Children of God Read Online Free PDF Page B

we-but-not-you. The other is we-and-you-also. If a Runao uses the inclusive we, you may be sure it is significant and you may rejoice in a friendship."
    From all over the southern provinces of Inbrokar, Runa refugees joined the VaKashani in Trucha Sai. Each man carried a baby, each baby born to a Runa couple whose diets had been supplemented with plentiful food grown in gardens like that of the foreigners—couples who had come into season without Jana’ata supervision, who had mated without Jana’ata permission, who had circumvented Jana’ata stewardship with unthinking cheer, unintentional defiance. The Trucha Sai settlement slowly filled with men whose backs were raked with long, tripled, half-healed scars, gaily pink and waxy, that sliced through dense, buff-colored coats.
    "Sipaj, Kanchay. It must have hurt you to carry this one here," Sofia had said one day, looking at those scars and remembering the journey to the forest. "Someone thanks you."
    The Runao’s ears dropped abruptly. "Sipaj, Fia! Someone’s child lives because of you."
    That’s something, she’d thought bleakly, lying back again and listening to the forest symphony of calls and shrieks and rustling leaves dripping with misty rain. The Talmud taught that to save a single life is to save the whole world, in time. Maybe, she thought. Who knows?
     
    NOW, A MONTH AFTER THE MASSACRE THAT HAD KILLED HALF THE RUNA village of Kashan, Sofia Mendes believed herself the last of her kind on Rakhat, the sole survivor of the Jesuit mission. Mistaking bloodless lethargy for calm, she believed as well that she felt no grief. With practice, she told herself, she had come to accept that tears were no remedy for death.
    Her life had been blessedly unburdened by happiness. When some period of fleeting contentment ended, Sofia Mendes did not register it as outrageous, but merely noted a return to life’s normal condition. So, as the first weeks after the massacre passed, she simply counted herself lucky to be among others who did not weep and wail for the dead.
    "Rain falls on everyone; lightning strikes some," her friend Kanchay observed. "What cannot be changed is best forgotten," he advised, not with callousness, but with a certain quality of practical resignation that Sofia shared with the Runa villagers of Rakhat. "God made the world and He saw that it was good," Sofia’s father had always told her when she complained of some injustice during her brief childhood. "Not fair. Not happy. Not perfect, Sofia. Good."
    Good for whom? she had often wondered, first with juvenile petulance and later with the weariness of a woman of fourteen, working the streets of Istanbul in the midst of an incomprehensible civil war.
    She had almost never cried. Child to woman, Sofia Mendes had never gotten anything by crying except a headache. From the time she was able to talk, her parents dismissed tears as the cowardly tactic of the weak-minded and schooled her in the Sephardic tradition of clear argument; she got her way not by sniveling, but by defending her position as logically and persuasively as she could, within the limits of her neurological development. When, barely pubescent and already hardened by the realities of urban combat, she had stood over her mother’s mortar-mangled corpse, she was too shocked to cry. Neither did she cry for the father who simply failed to come home one day or ever again: there was no particular time to pass from anxiety to mourning. Nor did she sympathize with the other destitute young whores when they cried. She held herself together and did not spoil her looks with a puffy, blotched face, so she ate more regularly than the others and was strong enough to jam a knife between ribs if a client tried to cheat or kill her. She sold her body, and when the opportunity eventually presented itself, she sold her mind—for a much better price. She survived, and got out of Istanbul alive with her dignity intact, because she would not yield to