“It may have been decided by governmental bodies, but it did not happen, it was not real, until many people stopped doing things one way and started doing them another, consciously and deliberately. Now, of course one uses the euro. One does not think about it.”
Mel stood up and brushed the moist dark soil from her jeans. Erszebet is appalled that Mel “dresses like a man,” and not even a proper gentleman but a farmhand. She keeps trying to get Mel to wear dresses and lipstick. Some of her advice is not without merit, for she has tastes that are highly refined, albeit stuck in the 1950s. But today jeans were the right attire.
“How many times must I redo it before it takes?” Mel asked, sounding exhausted.
“I cannot say for certain, but I will try to determine, because I like you,” said Erszebet. Reached into her bag, pulled out the frazzled-mop-looking thing.
“What is that?” Tristan demanded, in such a tone I realized he hadn’t seen it before.
“My számológép,” she said, haughty. She began to pick through the strings—the strands—of it. Tristan turned to Melisande with a questioning expression.
“Calculator,” Mel translated. “Not like a desk calculator, more like an accounting device.”
We all watched Erszebet as she selected a strand, examined it, muttered to herself, pulled it away from the mass. It was entangled with another strand near the bottom. “Yes,” she said, shoving the whole thing back into her bag. “You have to go back. We will see a difference next time.”
“You mean the book will be here next time?”
“Almost certainly not!” Erszebet scoffed. “But we will be closer to the book being here next time.”
“Excuse me,” said Frank with his gentle smile, “would you show me how that object works?”
Erszebet looked almost shocked, and squeezed her arm tighter over the bag. “I cannot give you my számológép,” she said. “I made it myself with my mother. It took years. I would sooner cut my hair off and give it to you.”
“I don’t want to keep it, I just want to look at it.”
“It will mean nothing to you. And if you start to fiddle with it you might change it. So, no.”
“May I ask, at least, what you use it for?” he said. Mel, with a hand up from Tristan, climbed out of the hole and reached for the sweatshirt I handed her. It was early evening and the air was beginning to cool.
Erszebet looked at the object in her hand as if Frank’s question put it into an entirely new light. “What do I use it for? It is . . . a kind of cheating.” She laughed a short, harsh, scold-me-if-you-dare laugh.
“Cheating?”
“Every action has reactions which have reactions. So, many consequences. You must keep track of all the possible consequences or bad things maybe happen. Nobody has the capacity to hold that much information in her mind at once. The számológép helps me to track the possible consequences.”
“And how does it work, exactly?” asked Frank, his face now glowing with anticipation at getting his Physics Itch scratched.
“It will be easier to show you after Melisande has done it a few times.”
“A few times,” said Mel under her breath, sounding like she had the flu. “All right. But I need a decent meal first.”
“I’ll get you home,” said Tristan, tossing her one of my clean gardening rags to wipe the dirt off her face. “Good work, soldier, we’ll try again tomorrow. Erszebet, let’s go. Eh . . .” He looked at the hole, then at me. “Sorry about the garden, ma’am. I’ll call some men to come in tomorrow morning and tamp all the soil back down in there.”
“Won’t save the tomatoes,” I said.
“Well, we need it intact so we can dig it up again,” he said, almost sheepish.
When they were gone (Erszebet now bunking with Mel, who has moved to a larger apartment), Frank and I gazed at each other through the deepening twilight, over what had been the best of my cucumber patch. “Such an interesting thing, that . . . számológép,” he said, pronouncing it wrong. “I wonder if I could figure out how it works, what she’s doing with it.” (I should have known that would be his takeaway from the entire day: not the failure, not the future, not the ruined garden, but the interesting gadget.)
I thought about what was in the attic. I wished it were not in the attic, and that being unavoidable, I wished I did not know that it was in the attic. But that glowing, boyish eagerness on his face . . . for more than fifty years now I have been charmed by it.
“I know where to find one,” I said. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
Diachronicle
DAY 324 (COLONIAL BOSTON DTAP, 1640)
In which, having not succeeded, I try, try again
THE SECOND TIME, THE ARROW struck me before I fell out of its way.
I cried out, too dizzy and disoriented to keep quiet, and found myself remembering what Goody Fitch had said the first time: “It would hit you another time.” What she’d meant was, it does hit me another time. She knew. She knew I arrived here more than once. What else did she know?
In a dreamlike state, I heard her shouting out to Samuel, heard her tell me not to move, waited until she came back with the blanket—and this time, a small roll of linen that she used to bandage my calf. The wound was only a superficial graze, really, enough to require tending but not enough to lame me. Enough, however, that it would make the slog of the day even more of a slog.
What followed was a six-hour stretch of déjà vu, ameliorated by the benefit of hindsight-as-foresight. The witch and I had almost the same conversation we’d had before. I declined the maize, knowing what it would do to my innards. When she offered me the musket ball and piece of wampum, I begged her for a second wampum bead, and she gave it to me. I asked her if I might wear her corset, since I was going out into the world and she was not, but she declined, as she expected Goody Griggs to be by to quilt midday and did not want to appear slovenly to a neighbor.
“Always feel free to ask me, though,” she added. “Sometime it might be available.”
That was the closest she came to telling me she knew that I was visiting her multiple times. Now the daughter’s comment when I’d given her my name—“You already told me”—made sense too. Once I’d returned from my tasks in Cambridge, I was determined to interview Goody Fitch, to ask her to explain her understanding of the Strands, as Erszebet called them. Perhaps if various witches described it, we could, between all their descriptions, come to grasp it.