The Fifth Sacred Thing (43 page)

He had thought he was over the hurt of that but he realized, watching Sachiko’s face register shock, then horror, then pity, and then carefully close to conceal all emotion, that he would never be over it.

“You don’t need to play to have ideas,” Walker said. “Besides, we’re your friends, aren’t we?”

“A long time ago,” Bird said. “I don’t even know who’s in the Guild now.”

Walker proceeded to fill him in on all the woes and triumphs of the Musicians’ Guild over the last decade. Bird tried to smile, but as he listened to accounts of death he felt mostly pain. He was remembering what Madrone had said, that they had lost a third of the city. Yes, it was true, and it hurt.

“Come around,” Sachiko had urged him again. “You can still sing, can’t you, Bird? And write? Any fool can play guitar, but nobody else writes songs like you did.”

Maybe he was needed, after all. Maybe half a musician was better than nothing.

But he couldn’t accept that. Maybe he would never again be more than half himself in every other area of life, but music was too important. Better to let it go than to bring a shoddy offering to the Goddess.

“You used to have a beautiful voice,” Sachiko went on.

“My voice is shot,” Bird said. “Just forget it. There’s no music left in me.” He had thought maybe there would be, when Madrone was still there, and he had tried, for her. But she was gone, and he couldn’t seem to try for himself. Abruptly he turned away from Sachiko and Walker and walked off without saying goodbye.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Maya said to him. “Are you okay?”

“I told you to stop worrying about me. Let me worry myself in peace, all right?”

“So now you’re the one who’s worrying!”

“You bet.”

“Madrone?” Holybear asked softly.

“Of course I’m worried about her. Worried sick. And I’m worried about
this city. Council heard our warning, but nobody seems to know what to do. We have no arms worth speaking of, even if we could reach consensus on how to use them. I tell you, I wish I’d gone south again, just because I don’t think I can bear to be here when the armies come north.”

Maya was silent. Although she tried, she could think of nothing to say.

“Everything’s so beautiful,” Bird continued. “The streams are full of water, and the markets are spilling over with food and flowers and crafts. And it all seems unreal to me. What good is it all if we can’t defend it? And how do we defend it without becoming what we’re defending against?”

“I can’t answer that,” Maya said. “But look, tonight is the Seder, when we remember how the Jews were freed from slavery in Egypt. The great liberation holiday. If it happened once, who’s to say it can’t happen again? We have to believe it can, Bird, even if it goes against our common sense. We have to believe in miracles, just as we have to believe that the days will get longer in the springtime, that the rains will return in the fall. What could be more of a miracle than that?”

“I wish the future looked that dependable,” Holybear said.

“It never has been, certainly not in my life,” Maya said. “I remember Johanna and I, when we were about twelve years old, walking home from school during the Cuban missile crisis, wondering if we were going to hear the whistle and see the flash. And yet, against all odds, here I am in a beautiful white dress, walking out in a city where streams run clear through fertile gardens and nobody goes hungry or lacks shelter or companionship or beauty. Worried, mind you, by a possible romantic entanglement in the tenth decade of my life.”

Bird smiled. “You want me to cheer up?”

“Immediately, before I’m forced to reinvent the profession of psychotherapy. Oh, I know you need your depression and despair, certainly you’ve earned your right to wallow in misery, but I’m selfish. This could be my last Seder, and I want to enjoy it.”

Maya, Bird, and Holybear turned a corner and headed for the base of the tower supporting the bright-painted gondolas that would carry them high over the city’s twining paths and gardens. The tower was newly repainted by the Transport Collective so that iridescent colors played in subtle patterns across its struts. The windspinner at its crown was marked with a spiral. As the blades revolved, the spiral turned inward, a vortex sucking the eye in and beyond.

“I don’t like that spinner,” Maya said. “It seems ominous, somehow.”

“That’s because you’re a writer,” Holybear said. “You think in symbols. In my case, it’s just a constant reminder of a math class I had to drop my third year at the university. Shall we take the elevator?”

“I can walk,” both Bird and Maya protested in unison, and then laughed.

“I’ll meet you on top,” Holybear said. “Since I’m the one carrying half a ton of
charoset
, I’m going to take the elevator.”

Levanah House was built for formal entertaining, with high-ceilinged drawing rooms whose French doors opened onto a back patio. Now long plank tables covered with white cloths flanked by an odd assortment of folding chairs filled the gracious rooms. Aviva was bustling about with carafes of wine, a rare treat these days, and plates of matzoh, the flat ritual bread. Sam came forward to greet them. He smiled at Maya, a speculative light in the dark eyes that nestled under his bushy brows, and gripped her in a firm hug that lasted just a beat or two longer than was necessary. All right, Maya admitted to herself, there is an attraction here, if I wanted to get myself mixed up with such an old coot—not that he isn’t two decades younger than myself. But who’s counting? she asked herself as he looked at her with frank appreciation.

Sam greeted them. “Any news of Madrone?”

She shook her head.

“I’m sorry. I hope she’s okay. She’s a rare one, you know. A rare spirit.”

“I know.”

He gave Bird’s legs a professional glance. “How’s the hip?” he asked.

“Better, you old butcher. A lot better.”

“And the hands?”

