The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [124]
ADDENDUM TO THE CONFESSIONS OF HIOB VON LUZERN, 1699
Brothers, I send this back to you knowing in no fashion what tomorrow might bring. I send back Marcel and Abelard over the mountains to bear back this manuscript. Hiob felt at ease speaking to God, comfortably, two aged grandfathers exchanging tales. I can speak only to the page. I write knowing in no fashion what tomorrow may bring. For my own part, I will stay. Hiob cannot be moved, and I cannot leave him.
I have asked the woman in yellow to bear me back to the Tree of Books, so that I may attempt this tale again, make it more whole, fill the places the mold took from us. It is my intent to build a small hut there, on that plain, so as to lose no time transporting the manuscripts back here. It is not for love of Prester John I do this, but for love of Hiob, who should wake to illumination.
Oh, but I lie. I also want to know the rest, I also burn to learn what followed, I also find my heart grown bitter with having those books stolen from me too soon by the mere villainies of air and light. How those volumes corrupt in their turn, so that I feel within me tendrils of green, and red, and gold, swarming over my heart, eating me whole. Take me back, I said to her, take me back, I cannot bear it.
The woman in yellow, Theotokos, I suppose I must call her, looked intently at me for a long while.
“I will consider it,” she said finally.
“Abbas will support me. It is not yours to decide.”
The woman turned her head to one side, and I believe she almost smiled.
“It is my tree,” she said softly. “It belongs to no one but me. Not Abbas, and not you. Go to him if you like. He rules at my pleasure.”
And she made a curious gesture, stroking the skin of her neck, the space just above her collarbone, unselfconscious, bare.
And so I wait. I wait for her to convey me back to that place. I wait and think of Hagia, and Imtithal, and the strangeness of women. I wait and think of how the world was made. I make sure Marcel and Abelard are well stocked with eggs and meat and oranges, and send them off into the ashy day. I eat Abbas’ chickens, and pray. Oh, how I pray. I pray you will not condemn us, at home, in those familiar halls, with those sweet chestnuts in the garden. Nothing was as we expected. We are but mortal men. We cannot be blamed for the shape and history of the world.
One further thing I must relate, and then Abelard is eager to depart, for he hates this place, and has the patience of a gadfly. But I have no explanation for what I wish to tell, and no knowledge of its meaning or purpose. I can only say, as John might: It happened, no denying would stop it from having happened.
Yesterday, as I sat beside Hiob’s slab, dizzy with the scent of the flowery garlands, my master opened his mouth. I started, relief flooding me. He would wake, it would be all right. All would be well and all would be well—but he did not wake. His jaw cracked open, and out of his mouth a small, forked branch emerged, its foliage wet and wrinkled like newborn butterflies, its fruit nearly invisible, finer than dust. It grew out of him, slowly, a delicate stripling, studded with leaves like emeralds, glowing gently against his grey, senseless skin.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When addressing the delicate issue of a book’s genealogy, one has to begin at the beginning. I owe a great debt of thanks to Deborah Schwartz, my medieval studies professor at Cal Poly, who awakened in this lapsed Classicist a grand love of the medieval world that went far beyond the ersatz RenFaires of my youth and into something altogether stranger and deeper. Though I bear the shame of having failed to complete my graduate program, Dr. Schwartz rekindled my passion for Arthuriana,