The Pale Convent: Sister Vira

The rosemary hedge stood taller than Cordelia remembered from her girlhood visits to the convent, or perhaps the hedge had not grown and she had simply shrunk under the weight of what brought her here. She crouched in the gravel path between the raised beds, fingers working a knot out of the frayed hem of her traveling cloak. Dawn had not yet broken. The sky over the Carpathians was the color of a bruise half healed, that thin grey-purple the world remembered just before it decided what color to be. Somewhere behind the chapel, a shutter knocked against stone in a wind Cordelia could not feel. She had been listening to it for an hour, perhaps two. Sleep had not come in three nights. The smell of thyme and crushed sage rose from the path where her knees pressed into the cold gravel, and beneath those, the deeper mineral scent of wet earth that the convent garden never quite lost, even in August. She had come to the gate at dusk the previous evening with a letter in her reticule and a name she had not spoken aloud in seven years. Sister Magdalena had answered the bell and looked at her for a long moment before stepping aside, and the silence between them had said everything Cordelia had hoped to avoid saying. Now she was crouched in the herb garden because Sister Magdalena had told her to wait there until the office of Prime was finished, and because her legs would not hold her any longer, and because the garden was the only place in the convent that did not watch her back. The shutter knocked again. Cordelia counted the seconds between strikes. Six. Then five. Then six again, as if the wind were breathing. "You are the Englishwoman." The voice came from the far end of the garden, where the path curved around a low stone well and disappeared into a trellis of dried beans. Cordelia rose, brushing gravel from her skirts, and saw a young nun standing in the thin light with a wooden gathering basket hooked over one elbow. The nun's habit was too large for her. The hem had been taken up twice and let down again, the stitches uneven. Her face was narrow and pale, and beneath the wimple the skin of her temples showed the bruised violet of someone who had not slept well in a very long time. "Sister Vira," Cordelia said. The name had been in the letter from Sister Magdalena. She had not been told what the sister looked like. Sister Vira did not smile. She walked forward along the path with the careful gait of a woman who had been told once too often to keep her eyes lowered and had decided, with great deliberateness, not to. She stopped an arm's length from Cordelia and studied her face the way Cordelia imagined a scholar studies a manuscript suspected of forgery. "You are younger than the file says," Sister Vira said. "Also thinner. Also more frightened, though you are doing a very competent job of pretending you are not." Cordelia felt her mouth open, then close. "I was not aware there was a file." "There is always a file. The convent is run by women who came here because the alternative was worse. Women like that keep records. They keep records of everything, including the people who come to the gate with letters from their dead mothers and shoes that have walked too many roads." Sister Vira's Romanian consonants were clipped, each word placed on the air and left there. "You came for the girl." Cordelia did not ask which girl. There was only one. "Yes." "And you intend to take her away." "I intend to see her. What I intend after that will depend on what I see." Sister Vira regarded her for a long moment. The first true light of morning found the garden then, slipping between the rosemary and the slate roof of the chapter house, and in it Cordelia saw that the dark circles beneath Sister Vira's eyes were not simply shadows. They were the color of old ink, of bruises that had stopped trying to heal. "Walk with me," Sister Vira said. "The gardener comes at the half hour and she talks. We do not want the gardener to talk." Cordelia followed. The path wound between raised beds of sage and lemon balm and a low border of lavender so old its roots had begun to crack the stone edging. Sister Vira did not look back. She moved with the unhurried stride of someone who had learned to make silence feel like conversation. "Your mother was here for two years before you were born," Sister Vira said. "Did you know that." It was not a question. Cordelia said nothing. The gravel crunched under their feet in a rhythm that would have been companionable on any other morning. "She came in winter. She came alone. She left in spring and she never spoke of it, and when she died she took the silence with her, which is the only inheritance your daughter has of hers." Sister Vira paused beside the well and rested one hand on the low stone wall. "I was twelve when she came. I was a postulant. I brought her bread and broth and once a pair of stockings that were too small. I remember her hands. She had your hands." Cordelia looked down at her own hands. They were clasped too tightly in front of her. She unknotted them with effort. "You were at the convent then." "I have been here since I was nine. They took me in. They educated me. They put me in the library and let me alone, which was the only kindness anyone had shown me since my parents died of the fever in Sibiu." Sister Vira's voice did not change when she said this. She mentioned her parents' deaths the way a cartographer might mention a road that no longer existed. "I was a folklorist at the university before my vows. Did Sister Magdalena tell you