rolled around scraps and leavings of food.
“And sleep, a good bed,” Juko said, murmuring. The two women exchanged a closed look. They had a habit of leaving him out of certain things, never would tell him their meaning unless he asked, and maybe not the truth then. He always had resented such moments, and gradually had got away from asking for explanations. But he thought he understood this one. Juko, when she was divorcing Humberto Indergard, had moved in with Kristina and mostly stayed in her bed for weeks. His mother had had the Clearness Committee in to see her, but mostly let her sleep, and sleep, so long as she came out to eat healthy meals.
He said, his voice hoarse, “There was not much sleeping on the Ruby.”
Their faces looked at him in constrained surprise. “No. No, I guess not, Bjoro,” they said to him, without either of them asking what it was that had kept him from sleeping. It was dreams of the dead, he had planned to say bitterly, and the unspoken words settled in his chest, constricting his breath.
They talked around him. Maybe they were resuming a conversation they’d been having while he slept. “Old Kelling is getting off the Advices and Queries Committee,” Kristina was saying. “He’s been telling everybody his health is broken.”
“Oh, he always worries too much about his health, Kelling does.” Juko’s attention again was on the wickerwork. She worked the strands deftly, examining them under the lamp. “How old is he? Seventy? He’ll get to be a hundred, but he’ll complain every day until then, about his bad health.”
Kristina nodded. “There’s a man in my family who has a loose valve in his heart,” she said. “He never has spent a minute of his life complaining about his health, eh?” She was back at her work too, shelling the beans. She took them out of a gunny bag two or three at a time. The pods were mottled, purplish, papery; she had made a little loose mountain of the empty ones beside one of her knees. The beans in the bowl were creamy beneath faint purple whorls.
“Is that Orid Finĉ?” Juko asked her, glancing up from the braiding.
His mother nodded. “Orid never complains about his heart. Only he has a pale look, and if you put your head on his chest you can hear a kind of whistling sound when the blood moves.”
Bjoro knew Orid Finĉ. Orid was seventy, his hair white and silken framing a long face, without any resemblance to Peder Ojama except in the sound blood made, leaking behind a breast bone.
Juko teased Kristina solemnly. “You had your head on Orid’s chest.”
His mother showed her yellowing teeth. “That was a long time ago.” Then she said, closing her mouth to a sly smile, “He is only a relation by marriage.”
Juko laughed. In a moment she said, “When I was little there was a blind woman in our neighborhood. Did you know her? I don’t remember her name. Maybe it was Pena? Or Lena?” Kristina shook her head. “Well anyway. This woman had a cane and walked about without any trouble, it seemed to me. I liked to play as if I was blind, eh? Shut my eyes and go out on the footway or the fields and find my way around. But I never could keep my eyes shut all the way tight.” She smiled ironically.
They went on telling these stories of health and infirmity, first Kristina and then Juko, while Bjoro silently emptied the bowl of soup by spoonfuls. When he lifted the bowl to his mouth for the last of it Kristina said, eyeing him, “We sent everybody away. We swept them out of here with a broom, eh? They can come back tomorrow when you’ve got rested up. You know Leon Thorssen is clerk of the Yearly Meeting now that Guner Ĝohanesen has died? He maybe hasn’t got old Guner’s patience: He came with five people from that Planning Committee and wanted you to tell what you saw. What was he thinking! Some of them went over to Luza Kordoba’s house, too, but I bet Luza’s spouse—what’s her name? Tereza?—pushed them out the same as we did. To come today, the very day you are home! the very hour! We told them to come back tomorrow. All that business can wait, eh? You won’t forget how to tell what you saw. Anyway, they won’t be publishing the Advices and Queries anytime soon. We said you needed a sleep. And to eat. Are you full now? Do you want to get into bed again?” She touched Juko’s arm. “Put him to bed, Juko. He has something he wants to give you, I bet, something he’s been saving.” She flashed a narrow smile. She considered intercourse, along with food and sleep, essential to life.
Juko laughed and put her hand softly on his back. He didn’t know what this touch meant—whether she was telling him she was anxious to copulate with him, or consoling him for being too tired, too filled with grief, to consummate his homecoming in that usual way.
He didn’t feel interested in intercourse with Juko—moving his body was a ponderous effort in the unaccustomed gravity, and he had had only brief, edgy rest for weeks. But he had lost his craving to wrap his cold legs around his wife and lie in her arms like a sick child. Her hand on his back patronized and irritated him.
“I haven’t needed fucking, only sleep,” he said harshly.
This startled them, and they looked at him in a guarded way. It wasn’t their usual practice, this tiptoeing around his feelings. The two of them always had shared a directness, a willingness to chide him, and their silence seemed a kind of humiliation. He felt a sudden impulse to say something else, to accuse them of something, but his brain wasn’t able to bring it forward.
Juko stood with the empty soup bowl and washed it at the galley’s little cold-water tap, put away the scraps of food, wiped down the chopping board. While she was doing this, Bjoro’s mother watched him across the heap of shelled beans. Gradually his choking anger loosened, and he said tiredly, “I’ve not had much sleep for more than three weeks.”
