The Newborns
Letter 6 of the Book of Forgetting
That morning came in warm and close, and I was at my bench calibrating the rangefinder when Noa came in without knocking, her blue sweater bright, her river stone in her hand.
“Fernando,” she said. “Three babies again. All born before dawn. All dreaming the sentence.”
I set down the calibration weight. “Three.”
“Yael and Rimon Kfir. Twins. And Ophir Segal.” She counted on her fingers. “Liesl had twins. Ivo had a son.”
I stood up and reached for my jacket. “Let’s go see them.”
Liesl’s house was small and neat, the windows open to the warm air. She sat in a chair by the bed, a baby in each arm, her dark hair loose around her shoulders. Her forearms still carried the small sparks-burns of her work, and she looked at me with the same direct, unblinking stare she used on a bent bracket or a cracked gear.
“Fernando,” she said. “You came.”
“I came to see the twins.”
She looked down at them. “They were born at four in the morning. The midwife said they came out holding hands.”
I stood by the bed. The babies were small, their faces creased, their eyes closed. They breathed in the same rhythm.
“They woke up an hour ago,” Liesl said. “Both of them. At the same time. And they said it.”
“The sentence.”
“The fog is just fog.” She said it flatly, the way she said the weight of a beam or the temper of a metal. “Both of them. In the same voice. Like they’d practiced it.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had heard the sentence from newborns for weeks now, but twins were new. Twins were a doubling.
“Ivo’s son too,” I said.
“I heard. Ophir. Same sentence.” She shifted one of the babies, her thumb stroking its cheek. “Three babies, same words. Same morning. And three old ones died last night.”
“I heard. Lior the nurse. Jonah the cook. Samuel the instrument maker.”
“Samuel,” Liesl said. “He made the first rangefinder. Before you.”
“I know.”
She looked at me a long moment. “You keep the record, Fernando. What does the record say about this?”
“The record says what happened,” I said. “It doesn’t say what it means.”
She nodded slowly, and I saw her hand tighten around the baby’s small body, a mother’s grip, protective and fierce.
Ivo was at the guard post at the end of the west road, his radio clipped to his shoulder, his grey-green jacket heavy even in the warm air. He stood with his back to the fog, watching the empty road.
“You heard about my son,” he said.
“I heard.”
“He said it. The sentence. First thing out of his mouth when he woke.” He crossed his arms. “My wife cried. I didn’t know what to do.”
“What did you do?”
“I held him.” He looked at me, his eyes checking the road, the fog, my face, the road again. “And I felt the words in his chest. Like they were vibrating there. Like a tuning fork.”
I didn’t speak.
“And I thought,” he said, “that I’ve turned people back from this fog line for twenty years. I’ve fined them for measuring. I’ve told them the Council prefers people to stay at their work. And my own son comes out of my wife’s body knowing something about the fog that I don’t know.”
“He knows one sentence,” I said.
“That’s one more than I know.” He looked at the fog a long moment, then back at me. “You keep the record, Fernando. I’m telling you this for the record. I turned Rimon Kedem back this morning. And Gavriel Dagan. And Ophir Sharon. All of them walking toward the fog with instruments. All of them fined.”
“Miriam too,” I said. “Idit fined her for measuring.”
“I know.” He shook his head. “The Council is tired, Fernando. They’re tired of the numbers not matching. They’re tired of the questions. And now the babies are talking.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know.” He uncrossed his arms and looked at his hands. “I held my son this morning and I felt the words in his chest, and I thought: maybe this place was made on purpose. By someone who is not against us.”
“That’s what Yarden said,” I said. “Sitting by the Lethe. Quietly sure.”
Ivo looked at me. “Yarden sits by the river doing nothing. I stand at the fog line doing nothing. Maybe it’s the same nothing.”
The funeral was at sunset. Samuel the instrument maker, Lior the nurse, Jonah the cook. Three coffins, plain wood, carried by their families. The whole town stood in the square, and the fog pressed grey at the road ends, and the babies slept in their mothers’ arms.
I wrote the day in the Book of Forgetting. Three born. Three died. One fined. Three turned back. The numbers balanced, the way they always balanced, and I did not like the shape of it.
But the twins had held hands when they came out, and Ivo had felt the words in his son’s chest, and I did not know what any of it meant.
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