The Ceremony

I recall as a child once a year my family would take me to the temple where we would meet everyone. Those not attending the ceremony were those in fact the ceremony was dedicated to.

The temple was shaped as a cross so vast in the mind of a child that I could not see its ceiling. Only would here and there some flash of light interrupt that great darkness, as if from some metal suspended somewhere up there. My parents used to remind me every single year how the arms of the cross that was the temple were exactly the same length. Every single year someone would undertake the hard measurements in order to confirm that no changes had occurred, that harmony reigned in numbers.

The altar was at the centre where the arms met. The base was a circle, but the second step was a square and the following was some other kind of geometrical figure. I remember only that it had so many sides and corners that it might as well have been a circle. From the third layer launched four columns or maybe more. They were jet black, like nightmares. They went up so high that I thought they had no end, even though something did cast a shadow over the priest.

No matter how much I ran around the altar or how fast, I was always faced with the same priest’s face. It was as if the priest was standing on every corner of the altar at the same time. He wore such black that at times he was indistinguishable from the columns and the stairs. Because, of course, the stairs too were so black that it looked like he was standing on nothing but shadow. At the forefront of this blackness stood the priest’s face. It was so very white and shiny as if it was made of hard porcelain. He never cast his eyes upon us but he kept reading and reciting. He mostly seemed to be talking to himself, but we could all hear his words.

It was for this reason that us kids were allowed to run around during the ceremony and make as much noise as we wanted, because no matter the magnitude of any noise we could make, the priest’s voice would reach everyone, as if he were whispering in everyone’s ears. I remember running on the polished floor with the other kids. It was so smooth that I was always afraid that I would slip any moment and fall. But no one ever did and not for lack of trying. I could always hear the words of the priest, no matter how breathless I was. I always felt like those words were specifically for me, but as a child and, to be honest, up to this day, I have never been very good at listening to what people had to say specifically to me. But even if I had wanted to I could not unhear the priest’s words.

In the temple it was as if noise and silence coexisted, never hindering one another. It was not that silence was a background for noise, not at all. On the contrary, it was more like as if everyone felt both noise and silence at the same time, so that noise was not a disturbance, but made of sounds intertwined with the lack of sound. I could hear everything and feel the peace of quiet at the very same time. The only sound I could not silence were the words brought by the voice of the priest.

And yet, his voice was like silence: soothing and almost as if silk. If I hadn’t always had this attitude that refuses to listen to what people have to say specifically to me, I might even have let it seduce me. So I ran and I played, often losing sight of my parents and then panicking like the child I was. I did everything I could not to hear that sweet, soothing, silky silence filled with words, addressed, as I felt, specifically to me, even though they didn’t seem, those words, have anything to do with me. Or so I thought at the time.

The richest families had niches along the sides of the arms of the temple. They were spacious enough considering the richest families were often not very large. There were no names in the niches and they looked all exactly the same to me, in shape and size, but every family knew which niche they belonged to, even though the families seemed to shift every year according to a logic I never became acquainted with. My family was not rich, but it was large, so we wondered in the middle of the arms of the temple and we would play together with the children of other families that were also, not rich, but often quite large. And then there were the other kids, who stayed with their families in the niches, which were large enough for them to play, even though they could not run that far. Children of different notable families were able to play together in one family’s niche after the two families had stipulated and signed a contract, which the children had to keep with them at all times. If they lost their contracts the children would be held in the niche of the family they were playing in and, consequently, would remain with that family for the rest of their days, unless a new contract the following year was signed that could reverse the circumstances.

The priest kept whispering the ceremony. He would recite the names of the people that were no more present, would tell the name of the family they belonged to and mention how it came to be that those people were not with us there present. I really did not want to hear about the people that were not there present; because I was afraid I would hear the name of someone I had known or, worst, someone I had played with only a year before. But the priest did not care about what I did or did not want and I kept hearing those names, and the names of the people who were missing them, and the circumstances of their disappearances. I had always had the feeling, a feeling that I still feel now as fresh and troublesome as I felt it then; I had this feeling that all that was left of those people were the soothing words of the priest.

Tahlia Red, of the RedKeep Norton Family,

Maybe she was young, maybe she was old.

Maybe she betrayed, now she’s cold.

Through her lips crept poison

Down to the treachery in her bosom.

She was young. She was old.

Now she’s cold.

So I played and I screamed and I heard and listened to. The list would go on and on for I cannot tell how long. Time for a child is not very categorical, it stays in the background, something adults evoke now and then when you have to go to sleep or leave your friends and go back home. So I never know how long that litany would go on for, but I knew at the end I was always tired and hungry and thirsty. There was no food and no drinking in the temple as if the only things your body was supposed to feed on there were the words of the priest.

