by Molly Gloss
Her son blinked impatiently. His tears fled onto his lashes and vanished. He looked away, beginning again slowly to push the sponge across her fevered skin. “There isn’t any meaning at all, Kristina. There’s chaos.” His voice was low, murmuring, as happens when you know an argument has gone past the point of usefulness. Kristina’s shame deepened. She hadn’t felt they’d been arguing.
“We must just try to make our lives coherent,” she said sorrowfully. “To go on gathering ourselves into the Light.”
“What does that mean?” he said harshly. “What are you looking for, in this Light? God’s face? What does that mean? That it’s implacable? Beyond knowing? Yes! God’s face, then!”
At times in her life she had felt she had an understanding of God—for a few inexplicably clear moments she had recognized the essential value, the equal wonder, of everything in the universe. She had understood, there was utterly no distinction, no separation, between the parasitic beetle, the anibird, Wolfgang Mozart, the evacuation of a bowel. But it was easier to let this understanding go than to confront the terrible weight that lay inside it. And it was something like that that made her loosen her grasp now, made her let go her desperate embrace of the New World and withdraw into the frailty and effortlessness of her illness. “Help me onto the toilet,” she said pitiably. “I don’t want to use this damn pot Leo put by the bed.”
She wasn’t able to remember when she had last stood naked before her son, and she clutched the bedsheet ineffectually while Bjoro supported her by the elbows. “How cheaply we take good health,” she said through her teeth. Bjoro brought his arm around her, murmuring impatiently, “I’ve seen naked old women, panja.”
She tightened her hands tremulously on the sheet—a medicine bundle against her breastbone. “Do you think old women don’t have any dignity to keep?” she said wretchedly.
But swiftly afterward she lost the strength for modesty, became indifferent to such things, undignified. She lay naked with the sheet bunched under her when the fever broke a sweat; she gave up the effort of getting into the lavejo and took to using the pee pot beside her bed. She no longer cared if it was her daughter-in-law Juko, or her grandson Eneo, who sponged her naked limbs; if it was her daughter Olinda who helped her to squat and pee, or Olinda’s husband Axel.
She dreamed and woke, dreamed and woke, in a brief shallow circling. Objects in the room slid away from the walls and down into her dreams, allusory, intangible, transient. Or she entered the walls and became permeable, imbued with light. She was a person who always had tried to interpret her dreams, but was too sick to redefine these—or they meant nothing, they simply were. In a sudden feverish insight, she accepted them for what they seemed—another domain of life, having equal weight with her waking life. The face of God. She thought she might die, and it was a relief to let go her old dread of dying in her sleep—it had been an arbitrary habit, she realized, assigning more reality to the waking world than to dreams.
When she began slowly to be convalescent, it was Bjoro’s daughter Abigajlo who kept her company in the daylight hours. They played Go, or chess, and in the long afternoons Abigajlo read to her, with the librajo propped on her knees: poems and moral philosophy, religious mysticism and the metaphors of physics. Abigajlo was twenty. All of her life, she had seemed to absorb from the air the shape of things unseen—intimations, flashes, whispers, bodings—and from that seed ground had sprung a lively interest in spiritual matters that her parents never would share in. Hlavka’s beliefs had been narrow, she had been grounded in a concrete reality, was strictly humanist: A soul was the fundamental force for good in human beings, only that. Bjoro, if he ever had been open to hidden things, had shut those doors one by one until now he stood behind a stolid disinterest. He regarded his daughter’s beliefs with remoteness. For years, Abigajlo had been bringing her spiritual interests to Kristina, as she never could do with her parents: She had a passion for the unknowable shadowy edges of things, and Kristina was a religious woman.
They argued mildly about the principle of abimsa, which wasn’t a tenet of Quakerism but of Hinduism, and practiced by certain Jains and Taoists. Abigajlo was fierce in her belief that all living things sought their own happiness, and people ought to do what they could to keep from interfering with that.
“What is your practice when the happiness of mosquitos or little black flies involves your blood?” Kristina asked her in amusement. “What will you eat if you give up cutting lettuces, whose happiness is to flower and go to seed?”
Abigajlo had thought these problems through, and only grinned back: If people went on struggling toward an ideal that was unattainable, then in the striving itself they might find something unexpected, an insight.