that." "No." "No. She would not have. Sister Magdalena believes the past is a country one should not revisit without papers. I disagree. The past is the only country whose customs I trust." Sister Vira turned from the well and continued along the path. "Your mother came here because she was carrying a girl, and the man who had put the girl in her was not the man she would later marry, and the man she would later marry was not a man at all in the way that mattered. She came here to hide. The convent hid her. The convent hides everyone. That is what it is for." Cordelia stopped walking. The shutter behind the chapel had gone silent. In its place rose the thin sound of the sisters beginning Prime inside the chapel, voices blending into a single sustained note that seemed to come up through the ground rather than down from the building. "You speak as though you have been waiting for me," Cordelia said. "I have been waiting for someone. You will do." Sister Vira glanced at her. The look was brief, clinical, almost amused. "You want to know what your daughter has become. You want to know if she is well. You want to know if she is like her grandmother. You want to know if she is like you. These are the questions of a woman who has not yet learned that the convent does not return what it takes in. It transmutes. You will not recognize her. You will recognize her in every particular and you will not recognize her, and both of these will be true at the same time." Cordelia swallowed. The thyme crushed under her heel released a small green sharpness into the air. "How do you know so much of this," she said. "Sister Magdalena's letter said only that you were the librarian." "Sister Magdalena's letter said only what Sister Magdalena wished you to know before you reached me, which is very little and very carefully chosen." Sister Vira stopped at the end of the path, where the garden met the cloister wall and a wooden door stood set into the stone. The door was the color of old blood. "I am the librarian. I am also the archivist. I am also the only person in this convent who reads the records that the rest of them pretend do not exist. Your mother's record exists. Your daughter's record exists. Your record will exist from this morning forward, because you are standing in a garden that has ears in every hedge." She reached into the folds of her habit and drew out a small square of paper, folded twice, and held it between two fingers the way one might hold a dead insect. "I am going to give you something. You are going to put it in your pocket and not read it until you are alone in your room. You are going to read it and you are going to be afraid. You are going to want to ask me questions. You are not going to ask me questions, because if you ask me questions I will have to answer them, and if I answer them, I will have done something I cannot take back, and the convent will do something to me that I can." Cordelia stared at the paper. It was the gray of cheap foolscap, the kind used in any scriptorium in the country. There was nothing on its outside. Sister Vira's fingers did not tremble. "Why me," Cordelia said. "Why now." "Because you are the first of her blood to come back. Because the pale one has been quieter these last three months than she has been in my entire memory, and quiet in this convent is not peace. Quiet here is the held breath before the scream." Sister Vira's voice did not rise. It grew thinner, the way a wire grows thinner the more weight is hung from it. "And because your mother made me promise, on the night your daughter was born, that I would give this paper to whoever came next. I have been waiting twenty-three years to be released of it. Take it." Cordelia took it. The paper was faintly warm from Sister Vira's habit. She slid it into the pocket of her skirt without unfolding it. "There is more," Sister Vira said, "but the more will not be told in a garden at dawn with the gardener ten minutes away. Tonight, after Compline, you will go to the library. You will tell no one you are going. You will take the second stairwell on the left of the cloister, the one with the chipped step on the seventh tread, and you will climb until you reach the door with the iron latch. You will knock twice and wait. I will be there. I will answer. What I tell you then will take the rest of the night." Cordelia's mouth was dry. "What is in the library." "Nothing that you would call a book. Not anymore." Sister Vira glanced toward the chapel roof, where a single crow had settled on the cross. The crow regarded them with one pale eye. "There are things in this convent that have been written down and things that have been written over, and the difference between the two is the difference between a door that opens and a door that has been painted on a wall. Your mother understood this. Your daughter has begun to understand it. You are the slowest of the three, but that is not your fault. You were not raised here." A bell rang once from the chapel tower, the single clear note that marked the half hour. Sister Vira stiffened. "The gardener," she said. "Go back to the gate path. Walk slowly. Do not look at the east tower." Cordelia's gaze had already begun to drift, of its own accord, toward the far corner of the convent complex where a narrow stone spire rose above the roofline of the dormitory. The east tower. She had not known, until that moment, that she was looking for it. The spire was darker than the rest of the building, as though the stone had been soaked in something that had never dried. Sister Vira's hand