The Day's Battles

Do you know what I like about you, Niwa? 

You always ask the questions. You always ask the right questions, and you listen in a time when people spend so little time 

just listening. 

The Aspag looked touched, but not in the usual way that people express joy or gratitude. What happens with Makarios Niwa, whenever he becomes emotional, is that he tends to pause whatever he was doing, even if it was chewing food. Presently he lifted his cup to take a sip of water, and one could discern a slight trembling in his hand. He let out a long sigh. After a while he said:

"What else is there to do? I always want to know what goes on in people's heads. Even if these thoughts disagree with my own. Especially if they disagree with my own."

"What would I know if I never questioned anyone in seminary? The way they taught their things, it was like theirs was the only right way to see it — they are poised to tear any opposing point of view. And of course I had to find out what they were."

It was the old moral dilemma whether to entertain one's morbid curiosity. Some wise men say that nothing good could come out of courting that kind of controversy. The Aspag just happens to be one of those who could not switch it off.

"If he could get in my brain and read all of my thoughts, he will do it, the rascal!" said the Abbé.

The Abbé loved hiding his thoughts. He also loved hiding the fact that he rose two hours earlier than everyone else, and broke a hearty sweat tilling all of the fields. War orphans who grew up here just assumed that fields tilled themselves.

The plough used by Abbé Musa Abisheganaden was made to fit the yoke of a buffalo. Now that livestock were either eaten or otherwise lost, the Abbé yoked it upon his own shoulders. No other person at the abbey could heave the plough like he.

Least of all Irannika, a person who was made for everything other than manual labour, even though her convictions would protest every syllable of what I just said about her.

"I am made to serve my people!" she wheezed, as she let fall a bucked filled with water from the well. Once, she would have felt an affinity to the story of the prince Siddhartha Gautama, of noble birth and painless upbringing, who witnessed human suffering only by accident, spent a ton of time in meditation and finally arrived at the conclusion that all the world's ills came from one's own mind.

But Sister Irannika had not the acumen of Siddhartha, nor could she detach herself so cleanly from the messiness of the physical world, and the daily pains of the Abbey's elderly inhabitants. Today she was particularly disturbed by having to clean shit in the hallway. She berated herself for not making the chamberpots available, and that she had neglected to change the diapers for grandma Anita.

Sister Olivia had her own garden at the side, where she grew tomatoes and mint. She was softening the soil on the outer parts of the garden with a pickaxe, hacking at it with more fury than one would consider normal. It was probable that she had recently with a quarrel with someone prior to this. Perhaps Irannika? On days like these even the Abbé gives her berth, so we should leave her alone for now.

Jean-François Millet. The Angelus (1857)
Collection of Musée d'Orsay