This was a condition they felt able to understand. They looked at him with affectionate tolerance. “I’ll come to bed with you,” Juko said, and reached her hand down to him. He stood slowly and let her lead him back into their room.
It was close and hot and dark, and smelled of his sweat. She went to the shutters to let the night air come in, but he said, low-voiced, “No. Will you leave them shut, Juko?” Her face searched him out blindly in the darkness.
“Are you not over being cold, then?” she said to him i
n a murmur. He wasn’t able to answer, but she came away from the window again, left the room closed up.
He sat on the mat heavily. She knelt behind him and began to knead his shoulders. She was tender, thorough, she knew the places that held on to tiredness. He shut his eyes.
“Do you know?” Juko said softly. “Peder’s wife dreamed her husband’s death, before the Ruby was gone, but kept from saying so.” Bjoro’s eyes became hot with unshed tears. She waited, and when he didn’t answer, she went on. “I’m sorry for what happened to Isuma and Peder.” Her voice became almost a whisper. “I’m sorry.”
He didn’t know why her insistent sympathy, the urgency of her thin voice, angered him. He realized, he didn’t feel grief for Peder’s wife, but for himself.
“Dreaming of death is something we will do every day, on that world,” he said bitterly.
She kept kneading his back and shoulders in silence. Her fingers were strong. Sometimes she flattened her palms and pushed the heels of her hands up and down the valley between his shoulder blades, either side of his spine. Gradually the rhythmic stroking aroused him a little. He was still wearing the caparajos they all had favored in the Ruby, and he thought his erection was hidden in the freedom of the loose trousers, but Juko whispered, “Do you want to lay with me now?”
“Yes,” he said hoarsely.
He stood and pushed his trousers down from his hips. Juko laughed. “I guess you do,” she said.
He lay heavily on the mattress, inert, and she knelt over him kissing his chest lightly and his soft belly and the urgent rigidity of his penis, stroking his cold skin with her hands and her mouth. She was patient, willing, and that built his inexplicable anger. He didn’t know what he wanted from her, but when she took one of his hands and put it under her shirt, cupping a breast, prompting him, he convulsed suddenly with rageful passion. He seized her with both hands, rocking up wildly and then turning onto his knees to put her body under him. She braced her arms against his weight but she was pulling at her own shirt, working ahead of his pent-up rush. In an urgent fire, he grappled her trousers down, shoved her legs open with his knees. She was moving under him, murmuring, words he wasn’t able to hear. He climbed on her, his elbows across the bones of her arms, and she twisted and her breath let out a high gasping sound of pain that made his skull hum. He pushed himself against her, groping, his penis beating against her pubic bone. Behind his teeth a whining sound arose, as he thrust against her uselessly, wild with defeat. He became aware that her mouth was open, that she was letting out a continuous whimpering complaint. She struggled under him, pushing against his weight.
In a frenzy he jerked her by the arm, the leg, onto her belly and hooked his arms under her thighs, lifting her buttocks to him. Another, higher sound came from her, or a word, what or wait, but eclipsed by the heavy booming inside his skull. It was another wife, it was Hlavka, with whom he used to have anal sex. But recklessly, uncontrollably, he forced himself into Juko’s anus, and the sound she was making became a toneless, gasping crying, a thin wail that raised a singing under his scalp. He pumped against her with a terrible fury, his arms braced rigidly beneath her thighs, until his muscles loosened and shook with fatigue, until finally he was too heavy, too tired to keep on with it, and he rolled away whimpering, without release, and held his penis in both his hands, pulling on it in an exhausted rage until a short hot spurt of semen wet his thigh.
He released a few hot tears as well, and a clenched moan of misery. Then in the slowly cooling sweat of heat and fire, lying on the bed in the darkness with his hands still clasping his flaccid penis, he felt relieved of something, as if he had emptied himself of waste. When he realized he was searching for something in the blackness of the ceiling, he deliberately shut his eyes.
He became aware of his mother moving in the small alcove where she lay at night; and then he began to hear Juko’s short huffing breath containing some louder sound of tears or fury. When she moved against his back, shifting away on the bed, he rolled his head toward her. She crouched on the mat of their bed, her hands pressed over her mouth, her knees flattening her breasts. Behind her hands was the sound of grievous breathing. Bjoro’s limbs filled with a ponderous dull guilt and pain. Reflexively he began to go over and over what had happened, conceiving other endings, other beginnings, words said or unsaid, until he was no longer certain what the truth was, though he imagined the detail of gestures, silences, tears. I forgot which wife I was with, he thought of saying. In his mind, in the peacemaking that had not yet begun, Juko was mournful and forgiving; she took some of the fault onto herself.
“Juko,” he said sorrowfully. She made a sound, a catching of air, and stood up, pushing away the tangled shirt and trousers stiffly and going from the room naked. He lay in a heavy lethargy in the darkness while water ran in the sink, and his mother’s voice asked something. Kristina knew the sounds people made, wrestling on a bed, she maybe had heard Juko’s held-in wailing and imagined—what? He wasn’t able to hear what she asked, but his wife’s harsh answer, illuminating nothing: “No, go to sleep, Kristina, go to sleep.”