closed on Cordelia's wrist. The grip was cold and very firm. "Do not," she said. "Not yet. You have not earned the looking. Tonight, in the library, I will tell you why your mother could not stop looking, and what it cost her, and what it will cost your daughter if you do not do what the paper says. Now walk. Slowly. Do not turn your head." Cordelia walked. The gravel whispered under her feet. Behind her, she heard Sister Vira's habit rustle against the rosemary as the younger woman bent to gather a sprig of something, humming a note that did not belong to any office of the hours. The paper sat in Cordelia's pocket like a small, warm coal. She did not reach for it. She kept her hands at her sides. The sun had cleared the roof of the chapter house now and was laying down long bars of gold across the garden, and in that gold every leaf and pebble cast a shadow sharp as a knife, and in every shadow Cordelia saw the shape of a question she did not yet know how to ask. She reached the gate path. She turned once, as though to be sure Sister Vira was still there. The nun was gone. The rosemary hedge stirred faintly where she had been standing, then settled, and the path behind her was empty except for a single sprig of dried lavender dropped on the gravel as if by accident. Cordelia did not pick it up. She went on to the guest quarters, where Sister Ilona was waiting with a bowl of broth and a face that meant to be kind. "Sit, sit," Sister Ilona said, guiding her to a low stool by the window. "You look like a woman who has walked too far on too little. Drink this first. Talk after. The kitchen is not listening the way the garden listens." Cordelia sat. She took the bowl. The broth was hot and tasted of parsnip and the faintest bitterness of something medicinal. Sister Ilona hovered, hands folded into her sleeves, watching her with the patient concern of a woman who had outlived a husband and a great deal besides and had learned that the worst things in life arrived in the morning wearing the face of routine. "There is a young nun," Cordelia said, before she could stop herself. "In the garden. Sister Vira." Sister Ilona's face did not change. Her hands, folded into her sleeves, tightened almost imperceptibly. "Ah," Sister Ilona said. "Yes." "She spoke to me." "Yes. She would." Sister Ilona crossed to the small hearth and added a log to the fire, though the morning was already warm. "Sister Vira speaks to everyone. It is one of her difficulties. The other sisters find her sharp. I find her hungry. She is hungry in a way that food does not fix." "She gave me something." The fire crackled. Sister Ilona did not turn around. "Did she," Sister Ilona said, and the words were flat and careful, the way one speaks over a sleeping child. "A paper." "Have you read it." "No. She told me not to until I was alone." "Then do not. Read it alone. Read it in this room, with the door shut, and when you are finished, put it in the fire. Do not fold it into your Bible. Do not tuck it into your stocking. Do not carry it on your person. The paper itself is not the danger. What it knows of you is the danger." Sister Ilona turned from the hearth. Her face was the color of tallow, and her eyes were older than the rest of her. "Sister Vira means well. Sister Vira has always meant well. Sister Vira also believes that knowing is a kind of rescue, and it is not. Knowing is the place where rescue ends and something else begins. Read it. Burn it. Then come down to the kitchen and eat bread with me and tell me nothing." Cordelia looked into the bowl. The broth had gone still. Her own face looked back at her from the surface, faint and distorted, a woman she almost recognized. "She said to meet her tonight. In the library. After Compline." Sister Ilona was silent for a long time. The fire popped. A log settled into itself. "Then you will meet her," Sister Ilona said at last. "And I will not ask you what was said. And in the morning you will decide whether to take your daughter down the mountain or leave her where she is. And whatever you decide, I will give you bread for the road, because that is what I do. I give bread for the road. I have been giving bread for the road for thirty-one years, and most of it has been eaten on the way to somewhere I would not have chosen, and yet here I am." She took the empty bowl from Cordelia's hands, her fingers warm and rough against Cordelia's cold ones. "Read the paper," she said. "Burn the paper. Eat the bread. Do these three things in this order and you will still be a woman in the morning. Do them in any other order and I cannot promise you anything, including yourself." Cordelia nodded. Sister Ilona left the room, her footsteps slow and even on the stone corridor, fading into the larger silence of the convent at its morning work. The door closed. The room was quiet. Cordelia reached into her pocket and drew out the folded paper. It sat in her palm, gray and ordinary, no larger than a playing card. She unfolded it once, and again, and the three lines were written in an ink that had faded to the color of dried blood, in a hand she did not recognize, in a language that was not quite Romanian and not quite Latin and not quite anything she could name. Do not enter the east tower. Do not name the pale one. Do not love us. She read the lines a second time, and a third, and the room grew smaller around her with each reading, the walls drawing inward by a fraction she could not measure, and the fire on the hearth gave no heat, and the morning light through the window was the color of the paper in her hand.

