by Ann Benson
“But you love Kristina …”
“My God, of course I did, do, she’s my daughter. And I’ve always been there for her when she needed something, always taken care of her.”
So kind and steady and calm … Janie had no doubt that he’d been a wonderful father. But it was still a huge, weighty burden. “It’s like you had this secret life all these years and I didn’t know anything about it. I thought I knew—”
“We were both in college. We weren’t in regular contact back then.”
Something stirred in her, a thought about the timing of it all, but in the confusion of the moment she let it pass. “Good grief, Tom, I hate to tell you what I was thinking.”
“What were you thinking?”
“Well, that there was something—romantic—”
“Janie, please. The difference in our ages alone … how could you think that of me?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I really did. I didn’t want to believe it. But I do know that you should be very proud—she’s a remarkable young woman. Wise beyond her years … I just keep wanting to ask her where she comes up with some of the stuff she says.”
With pensive, almost wistful sadness, Tom said, “She is remarkable. In more ways than I can even begin to tell you.”
But you will tell me, eventually, because whatever it is about your daughter that distinguishes her so dramatically is something you had a hand in. Secrets like that always wanted to get out, to be set free. It was time, Janie believed, to start that process of unburdening.
“She’s not in Big Dattie, Tom.”
He looked into her eyes.
“I know.”
“But just about everyone her age is in there.”
“I, uh, had someone take her out, in …”
He looked away again. “When …”
He couldn’t seem to finish the sentence.
“Tom,” she said, very gently, “I’m not sure I understand—you can have people taken out?”
He nodded slowly. “Once upon a time.”
“How?”
“It was all money.”
“But that kind of money …”
“A couple of big lawsuits, settled very quietly, remember? I mean huge.”
Janie let him sit with his thoughts for a few moments. Memories overtook him. And eventually, he shared them with her.
She was stupefied. “But I didn’t know that was being done then. Oh, my God, Tom—she’s got to be one of the very first.”
“The very, I think,” he said. “The very.”
Life will always find a way, even in the worst of times, and during the plague winter that followed the closing of Camp Meir’s doors to the outside world, a child was born to Michael and Caroline, a beautiful little daughter with her mother’s red-gold hair. They named her Sarah, after the ancient crone whose wisdom, recorded so carefully by Alejandro Canches more than six centuries earlier, had held the key to her mother’s survival in the new millennium. Her middle name was Jane, after the woman who was there to receive her when she finally struggled, wailing her protests, in blessed perfection from the womb of her mother.
And every time Janie Crowe saw the baby at Caroline’s breast, so safe and unaware, surrounded by the love of her parents and protected by the vigilance of an entire devoted community, she couldn’t help but think of all the babies born on the outside that winter, into the dark cold pain that she knew must exist out there. She often wondered, with a heart full of fear for her species, what the desperate mothers of those babies would sacrifice to see that their offspring survived. Anything they had, most likely, would be given without a second thought; such was the nature of motherhood in the wild. In that dreadful plague winter, it would not be much.
But life always finds a way, she reminded herself during the long nights, as wind-driven snow and ice worked their furious rage on the stark New England landscape. Some of those babies would survive, as they had during DR SAM’s first reign of terror—that much could be claimed with reasonable certainty. What those babies would grow into, however, could not be predicted.
Now and then some poor soul would stumble witlessly upon the camp’s electronic fence and rattle it, only to wake up later a good distance away with a sore arm and a fuzzy head. Occasionally there would be a hoofprint left in the snow, or sled tracks to account for the unexpected relocation. Janie ventured outside when the cold was not too brutal and the wind not too biting, to walk on the camp’s grounds and think her private thoughts. Most often on these winter strolls she found herself dwelling on the anonymous man whose life she had taken in the desperate effort to preserve her own and Caroline’s. She’d been accountable for many a human being in her work as a physician, and there had been occasions when her act, or her failure to act, had tipped the scale of life and death one way or the other. But in all of those cases, Mother Nature had brought the ailing patient to her already damaged and she had used her gifts to work the best outcome.
But not so with Anonyman, as she had begun to call him in her own mind. Killing him had been a choice, and Janie had to believe that she had chosen wisely, or it would be impossible to go on. Giving him a name had not made it easier to shed the weight of her guilt. He raged through her sleep as vividly as she imagined Carlos Alderón had slouched through the sleep of Alejandro Canches, and she found herself seeking comfort in the pages of the ancient physician’s journal more and more frequently as spring approached.
News from the outside was sparse and irregular. Every few days Virtual Memorial would light up and scream incoming, incoming, incoming, and everyone would gather around in eager anticipation of some word of improvement. The news was never entirely good or entirely bad. Minnesota reported in most frequently, for the hearty Scandanavian plainsfolk who lived there were already building communities again.
Janie knew why the death rate there was lower than in anyplace else. And so did everyone else in Camp Meir. Especially Caroline.
She’d survived plague.
