The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [154]
Emilio typed a while longer and then closed out the file, satisfied that he’d written enough to be able to reconstruct the logic the next morning. "I’m sorry, Anne. I had four languages going in my head at once and if we had added one more—" His fingers flew apart and he made a sound like an explosion.
"How do you keep them all straight?" she asked.
He yawned and rubbed his face. "I don’t always. It’s funny. If I understand an entire conversation perfectly in Arabic or Amharic or Ruanja or whatever, with no missing words or confusing ideas, I sometimes remember it taking place in Spanish. And I’m losing Polish and Inupiaq."
"Those were the ones in Alaska, between Chuuk and the Sudan, right?"
He nodded and flopped back on a cushion, digging fingers into his eyes. "I may not have done well with them because I was so resentful about having to learn those two. I never got used to the cold and the dark, and I felt that my education was being squandered. Nothing made sense to me." He took his hands away from his face and looked at her sideways. "It’s not easy to be obedient if you suspect your superiors are asses."
Anne snorted. Not a very saintly remark, she thought. "At least the Sudan was warm."
"Not warm. Hot. Even for me, hot. And by the time I got to Africa, I was getting better at learning languages in the field. And then—well, professional irritation seemed pretty trivial." He sat up and stared out into the darkness. "It was awful, Anne. No time for anything except feeding people. Trying to keep the babies alive." He shook it off. "I am still amazed that I picked up three languages that year. It just happened. I stopped thinking of myself as a linguist."
"What did you think of yourself as?"
"A priest," he said simply. "That was when I really started to believe what was said at ordination: Tu es sacerdos in aeternum."
A priest in perpetuity, Anne thought. Always and forever. She studied the protean face: Spaniard, Taino, linguist, priest, son, beloved, friend, saint. "And now?" she asked softly. "What are you now, Emilio?"
"Sleepy." He grabbed her neck affectionately and pulled her close to pass his lips over her hair, loosened in sleep, silver-gilt in the camplight.
Anne motioned at the monitor. "Heard anything?"
"I’d have mentioned it, Anne. In a loud and ringing voice."
"D.W. will never forgive himself if anything’s happened to those two."
"They’ll be back."
"What makes you so certain, hotshot?"
He spoke from his heart and from Deuteronomy. " ’You have seen with your own eyes what the Lord your God has done.’ "
"I’ve seen what human beings can do—"
"You’ve seen what," Emilio conceded, "but not why! That’s where God is, Anne. In the why of it—in the meaning." He looked at Anne and understood the skepticism and the doubt. There had been so much joy, such a flowering within him ... "All right," he said, "try this: the poetry is in the why."
"And if Sofia and Marc are lying in a heap of wreckage right now?" Anne demanded. "Where would God’s poetry be then? Where was the poetry in Alan’s death, Emilio?"
"God knows," he said, and there was in his tone both an admission of defeat and a statement of faith.
"See, that’s where it falls apart for me!" Anne cried. "What sticks in my throat is that God gets the credit but never the blame. I just can’t swallow that kind of theological candy. Either God’s in charge or He’s not. What did you do when the babies died, Emilio?"
"I cried," he admitted. "I think sometimes that God needs us to cry His tears." There was a long silence. "And I tried to understand."
"And now? Do you understand?" There was, almost, a note of pleading in her voice. If he told her he did, she’d have believed him. Anne wished that someone could explain this to her and if anyone she knew could understand such things, it might