The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [45]
I sat on the snow. Nothing like this had ever occurred before. I had been dropped. I looked up into the man’s eyes, and they were strange to me; they had a whiteness circling a deep, dark well, instead of a panoti’s total white. It seemed to me that he had an open void in his eyes, I was afraid of another soul for the first time. His cheeks sucked in, so hollow! He stared down at me, a little blue-black creature with great huge ears like an elephant’s, her furry clothes all stuck with snow, about to start crying for the clumsiness of a stranger. And the man, with a great effort, picked me up and soothed me. He stroked my ears, which is very pleasant for panoti, and in language prickly and soft all at once, told me all was well. I understood him, though some of the words echoed weird and warped. It was as though we spoke languages that had been siblings, but separated at birth, and left to grow up on their own without knowing that the other had a passion for diphthongs or certain ornate verb tenses.
His name was Didymus Tau’ma, he said, and who was I?
Imt’al, I whispered, now in terror, hardly able to say my own name. He smelled hot, and faraway, like baking sand. Do you have any gimelflowers?
He didn’t. My mothers and my father made him the ox-tea and listened to his tale: he had come from a place I could not even pronounce, called Yerushalayim, where all the domes were made of gold, and olive trees grew all full of oil and fruit. When he spoke of his city, even though his accent jangled strangely, I sat slack-jawed, as though I could see it before my eyes: dusty streets and palm dates smashed on the earth, evening prayer-songs like swans calling, and a man called Yeshua, who Didymus said was his brother, and Yeshua had died because the governor said he must. But three days later he rose out of his tomb and ate bread and drank wine somewhat gone to vinegar and spoke with all of them. Didymus himself had needed to touch Yeshua’s wounds, half-scabbed and half-healed, warped and ropy with scars, before he could call him brother, and believe it true.
You must have planted him deep and well, one of my mothers said, for him to sprout so quickly. The foreign man stared at her and she stared at him and even I could see that he did not understand in any part what she meant. But neither asked further, not wishing to be rude.
While Yeshua’s friends ate and drank and told old jokes concerning donkeys, Didymus looked toward the sun for a moment, just for a moment, and when he looked back to the table his brother had gone, never more to return to the living. Yeshua had returned to them—and all Didymus had done was doubt and frown. He was ashamed. Didymus Tau’ma dwelt deep in grief, he said. He would never see his brother again, not until he died himself, and perhaps then he would know how to smile.
If you die here, my lobe-father said, putting a slim arm around the stranger’s shoulders, we will see to it that you are buried near your brother’s tree, even if we must walk all the way to Yerushalayim.
Didymus Tau’ma thanked him, but he did not understand. He did not yet know where he was.
Now, as you know, there is a sea that surrounds our country, a sea of sand, and it is called the Rimal, and I know you have drawn pictures of it in your lesson books, and used up all the yellow paint. But four days a year a path forms in the sand, which might lead someone lost at sea to our shores. Such a thing happened when the Ship of Bones beached here. But there is another way, I think, through the mountains, the way my friend Didymus Tau’ma came.
He stayed with us for many years, and came down into Nural to see the al-Qasr, and tell the story of his brother to the king, who was called Kantilal