37
The bridge’s white expanse was just as he remembered it from a decade before, when he’d stood in its center with Eduardo Hernandez and looked down at the blackened bodies that floated in the fouled waters of the Rhone, bodies with tortured expressions and swollen necks, all crying out through their masks of death to be laid to rest. But there were not enough living to collect them, not enough graves to accept them, not enough priests to mutter over them. The feelings of that day came back to him like the glancing blow of a mace, heavy and stultifying, and he stopped his horse, as he and Hernandez had done so long ago.
He’d been terrified then, and he was terrified now, but it was a different sort of fear that held him in its grip on this gray day. On his first crossing of the bridge, he’d been afraid of life away from his protective family, frightened of the journey, uncertain of what lay ahead. He hadn’t known if he was man enough to face the road ahead of him, but he’d found that he was. And in the time between his first passage over the bridge and the one he made now, he’d come to know that inner man far more intimately than he’d ever thought possible, than he’d ever really wanted to know him. He longed for the naivete of that first passage, for his youthful ignorance, because now what lay ahead of him was clear: that portion of his life in which he would miss, and long for, the daughter whose child he had strapped to his chest.
Ah, Hernandez, he mused in thoughtful silence, my dear companion, how I have missed you! How innocent they had both been when they first crossed that bridge. I knew nothing of life, nothing at all, and you, with all your worldly experience, could not even imagine what awaited me.
If only they had stayed on the other side—might Hernandez be alive today? Could such an adventurer as that great Spaniard have lived through the decade that followed his untimely death?
Half of everyone had died, he remembered.
But look down from your Christian heaven, my friend, and take note of how well you instructed me! I have lived, against the very will o
f God!
I have made another friend, you know, though I did not recognize his affection for me until it was nearly too late to enjoy it. And he has helped me on my journey, as you did, though he did not have to give up his soul to do so.
The child moved against his chest.
And yes, I nearly forgot, I have a daughter. I stole her from a king. She taught me that there is much to love in this world, if only one looks … and she has presented me with this fine grandson, though I am still such a young man!
But sadly, she has never brought him to her breast …
He opened the top of the swaddling and looked into the pinched pink face of the stirring infant. “You know nothing of what lies before you, little man,” he whispered, “but I swear on the life of your mother that I will do what I can to keep you safe.” He rubbed the child’s back, and in a few minutes the baby settled down again. He kneed his mount gently in the side, and the beast began to move forward, with slow, sure steps.
“We shall find you a suitable wet nurse as soon as we are on the other side.” He looked back at the nanny goat who trotted behind the horse at the end of a tether, her full teats swaying as she scurried along. The animal looked immensely unhappy and bleated in a most disturbing manner. He had paid the princely sum of two gold pieces for the aggravating beast, but she had provided warm milk to nourish the child and for that Alejandro would have paid ten times the sum. “Then when a proper nurse is found, we shall put this annoying nanny out to her reward at pasture, with our undying gratitude for her good service.”
The papal palace still dominated the vista, its white spires striving heavenward toward that ethereal place all Christians believed lay beyond the miserable bonds of life. He looked up and imagined the new pope, whose name he did not know, and did not care to know, ensconced in his private tower, surrounded by advisors and sages, though Alejandro could not imagine that any of them could be so shrewd as de Chauliac had been on behalf of his patron Clement. The current ambassador to the Christian God would be firmly seated in the glorious might of the Church, with its unending reach and limitless mandate. He could disrupt the lives of Avignon’s Jews, and many more, by scribbling a few words on a parchment scroll and pressing his seal into a bit of heated red wax on its surface—and despite the suffering he could cause with such a simple act, he need never give it another thought. Would this one turn out to be as unfathomably considerate as Clement had been, against all advice, when de Chauliac served him? He would find out in short order.
The streets of Avignon were far cleaner than he remembered them to be. “Ah, young Guillaume,” he said to the baby, “you cannot imagine the filth of this place before! It shines now in comparison.” And it was true; he saw no rats, and very little garbage.
He found himself in a large, open square. He did not remember it from his first time in Avignon, but unlike Paris, which suffered under the pall of a war, Avignon had prospered quietly under the protective wing of the Church, and the means to beautify it had been found. The wide expanse of cobblestone was aflutter with the despised pigeons, who swooped down to poke through the occasional droppings of the horses, and alive with pedestrians. Goat still in tow, he scanned the plaza, looking for some sign that there was a natural route one ought to take. But people were walking in all directions, and nothing inspired him.
The baby began to stir again, this time more vigorously, and he would not be comforted. So Alejandro got down off the horse and led the animal to the edge of the square, where he tethered it to a tree. He untied the goat and bent down next to her. Her milk sac was nearly full; it would be time to empty her, anyway. He massaged the sac with one hand, while patting Guillaume’s tiny back with the other, and soon her milk began to flow. “Here comes your dinner, little one,” he said, and he set a small pail from his pack underneath her. Slowly and patiently he filled the pail, for to rush would sour the milk or spook the goat, and neither was a desirable result.
