The Testament of Yves Gundron (19 page)

“Brother,” I whispered to him as our good neighbors prayed, “does something ail you?”

Mandrik shrugged and retreated farther into his sleeves. “Who knows what they would want? Who knows if they wouldn't rather be dismembered and scattered to the carrion birds?”

He himself had mandated this funeral, as I recalled. “You heard Clive tell me they were wandering.”

He gave a somber nod.

The Lord's Prayer cascaded around my uncomprehending ears a moment before I managed again to speak. “Do you think all Ruth's countrymen are Jews?”

“Jews? I'll wager most of them are nothing at all.”

“Pardon?”

“Did you look at their faces? Tell me if therein you saw the light of God.”

This seemed inappropriate at a funeral, howsobeit of utter strangers. “I don't want to think about it.”

Adelaïda backed out of the crowd to see what we were talking about. “Nothing,” I told her. Her eyes flared with pique.

“I don't think we should have left Ruth alone,” Mandrik said. “She can't fend for herself.”

“I'm sure she's fine.”

“Or will be,” Adelaïda said, “after Lord knows how many months of us waiting upon her.”

My ears pricked up like a horse's at her tone. “Is there a problem, wife?”

“Not yet, certainly, no.” She made her way nearer the spectacle once again.

Twelve of our ablest-bodied—Ydlbert's elder sons in prominence among them—brought the caskets gently to the ground. My stomach sank, for only by the grace of God were my family and I not thus aslumber. If it had been my wife, this day, beneath the alder, next to my parents, my siblings, my first wife, next to all that I once held dear? My heart would be broken; not one loss more could I bear. As it was, Hammadi's body lay headless and moldering in the meadow, and I could bring myself neither to think about it long nor to go to the spot to move her.

“I hope,” my brother continued, with what was surely hardly a pause, “they were believers. Else, for all the comfort we are thus giving ourselves, we have done nothing to help them.”

“Will you stop discussing it?” I whispered. “You're spooking me.”

Friedl Vox stood docile next to her son, and merely wept over the spectacle with her one good eye.

Desvres and Dithyramb began shoveling, and the earth fell upon the first box with a sickening thud. There would be no ceremony for my Hammadi, and no one with whom to commiserate over her loss. Who had lost a named horse before? In our parents' times, life was so fragile, and survival so delicate an endeavor, that they hardly took time to mourn their human dead. My father would have given his strong right hand for the luxury of grieving for a beast of work. But Hammadi herself had made this so—by releasing me from my labors, she had freed me to contemplation. Now truly and for the first time did I bear the weight of its bitterness.

The next day came the season's first hard rain, so quickly that it pooled in the yard and the burgeoning crops, drowning the frailest shoots and turning all else to glistening mud. Mandrik brought Ruth a board to hold across her lap, that she might continue her writing; and he sat
busy working at the table all morning. Adelaïda made a point of sweeping around him, cooking around him, as if he were most especially in the way. On such a day I should have found indoor work to occupy me, but I could think only of Hammadi under the glowering sky, the raindrops pressing at her body, telling it, as it rotted, to make haste, make haste.

“I'm going out to bury the horse,” I told them.

“Not in this weather, you're not,” my wife chided.

Mandrik, however, saw the fire in my eyes, stood up, and girded himself against the rain. “Come, then.” Against my wife's protests and what might at some other time have been my own better judgment, we set out to Ydlbert's, our heads bowed under the onslaught of the weather, my wineskin across my body and its contents providing succor at every third step.

We must have looked a sight when we arrived, for Anya blinked at us, unwilling to open her door farther to the dripping messes we had become. By that time, also, I was well drunk. “It's no matter, Anya,” said I. “We have only come to borrow Thea and the cart.”

“In this rain?” Ydlbert asked, approaching the door with his youngest slung across his shoulder like a rag.

“I can't rest until I bury her.”

“Neither can you dig a hole in the rain, lad. Use your sense.”

“I cannot rest,” I told him.

Mandrik added, “You cannot argue with a man possessed.”

He shook his balding head and patted his dangling son without attention. “Do you need my help, then?”

I shrugged my sopping shoulders. I was too sick and weary to ask.

Mandrik said, “With great thanks, Brother von Iggislau.”

