Other Earths (collection)

M’rta looked down at her hands. “I was only a girl when the Inquisitor came to our town. My father was a baker; he had money to send me and my mother to N̈rnberg. For that, he was burned in the marketplace, although his blood was as red as the priest’s.”

“Like my father sent me away.” Erzs’bet put her face in her hands.

“You think you’re so smart, don’t you?” said Csilla.

“What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Mad’r.

“Getting me to tell Erzs’bet’s story because you want me to talk about my father. He sent me away just like King Andr’s send Erzs’bet away. Well, I think he should have kept her in Hungary!”

Mrs. Mad’r shook her head. She looked, Csilla thought, like the mathematics teacher at her school, when she had hopelessly muddled a multiplication problem. “Then she would have been killed, just as her mother the queen was killed. Csilla, you must understand that the Inquisition was burning anyone identified as a witch. And the easiest way to be a witch was to be one of the T̈nd’r. We have always been hiding, always fleeing, since the days of the Daughters of the Moon. Your father was working to change that. He was writing a book—”

“I know,” said Csilla. “He worked on it all day long, and sometimes all night long.” She would wake in the darkness and hear the sound of the typewriter. So she would put on the sweater that her grandmother had worn on days when the apartment was cold, walk down the hall to the kitchen, turn on the old stove, and boil the water for tea. When she brought it to him, he would look at her with that tired look in his eyes, her handsome Papa, and say, “Thank you, Csillike. You are my own guardian angel, aren’t you?”

In the mornings, she would make his lunch so that he would eat something while she was at school, but often when she came home, she would find the bean soup cold, the brown bread gone stale. “You forgot to eat again,” she would say, accusingly. “Have you been typing all day?”

“I’m so sorry, Csillike,” he would answer. “I seem to have forgotten some of the details of Szent Erzs’bet’s story. Could you sit beside me and tell me if I have the name of the Abbess right? I promise I’ll eat whatever you made me, no matter how cold it is.”

“It was a book about the T̈nd’r. He was writing down all of my grandmother’s stories. I used to help him with it.”

“Help him?” said Mrs. Mad’r. “How did you help him, Csilla?”

Csilla looked at Mrs. Mad’r curiously. She was leaning forward in her chair, no longer the disapproving teacher. Instead, she sounded like an eager child. “Well, not really help. I mean not with the typing or anything. But when he forgot something, or got something wrong, I told him how the stories went. My grandmother told them to me, and she made me tell them to her, so many times! I don’t think I could forget them if I tried.”

“Oh, my dear,” said Mrs. Mad’r. “Don’t you know why your father sent you away? He sent us a message, but messages are so difficult. They have to be—well, not exactly clear, in case the wrong person reads them. He said he was writing down his mother’s stories, the whole history of the T̈nd’r. We’ve never had a history, just stories, Csilla. Stories remembered by the old people, because the young had so many other things to think about, and when something was forgotten, it was forgotten forever. In Erzs’bet’s time the church burned everything written about the T̈nd’r, and even now in Hungary books about the T̈nd’r are banned. They cannot be published or sold because the state believes that we do not exist. Can you imagine what that means to us? We have been hiding and fleeing so long that the T̈nd’r are scattered now, over Europe and here in America. Without a history, how can we know who we are, or find each other again? Your father was trying to teach us. His message—it was so difficult to understand. First we heard he was sending us a copy of his manuscript. Then Helga said he was sending us his daughter. And then there you were—”

“In my science class,” said Csilla, “the teacher told us that the T̈nd’r had a genetic defect. That we were …sick, not as strong as other people because we had bad genes. She said everything could be explained scientifically.”

“Do you believe that?” asked Mrs. Mad’r.

“I don’t know,” said Csilla.”My father believes in the stories, and he’s a professor at the university. But of course, he’s a philosophy professor, and not at all practical. He can’t even keep his socks mended. If the stories are real, what happened to M’rta’s ointment? I mean, there’s nothing like that now.”

“It’s another thing we’ve lost,” said Mrs. Mad’r. “That’s why the stories are so important.”

Csilla said, suddenly, “Did you know my name, when you told me about the Daughters of the Moon? Or did you really think I could be named T̈nde”