Abigajlo also flatly believed natural objects, rocks and ponds, sky, had souls, and Kristina put forward a problem: On the Miller, what was natural? The river and the lakes were engineered. Was there soul in a cloud called to life by machinery? But then both of them began to trade apocryphal stories about self-conscious vehicles and malevolent generating plants. “There is anima in any damn machine, eh? If you ask a mechanic.”
Kristina made an effort to tell her grand-daughter some of her dreaming, but the brief, evanescent images became ordinary or absurd when she impounded them in language. “There was something I understood . . .” she said, muddling to a stop. She waved a hand vaguely, irritably. “It’s gone again. . . .”
Abigajlo sat beside her bed chewing on a loaf of bread and swallowing it down with tea. “When you’re in my dreams, we’re always arguing,” the girl said, as if she thought this might help Kristina to find what she’d lost. Kristina croaked a helpless laugh. She liked their amiable, discursive quarrelling.
In the evenings it was Juko or Bjoro, one or the other, who came and slept in the house. Kristina was thin and weak but driven by urgency: She coerced each of them in their turn to read to her from the pile of Minutes, and Advices and Queries, and sheets from the modem and the exploratory balloons, while she lay in bed with her burning eyes shut. They were always tired, themselves. They stumbled over words, lost lines, fell into confusion. Bjoro, when he was fed up with boggling the words, would say, “Enough,” and shove the papers from his lap, go off to bed. But Juko sometimes would sit with a finger on the page, frowning wearily through long baffled silences, until Kristina finally would open her eyes and see her sitting there, and murmur, “Go on to sleep, leave that, it’s all right.”
Juko was private, withdrawn, and Kristina let her be so, afraid of something that remained vague, a shadow that was in some way an umbra of the new world. While they ate together, or while Juko combed Kristina’s hair or shook out her bedsheet, they went on as they ever had, in conversation and argument about food and work, sewing, people they both knew. They went on telling confidences, Juko complaining about her brother, and telling the little oppressive details, the resentments and sorrows of seeing her old father, Silko, circling back to childishness; it had now come round to peeing his pants and mashing foods with his fingers. But she and Kristina avoided speaking Bjoro’s name, both of them did, and Kristina understood this slight scission was a gulf—they were isolated from one another suddenly, their friendship of twenty years brought down as easily as that, as if it had been a bridge made of paper and string, negligible, irrelevant.
“Do you remember Daĉjo Otersen?” Kristina asked her suddenly while they were standing at the sink in the women’s bathhouse. Kristina gripped the edge of the splash board shakily, steadying herself while Juko stood in front of her soaping and washing her face, working the washrag deliberately into the hollows at the hinges of her jaw, into the crevices of her ears, the creases of her eyelids and cheeks.
“He was Helena Hajnzel’s son, he was one of them on the May Snow,” Juko said after a moment. This man Daĉjo Otersen and two more had been lost on the tugship May Snow when it went out ranging for rocks and never sailed home. “I didn’t know him, much. I knew Liliana Olavo, better,” Juko said, nami
ng one of the others who were lost. “Liliana’s sister married a cousin of my father’s, that was how I knew her.” Scrupulously, she began to rinse Kristina’s face of soap.
“He was in a dream of mine, I think,” Kristina said. She didn’t know why this dream had reappeared to her just at this moment. Or why she had dreamed of Daĉjo Otersen, a man she knew only slightly.
“Daĉjo?”
“He was . . .” Kristina felt for the thread of the dream. “There was a red sky and he was a bird, I saw his feathers, and the beak, his eye was ringed in black—I don’t know how I knew it was Daĉjo.” In the dream, he had sat on the lofty cap of a light pole with wings folded, one black eye fixed upon her, and then flown into the sun, which had become visible in the ceiling behind him, beating his wings in a hard, slow rhythm the way a heron flies, or a swan, though she had known he was neither, was only himself, Daĉjo Otersen, flying, feathered.
Juko said without interest, “What was he doing?”
