How did my brother, with whom I had sucked on chunks of sugar, have such thoughts? He was as mortal as I, raised by the same parents, three years my elder. But his mind fixed on the infinite while mine fixed on carts, crops, and weather. I suppose that a family with more than one dreamer would be cursed beyond measure; still did I envy the breadth of his mind.
“I wouldn’t,” I said, “let Father Stanislaus see it.”
“No, no.”
“Because he’s not big enough to understand it.”
“Absolutely not.”
Despite that he was in every way my superior, his eyes searched mine for deeper praise.
“It is magnificent work.”
The light in his smile would have repaid any earthly debt. “But do you think it true, brother? Does it make sense?”
“How could I know?”
He nudged my leg with a stockinged toe in his sandal. “Oh, come, Yves. What does your gut say?”
“My gut says it’s hungry, and anxious to build this new cart. And that I wish I had been you, that I had been thus blessed.”
“Nay, Yves. You’re the one with the harness.”
“A harness is worlds different from a knowledge of first things. Will you help me with the cart, anyway?”
“A knowledge of first things is not all in this world.”
“No.”
“You could speak to our brothers and sister, and see if they had anything for you to write.”
Holy man or no, I gave him a fine shove upon the shoulder. “Like what?”
“Any number of things. A ballad? Or a history?”
“Don’t be daft, monkey. Somebody’s got to till the fields.”
He stood and wiped the dirt from his cassock. “And how did you get on with your stranger last night?”
“Somewhat difficult to understand. Adelaïda seems shy of her.”
He nodded. “But she’s lovely, isn’t she?”
“A bit tart.”
“But lovely.”
“Not everything is pen and ink, Mandrik.”
“I’m aware.”
I, too, stood, and we walked at a gentlemanly pace toward my abode, our family home, where he, too, had passed the bumbling days of childhood. We walked in silence a few minutes before he began to mutter, then finally burst into song:
Alms! Alms for your Chouchou
Awakened by Visions,
Now helping his brother
Improve the life of the whole town!6
The housewives were used to his sweet tenor, and began appearing at their doorways with baked apples, cheeses, and hunks of dark bread. They bowed their heads to him as he accepted their offerings into his capacious sleeve. The Widow Tinker, who still cooked as if she had a great family, though her daughters were long since married off, wrapped him a whole leg of lamb in a cloth and bade him Godspeed. When he was sufficiently laden, he held open the cache to me, saying, “Here, have a nosh before we get there.” I accepted a hunk of ripe cheese and a heel of black bread from the alms sleeve—grateful for my brother’s skills, however odd—and dreamed of my new cart as we walked.
Mandrik dumped his booty on the floor of the barn. When Hammadi blew him a welcome, he gave her an apple and a pat on the nose, but turned immediately to help me in my work. With great effort we turned the cart to rest on its bed, the two great wheels creaking with the force of their own revolution. We pried off the axle with an iron bar, and set to work salvaging the nails.
“Mandrik,” I said, “the stranger’s account of her homeland doesn’t tally with your own.”
My brother raised his eyebrows. “And does she hail from Indo-China?”
“No.”
“Well, then.”
I worked on in silence a moment, but I was not done. “And when twice I said to her, ‘Indo-China,’ she said back, ‘Vietnam.’”
“There’s no accounting for the ways of strangers.”
“Mandrik, when yesterday she told you where she was from—”
“From Boston.”
“Yes. Had you really heard of such a place, or did you dissemble?”
He put down his hammer and separated the good nails from those yet to be tried. “Of course I had heard of it, brother. I see no reason to tell her lies.”
“And yet Boston is no place I’ve ever heard you speak of.”
“I heard tell, in my travels, of a thousand thousand places. I will be glad, if it please you, to name you all their names, but it would take a fortnight—”
“Nay—”
“—and a great expenditure of breath. Still, whatever your pleasure.”
“Nay, Mandrik, nay. I see that you’re right.”
Soon our banging and grunting brought both women and my daughter to the barn door, where they stood silhouetted against the bright morning. Ruth was attired in a looser, more modest pair of trousers—a thing that but the day before I could never have imagined remarking about a woman—of a soft, faded blue, and a shirt that covered her with due propriety to the wrists and hips. Dimples of light still shone through her slender legs.
“What happened?” she asked.
“We’re rebuilding the cart the way you said.”
“With four wheels? I never should have mentioned it.”
Mandrik hammered delicately at a nail. “I can hardly believe we didn’t think of it sooner.”
Ruth said, “I’m eating myself with guilt about this cart.”
“Why?” I asked.
She shook her head in a brooding fashion. “I suppose you would eventually have figured it out yourselves.”
“Aye,” said Adelaïda, “Yves is always at his inventing.”
“And,” I added, “I am glad for your inspiration.”
My brother continued with the nails, three light, expert strokes to each head. “Indeed, in every culture there are stories of foreigners and other fanciful beings with strange knowledge. Surely not all the tales of our grandmother can be true; it was her status as an outsider that made her so fruitful a topic. Every culture does this; you are simply our first opportunity, this generation. And we appreciate your fine idea.”
“Are there more cultures,” Adelaïda asked, “than hers, ours, and Indo-China?”
Mandrik smiled. “More than you can dream of. But you cannot see them from here.”
Elizaveta bolted into the yard, and Adelaïda turned to follow her.
“Where can you see them from, then?” Ruth came to sit near us on the ground.
“From