“It is an amusing story, Sarah and I am sure there are many more like it, but still there is so much more to Hungary than just these vineyards and the lake. Lena should see some of it,” he argued.
“Don’t underestimate the grapevine, Amice carissime,” Sarah said. “The grape reveals an amazing amount of truth; no wonder the Bible refers to it so often. Knowledge, whether from books or from travels, is one thing but truth is something quite different. We study and then store our lexical knowledge in our brain cells. With some effort and an average intellect anyone can appear knowledgeable. However, truth, or belief must be discovered through the spirit, through the heart -- provided of course that we accept the existence of something as insubstantial as the soul. Truth is universal, but the road arriving to it is highly personal. And the grape can tell a great deal on the subject. If I am not mistaken, Lena is just discovering that.”
“But perhaps searching for this truth is less personal then we assume. So much of what we know as truth is not discovered through personal experiences, but through what others discovered and then pass it on to us, ”Lena objected.
“My dear child, it is late at night and at this late hour my aging body objects to heavy philosophical thoughts, but it would kill me not to repeat the old wisdom , namely that knowledge and truth are not necessarily the same things. Once this pedantic definition is stated I need to confess that I don’t hold much of what others tell me about truth. I do accept most of the knowledge they discovered, but I am suspicious about the so-called truths they hand to me. Much of it is frightfully biased, one-sided, subjective and depends on the highly unreliable and subconscious selective service of the human intellect, which accepts only those concepts he likes, or which fit into his personal set of beliefs. He ignores, ridicules or rejects everything else. This is why I believe that each person must seek and ultimately find truth on his own, otherwise we muddle things and no longer can see even the basics. I hope Father Paul, you won’t object to my approach,” Sarah said.
He did not and they sat peacefully in the evening’s silence. The children were fast asleep and if the nuns were not, they too were very quiet. A night owl called in the garden and bugs circled the garden lamps outside.
“I am so glad you invited me to join,” Lena said. “I do volunteer work at home too, but this is so… different.”
“I told you so, but at this point I am also telling you that if we want to feed the kids a decent breakfast in the morning, we better retire now. I feel terminal tiredness and I need the restorative beauty sleep. Good night and we’ll meet again in the morning soon after the sun rises, if not before. These kids have no mercy.”
After this evening’s intellectual and emotional stimulations Lena found it difficult to relax and to fall asleep. The cell assigned to her was obviously designed for women, who had divorced themselves from the world’s pleasanter offerings, kept no material things and considered the desire for comfort as one of the sins of the flesh. The bed was narrow and hard, the sheets, although clean, were made of some rough material, probably woven in a manner to give the sensation of a hair shirt, scratchily different from her Egyptian, satin-finished, high thread-count bed linens, woven in Italy. The uncomfortable mattress had a deep indentation in the middle, made by countless bodies trying to sleep there before her. The bed, much too short for her tall frame, became a challenge that only Procrustes could have solved—provided one was foolish enough to submit to his less than tender methods of fitting a person into a bed too small for him. As she tossed on the creaking bed, she was not sure whether she could spend another night on it, but then the memory of the busy day emerged, and she knew she would stay. The laughter of the youngsters, their astounding appetite and appreciation of the food, their exploding energy, and their eager and curious minds were the rewards. She remembered the organ music and the conversation just a while ago and decided that spending a few unpleasant nights in an inhospitable bed was a fair enough exchange for what she received. She would not trade a minute of it, no matter how much the bed resembled some device in a medieval torture chamber.
As was her habit, she reflected upon the conversation of the evening, and upon her own reaction to Father Paul’s lecture. Women’s outlook on life is often dependent not so much on logical considerations, but on emotions. They filter their impressions of people through the fine sieve of the heart, and not through the logical considerations of the brain. Men, devoted to logical reasoning, would never understand why a woman can like a certain trait in one person, yet be irritated almost beyond endurance when another displays the very same behavior. In fact, Clyde too was blessed with a rare facility to talk entertainingly about a subject; yet, when he started to lecture she felt not enlightened, but diminished and disturbed. She became an insignificant beneficiary of his superior knowledge and she hated that. But when Father Paul spoke, or even when he lectured, she had no such feelings. She loved listening to him. What was irritating in one man was pleasing in another. It made no sense, but there it was.
