Mina A Novel

CHAPTER I Someone asks: What country, friends, is this? No answer. I open my eyes with a start. In the dim early-morning light, the world returns around me. I lie nestled in straw in the stable loft of a country estate. I look out a dormer window toward the soft hills that rise in a low ridge between the estate and the nearby village. Below me the horses shift in their stalls. Their safe smell and their heat rises to me. It is dawn, and the sounds of the yards and the house awakening will begin in a few moments. This is the moment of stillness before the lark rises toward the rosy light raying up from the eastern horizon, toward the zenith of the clear spring sky. My work begins as the lark flies up, singing from its meadow nest to greet the sun. I too rise. I begin not with a hymn to nature but with a visit to the outhouse, ablutions under the pump, a quick ordering of my garments. Then I attend to the horses. They need water, clean straw, and grooming. But first I have something else to do. I have a dream that recurs. It came to me again last night. I walk from the door of our croft into the field that slopes to the south. The land is green, green, green, like a velvet gown laid over a curving body. In my dream I tread lightly on the soft surface. I feel the spring of grass beneath my bare feet. As I pace down the slope of the field, I feel the warmth of the sun on my face and arms. All is pale blue above, green below, and a fresh wind blowing. I notice something growing in the field. Loaves of bread, golden-crusted. It is as if the corn had grown, been harvested, thrashed, ground, kneaded, baked all in a nightas if the bread grew ready to my hand and mouth directly from the earth. In my dream I smell the yeasty bloom and fall to my knees, mouth watering, guts cramped with hunger. I am eager to pluck and eat these magic mushrooms, brown-gold buttons on the green velvet field. I lay my hands reverently on a loaf and find that I hold stone. Frantic, I rise and run about the field from seeming loaf to seeming loaf. All stone and heavy beyond bearing. I stumble, weeping, down the slope, and in that sudden translation of dreams find myself in a dug field. A man in ragged clothing stoops over his spade; his face is averted from me and his lowered head is covered with a shapeless blob of felted hat. He looks familiar and yet I cannot put a name to him. He turns the earth, stoops his back into the weight, lifts brown clumps from the soilpotatoes. Here is food, I think; not crusty, fragrant bread but gray flesh formed under dark loam. This man will share with me a potato or two, and I will find green herbs in the field and feed my brother. I hurry toward the man and stand beside him. My heart fails me, for here again are stones. His face turned from me, he delves stone after stone from the ground, brushes away dirt and sets the stone on a rising heap. A cairn is growing in my dream, a monument, a funeral pile. I stoop to see the face of the man who digs. His blue eyes burn with fever. His eyebrows are thick and red. His cheeks are gaunt with hunger, yet glazed with the red-gold stubble of his rough beard. This is my father. He does not speak. My tongue is thick in my mouth, my throat burns. I cannot make a sound. It would not matter if I could; I know he would not hear me. I turn to look back to the house at the top of the rise. It is tiny in the distance. I have come much farther than I thought. I turn my steps along a path. The green grass lies to my right, the spaded soil to my left. My father will not, cannot, speak to me, for he is dead. I think that I will go back to the house and find my brother. The house is a white toy in the distance, the sky is blue and far above. I am filled with a sense of urgency. Then, as always, I awaken in a strange country. Above the place where I nest at night in the barn loft, I have rigged a bag that swings away from thCeely, Jonatha is the author of 'Mina A Novel' with ISBN 9780385336901 and ISBN 038533690X.