“Slow,” Bird said, in the voice that warned off further questions. And slow was the word for them, he thought, creaking up and down the piano in labored scales as he attempted to demonstrate some simple exercise for Rosa. Sometimes he regretted agreeing to Sister Marie’s request that he give the girl piano lessons, but she had been so persuasive. “Rosa’s lost her whole family,” Marie had said. “Even the baby died last week. Oh, Bird, it would mean so much to her. She’s very musical, and it would give her back something of her own. And besides, she’s at that age … you know.”

“Know what?”

“She has a terrible crush on you.”

Rosa did look up at him with adoring brown eyes as he banged the keys and swore and sweated, and she was a nice girl, who worked hard and undoubtedly had some talent. If she would only stop asking so damned many questions.

“How did you hurt your hands, Bird?”

“A guard smashed them when I was in prison, down in the Southlands.” He answered curtly, looking at the music, away from the shock in her eyes, which somehow intensified his own hurt.

“Why, Bird? Why did they do that?”

“They wanted me to tell them something I didn’t want to tell them.”

“What?”

“Diosa
, I don’t remember what, exactly. I didn’t want to tell them anything they could use against us.”

“Did it hurt?” she asked quietly.

“Of course it hurt. Look, don’t think about it,
querida
. It happened a long time ago. Think about getting the timing right on those triplets.”

She did think about it. He could tell by the way she gazed at him with a mixture of pity and worship that made him want to slam the lid down on the piano keys and tell Marie to find her another teacher. But he couldn’t do that, not to a little girl. And the lessons forced him to play a bit, so he could answer with an honest “yes” when Sam asked if he was keeping up with his exercises.

“I’m not noticing anything I could call improvement,” Bird said.

“Give it time.”

“I’m not sure we have time.”

Sam made no answer.

“Let’s begin,” Aviva called out. “Outside, everybody.”

The ritual itself, Maya reflected, had added a bit of Pagan seasoning to its Jewish essence. She could almost hear the voices of her grandparents, sniffing in mild disapproval as Aviva led them into the garden to bless the elements and acknowledge the Four Sacred Things. Then the participants washed one another’s hands as a rite of purification and filed back indoors.

When they were all seated at the table, Aviva held aloft the plate of sacred foods.

“Here is the egg of life and the greens of spring,” Aviva said. “The bitter herbs, that stand for the bitterness of slavery, and the shankbone—in this case, a roasted chicken neck—to symbolize the burnt offerings brought to the Temple in Jerusalem.”

“Perfectly Orthodox,” Maya whispered to her ghosts.

Aviva continued. “And here is the
charoset
, this mixture of apples and nuts and wine and spices, which they always told us stood for the mortar in the bricks the Hebrews laid for their masters. But we know these are the sacred fruits of the ancient Goddess, apples of life, wine of intoxication, the tree fruits that honor Asherah, who stood reduced to the form of a pillar in the Temple of Solomon and who later was expelled from worship. Yet her memory was never truly erased, and down through the centuries her gifts have sweetened for us the harshness of life, even as this food sweetens the bitter herbs we dip into it. Let us taste it tonight as a token that no true power can ever wholly be lost, and as a promise that, whatever bitterness lies ahead, we will also find sweetness.”

Maya could feel her ancestors bristle at the mention of the Goddess. Everything changes with time, or it dies, she told them silently. Be glad this ritual is still so alive. Now shut up or go away.

Ari, a black-bearded bear of a man seated at Aviva’s side, stood up.

“I dedicate the first cup of wine to the ancestors,” he said. “I honor the ancestors who were slaves under the Pharaohs.”

One by one, going around the table, they spoke.

“I honor my ancestors who were stolen from Africa to slave on this continent.”

“I honor the ancestors of this land, enslaved by the Spanish.”

“I honor my ancestors who died in the concentration camps of the Nazis.”

“I honor my ancestors who died in the Palestinian relocation camps.”

“I honor my ancestors who died at the hands of the Stewards in our struggle for freedom.”

“I honor those who will die in the struggles to come.”

A silence fell on the table, broken by the sweet soprano voice of a young woman who sang a blessing in Hebrew. They drank the first cup of wine.

As the wine took hold, the arguments began. And that was quite traditional, Maya thought. She remembered the Seders of her childhood as nuggets of ritual embedded in a matrix of lively discussion, her uncles disputing fine points of ritual, her father, when he attended, challenging every reference to external divine aid, her grandmother popping up periodically to complain loudly to her grandfather, “Oy, Jake, hurry up. People have to eat.”

As Aviva and Holybear argued amiably, Bird sat wrapped in silence. Maya reached over and touched his hand. He patted her hand abstractedly and gave her the little false smile she hated to see.

Sam was reading from the Haggadah, the book of prayers and songs and stories. “ ‘And the Source of All brought us out of Egypt, with a strong arm and an outstretched hand.’ ” He paused, looking up at them over his thick reading glasses. “What does that mean to us? Personally, after the Millennialists, I’m wary of any sort of divine intervention. I come from the fine old leftist Jewish secularist tradition, where we were taught to use the strength of our own arms and hands. If there’s a God or Goddess offering deliverance, it had better be us.”

“I read it as hope,” Aviva said. “Hope is the source of strength. We can depend on our own arms and hands, but we can’t do anything without hope.”

“But it’s not just individual hope,” a woman Maya didn’t recognize said. “The strong arm is what we can lean on when all of our arms are working together.”

“God is our united support,” Ari said.

“But what about when you’re all alone?” asked the woman with the sweet voice.