The paper lay open in Cordelia's hands, and the lines stared up at her with the patience of something that had waited a long time to be read by the wrong person. She read them again, because she could not help it. Do not enter the east tower. Do not name the pale one. Do not love us. The letters were small and deliberate, drawn with the kind of care that suggested the writer had not been hurried, or had been very hurried indeed and had fought against the hurry with every stroke. The ink had faded to the color of dried blood, though whether it had ever been red or had simply aged into that particular rust was impossible to tell. The paper itself was heavy, older than anything she would have expected to find folded in the pocket of a stranger's coat, and there was a faint smell to it, musty and sweet, like the inside of a church that has been closed for a season.

She should burn it. Sister Ilona had been clear about the order. But the paper was warm in her hand, warmer than it had any right to be given the chill of the morning room, and the lines were not Latin and not Romanian and not anything she had a name for, though she had spent enough years in the reading room of the British Museum to recognize the shapes that letters make when they are pretending to be other letters. She had seen similar shapes in the margins of a Coptic psalter once, and in a fragment from a desert monastery that the curators had not allowed her to touch but had allowed her to photograph, and the recognition sat in her stomach now like a swallowed stone.

She folded the paper. She unfolded it. She folded it again. The fire on the hearth was low and gave no heat, as she had already noted, and the morning light through the window had not changed its color, which was the color of the paper in her hand, which was the color of old blood, which was the color of nothing she wanted to name. She stood. She sat. She stood again. The room was small, smaller than the room she had been given on her first night at the convent, and it had not occurred to her until this moment that the room had no mirror, though every other room she had been in at Saint Catherine's had a small square of polished metal hung above the basin. She caught her own face in the window glass, which was cleaner than she would have expected in a Carpathian convent, and she looked at herself the way one looks at a thing one is not certain one still resembles. Her eyes were brown. Her hair was the color of walnut wood. Her mouth was a straight line. She did not look like a woman who had been told not to love something by an unknown dead woman. She looked like a woman who had not slept enough.

She put the paper back in her pocket. She took it out again. She put it back. The bread from Sister Ilona sat on the table, half eaten, the crust already going stale in the thin air of the room. She had been told to eat the bread and burn the paper and that the order mattered. She had not been told what would happen if she did them in the right order but did not read the paper first, though she had read it, and so perhaps that was already done. Perhaps it was too late. Perhaps it had been too late from the moment the driver had handed her the coat with the paper in its pocket and she had taken the coat without asking whose it had been, and without asking why a dead woman's coat had been left in a convent parlor on a night when no woman of the house had died.

The convent at Saint Catherine's kept its records in a long low room at the end of the east corridor, which was not the east tower but which ran in the direction of the east tower, and which Cordelia had been told on her first day, with the particular flatness that the nuns used for warnings, was the corridor one did not use after vespers. She had not asked why. She had assumed it was because the floor was uneven in places and the lamps were few, or because the wind came down from the mountains at night and found the corridor's loose windows and made a sound that the more nervous of the sisters could not bear. Now, standing in her small room with the paper in her pocket and the bread on the table and the fire that gave no heat, she thought about the east corridor and the east tower and the woman who had written do not enter and do not name and do not love, and she thought that perhaps the corridor was forbidden after vespers because the nuns did not want the younger sisters walking in the direction of the place they had been told not to walk toward.