She was suddenly irritable. “Oh I don’t know, it was a dream.” And then, irrationally, tears sprang in her eyes. She put a trembling hand to her mouth, and Juko let one of her own hands down and looked at her, alarmed. “What? The dream?” Kristina wasn’t able to answer, wasn’t able to understand what the dreaming or the crying meant. When finally her throat opened and spilled out words, they weren’t any she’d expected. “I always have wondered, do you have poor Vilef in your dreams?” she said sorrowfully. She was surprised, both of them were, by her breach of an old, unspoken agreement not to speak of this dead child.
“I don’t dream!” Juko said fiercely, and began to wring out the washrag. Kristina was startled by the scrim of fear in her daughter-in-law’s eyes, and felt herself flooded suddenly with self-reproach. What was in her mind, to bring up that poor dead baby after all these years?
Juko folded the washrag neatly, hung it from the faucet. She took Kristina’s arm and walked her wobbly back to their apartment. A burning silence charged the air between them, and this quickly was a pain Kristina couldn’t bear. When she was settled in the bed and had her breath back, she said unhappily, “Are we finished being daughter and mother to one another, then?” and Juko looked at her in astonishment.
“No! Where does that come from? Because I won’t speak to you about my dead son?” Her face became very bright. “Because Bjoro and I aren’t sleeping in the same bed?”
An inarticulate dread rose in Kristina. “That isn’t anything to do with me,” she said crossly, and turned her face away. In that moment, she understood: It wasn’t the keeping of these secrets but the baring of them that she feared.
Juko made a small frustrated noise and put out the light, went to her own bed. After a while, into the darkness and silence she said flatly, “Once, I dreamed the air was water and he swam in it, smooth as a fish.”
A gift of fever and sickness, a lost memory, rose up slowly in Kristina. “Some of the world is visible to us,” she said, sighing, “but some of it can only be seen in our dreams.”
9
Ĉejo
And these things I see suddenly, what mean they?
As if some miracle, some hand divine unseal’d my eyes.
Shadowy vast shapes smile through the air and sky,
And on the distant waves sail countless ships,
And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me.
OLAVA MORGAN’S HANDS were thick, blunt-fingered, the nails etched with indigo blue as if she might have been dying yarn before she came to lay her hands on Humberto. “This is holding me,” she said, sighing. It wasn’t clear if she was speaking to Humberto or to Ĉejo. Ĉejo was watching her, sitting cross-footed beside his father, who was lying on his mat on the floor with Olava’s large hands spread across his eyes. “Right here, the eyes, my hands are stuck here, the pull of the energy is so strong, maybe it would pull some skin off if I moved my hands. It feels like that.”
Ĉejo said earnestly, “One of his eyes won’t close.”
He knew that Olava knew this. She had been in their house daily since Humberto had suffered his stroke. He didn’t know why he felt compelled to tell her, One of his eyes won’t close.
Olava said, nodding, “I can feel that. This eye, the right one, eh? I can feel the heat.” She shifted her hands, drawing the thumbs under, bowing the knuckles. There were twenty hand positions in the rijki healing art; Ĉejo knew this from his grandmother, who had learned a little rijki therapy from Olava in the hope that it would ease Humberto’s sleep. He had been sleeping badly since this stroke had paralyzed him, and often, late into the night, he lay muttering and beating his motive left hand against the floor. All of them had had to learn to sleep with the commotion—Leona’s inexpert practice of rijki therapy never had brought him peace.
“I can feel the heat,” Olava murmured again, her hands making a shape like two long narrow mounds of earth hoed up for planting pumpkins. She narrowed her eyes and shifted her weight on her knees. She was a big woman with a cap of gray curly hair, pointy front teeth. She had a sloppy way of dressing, sometimes wore crumbs of food at the corners of her mouth—her untidiness put Ĉejo off, and he and his grandmother had argued over this in the past. But Olava had been kura to his father’s family for more than thirty years, and in the first days after the stroke she had tenderly cupped Humberto’s pulse in her palms for hours at a time while they all waited to see if his brain would swell enough to kill him. She had been daily explaining things, relieving anxieties, serving as a sort of clerk at their family Meetings. What was a doctor’s chief work, anyway, after inoculations and setting broken bones? It was helping people through difficult times, even through dying. Ĉejo had lately given up thinking that sloppiness was an obstacle in those matters.