When the water was shut off, he thought he heard a door sliding, and imagined Juko taking the old manta they kept hanging above the shoe bench, a cape against the rain for people who walked anywhere after dark, and settling angrily on the narrow boards of the pasado with the cape pulled up like a blanket over her breasts. Then he imagined her putting on the cape and walking around to Senlima or Alaŭdo, to her brother’s house or her son’s, and a cold anxiety rose in his body. But she came into the room again. Her shape moving against the darkness was erect, stiff-limbed, her small breasts lay against her ribs. She went around him lying on the mat, went to the casement and pushed open the shutters. Then, in the night light falling into the room, she got into a clean shirt and trousers, her arms swinging in short, jerky arcs. He sat up on the bed and watched her with a kind of thrilling dread.
“I haven’t—” he whispered. “It wasn’t—”
Without stopping what she was doing she said to him in a furious whisper, “I won’t have a husband who thinks I am a hole to stick his penis into.”
He put his head into his hands. “I have killed our marriage,” he said piteously. Juko blew a wordless sound through her lips, something made up equally of anger and amusement, as if she considered this bathetic. He looked at her. She had taken her dirty shirt and begun to push things unsystematically into the middle of it, unrelated objects from shelves and trunks: a hat, a hank of thread, old sandals, a scarf embroidered by Humberto Indergard. He stood shakily. “I was crazy,” he said, opening his hands, murmuring. “There isn’t any reason why you should forgive me. It was a bad thing to do. I was crazy.”
She pulled the sleeves of the shirt into a bundle and held it against her chest. In the darkness her face was a shining mask of pain and bitterness. She said, thick and low, “I’ll live in my brother’s house until you are sane again.”
He made a lost sound, and when she shifted her weight to move he put his arms around her desperately, the bulk of the bundle between them. She became rigid, standing with her face turned from him, waiting to be let go. Through the open casement of the window he heard voices speaking, the clack of a loom, someone’s child crying, an enigmatic, quick patting of hands. He realized irrelevantly that the daylight was barely gone. In the incomplete darkness, not many people were sleeping yet. In Kristina’s little grotto under the stairs of the sadaŭ, there was silence. She had a practice of intruding herself in their arguments, of taking Juko’s part in any quarrel, and he felt her reticence now was a fearful sign. He stood holding his wife hard in his arms, unable to speak or act effectively. Her breath going in and out of her mouth made a bristly sound that he felt along his bones, like a scraping of metal.
In a while she said, “Let loose, Bjoro,” her voice shaking under the weight of anger.
He said hoarsely, “Please, Juko, make peace with me. Please. I behaved in a bad way. I was crazy.” He put hi
s mouth against the crown of her head, whispering desolately, “I didn’t know I was hurting you.”
She reared against him, jerking her head, and his teeth rammed the inside of his mouth. He tightened his arms convulsively and went on holding her, rigid with fear. She twisted, turning her face toward him, her mouth misshapen. The bottom lids of her eyes brimmed with tears. “Don’t say you didn’t know you were doing it!” she said in a wild whisper.
He didn’t have an answer. He looked away helplessly. “I was crazy,” he said in a rising wail.
Juko sobbed suddenly, and this unexpected sound from her drove the air out of Bjoro’s lungs in a hiccup of surprised terror. He hooked his chin over the pitch of her shoulder and turned his face into her neck. The heated, pungent, womanish odor of her skin overwhelmed him with grief. “I’m sorry, Juko. I’m sorry,” he murmured repeatedly, and tears ran in his mouth and stung him where his teeth had cut the inside of his cheek. But when she had loosed three or four long roupy sobs, shuddering against him, he understood that her tears signaled a kind of yielding, an adjustment. His own crying became relief, and when she made a weak, insinuating effort to get out of his clasp, he loosened his arms. The bundled-up shirt slid down to the floor.
Juko brought the heels of her hands to her face and let them rest there, standing breathing hard over the little hillock of her goods. Bjoro stood, not touching her, with his arms still raised slightly, unfinished with letting her go. After a while she dropped her hands and made a slight, tired movement of indecision or despair and then lay down heavily on the mat, on her hip, crossing one arm over her eyes. Bjoro in a moment sat carefully below her feet. He waited, and when she didn’t speak he put a hand on his wife’s foot. It was bare, clammy.
The world moved under them in a ceaseless regulated sweeping. In the darkness, her smell was familiar, the sound of her breathing familiar to him. His fingers, closing on the small bones of her foot, warmed it slowly. Finally he came around the bed slowly and lay down beside her. He felt heavy and exhausted, tired of anxiety. Lying on his back looking into the ceiling, he realized he was waiting for the damp weight of the darkness and the silence to deaden their crisis. After a while she sighed, her little breath descending in him, rising out of him, sweeping up a windrow of weeds and old leaves.