“Then come.” He sighed, slapping my shoulder. A wet spray cascaded from me and descended into the general fray. “It'll be faster with three.”

“The lot of you,” said Anya, “have no respect for womankind. No idea how much work you leave us after you've filled our wombs up with bairns.”

Ydlbert kissed her thin lips and handed her the squirming child before he set off, head bent grimly, toward the barn.

It was hard work for Thea, pulling us along the soft road, and every few steps she balked and turned to see if we had changed our minds, or
come to our senses. Mandrik huddled in the back of the cart with his arms up his sleeves. Ydlbert brought the wet whip down a few times against Thea's black hide, but could not make her pull faster, and soon began to exhort her more kindly with words. Thus he convinced her to draw us across the wet meadow, but he could not make her approach the body of her departed sister. Even in the rain was the carcass covered with flies, her proud, glossy coat already pocked and flecked with decay. Above the stink of wet leather, wet grass, and my own inebriation rose the terrible stench of death. Far overhead we heard the low, mournful cry of another airplane seeking its departed kin. We struggled with all our might; to lift Hammadi's lifeless body onto the cart, then retrieved her grimacing head, the eyes wide, dull, and littered with flies. Thea could hardly hold the cart still, no doubt because she knew what her nose smelled and her keen eyes saw. Our shoes sticking tenaciously in the mud, we walked back to my land alongside her, as much for the health of our stomachs as because we could not ask her to cart any more of a load.

We turned northwards and pulled the cart through the fallow field toward the cairn, which glistened black in the rain. I myself was rain, covered with rain, full of rain. “I've brought you company, Iulia,” I cried to her. “Brought you another.” And we commenced to dig a few paces from Iulia's grave. Never in a lifetime of farming did I perform a labor so difficult as digging in that wet, fertile mud. Ydlbert cursed a string of oaths worthy of Friedl Vox, but I could not laugh as perhaps he wanted me to. Mandrik grunted under the strain of the labor, but said nothing. Twice did I think my back would break in twain, and I lay down with my beloved in the loamy comfort of the earth. But I did not die, nor could I feel myself sweat in the driving rain, and though my eyes and throat were hot, who knew but God if I cried, so washed the salt tears into the tumult that bathed the ground. We built a high mound above the body, and took, each of us, an ugly, craggy rock from the cairn with which to commemorate the death of my friend and beast. We lay down in the mud for a while—for what did it matter, after we'd been in it for hours—looking up at the two cruel heaps, and, filthy beyond recognition, drove home to Ydlbert's. When at last Mandrik and I returned to my farm, it had never looked so dismal or covered in mud, and though Adelaïda had warmed blankets by the fire and baked us potatoes in the coals, I stripped, regardless of our visitor,
lay down in her soft pallet, and woke some time the next day, unaware that a whole night's darkness had passed, for the darkness behind my eyes and the pain in my body had eclipsed it like the wandering moon the bright sun.

Mandrik stuffed a new mattress with straw, that my wife and I might have a more comfortable bed while we slept thus on the floor, and he went home later that day, for he could not leave his plants untended. But as long as our patient convalesced, he returned daily with nourishing fruits from the garden, with tales to tell and manuscripts to read. Her face brightened whenever she heard his creaking rope shoes coming up the yard. I could imagine how wearisome would be such a confinement without so caring and interesting a visitor, and was glad for his more frequent company. My wife did not complain, but I thought I caught a tightness in the set of her lips, which had not been there before.

The double axle appealed to intuition; the mind's eye could create it where no such thing had been before. But the accomplishment of brakes was a different task. Ruth, groggy with fever and smoke, nibbling the day long on fruit and her revolting crusts of burnt bread, could not make clear if they were to be pulled, or pushed, or whatnot, and could explain their functioning only by making a quick, startled expression that sent Elizaveta into hysterics. “It makes it stop,” she said again and again. “What else can I say? I don't know much about machines. Mandrik?”

“I cannot help you.”

“If it is strong enough to stop the cart,” I reasoned, “then surely it will run it aground or crack an axle. We don't need it. I won't drive so fast anymore. The Archduke will issue a ban on fast driving.”

“No, he won't,” she said, her voice rising with impatience, “because everyone likes it. It's fun.”

“We never used to think about fun.”