She went to the library. This was not a decision so much as it was a yielding. Her feet knew the way because she had walked it every morning for the eleven days she had been at Saint Catherine's, following the smell of old paper and the cooler air that lived in the stone of the lower floor. The library was the one part of the convent that did not feel like a convent. It felt like a place where someone had once been permitted to think, and the permission had soaked into the walls. The shelves were dark wood, oiled but not polished, and the books were bound in leather that had gone the color of tea, and the lamps were real lamps, not candles, which meant that someone in the last century had run a wire through the stone and made a bargain with electricity, and that someone was probably the woman whose coat Cordelia had been wearing since the night before.

Sister Vira was already at her desk. This was not a surprise. Cordelia had never seen Sister Vira anywhere but at her desk, in the same chair, with the same lamp at her left elbow and the same stack of ledgers at her right. She was a small woman, fine-boned, with the kind of face that looked like it had been drawn with a very sharp pencil and then left out in the weather for a few decades. Her veil was the same blue-gray as every other sister's, but she wore it pushed back from her forehead, which gave her the look of someone who had removed a hat in a room where hats were allowed. Her eyes were pale and moved the way a fox's eyes move, taking in everything and giving nothing back. She did not look up when Cordelia came in. She turned a page in the ledger she was studying, and the paper made the sound that old paper makes when it is being respectful of itself.

Sister Vira. Cordelia stood at the edge of the desk. The desk was the kind of desk that had been built for a man with large hands and a contempt for inkwells, and Sister Vira sat at it the way a cat sits on a windowsill, taking up only the space she needed and no more. Sister Vira turned another page. Cordelia waited. The lamp on the desk made a small ticking sound, the sound of a filament that was not quite committed to its purpose. The room smelled of paper and of the polish Sister Vira used on the wood, which was linseed and something sharper, perhaps turpentine, and of the cold tea that sat in a cup at the librarian's elbow and that no one ever seemed to drink.

I am looking for the records of the house, Cordelia said.

Sister Vira looked up. Her gaze came to rest on Cordelia the way a bird comes to rest on a branch, with a brief assessment of the weight. Then she said, in the clipped, slightly amused voice that was her particular instrument, Every woman who comes here says that. Every woman who comes here means something else. You will tell me which you are, or I will tell you for you, which is faster but less polite.

I want to know who died here.

Sister Vira set down her pen. The pen was a fountain pen, which Cordelia had not expected, and the ink on its nib was the same rust color as the ink on the paper in her pocket, though that was surely a coincidence, and Cordelia did not believe in coincidences but did believe in the small, dull repetitions that the world performs when it wants to be noticed. Sister Vira said, Many people have died here. This is a place where people come to die, or to live until they die, which is the same thing with more steps.

I want to know who is buried here.

Sister Vira considered this. She folded her hands on the ledger. Her hands were the hands of a woman who had once been permitted to handle books without gloves, and the ink had gotten into the whorls of her fingertips in a way that gloves would have prevented and that she had apparently decided was acceptable. She said, That is a different question. That is a question that requires me to show you something I do not usually show, and to tell you something I do not usually tell, and I would like to know why you are asking before I do either.

Cordelia did not lie. She had never been a good liar, and she suspected that Sister Vira was the kind of woman who would know if she tried. She said, A woman died three nights ago. She left a coat in the parlor. The coat had a paper in it. The paper said do not enter the east tower, do not name the pale one, do not love us. I want to know who she was.

Sister Vira did not react. She looked at Cordelia for a long moment, and then she pushed back her chair, and the chair made the sound of wood against stone that furniture makes in buildings where the floors are honest. She said, Come with me. She walked to the far end of the library, where a curtain of dark green baize hung from a rod that was older than the rod's brackets. She pulled the curtain aside. Behind it was a door that Cordelia had not noticed on any of her previous visits, because the curtain had been drawn and the lamp light did not reach that corner. The door was iron, and it was not locked. Sister Vira opened it and went through, and Cordelia followed, because not following would have meant standing in the library alone with a curtain that moved of its own accord in the draft from the corridor.