She was tired and restless. For quite some time her body tried to find an acceptable corner on the potholed mattress which in addition to its other shortcomings slanted to one side as if it wished to roll her off to the floor .However, gradually her muscles relaxed, and sleep was slowly overtaking her. Thoughts were becoming fuzzy, reality and dream pictures intermingled and she could no longer follow her own reasoning .Snatches of conversations, disconnected memories surfaced, but none made much sense. Then for a brief moment full consciousness returned and she remembered how much she enjoyed listening to him and mumbled with surprise. “There is a difference, because I like Paul and I don’t like Clyde.”
Fleetingly she was astonished, because up to now he was ‘Father Paul’. For the first time she thought of him simply as ‘Paul’. The thought pleased her and in her half dream she smiled and repeated, “I like him. I like Paul very much. He is a sweet and treasured friend.” The thought slipped away leaving no trace, as if the waves of a restless sea had washed away the writing. Nothing was left of the passing insight. The waves too were gone, only smooth sand remained, but there was no message written on it. Nothing was left. Her thoughts were disconnected once again and then at a moment of which she was not aware, she sunk into deep sleep and her thoughts turned into unclear dreams.
SEVENTEEN
On the second day at the convent, the two women cleared away the ruins of the noon meal and Sarah announced her need for an afternoon nap. The children were getting ready for a hike.
“Don’t you want to join us, Helena?” It was difficult to decide who was more excited, the reverend father, or the children. “We plan to visit a peninsula; or rather our goal is the chapel on the hill there. The hill is not in the Mt. Everest category, but has its own charm and local interest. It was erected by forty-six fishermen, who in a miraculous way escaped drowning. The view is lovely from there; it is worth the effort to climb up. You should not miss it.”
“Do I need an oxygen pack?”
“No, I promise. By the way, it has a special interest for you. Just recently the community erected a memorial table at the chapel; the tablet is the work of Janos Nemeth, a ceramic artist of national reputation and the owner of many noble awards. He designed the tiles covering the stove in your living room. It is the great pride of the gentleman who owns the house you are renting.”
The children, apparently not familiar with the concept of physical exhaustion, kept a brisk pace. After marching at top speed the five miles to the foot of the hill Lena would have preferred to place herself at a table in one of the inviting coffee houses and wait in contentment with a tall glass of iced coffee until they returned. However, Father Paul was merciless.
“Now the fun begins,” he announced cheerfully. “But it will not kill you, Helena. A few years ago the village council built a nice and thoughtfully graduated path to the chapel, making the climb no more strenuous than your morning walks.”
Actually, it was, but by that time Len
a would not have admitted any sort of exhaustion or weakness and carefully controlled her breathing in order not to betray her. Of course, the view was truly worth the trouble. The children spread out and explored the hilltop and the chapel.
“Let us sit here for a while, and enjoy the view,” he suggested pointing to a well-placed bench and tactfully refrained from noticing her shortness of breath. “At one time the lake was much larger and this hill was then an island. In time the water receded, the island became a peninsula, but the panoramic view was left and it is truly lovely.”
Lena merely nodded and waited until she could talk without wheezing. It was pleasant to sit and watch the lake, to listen to the laughter of the children, to just relax. She imagined the landscape with an even bigger body of water and was awed. With the help of wind, rain, volcanic eruptions and erosion the Artist, who apparently is never quite satisfied with His work, keeps changing the shape of the world by repeatedly wiping away his creation and starting again from scratch .Some of the smaller hills around were very like models discarded in preference to a better design that was more satisfying to His artistic sensitivity. Artists are like that, whether they are divine or are just made from humble clay. Sarah too keeps redoing her landscapes.