Then he sat down on a stone wall and placed the child in his lap. He dipped the corner of a small white rag in the warm milk, and laid it gently on the child’s lip. The tiny baby sucked lustily and made quick work of draining the rag. He did this over and over until the child was satisfied, and then he dipped his own finger in the milk and offered it, so the infant might know the warmth of flesh between his lips. “When we have found you a nurse, you must know what to do,” he cooed. “She will not come with rags for teats.”
All he had done in the time since he had left Paris, it seemed to him, was ride and feed the child, and change his swaddling when it was required. When he was not doing any of those things, he would try to sleep. But it felt to him that he had closed his lids no more than a few hours altogether. Imagine, he thought to himself, being a woman alone with an infant … how would one survive? More often than not in such cases, he knew, neither the mother nor the child lived.
But this would be the last time this child would eat his dinner from a bit of fabric, for if all went according to his plan, he would find a temple, and there seek a Jewess who would take pity on them and offer herself in hired service as a nurse.
When the child was cleaned and swaddled and back on his chest again, he retied the goat to the horse. He walked out into the square and stopped the first intelligent-looking passerby.
“Please, sir,” he said, “where might I find the section of town where Jews live?”
The man stared suspiciously at him. He held out a scroll that he himself had written in Hebrew. “I am owed a debt, and I must collect it.”
The man looked at the scroll with disdain, then turned and pointed in a southerly direction. “That way,” he said, and he started to walk away.
“What street should I seek?” Alejandro called after him.
“Rue des Juifs,” the man said.
It was, like Rue des Rosiers, a dark and narrow street, thoroughly unlovely but clean and uncluttered and alive with familiarity. And on the door frames he saw not the leftover traces of mezuzahs, but the symbols themselves. He got down off the horse and led the animal along, and as he worked his way down the street he reached out and touched each one.
He went two or three blocks, attracting vague but not unfriendly stares from those he passed. This would be a tight-knit community, where the denizens all knew each other, where everyone knew his place. As watchfulness, his constant companion for a decade, slowly ebbed out of him, he felt oddly light and uncontained. And though his attire was completely European, he was not immediately taken for an outsider. Cautious nods of greeting were given to him as he proceeded, toward what he did not know, and he found himself smiling and nodding back with genuine friendliness and a complete lack of suspicion.
And suddenly, as if God Himself had led him there, he found himself in front of a small building that could only be a temple. He brought the horse and goat to a halt and stood there for a moment regarding the neat facade.
“Well, young Guillaume,” he said, “I believe this is where we wish to be.”
There was no place to tether the animals so he stopped a passing youngster and offered a sou for their temporary care. The boy happily accepted, and when handed the rein, stood there gravely, the pride of a working man on his small face.
Clutching the baby firmly to his chest, Alejandro bent over and entered through the small door. The floor was sand, to soften sound for those who would meditate deeply on the wonders of God. And there at the front of the small room were two old men, doing just that. Their heads moved rhythmically in a bobbing sort of motion while their lips poured out a steady stream of worship. It was the classic stance of a devout Jew at prayer, something he had seen many thousands of times in his youth. But the eyes of the man who had been across Europa noticed something he had not observed as a youth.
How curious this practice looks.
One, Alejandro assumed by his attire, was a rebbe, likely the leader of this congregation and the greater community itself. The other seemed to have no special significance beyond his ob
vious devotion. So deep was the concentration of these two men that they did not notice him.
Surely the rebbe will know of a nurse, he thought. And when he spoke aloud, the Hebrew rolled off his tongue with uncanny fluidity.
“Shalom, Rebbe,” he said quietly.
The rebbe turned slowly and faced him. “Shalom, my son.”
“Might I ask you a question? I am a traveler in need of advice.”
“If I can be—”
But his words were cut short by a sudden moan from the other elderly worshiper, who turned around and now stood facing the tall intruder. On uncertain feet, he took a few steps forward through the sand. He steadied himself by placing a hand on the wood railing and squinted through the dim light at the new visitor. And then, in a trembling, shaky voice, he whispered, “Alejandro?”
Alejandro thought for a moment that God had commanded him to give up his tongue; he could not make it move. All spit deserted him. But somehow, in his shock, he managed to utter the one word that needed to be said.
“Father?”
The old man started to teeter, so he rushed forward to support him. And then, with the child still against his chest, he took the old man into his trembling arms as hot tears of joy streamed uncontrollably down his cheeks.
The baby Guillaume Karle screamed inconsolably as he did what the sons of Jews had done for centuries before him: he gave up a bit of his manhood to God, and received in return God’s promise to remember him. And though the child was not the blood son of Alejandro, the rebbe had decided that it would accomplish nothing to hold this shortcoming against him. He is just a baby, the wise man said. We shall teach him how to be a good Jew.
And when the brief ceremony was over, Alejandro brought Guillaume to a woman nearby, a young widow with a child of her own newly weaned, but plenty of milk left to service Kate’s infant son.
“Ah, Leah,” Alejandro said with a smile as he handed the child to her, “what wonders you have worked. See how he thrives in your care!”
