But maybe that’s wrong too and you did see us then. If you did, you would remember us even if I wasn’t but nine then and Marya eleven, because as soon as I saw your face tonight I knew that it would never need to flee, hide from, fear or dread or grieve at having to remember anything it ever looked at. Marya might fail to see that maybe — Marya now too, since she also had to come all the way to France to watch the refusal of her half-brother’s life, even if she doesn’t need to fear or dread or grieve at having to remember either — but not I. Maybe Marya is why you remember us if you saw us then: because she was eleven then and in our country girls at eleven are not girls anymore, but women.
But I wont say that, not because of the insult that would be even to our mother, let alone to you — our mother who had something in her — I dont mean her face — which did not belong in that village — that village? in all our mountains, all that country — while what you must have had — had? have — in you is something which all the earth had better beware and dread and be afraid of. The insult would have been to evil itself. I dont mean just that evil.
I mean Evil, as if there was a purity in it, a severity, a jealousy like in God — a strictness of untruth incapable of compromise or second-best or substitute. A purpose, an aim in it, as though not just our mother but you neither could help yourselves; and not just you but our — mine and Marya’s — father too: not two of you but three of you doing not what you would but what you must.
That people, men and women, dont choose evil and accept it and enter it, but evil chooses the men and women by test and trial, proves and tests them and then accepts them forever until the time comes when they are consumed and empty and at last fail evil because they no longer have anything that evil can want or use; then it destroys them. So it wasn’t just you, a stranger happened by accident into a country so far away and hard to get to that whole generations of us are born and live and die in it without even knowing or wondering or caring what might be on the other side of our mountains or even if the earth extends there.
Not just a man come there by chance, having already whatever he would need to charm, trance, bewitch a weak and vulnerable woman, then finding a woman who was not only weak and vulnerable but beautiful too — oh yes, beautiful; if that was what you had had to plead, her beauty and your love, my face would have been the first to forgive you, since the jealousy would be not yours but hers — just to destroy her home, her husband’s faith, her children’s peace, and at last her life, — to drive her husband to repudiate her just to leave her children fatherless, then her to die in childbirth in a cow-byre behind a roadside inn just to leave them orphans, then at last have the right — privilege — duty, whatever you want to call it — to condemn that last and only male child to death just that the name which she betrayed shall be no more. Because that’s not enough. It’s nowhere near enough.
It must be something much bigger than that, much more splendid, much more terrible: not our father gone all that long distance from our valley to seek a beautiful face to be the mother of his name’s succession, then finding instead the fatal and calamitous one which would end it; not you blundered there by chance, but sent there to meet that beautiful and fatal face; not her so weak in pride and virtue, but rather doomed by that face from them; — not the three of you compelled there just to efface a name from man’s history, because who on earth outside our valley ever heard that name, or cares? but instead to create a son for one of you to condemn to death as though to save the earth, save the world, save man’s history, save mankind.’
She brought both hands up in front of her and let them rest there, the fist of one lying in the other palm. ‘Of course you knew us. My folly was in even thinking I would need to bring you proof. So now I dont know just what to do with it, when to use it, like a knife capable of only one stroke or a pistol with just one bullet, which I cant afford to risk too soon and dare not wait too late. Maybe you even know the rest of it already too; I remember how wrong I was that you would not know who we are. Maybe your face is telling me now that you already know the rest of it, end of it, even if you weren’t there, had served your destiny — or anyway hers — and gone away.’
‘Tell me then,’ the old general said.
‘ — if I must? Is that it? the ribbons and stars and braid that turned forty years of spears and bullets, yet not one of them to stop a woman’s tongue? — Or try to tell you, that is, because I dont know; I was only nine then, I only saw and remembered; Marya too, even if she was eleven, because even then she already didn’t need to dread or grieve for anything just because her face had looked at it. Not that we needed to look at this because it had been there all our lives, most of the valley’s too.
It was already ours, our — the valley’s — pride (with a little awe in it) as another one might have a peak or glacier or waterfall — that speck, that blank white wall or dome or tower — whatever it was — which was first in all our valley that the sun touched and the last that lost it, still holding light long after the gulch we crouched in had lost what little it had ever snared. Yet it wasn’t high either; high wasn’t the right word either; you couldn’t — we didn’t — measure where it was that way. It was just higher than any of our men, even herdsmen and hunters, ever went. Not higher than they could but than they did, dared; no shrine or holy place because we knew them too and even the kind of men that lived in, haunted, served them; mountain men too before they were priests because we knew their fathers and our fathers had known their grandfathers, so they would be priests only afterward with what was left.
Instead, it was an eyrie like where eagles nested, where people — men — came as if through the air itself (you), leaving no more trace of coming or arriving (yes, you) or departing (oh yes, you) than eagles would (oh yes, you too; if Marya and I ever saw you then, we did not remember it, nor when you saw us if you ever did except for our mother’s telling; I almost said If our father himself ever saw you in the flesh because of course he did, you would have seen to that yourself: a gentleman honorable in gentleman fashion and brave too since it would have taken courage, our father having already lost too much for that little else to be dear spending), come there not to tremble on their knees on stone floors, but to think. To think: not that dreamy hoping and wishing and believing (but mainly just waiting) that we would think is thinking, but some fierce and rigid concentration that at any time — tomorrow, today, next moment, this one — will change the shape of the earth.
‘Not high, just high enough to stand between us and the sky like a way-station to heaven, so no wonder when we died the rest of us believed the soul hadn’t stopped there maybe but at least had paused to surrender half the coupon; no wonder when our mother was gone for that week in the spring, Marya and I knew where she had gone to; not dead: we had buried nothing, so she wouldn’t have to pass it.
But certainly there, since where else could she be — that face which had never belonged to, had no place in, our valley from the beginning, not to mention what we, even her children, had felt, sensed, behind that face which had no place in our mountains, among our kind of people anywhere; where else but there? not to think, to be accepted into that awesome and tremendous condition, because even her face and what was behind it could not match that, but at least to breathe, bathe in the lambence of that furious meditation.
The wonder was that she came back. Not the valley’s