“Except,” Adelaïda said, “on holidays, or sometimes before we were wed.”

“So,” Ruth said, “now you've had some fun, not on a holiday. Are you willing to go without it?”

I did not like these questions. “I'd rather not.”

“Then brakes are easier than accidents.'

“I'm sorry about your leg, Ruth.”

Mandrik said, “Be thankful it heals.”

“It's not your fault. But brakes. They—it
grips
the wheel slightly, so the friction slows the thing down.”

“Can you draw it?”

She shook her perspiring head no.

“How am I to build it and put it on my cart when you, who have seen it, cannot even describe its workings?”
²
The fire we kept stoked to heal her seemed unbearably warm. “Well, hang improving the cart. I have no horse with which to move it.”

Adelaïda, watching her soup by the fire, sang:

“Stop that, will you?” barked I. “I don't want to think about her.”

“I was memorializing her.”

“Do it some other day.”

She turned from me, and stirred the pot with renewed vigor. I regretted my harsh words, though I did not retract them. I sat on the bed with a chalk and a slate, puzzling my way through the new invention.

“On a bicycle,” Ruth said, “it's definitely a thing that grips the wheel.”

“A bicycle?”

“Ruth,” Mandrik admonished. “You must quit mentioning things my people know not of.”

She furrowed her brow, then closed her eyes.

Mine had been the work that released us from slavery—mine the harness, mine the sundry improvements to the cart, which had rendered it so efficient as to become dangerous. But the following Market Day,
mine was the back that bowed beneath what I admitted to be the insignificant weight of a carrying sling full of early lettuces. My eyes smarted with the ignominy, my back cried out in imagined pain, and all my soul yearned for the work and the company of my Hammadi. None of my good neighbors had thought to leave room in his cart for my produce, or to come fetch me before the exodus. I walked the long road alone. Those who lived farther from town—Jude Dithyramb, Yorik von Iggislau, Wido Jungfrau, and my Uncle Frith—passed me along the road and called out greetings, as if I had taken this activity up for a pass-time. Frith even whistled and called back, “That'll show you what good it does, inventing things!” I had rounded the bend by Ydlbert's yard when his cart clattered onto the road behind me and pulled abreast. Thea, somewhat ahead of me, turned back to stare, something between shock and amusement lighting her great brown eyes.

“Hop aboard, brother,” said her master, “and we won't be late.”

I looked up at my friend, standing blithely amid the lettuces behind his reins, and I choked with rage.

“Yves,” said he, “in an hour the market will be abustle.”

I resettled my burden on my back. “I'll walk.”

“Why so?”

“It is my fate now. Without Hammadi, I must struggle to earn my living.”

“Come. We'll visit the horse dealer, and by tomorrow you'll have your new girl trained to the plow.”

The mention of a replacement infuriated me, and I looked at him with the cold, appraising eyes of a stranger. Beneath that soft, brown cap, I knew, more and more of his pate was naked to the breezes, and his belly was growing fat. Thinking about it gave me pleasure.

“Yves.”

“Go, man. I'll walk, and I'll see you there.”

He clicked his tongue at Thea, who hesitated to leave me trudging along with so sour an expression on my face. She strained briefly under the weight before she picked up speed—as my Hammadi would never do again. As soon as they had gone I regretted my folly, for no one else offered to bear me and my lettuces to market.

It was a long walk, and the sun was high in a hazy sky before I reached the Great West Gate of Nnms. Within, the paved streets were bustling with traffic, and workmen were laying stone foundations for
new dwellings. Great: brass placards had gone up announcing the names of the new streets. The broad thoroughfare to the church was Via Urbis, and its sister, branching off to the fortress to the south and the horse dealer to the north, was Via Mappamondo. My progress along Via Urbis was slowed by the throngs, and when at last I arrived, my countrymen had sold the cream of their produce and were folding up their tarps. I took a place toward the end of the row and set out my lettuces, somewhat battered and warm from jouncing against my body. They sold quickly, for they were large for the season and fair of hue, but it was late enough in the day that the townspeople bargained, and grew surly at my attempts to obtain a good price. One lad, his finger so far up his nose that I feared for his welfare, said, “Ain't you the one with the traveler and the dead horse? My pappy says to stay away from you.”