The room behind the door was small and cold and smelled of earth. There were no windows. There were shelves, but the shelves did not hold books. They held ledgers, dozens of them, bound in the same dark leather as the books in the outer library, and each ledger had a year on its spine in faded gilt, and the years went back farther than Cordelia had expected, back to a number that she did not want to add up in her head because the sum would have been larger than the convent and older than the mountain. Sister Vira took down a ledger from a middle shelf. She opened it on a lectern that stood in the center of the room, and she turned the pages with the care of a woman who knew what was in them and had decided long ago that knowing did not make them less worth handling gently.

She said, This is the book of deaths. Every woman who has died in this house since the house was a house is recorded here. Every woman who came here to die, and every woman who lived here and died here, and every woman who was sent here because her family could no longer afford to keep her, or because her family wished to be rid of her, or because her family did not wish to know what had become of her. Every one of them has a name in this book.

Cordelia looked at the open page. The handwriting was small and neat and varied from entry to entry, because the hand of a librarian was not the hand of an infirmarian and the hand of an infirmarian was not the hand of a mother superior, and the book had been kept by many hands over many years. The entries were of the form that one would expect: the name, the day of death, the cause if known, the age if known, and a final line that always read, Buried in the customary place. The customary place. Cordelia said, Where is the customary place?

Sister Vira turned another page. Then another. Then she closed the ledger and put it back on the shelf, and she took down another, older, and opened it to a page near the end. She said, There is no customary place. The customary place is what we write when there is no place we are willing to write down. There is a garden behind the east tower. There are stones in that garden. There are no names on the stones. There are no markers. There is nothing that would allow a person to stand in that garden and know who lay under any particular stone, or under any particular patch of grass, or under any particular shadow of the tower itself. Thirty-seven women are buried in that garden, and the book knows their names, and the book is the only place their names still exist in the order they were given.

She turned the ledger so Cordelia could see. The page was dense with entries, and at the bottom, in a hand that was older and more careful than the hands above it, was a list of names, and beside each name a date, and beside each date a small cross drawn in ink that had faded to the color of dried blood. Thirty-seven crosses. Thirty-seven names. Cordelia read the first name and the last name and did not read the names between, because the names between were not hers to read, and because reading them would have meant admitting that she had a right to read them, and she was not yet sure that she did.

She said, Why are there no markers.

Sister Vira closed the ledger. She did not put it back on the shelf. She held it under her arm, against her side, in the way one holds a child one is not willing to put down. She said, Because the women buried there did not wish to be found. Because the women buried there were buried by other women who loved them and did not wish them to be found by anyone who came after. Because there are things that should not be looked for, and a grave is one of them, and a name on a stone is a kind of looking that cannot be undone. She looked at Cordelia. Her eyes were very pale and very still. She said, You have the paper in your pocket. I can see the shape of it. Do not show it to me. Do not read it to me. Take it back to your room and burn it, as you have been told to do, and do not ask me about the pale one, because the pale one is not mine to speak of, and do not ask me about the east tower, because the east tower is not mine to enter, and do not ask me about the women in the garden, because the women in the garden have been dead long enough that they deserve the silence they were given.

Cordelia stood very still. The room was cold. The ledger under Sister Vira's arm was heavier than it looked, and Cordelia could see, now that she was looking, that Sister Vira was holding it the way one holds something that one has held many times before and that has become, over the years, an extension of the arm. Sister Vira said, Go now. I will not ask what you mean to do. I will only ask that you do it before vespers, because vespers is the hour at which the house listens, and the house has been listening longer than either of us has been alive.

Cordelia went. She walked back through the library, past the shelves of books that smelled of leather and time, past the desk with the lamp that ticked and the cold tea that no one drank, and she went up the stairs to the corridor that led to her room, and she did not look back, because looking back would have meant admitting that she expected to be followed, and she did not expect to be followed. She expected to be watched. She had been watched since she arrived at Saint Catherine's, by eyes that were not always attached to faces, and the watching had a quality to it that she had not been able to name until this morning, and the quality was the quality of something that had been waiting for a long time and was now, very gently, beginning to lose patience.

She reached the top of the stairs. The corridor was long and stone-floored and lit by a single lamp that hung from a bracket in the center, and the lamp made a pool of yellow light that did not reach the ends of the corridor, which fell away into shadow on either side. The stairway behind her was narrow and turned once before it reached the floor below, and from where she stood she could see down into the turn, and in the turn, standing on the third step from the bottom, was a woman.