Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

Domino blanched. “Ah, yes,” she sighed, after a time. “The document. The Serpent in our Eden.”

Maria Une delivered his lunch, and after it had been absorbed by that ball of mystic white light that he imagined to occupy his lower torso, its nutrients reconverted into photons, the chaff transformed into what he was prone to label “dark matter,” as if bodily waste were the ash from a dead star, he e-mailed Maestra an account of the curious blue nude coincidence. Then, hating it all the while, he exercised for well over an hour, turning his cot into a gym mat, a platform upon which he performed sit-ups, push-ups, crunches, and other forms of self-torture as required by the tyranny of maintenance.

So exhausted was he by the strenuous workout that he fell asleep after reading less than a page of Finnegans Wake. When he finally awoke, it was dark. His dinner tray had been left on the bedside stool, and alongside the cornucopiate pita sandwich, there was a large glass of red wine (tea, eat your heart out!) and a sprig of orange blossoms.

He wouldn’t see Domino until morning, but when morning finally came (he had read most of the night), he seemed so hale and fit (the workout had paid a dividend) that she proposed a tour of the oasis. For the next hour, she pushed his chair around the grounds.

Against the thick mud walls of the various buildings, yellow roses bloomed, and in the willows that surrounded the large spring that was the centerpiece and lifeblood of the compound, cuckoos sang. Irrigation troughs funneled water from the spring to gardens dense with tomatoes, cucumbers, chickpeas, and eggplants. In groves scattered throughout the oasis, there were trees that each in its own season bore figs, almonds, oranges, pomegranates, walnuts, dates, and lemons. Chickens scratched beneath jasmine bushes, as if doing a kind of archaic arithmetic; a solitary donkey swished its tail with such regular cadence that it might have been a pendulum for keeping the time of the world; and a few runty black goats bleated and chewed, bleated and chewed, in a manner that suggested they were eating their own voices. A great peace and a floral fragrance hovered about the place: it probably was at least a low-rent approximation of Eden.

“The Syrian government doesn’t object to your being here?” Switters asked, recalling that no country on earth with the possible exception of Israel had experienced historically as many religious massacres as Syria.

“Au contraire. Damascus loves us. It can point to our token convent as an example of its tolerance and diversity. We’re good, how do you say, PR for Syria. Damascus likes us better than Rome does.”

Outside the arched and latticed doorway that led into the dining hall, Domino formally introduced him to each of the sisters. Each, that is, except for the one he most desired to meet. They ranged from Maria Une—the oldest, save for the elusive Masked Beauty—to Fannie, the youngest at thirty-four, and the most overtly friendly. In between, there was Maria Deux, taciturn and pinch-faced; ZuZu, who resembled the wine-jolly hostess of a TV cooking show; frizzy, foxy-eyed Bob, who might have been Einstein’s twin sister; Pippi, who was cinnamon-haired, heavily freckled, and wore a carpenter’s belt; and Mustang Sally, petite, plantain-nosed, and festooned with the kind of spit curls that hadn’t been seen on a Frenchwoman since BrassaI photographed Paris’s backstreet bar girls in the 1930s. In their identical ankle-length Syrian gowns, they might have been a culture club, a Greek sorority, perhaps, organized by mildly eccentric middle-aged Ohio housewives in a chronic pang of misplaced aesthetic longing. On the other hand, they were poised, tranquil, earnest, and highly industrious. They nodded politely when Domino informed them that their guest was fully recovered from fever, thanks to God and Pachomian charity, and would be departing their company on the supply truck the following day or the day after. His presence must have been a novelty, though whether welcomed or resented he couldn’t tell. Certainly, with the notable exception of Fannie, the women appeared anxious to return to their labors.

Domino resumed the tour, pushing him out past the grape arbor, generator shed, burn barrel, and compost heaps, out to, and then around, the parameters of the high, solid wall that separated her gentle green island from the harsh sandy vastness that surrounded it. Eventually they arrived back at the great gate, and it was there, as she slowed to impart some fact or other (she seemed to enjoy wheeling him around: women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates?), that he noticed on the ground to the right of the gate a pair of wooden poles that had wedges attached to them about eighteen to twenty inches from the bottom.