The lake shimmered sedately below expressing ancient, holy contentment, its surface dotted with lazily moving sailboats. The emerald green of the vineyards almost reached the blue of the lake. A stork flew above but quite close, sailing gracefully, barely clearing the treetops; it was a thing of beauty and elegance, despite its size and comically outstretched skinny legs.
“I can’t get over these big birds flying about, because where I live there is nothing like them in the sky,” she remarked and then added, “We knew a highranking Air Force pilot, whose mother, well advanced in years, could never get over picturing her son in an airplane. Once after a visit, this frail little woman reached up and kissed her son goodbye and then whispered her maternal advice to him; ‘Now you take care of yourself, son. And for the sake of my peace, always fly low and slow’. We loved her for that, and it was fun to repeat her sweet but lopsided warning to each other when we said our farewells. These birds flying low and slow are exactly how she wanted her son to fly his F-16 Fighter Falcon.”
“Mothers are like that. When I went once to a summer seminar in Rome, mine packed woolen socks and shawls, and so much food that it would have sustained me for forty years during the Exodus from Egypt. And that, when the temperature was hitting 40 degree Celsius! This is one reason we appreciate our mothers so much. Their love and care is phenomenal.”
A slight wind whistled through the branches and it brought the magical essence of summer made from the delicate mix of flower fragrances, water, heat, freshly cut grass spiced with the scent of woodruff, sunshine and shadows, bird song and the children’s laughter. All components were in harmony and expressed the celebration of life in a most unobtrusive way.
“And what is the story of the fishermen?” she finally asked. “It seems that every stone, every patch of earth, every lake or river has a story here.”
“When people live long enough at the same place, history or legends are part of it. Do you know what a rianás is?” Lena just shook her head. It was another term she did not know.
“It is nothing very unusual, or exotic. It is a winter spectacle: the sudden splitting of a sizable ice sheet over a large lake. It can happen anywhere, but for the phenomena to occur certain conditions are necessary, such as the surface area of the lake, its depth, the thickness of the ice, previous smaller splits on the ice sheet, thermal changes in the air and in the water. Our lake has all these prerequisites, so the splitting occurs fairly often and it is always exciting. When a rianás happens, the ice splits with a tremendous thunder and often one sheet is pushed under the other. In a typical cold spell, the ice is so thick on the lake that it is possible to drive horse-pulled sleds from one shore to the other, a distance of about 15 kilometers across, or the trip could be made lengthwise, for a distance of about eighty kilometers. That is how thick the ice can be.”
The story of the fishermen took place in the year 1739, toward the end of the Little Ice Age, during a time when winters were exceptionally brutal and long, Father Paul related. A group of fishermen was far out on the lake ice fishing, when a rianás, several dozen miles long, cut across the frozen lake. The impact and the disturbed water underneath tore the ice sheet from the shore and the horror increased as the men realized that the violent split splintered the large sheets of ice all along the breaking line. The once solid sheet was broken into countless pieces of different sizes. Suddenly the safe and solid ice-cover disappeared and a seemingly endless surface of icy water, littered with huge chunks of ice, took its place. It is difficult to describe the dread of the men caught out there in the middle of the lake, trapped on their insecure frozen island that was driven by wind and water toward certain death. The ice block, on which they huddled, started to show dangerous split-lines. It was a sure sign that it would continue to crack and eventually break apart and would not support the men standing on it much longer. The fishermen looked on helplessly and waited for the final disaster. They prayed, of course. People usually pray when they are facing the inevitable. And then the segment of ice, on which they were huddling, was quite unexpectedly driven like a raft toward the shore. It was perhaps the wind, or the movement of the water under the sheet that caused it, but it was unexplainable to them. They called their rescue a miracle and as a gesture of thanksgiving for the extraordinary escape, the fishermen built a chapel, or perhaps restored an existing ruin. “And this is the happy end of the story,” he concluded, “just the way Sarah likes her stories to end.”
