Read Online Children of Paradise: A Novel by Fred D'Aguiar - Free Book Online Page A

cups with hardly a clatter and whisper, yet keep the sum of those hands, feet, and eating utensils no louder than a heavy breath, collecting trays of dirty dishes and running them under water with just a sound of a splash, and exit or enter rooms with a similar demeanor of, say, the wind taking the opportunity to explore an open space, or an inquisitive dragonfly or hummingbird. Those sounds. The noise of a child amounts to as much as that wind or that insect and no more; not one foot drags, not one collision of shoulders, not one foot finds that one loose floorboard in a parade of feet on the floor, not one body trips, nothing drops to the floor, not even a knife or fork or spoon. All of the commune’s utensils are collected one at a time from a tray of such things without the usual clash and scrape of metal. All this deliberate cultivation of quiet sums up the lesson to the children of their collective beating and the preacher’s outburst.
    The children chew with their lips sealed. They pick up each spoonful or forkful of food with such deliberation that they seem to be in the middle of using the fork or spoon of food to thread some kind of needle. They drink and do not slurp. They replace their cups on the tabletops with a deliberateness that slows time and kills sound. They burp and silence it by keeping their mouths shut, and only briefly do their puffed cheeks give way to that occurrence. Their joints crack and click involuntarily and make them a new breed of living thing, utterly quiet in all actions except for this noise in their joints. Bellies grumble with digestive juices, but even this is muffled and sounds like a building settling on its foundations or the air making some adjustment in temperature or pressure, if such a thing can be heard as much as it can be felt. Adults look at the children and nod their approval. A few of the parents think it might be high impudence on the part of their children to obey and in such an ostentatious manner. But most agree that this is a new set of children.
    The adults approve and return in their various work groups to their various allocated chores: to feeding the pigs on the farm, to cutting up trees at the sawmill to sell as timber for construction, to collecting eggs from the chicken coops, to milking in the cow sheds, to washing clothes in the laundry room, to mending and sewing in the tailor shop with its bolts of cloth on giant rollers, to the infirmary with its sick and mostly elderly patients, to the mechanic and carpentry shops, the bakery, the large kitchen with its vats for pots and battalions of potato peelers and legions of sobbing onion slicers, and washers of dishes clattering pots and pans in a carnival of stacking and soaping and rinsing, and somewhere a lone voice launches a couplet and gathers a chorus of voices all lifted in praise of the Lord as routine continues to be pressed on a daily basis into the service of the commune’s heraldic purpose.
    Supply trucks arrive leaving deep mud tracks, their big wheels caked in mud and the whole vehicle sprayed with it. Men unload bags of rice, sacks of flour, sugar, salt, barrels of cooking oil, vinegar, bottles of wine and spirits (kept out of sight and shuffled away directly to the preacher’s whitewashed house) and medical supplies in white plastic bags and sealed containers, from syringes to mobile coolers with ampoules of penicillin, analgesics, narcotics, and all of it walked directly to the pharmacy situated beside the infirmary and all of it kept under lock and key and properly refrigerated with an emergency generator ready to chug into action should the main compound generator choke to a standstill.
    The children chant in the schoolrooms, divided by screens easily wheeled around to accommodate additions or subtractions of children, and the chants vary from multiplication tables to Bible psalms to swearing allegiance to Father and the church of eternal brotherhood, sisterhood, parenthood, to singing hymns