Elisha's Bones - Don Hoesel [60]
Espy puts a hand on my arm as if to confirm my self-therapy. Still, my mood is more sour than it was and I resolve to make an effort at improving it. We’re in a new place, and the possibility exists that we will find something unique here—if Reese has not already found it.
I watch as the car tops a rise and the town spreads out before us. It’s the kind of thing one might see in a postcard—one of those where it looks as if the photographer stumbled onto a spot where everything that’s wrong with a place comes together to produce something marvelous, frozen in the instant the shutter clicked. The difference now is that the scene is in motion; a movement of people for whom this is much more than a backdrop. They live and breathe this place, this rural community that remains much as it was four hundred years ago.
As the car follows the only paved road through the town, climbing the steep hill that leads to the Seven Olives Hotel, I see many more people roaming the streets, slipping into and out of rustic shops and eateries, than I would have expected. It looks like a carnival midway. Children are everywhere, forming and reforming into groups that flit from one side of the street to the other and back.
“Why are there so many children?” Esperanza asks.
“They are following the pilgrims,” the driver says in passable English.
I’m not sure what he means but I look more closely and I now see that the children are not just engaged in aimless flocking. There are nuclei to these undulations of small bodies. As I watch, a group of eight or so detach from two people who disappear into a tearoom, only to run ten yards up the road to encircle a trio of adults in western clothes.
“Of course,” I say. I should have realized this would be the case. For most of the year I imagine that Lalibela is off the map, entertaining sporadic visitors with off-season vacation schedules. At this time of year, though, the place takes on special significance.
“Care to share?” Espy prompts.
“This is one of the holiest spots in the country. If you were a devout member of the Orthodox Church, where would you go for Christmas?”
“By the time Christmas comes, there will be fifty thousand pilgrims here,” the driver adds.
Espy’s eyes widen and she mouths a silent oh.
Something the driver has said gives me pause—something about Christmas. I glance at my watch, a Relic, to check the date, then shut my eyes, annoyed with myself. I reach into my jacket pocket, pull out one of Duckey’s cigars, and offer it to Espy.
“Merry Christmas,” I say.
It makes me feel better to see by her reaction that the day slipped past her, too. She takes the cigar and gives it an appreciative sniff. Much to my surprise, she removes the end with her teeth and spits it out the window. When she leans in for a light, I fumble to provide one, and seconds later she’s puffing away.
“When in Rome,” she says, sinking back into her seat. She draws the smoke in and releases it through her nose. If it stings, she doesn’t show it. “If it’s Christmas,” she says, looking out the window, “where are these fifty thousand pilgrims?”
“Good question.”
“Christmas is still almost two weeks away,” the driver says, looking back at us in the rearview mirror. “January seventh.”
I nod as if I knew this, and I think that somewhere among the growing catalog of things I’ve forgotten is floating the knowledge that the Orthodox Church celebrates the holiday two weeks later than most of the rest of the world. I try to picture these streets with ten times this many people and it’s hard to visualize. I’m hoping we will not