The Holy Machine

63

He was beautiful, the Holy Machine, a gentle, silver thing with a sad, wise, face. He sat in the warm shade of a flowering cherry tree, his right hand resting on a tortoiseshell cat, his left on an old grey dog. And fat honeybees buzzed from flower to flower above his head.

I approached him fearfully, dreading the moment when I would have to meet those calm silver eyes. But when the Machine looked up, he was immediately welcoming, lifting his large silver hand from the cat and extending it towards me in friendly greeting.

Slowly, reluctantly, I reached out to it.

‘I wanted…’ I began, ‘I wondered…’

Then I woke up. It was still the middle of the night. From across the landing came the loud contented snoring of Uncle Tomo. I got out of bed and went to the window. Outside, the trees cast dim moonshadows. Cicadas sang. Secretly, silently, the universe blazed down.

Who else could grant me absolution for my crime against Lucy if not a Holy Machine?

I quickly dressed and crept out onto the landing. It resounded, I now heard, not only with Uncle Tomo’s snoring, but with a lighter, more feminine snoring from Aunt Nada, harmonizing peacefully with his.

The door of Marija’s room was ajar. I peeped in. Oddly and touchingly, this woman who had always seemed to me so strong and confident slept with her thumb in her mouth like a small child. She looked very beautiful in the moonlight, with her dark hair all around her on the pillow. And the thought came to me with a sharp pang: what would it be like to lie in bed with a real woman beside me, a woman made, like me, of flesh and blood?

A notebook lay open on her bedside table. It was a diary. I could just make out yesterday’s date at the top of the page, but it was impossible in the moonlight to read any of the scrawled writing that followed, though no doubt it contained her thoughts about me and my arrival.

I tore a blank page out of the back of the notebook and wrote ‘GOODBYE THANK YOU.’

Then I crept downstairs and out across the olive groves of Uncle Tomo. The road to the coast was empty and mysterious in the moonlight. I began to walk.