The Testament of Yves Gundron (35 page)

“Well, then, I suppose I'll head home.”

“We'll see you at sundown,” Mandrik said, and took her arm above the elbow to lead her away.

I drove home in a frenzy of anger and self-hatred. I had seen nothing, but something I had most certainly seen. It only increased my ire to find Adelaïda weaving a fine checked cloth, our daughter on the floor beside her drawing what looked remarkably like the letter “E” over and over on my slate. Adelaïda's loom faced away from the door and the fire, and she did not turn to look at me when I walked in. “Good market?” she asked.

“Very good.”

“I should have thought you'd be the rest of the day dreaming with your brother.”

Elizaveta clicked her small tongue.

“My brother and Ruth are putting up berries. They'll bring us a tart this evening.”

“She doesn't help me with my preserving.”

“Mandrik says pickles are different from jam.”

“I suppose that both of them want to be fed?” The shuttle sang through the varicolored warp.

“Certainly you don't begrudge my brother dinner? Without his generosity, this house would not be ours.”

“I begrudge your brother nothing. It's only that it rankles me sometimes, how that stranger eats and eats, and can't even do housework.”

“Ruth helps a good deal. And as I recall, it was you brought her home.”

“I might decide otherwise, now.”

“Do not speak ill,” I commanded her, “of those I love,” though love was not the word that first sprang to my thoughts.

She kept sailing her weft through, and tamping it expertly down. “I once thought it was our family you loved. But I'm glad, at least, to know if it's otherwise.”

“Adelaïda.”

“Two lazy peas in a pod, is all I think of them.”

The image of my brother and Ruth lying together in a pod was more than my mind could bear at that moment, and I had the prickly feeling that my wife had meant it as just such a barb. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean what I said.”

“Perhaps you already know, then, of the rumors abroad that my brother makes merry with our guest?”

“What's that?”

“Rumors that, you know, he's been untrue to his vows.”

She paused to unwind a twist in her wool. “That's some news, if it's true.”

“You hadn't heard it, though?”

“Nay, but it makes its own, strange kind of sense.”

“It can't be true,” I said, “or one of them would have told us.” I watched her weave, three limbs working in harmony, the remaining foot keeping time. “He's my brother.”

She shrugged without slowing her movement. “All the more reason he might not want to debase himself in your eyes.” There was, if I did not mistake her, a faint note of pleasure in her voice. “Not that I believe it's true.”

“If you don't believe it, why does it fill you with glee?”

“Yves, when did you last hear me utter a gleeful word?”

She had, in truth, been dour a good while. “You don't believe the rumors, then?”

“Not until I see it with my own eyes.”

“Making preserves and fruit tarts is no sign of impropriety.”

“Absolutely not.”

I moved Pudge from one side of the table to the other. “Can you say nothing to convince me of their innocence?”

“I thought you believed they'd done no wrong.”

“Aye, but I suppose you could bolster my confidence.” I wanted her to take me in her arms. The house was empty but for the child; she could have. “Adelaïda, must you work right now?”

She turned to me, bored with my interruption. “Why?”

I gently touched her worn, soft dress, and felt her firm shoulders bracing against my touch. “It doesn't matter, I suppose.”

“Have you a reason, Yves?”

“No.”

I retreated to the barn. All the animals were out. I cleaned their dung and, when the task was complete, stood sweating and leaning against the rake. There was nothing to do. I took out paper and removed my pens from their box and arranged them, useless, on the floor. Damn everything and everyone I loved—including the miraculous new cart. I stared at the paper a long while, knowing I needed to do something with it, but not knowing what.

¹
Adelaïda made her displeasure with me abundantly clear, but as often as not I confused her real unhappiness with my sister's low-grade fault-finding. Nurit had a negative turn of mind, but her disapproval never amounted to much; whereas I had to keep reminding myself that Adelaïda, according to Yves's reports, had a sunny disposition when I wasn't around. I wanted badly to earn her trust.

²
I am amazed that in that moment I could not see how little my own work would amount to in comparison to Yves's own.

³
It was later that week, after a long day in the fields, that Mandrik first let me see his manuscripts. His home was clean-swept and bare: a single bowl and cup on the shelf his only possessions, besides his meager furniture, a collection of books wrapped in protective pieces of leather and cloth, and thousands upon thousands of pages of writing in his neat, narrow hand. He had filled every inch of each piece of paper, which I suppose is necessary when you make the paper yourself. He was my age, slightly older, but had already produced more than I could write in a lifetime. I confess that my admiration of the subjects he tackled was tinged with jealousy of his productivity. And I confess, too, that the pleasure of his company more than equaled the pleasure I took in his work.

⁴
“Why wouldn't you talk in front of Yves and Adelaïda?” I asked him, sitting that night at his neat table.

“Because I have not told them all of my journeys.”

“Of course you haven't.”

He shook his head. “But I have not even begun to tell them what I have seen.”

“It would have been a good opportunity, then.”

So that I could drink from his cup, he made his own tea in the wooden bowl. His hands were angry, however, as they crushed the nettles. “Do you not listen to me? I have seen things about which I cannot tell them.”

