Orson Card - Enchantment

"Unless he realized that these vowels should be different—"

"Father!" said Ivan. "You sound like... like one of those boneheads who thinks the Trilateral Commission is controlling every nation to fulfill some nefarious plan! What conceivable motive could anyone have for putting on such a fraud? What great wealth and power await the plotters who are able to train a young woman to fake proto-Slavonic as her native language? You know every scholar in the field, personally—which of them did it? Whose creature is she?"

Father shook his head. "I don't know. I just can't—you're not a liar, Vanya, so I have to assume you're being fooled yourself. But I watched her all during dinner, and I... I liked her, but I thought, of course I like her, they chose her because she's likeable, if you want to run a con game you choose somebody that people will like and trust, and... but you're right, who is the 'they' I'm assuming? It makes no sense at all. But... even if—Sleeping Beauty, I thought it was a French fairy tale—but even if it happened, why you? Why us?"

"Why not us?" asked Ivan. "It has to be somebody."

"And why now? No, I know your answer—why not now?"

Ivan laughed. "There, that'll put the last nail in Occam's coffin."

"You can cut yourself when you use somebody else's old razor, anyway," said Father. "For the time being, then, will I have to pretend to live in this fantastic universe you've conjured up?"

Impulsively, Ivan took his father's hand. They hadn't held hands much—like good Russians, they greeted with a kiss, and the last time Ivan could remember clasping his father's hand in anything but a handshake was when he was little, and Father helped him cross streets in Kiev. But the hand felt familiar to him all the same. Some memories don't fade, some physical memories are forever. The feel of your father's hand; the sound of your mother's voice. Only, Father's hand was smaller now. No, Ivan's was larger, but to him, it was his father who had shrunk, who no longer had the power of the giant, of the god, to enfold him and keep him safe. If anything, it was Ivan who was the guide now, the one helping the other to cross the perilous, unfamiliar street. "Father, Mother knew about this. Not the whole thing, but she told me when I got engaged to Ruthie that I shouldn't, that it was wrong. Like an old story out of Jewish folklore, she told me that I was already bound by oath to someone else, and it would be an offense to God for me to marry another. I thought she was completely wacked out, but... she was right. I had already married Katerina eleven hundred years before."

"Her intuitions," said Father. "When I first claimed the right of a Jew to immigrate to Israel, she told me No, I mustn't do it, you had things yet to learn in Ukraine. And then after we went to Cousin Marek's house, she stopped being agitated. She was perfectly happy to go when we left. Now that you've told me the story, I do see a pattern. You had seen Sleeping Beauty. That's all that was needed. Having seen her, you'd go back." Father sighed deeply. "She couldn't explain it to me. I'd never have believed her. I'm only pretending to believe it now."

But he was not pretending, not now. He had recognized that it was the only story that made sense of things. "So did Mother know everything all along?" asked Ivan.

"No, no," said Father. "If she had known what it was you needed to do, she would have told me, even if I didn't believe it. It wasn't even her idea to go stay with Cousin Marek. No, she just had a feeling. So... I didn't take it seriously. A feeling! What's a feeling? But now. If what you say is real, then who's the fool?"

"No fools," said Ivan. "Except those who think they understand the world. Those are the fools, don't you think?"

Father shrugged. "Fools, but when they build rocket ships, they mostly fly, and when they drill for oil, it mostly comes up."

"Those are the engineers doing those things, Father. It's the professors who are the fools."

"It's a good thing you smiled when you said that," said Father, "or I'd take it personally."

"I want to be a professor, remember?"

"Oh?" said Father. "I thought you were going to be prince consort of the magical kingdom of Taina."

"Prince consort in exile," said Ivan. "And as long as we live in America, I need an American job. I've got a dissertation to write this summer. Believe it or not, I really did my research, before any of this happened, and now I've got to..."

"Got to what?"

Ivan shook his head, laughing bitterly. "I haven't thought about my dissertation till this moment, not even when I toted the papers across the Atlantic. How can I write it now? I've met Saint Kirill's clerk. I've seen documents written in Kirill's own hand. I know exactly how the letters were formed. I know exactly how the language was spoken and how the priests transformed it in writing it down."

"Oh Lord," said Father, realizing.

"Before I kissed Katerina, I was all set to write a valid scholarly paper. Now if I write it, I either have to pretend to complete ignorance, or—well, there's no other choice. I can't very well write the truth and then cite, as my source, 'personal experience among the proto-Slavonic speakers of the kingdom of Taina, a realm that left behind no written records whatsoever and does not rate a mention in any history.' " Then Ivan told Father about Sergei, and the records he had the young cleric write in the margins and on the back of Saint Kirill's manuscript. "But I wasn't expecting to leave as suddenly as I did," said Ivan. "So there's no chance of the documents surviving. I don't even know how to prepare them so they might have a chance. They have to survive with their provenance attached. If they make their way to some library in Constantinople, for instance, no one will believe they're genuine. Someone's bound to ascribe the annotations to some anonymous clerk in the fourteenth century or whatever. Or some nationalistic fraud. I mean, if the parchments survive at all, they'll make a splash—but someone else will find them and interpret them all wrong. I have to find them, and in such a way that I can publish about them and affirm that they are exactly what they purport to be—documents written by Kirill himself and then added to by Sergei with his accounting of contemporary history and folklore."

"You speak as if you expect to go back to Taina."

"I do," said Ivan. "Because coming here was temporary. Katerina won't be happy until she saves her people. Coming here didn't do that. Coming here only saved we."

It was Father's turn to take Ivan's hand now. "I have to ask you, son. I see you being protective toward her, but you don't look as though—forgive me, but you don't seem to be easy with each other. You married because of a kiss and a promise made with a bear looming over you, right? But does she love you?"

Ivan laughed. "Now, that's the question, isn't it? No, she doesn't. I think she likes me a little better now that she's passed through the experience of changing worlds. I mean, she has a little less contempt for me. But love? That's not even part of why people marry each other, not princesses, anyway."

"Your mother and I, in some ways we're still strangers to each other, I think all married people are. But we fit together, we know each other as well as two strangers can." Father smiled ruefully. "I love her, Vanya, and she loves me. We're devoted. We don't make a great show of it, but we are."

"I know."

"You deserve that, son. I had my doubts about Ruthie—she seemed a little too assertive of how she adored you, too public about it for it to be real—forgive me, I didn't say anything because you loved her—but this one makes Ruthie look like the queen of wifeliness. I don't like the thought of you being married to a woman who always thinks she married down."