Switters pointed. “What are those?” he asked.

“Those? Uh, in French they’re called les echasses. I can’t remember the English. The nuns use them to be tall enough to look through the hole in the gate.”

“Stilts,” he whispered. “I’ll be double damned.” He swatted his brow smartly with the palm of his hand. “Stilts! Of course! Why haven’t I thought of that?”

To Domino’s astonishment, he stood on the seat of his Invacare 9000 XT and had her, protesting all the while, lean against the upright stilts to steady them while he climbed onto their footrests. At his signal, she stepped aside, and off he clumped, moving the right stilt forward and then the left—before he went sprawling onto his face. He’d covered less than a yard.

But he insisted on trying it again. And again. Covering a greater distance each time before he fell. Domino was beside herself. “You’ll break an arm! You’re ruining your nice suit! How can you stand on these cotton-pick . . . , on these damn stilts when you can’t stand on the ground?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll explain later. Let’s go. I can do this. I did it when I was a kid in Redwood City.”

She couldn’t restrain him. He was like a puncture in a high-pressure hose, spurting in all directions, spuming with an irrepressible puissance. The longer he remained upright, the more excited he became. Soon—well, whether or not it was soon depended upon one’s perspective: to Domino it seemed longer than a journey across purgatory on a lawn tractor—he was staying up for two or three minutes at a time. He wobbled, he lurched, he teetered and toddled and sprinted. He scattered goats and chickens, crashed into a date palm, got entangled in a laundry line (Oh, those ancient bloomers!), and, through it all, cackled like a lunatic.

Disturbed at their agricultural and domestic chores, the defrocked nuns gawked at him in disbelief and, perhaps, something close to alarm. Domino, running along behind him, pushing his empty chair, urged them breathlessly to ignore the spectacle. As if they could. Fannie, though, gave him an encouraging wink, and once, when he’d adroitly sidestepped a panicked nanny goat, Sister Pippi actually applauded.

In the Gascony region of southwestern France, where Pippi was reared, stiltwalking was somewhat of a tradition. Gascony farmers had once used stilts to wade in marshlands and cross the numerous streams, and were said to be able to run on stilts with amazing speed and ease. Asked to build a set of portable stairs to enable the sisters to see through the sliding peephole in the gate, Pippi, in a fit of fun and nostalgia, had made these stilts instead.

Struck by Switters’s persistence—he kept at it literally for hours—and delighted by his improvement—by late afternoon he was stilting with authority, if not exactly grace—Pippi beckoned him over to the roofed but open-air area at the rear of the storehouse where she maintained a small carpentry shop. “I’ve been saving these for a special occasion,” she said in her Gascogne French, and as Domino squealed “Non, non, non!” Pippi produced from beneath a lumber pile a pair of stilts more than twice as tall as the ones on which Switters had been practicing.

“Wow!” said Switters.

“Non!” said Domino.

“You strap these to your legs,” said Pippi, “so that you don’t need to hold on to poles. But it takes good balance.”

“My balance is unequaled,” boasted Switters, and he used the shorter stilts to boost himself onto the low rear end of the carpentry shop’s slanted roof. With Pippi and Domino holding the superstilts steady, he climbed aboard—and for a few breathtaking seconds, he jiggled, tilted, leaned, and swayed in slow motion, like a dynamited tower so in love with gravity it couldn’t decide which way to fall. After he took a few steps, however, he gained stability, and Domino removed her hands from her eyes. For her part, Pippi shouted instructions and beamed with approval as, over and over again, he circled the carpentry shop. Confident now, he was about to strike out across the compound when Pippi stopped him. Seemed she had another surprise.

A couple of years before, Domino had purchased cheaply in Damascus a bolt of red-and-white checkered fabric. The idea had been to make tablecloths for “Italian night,” the once-a-month occasion when the sisters enjoyed spaghetti and wine as a festive break from their plain Middle Eastern fare. For some reason, the cloth had been shelved and forgotten—by all, that is, except Pippi, who’d snipped off a substantial portion of the bolt and stitched from it a ridiculous pair of skinny trousers whose legs were a good seven feet in length.