On a day trip to Uttar Pradesh, Adi and her grandmother had come across a young sadhu, a holy man. Sitting under a tree by the river, he wore only a loincloth of saffron and a smear of sandalwood paste across his forehead.
For Adi, growning up in India, this was a common sight. But for Tillie, on her first trip to northern India, this was mysterious and romantic.
Motivated by the promise of sweets, Adi had acted as translator. Unclear of the distinction, Tillie had Adi ask questions of the sadhu as if he were a palm reader in a gypsy camp: Would she have a long life? Would she find love and fortune?
The response was unsatisfactory, as one might expect. Her grandmother, disconcerted but fair-minded, passed a few rupees into the man’s palm for his trouble.
As Adi bowed and turned to leave, the holy man reached into the cold ash from the fire next to him. Rubbing his fingers together before her, he appeared to produce a tiny gold ring from the dust. He placed it in his palm and held it out to the girl. “How about you, sundarra ladaki (beautiful girl)? Have you no question for me? Or do you already know everything about creation?”
Adi knew from the servants that many of the sadhus were not to be trusted. “No better than beggars,” Gita would say.
“Well,” said Adi. “I certainly know more than a . . . person who owns nothing but a bowl and a stick!” Blushing, she took her grandmother’s hand and marched her away. Tillie kept asking, “What was it? What did he say?”
For years after, Adi thought about the young man. The look in his eyes. The gold ring in his hand.
She knew she’d behaved badly. Truth was, Gita would have spanked her if she heard her talk to anyone that way. And she thought about every tale, told to her in the cradle, about Shiva walking in disguise among men. She should have asked the man something. Perhaps he did know all of the dark and mysterious secrets of the universe.
Because lately she wasn’t sure she knew anything at all about this creation.
• • •
The first time Adi woke, she heard the sound of rain on a roof. A cough, a groan, voices conversing. A pillow beneath her head. Cotton sheet under her fingertips. Her ribs ached on the right and there was a pain in the back of her head like a rusty nail. She tried to open her eyes, but drifted off again before she managed it.
The next time she woke, she heard distant thunder accompanied by the sound of a woman screaming. She worked hard to open her eyes. When she did, she saw a nurse with a fresh-born babe in her arms. The woman glanced over at Adi as she went past. “The Indian girl’s awake.”
Sometime later—an hour? a week?—Adi opened her eyes in a fright. Where was the watch? She tried to move her arms; it was as if she was under water. A cool hand touched her forehead. “Shush. It’s right here.” She picked up Adi’s hand and placed it on the watch tethered to its chain around her neck. “It’s wound every morning,” the woman said. “Not that that keeps you from yelling about it at night.”
This was distressing to Adi, though she couldn’t remember why. Drifting off, she dreamed of boxes containing thumbs and toes and children’s ears.
• • •
In the long, high-ceilinged room, the days passed one after another, for the most part quiet and gray.
Madame Bernard, their captain and queen, who snipped the babies’ cords and closed the eyes of the departed, read to them in the evenings, medieval romances and eighteenth-century French authors. Or she would have one of the women play the piano or the cello, or recite verse. There was squabbling among the women about whether the windows should be opened at night, but before long, the rain turned to sleet and it got too cold to have them open at all.
• • •
The first time she climbed out of bed, Adi wobbled for a moment and then fell to the floor like a rag doll. Madame Bernard picked her up and put her back under the covers. The next morning the woman appeared at Adi’s bedside carrying two canes. She asked Adi to go to the window at the end of the long room and let her know how many sailboats there were on the lake today. It took two hours and many bruises for Adi to find Madame and tell her that there was no lake, only a wheat field rolling away over the hill.
She used both canes for a time, then one, then none. The chores she could accomplish progressed accordingly.
• • •
She’d been brought to the hospital by a paleontologist nephew of Madame Bernard. He had found the girl wandering the ring road above Lake Kore with no voice and a ghastly amount of blood running down the back of her head. With a war looming, it might have been safer to take her somewhere to the south. But where? He knew she would be welcomed and cared for by his aunt.
In Madame Bernard’s hospital, talk of the war was kept to a minimum. There were only women here, and many of them were elderly or with child or damaged in some way. Her doctors had all been taken by the war, as had much of her equipment and supplies. Were it not for her devoted and resourceful nephews and her dwindling cache of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, she would have had to cease. But the “discord,” as she called it, was still beyond the village of Sampigny to the north and as long as it was, Madame intended to keep it outside of these doors. When the sound of shelling got too strident she played Italian opera on the phonograph in the middle of the room.
None of this mattered much to Adi. After her long sleep, she climbed out of her bed, but still spent most of her days in some small space in the back of her mind. She did her chores, whatever needed to be done: sweeping and sewing, brushing hair, washing pots, mashing turnips.
Now and again, when the curtains were open and the shadows from the clouds drifted over the fields, Adi would remember herself and think that there were things she should be doing. Soon, she would go. But there was always a new baby or another gray-haired woman who needed care, another bed to be made, a potato to be peeled. So, as long as the watch was wound and the bedpans were shining, Adi wandered the quiet rooms like a beautiful ghost.
• • •
Then one day, it began to snow.
• • •
Crown Prince Wilhelm, the eldest son of the German emperor, was put in command of the 5th Army. Only thirty-two, he had never commanded anything larger than a regiment. He determined that the only thing keeping the 5th Army from enlarging the salient, southeast of Verdun, was the river Meuse and the French soldiers in the village of Sampigny. Though not a superstitious man, he took the uncommon snowfall in the first week of November as a sign from God. Before sunrise, the attack began.
• • •
As the bombs fell, Madame Bernard curled up on the floor between the beds with the old women. She told them everything was going to be fine. The Marriage of Figaro played as loud as it could on the Victrola in the middle of the room.
But when Mozart could no longer be heard above the artillery and the great windows in the front of the chateau began to explode in the morning sun, Madame called to Adi, “Take the duvet from your bed and run!” Adi, in her nightgown, turned to get clothes. “No, girl! Run, now! To the other end of the lake!”