Just then his oratory struck me as overly dramatic. Still, I liked him, and liked watching him be flustered. “Such as?”

He slammed the two vessels down before me. “Would you believe me if I told you I had sojourned a fortnight in your city?”

“Boston,” I said quietly, “is not Vietnam.”

“It certainly isn't.” He offered me a chunk of honeycomb, which I declined. “I didn't go to Vietnam.”

“What'd you think, of Boston?” I asked, to still the other questions that were bubbling up in me.

“A grim little suburb of New York.” His smile was lopsided, extremely inviting.

“Don't get me started,” I said.

He replied, “No, Ruth. Don't get me started,” and set one hand on the table, bent over me, and kissed me. Had I not been sitting, I would have lost my balance. His mouth was gentle, his hand on my hair shaking—who knew if he had ever kissed anyone before? I knew I shouldn't mess with my data set, and I could imagine my sister, Nurit, the crack student, railing at me for thus spoiling my research; and yet despite my misgivings, I drew him closer, coaxed him down onto the bench beside me. I had never before kissed anyone who smelled not of shampoo and shaving cream but of human sweat, and the midday sun, and the nettles for tea. All my misgivings paled against the splendor of his nearness.

⁵
No university politicking was ever more difficult than those six long days I spent interviewing Archduke Urbis of Nnms. He talked incessantly with his hands; they were stained yellow, and smelled foul from all the oranges he ate. We sat together on silk cushions on the floor, fanned by the red servants and looking through the windows at his remarkable greenhouse, which sheltered his precious orange trees so brilliantly. I tried to write everything down, but it was hot, and we were half reclining, and he temptation to sleep lured me like nothing I had ever known. The warm breezes blew through the windows, and the birds sang in the branches. I was so bored, and so uncomfortable in the itchy clothes Adelaïda had made me, that I wondered if I had made a mistake, coming to Mandragora. Urbis had stories about everything—from his father, who had exercised the
droit de seigneur
with every woman (including Friedl Vox) in the parish, to his own, more modest exploits (which had not yet resulted in his taking a wife), to his plans to extend his great paving project out onto the High Road and the Low Road (which seemed a fine idea, if it would make the cart rides less bumpy), to his further, and secret, plans to raise an army and conquer all the territory in these mountains, thus bringing the heathens he believed to be all around under the gentle dictatorship of fruit-rich Nnms. By mid-afternoon I longed for Mandrik's company: for his plain speech; for the simplicity of his hut and what he offered me to eat there; for the tantalizing bits of his story he had held out before me; for the intelligence which sparkled in his large blue eyes; and not least for his kisses and the tentative way he traced the lines of my collarbones with his fingers. Urbis was a good interview, but none of his ideas was incandescent.

⁶
The expression on Yves's face nearly broke my heart with shame. I knew that he suspected the worst. Had he known how deep a bond was springing up between his brother and myself, he might have looked on us more kindly, but I saw that he thought I was corrupting his nearest kin. I would have given anything to tell him the truth right then, but Mandrik had asked me to keep silent until he could think of the correct way to convey the news. After all Yves had given me, this did not seem the way to repay him; and yet what I was doing seemed so exactly right, so miraculously the first thing in my life that had ever made me happy, that I couldn't feel very guilty about it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE DARK DAY

he roads in Nnms were beautiful, but had always been thick with people and beasts. Though we had admired them, we had never enjoyed them fully. As the road crew finished paving past the far ends of our village that autumn, however, the uses and pleasures of roads seized the popular fancy. We sent songs of praise to the Archduke—Ruth, who still had access to the fortress, brought Mandrik along with her to sing his and Adelaïda's compositions, apparently much to his Urbanity's delight. Before All Saints' we had outfitted every last village cart with a sitting board and brakes, and all of us could sit regally atop our vehicles, flying down the new, beautiful road in utter safety. How pleasant was the chill of the harvest moon's wind against the hands and cheeks! How the glory of such speed seemed a slice of Heaven! The paved road was harder than dirt upon the beasts' hooves and louder beneath them and the iron tires, but I cannot describe the purity of its pleasure. I was glad to have given some of my land to this great development, and would gladly have given more.

Rather more surprising proved the pleasure of walking barefoot along the road. My brother had advocated the practice ever since his return, but the villagers, myself included, thought it another of his fancies
and an invitation to ringworm. The roads at that time were full of sharp stones, all ready to reduce a man to tatters with infection, and the plentiful horse leavings made the prospect even less attractive. The new road was smooth as winter's first snow, however, and it was worth the trouble of avoiding the fragrant droppings to feel that coolness against the bare skin. So while, each day, some of us went tearing along, whipping our horses into a frenzy, others ambled arm in arm a short ways from their homes. As if none of the past two and a half years had ever happened, a part of our lives returned to its native slowness. It was good to regain the pleasure of seeing Ydlbert, or even Yorik or Dithyramb, out with his trousers rolled up, his feet rather blue, but willing nonetheless to stop and talk awhile, without the noisy encumbrances of horses, carts, and brakes.