“Is it true or a legend?” she wanted to know. He shrugged.
“Hard to tell. Probably a composite of both.”
“I am glad they were rescued. Is it childish to wish for everybody to live happily ever after?”
“Not at all. We were destined to be happy. There is nothing wrong with wanting it.”
“Do I hear a ’but’ at the end of your sentence?”
“Perhaps. I do believe in our right to search for happiness, but it takes time to realize what that happiness is, because it is often misunderstood .Happiness is modest; it is very easy to pass by it without seeing it. And sometimes it takes great suffering to reach it.”
Pain as a corollary to happiness? Lena was dubious. As a philosophy it might be intriguing and noble, but when it knocks on the door, it is in the human nature to rebel against it, to fight it, eliminate it and if religiously inclined, to pray for it to pass. Man, ever since he acquired the miracle of speech, has been telling and retelling stories of pain, both physical and spiritual, probably in an effort to understand it. Pain is inevitable, always the center of interest, but despite its importance and stubborn presence not something people wish for, or even understand.
“Are you happy?” she asked unexpectedly and her question had nothing to do with what he was trying to tell her. She avoided looking at him.
“Very much so,” he answered with conviction.
“What made you decide to become a priest?”
“What made you decide to write? What made Sarah decide to paint? It is a similar force, and it has little to do with decision. One cannot do otherwise. Perchance it is destiny.” He was searching her face calmly, perhaps in order to understand the reason for the unexpected question.
“Isn’t it hard? I mean… “ It was not like her to be indiscreet, but she wanted to know the secret of that mysterious inner peace that was all his own. He laughed and she did not doubt the sincerity of his answer.
“Sometimes it is, but life is never particularly easy, at least not if you want to make a good job of it. Raising a child, building a good bridge, being responsible for a sick person, taking care of elderly parents, living in a bad marriage, governing a country or flying a jumbo jet, making instantaneous decisions at the operating table, rushing into a burning building to rescue peop
le, standing in a classroom in front of twenty-five mostly unwilling children—none of it is easy, but if you believe in your calling, in yourself, and above all in God’s plans, then nothing is very difficult. The commitment to the purpose must be stronger than the fear of tribulations one encounters on the way. And we humans are made of strong, enduring stuff, and do not break down when the going is rough.” Once again she felt that he was hinting about her situation, and was not really talking about himself.
“I like people to be happy,” she said after a short pause.
’Yes, I know.”
“People’s laughter is reassuring. It says that the world is all right and we need not worry too much. People just couldn’t laugh this way, when the world is about to fall apart, could they?”
“Don’t be too sure about that,” he responded with a carefree air. “Sometimes people behave in a most unexpected and erratic way under duress, even while their world is in the final stage of collapse.”
A small gray bird landed close to the bench. It hopped around, coming closer at each turn. like Pavlov’s dogs, it was well trained in tourist behavior and was hoping for crumbs. As none was coming from the two humans, it foraged in the grass for a little while, but her search yielded very little. Directing its incisive bird gaze at Lena, probably accusing her for being different from most of the tourists, it shook its head in disapproval. After an insulting sway of its tail feathers it flew off to a more congenial feeding ground. Lena looked after it and wished she could just as easily fly away from failures, disappointments and conflicts.
She gazed thoughtfully after the departing bird and it brought back the memory of his prayer at Sarah’s lunches. “At the lunch table you ask God to feed the hungry. The first time I heard you pray so, I rebelled. I thought it was childish to toss back the unsolved problem of hunger to God.”
“Did you really think that? I never thought of that prayer in these terms. To me the prayer expresses our wish to work together with God. We’ll do our share, but need His help and blessing to accomplish it.”
The Reluctant Trophy Wife Page 26