“Well Humberto,” Olava said quietly, “I missed your face, eh? At my sister’s grand-daughter’s wedding.” She sat behind his head, her fingertips resting on his cheekbones, his mouth spread out just below the tips of her fingers. Ĉejo had become accustomed to his father’s crooked grimace, the one corner pinched and the other loose, but now with Olava’s big hands over his father’s eyes the mouth drifted alone, isolate and unfamiliar.
“That singer, Signe Pilsen, do you know her? She came and sang for my niece, a gift, a wedding song. Some people say she has a voice but it’s a loud screech, that’s what it sounds like to me. All the time she was singing at my niece’s wedding, I was thinking, that would be a good song if somebody else was singing it.”
Ĉejo had expected Olava to meditate while she was laying hands on his father. His grandmother always would shut her eyes and fall silent when she tried rijki on her son; Ĉejo thought if you were conducting the body’s ĉi from one person to another, you wouldn’t want to be talking about weddings and singing. He said cautiously, “Are your hands feeling anything now? Is any healing going on?”
Olava opened her eyes, beginning to smile slowly. “There’s always healing going on, eh? Healing and dying both.” She shifted her hands, flattening and spreading the fingers. “Here, put your hands on now, lay them on mine,” she said, wriggling her thumbs slightly. Ĉejo placed his own hands scrupulously over hers. “There’s heat,” she said, “and a pulling. Do you feel it? Right here over the bridge of the nose.”
The backs of her hands were cool against Ĉejo’s palms. He closed his eyes and waited to feel something. Olava began a wedding tune behind her lips. Her hands carried Ĉejo’s hands slowly outward; their four hands began to hold Humberto’s long face, his skull, tenderly between their palms. Olava went on humming quietly, not seeming to need to be focused on the touching, though Ĉejo went on trying to meditate, his eyes shut. As his hands became slowly heated, filled with a kind of charged weight, then finally he had to look, had to say, “Do you feel this, paĉjo?”
Olava’s hands, moving outward, had let his father’s eyes come out from under. His left eye was following Olava, his right eye looking up to the rafters, the floor of the sadaŭ. He stirred restlessly and said something
inarticulate, a quick glib collection of meaningless syllables. He looked at Ĉejo and Olava urgently, jumping his left eye from one of them to the other. Ĉejo shook his head, scowling, turning the sounds over in his mind. His father’s tongue was thick, intractable, but some few words were clear, and sometimes a garbled word could be understood. Pe! Jos duble! he may have said. Ĉejo didn’t know what these particular sounds meant.
Olava moved her hands and Ĉejo’s with methodical care, lifting them from Humberto’s face, setting them down on his right shoulder. She said quietly, “Well I don’t know that language you’re speaking, eh Humberto? You’ll teach it to me, I bet, if I keep paying attention. Through the skin, though, I know what you’re saying: Sure Olava, I feel that healing touch there, that heat, and I’m sorry I missed that wedding, that Signe Pilsen singing those songs in her screechy soprano voice, but I don’t know if you might be saying that, something like that, with your mouth. Or something else, eh? I don’t speak that fey language yet.” She smiled sorrowfully.
Ĉejo’s father, watching Olava’s face, stirred again and sighed. He was drooling from the loose edge of his bottom lip, seeming not to know when saliva had accumulated in his mouth. Ĉejo had a habit of wiping it away with the pad of his thumb, but his hands were occupied resting on Olava’s hands, on his father’s useless right arm, conducting the heat and power of his own body into his father’s, so he let the little dribble run down into the crease of Humberto’s chin. “Right here,” he said to Olava, “I feel this pulling right here.”
Olava nodded solemnly. “Yes. It’s pretty warm, I feel it drawing pretty strong.” She gave him a look. “You got a good touch. Your grandmother, she couldn’t feel it, couldn’t get her hands sensible to the energy. Humberto, we can show your son how you like to be touched, eh? He can lay hands on you, himself, after this.” She brought her hands down over his father’s abdomen, lifting her elbows out slowly, linking her fingers in a thick mat. “The spleen,” she said, murmuring. “You know the spleen? This is how to touch it, how to find a balance by touching. You make a path between your body and Humberto’s and let the ĉi flow along it.”
