And now, at last, she is with them.
And now she has always been with them.
And she is poured, for an endless moment, across the centuries, as oil is poured across a skillet. Her mind rushes to the furthest corners of things—the darkness before and the darkness after, the flash of light and life that counts as history, the endlessness of existence. She becomes a film, a thin slick of selfhood, spread far, far too thinly across cold, indifferent acres of casual cause and dread effect.
But then she gathers herself in again. She does it, in part, because she knows it can be done. And in part she does it because she is a teller of stories, which is how the thing is achieved.
And there are others coming and going around her, through her. They know her. They speak her name, and she speaks theirs. It is a benediction, flowing both ways.
And she teaches them, the things she only knows because they told her. She tells them about time, and about stories, and her wisdom is passed among them like the bread of the sacrament.
They come together in a complicated, fierce embrace. With each telling they become stronger—through endless repetition shore up their borderlands, defend their core. They build, through words, towers and ramparts of themselves. She helps them do it, leads the way, becomes the template and the map for every one of them.
And is the first to realise that these walls, which were a refuge, have by degrees become a trap. Not the walls of the house (the house comes and goes; the houses come and go) but the walls of their telling. They have dropped their foundations so deep and reared their walls so high that there is no moving now. They have built their own prison.
She shares her doubts with Gelbfisc and Ignacio, Ermel and Arinak. Most of all she confers with Anton and Magda, who are so close to her that they have almost become her.
“We have always been here,” Anton points out.
“So if we were ever going to leave,” Gelbfisc sighs, “we could not be here now.”
“But what if there’s more than one always?” Magda asks.
And Drozde laughs and hugs her, heart against heart and thought against thought, because the little girl has set them free.
Even the smallest part of eternity is still eternity.
She gathers them, and tells them. We’ve done what there was to be done here. We’ve become so strong, in ourselves and in each other, nothing can extinguish us. We’re like a ball of string so knotted up it cannot ever, ever be untied.
“We are the crown,” Father Ignacio murmurs. “The crown of thorns.”
“It may well be,” Drozde allows. “So now, I say, it’s time to leave.”
“We can’t,” Thea protests. “We can’t leave Pokoj.”
But Ermel at least is nodding. “Yes. I think we should.”
And Arinak: “It’s where we died. Where all the generations of us lay our bodies down.”
And Petra Veliky: “But did we mean to lay ourselves down, too? Or were we only taking off our flesh the way a runner takes off his coat and shirt—so that our souls could run the faster?”
And the questions and the answers and the declamations run between them. The stories of their lives are all told again, sifted for wisdom, combed for sense. Drozde waits, and says nothing more. It is for all of them, now, and she has made her position clear. Repeating herself would serve no purpose.
And one by one they come to it. And one by one they decide. And it grows in them like a seed, like a sense, so they’re like birds gathering on a sodden field in late October as the winter prepares to slam its lid in place over the sky.
They have to fly before that happens, but like birds they wait and wait. It will come when it comes. And it feels close. It feels as though it might be any moment now, if there were any moments left.
And there is. Just one.
And it opens within and around them as they fly.