Nahir Gree, of the GreeHammer Shant Family,

Like a swallow meant to fly.

To places old and high,

One day he left a roof

And he went… poof!

Every year I knew some of the names and some of those names had known me. I often knew the names that I would hear because they were not there in the temple that year and they would not be there ever again.

Jokan Nue, of the NueTow Nih Family,

Those who remember his name

Remember his notes with disdain

But his music is all that is left behind,

After his lover stole his mind.

No one would ever say anything or make any comments on those words. Every family would listen and grief in private, as if grief itself was shrouded in silence. I was glad my family were all there that year, but you could almost feel like grief seeping out of shadows and be lost into the overwhelming darkness of the temple.

Lidl Whyte, of the WhyteStone Dyr Family,

He was taken by a mystery

His bones too young for any history

He was taken and not given back,

One day everything just went black.

And then we heard an adult scream. From a niche an old man stood like broken leaves. Holding his fists ahead of him he howled and roared and bawled. Shocked like everyone else, his family had already repudiated him: they gaped at him as if at a weird object that did not belong to them. The old man was trembling; even the air around him seemed vibrating. Age weighted upon him, twisting his legs. Those legs barely carried him out of his family’s niche. Out there in the open where kids ran and stared.

His fist was shaking as only those who have lived too long can shake it. But what struck me were his tears, visible even from afar as if imbuing the temple with their light. He tried to wipe them away with a sleeve, but that was not enough. I didn’t know why, but I knew his outcry was wrong. As if there were rules only the gaping adults knew and he had broken one of them. I felt that now everything, even the temple, could fall apart. It was as if seeing an old man crying made me had made me somewhat smaller.

“No, why him.”

His words had been spoken as if he had broken glass in his throat and his words gurgled in blood.

“It should have been me. Someone has made a mistake. It should have been me. It’s not fair. It’s not right. He was only a child. Take me instead, take me.”

He walked as if drunk. A large vacuum had opened around him now, as if someone had sucked away a chunk of reality. Everyone shifted carefully away as if his sorrow was a disease. Two black figures appeared. They looked exactly like the priest, but their faces were somehow different. It was as if they had come out of the empty space around the old man.

Neither of them touched him, but they came to surround him with their presence. Like magnets they pulled him along with them. They walked to the altar, the only place of meaning in the temple. I don’t know exactly from where or why, but I started to feel clutched inside, as if my entrails were getting knotted and pressed into a smaller and smaller ball.

My parents had warned me never to talk to the priests. Because if you spoke to a priest, the priest could speak back to you. And the priests never spoke of, or to, the living. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but my parents seemed to. All of us kids were taught to be afraid of the priests through the scared eyes of our parents.

In the time of a thought the three of them, the two black, silent, pale priests and the old, crying man were at the altar. The man kept making sounds but he was not a priest, so I could not hear his words now that he was so close to the altar. It was as if the whispering of the priest muffled any sounds. A sadness came into me that day like a shadow and like a shadow never left. It happened the moment the priest stopped his litany and looked at up the old man.

I tried to turn my head away, it was enough for a child: it was already too much. No matter where I turned though, I kept facing the scene of the priest and the old man. Can a child turn into a madman at such a tender age. I think I did.

The old man probably felt he was having an audience with the only being that could help him. So he started again. in the silence of the priest we could all hear the old man now.

“I am all I have. It should have been me. I have a life I shouldn’t have. He should have it, he can have it. I know my life is old, but a life is a life. And I can’t do it any longer.”

At this the priest didn’t say a word. He kept staring, his face as blank as a face can be without losing its humanity. He didn’t move. He didn’t even blink. The density of his persona was so overwhelming that my heart turned suddenly heavy and I sank onto the floor. Most of the children were down there with me, some of the adults too. I could see them all falling as if the earth had shaken. We must have all looked so ridiculous.

The old man was still standing, but I could see the sweat of his effort. The priests by his side must have kept his heart from sinking just yet. It goes without saying that they were unshaken.

“I give you all of my sorrow.”

The priest blinked at that and all the pressure lifted. I sprang up looking guiltily around me, as if my parents were bound to scold me for having finally fallen to the ground. On the contrary, my mum looked terrified. She hadn’t got up yet. My dad was trying to help her but he was too busy trying to unsee what was happening by the altar.

The priest spoke:

Wyll Whyte, of the WhyteStone Dyr Family,

In that moment I could see a strange joy in the teary eyes of the old man, who was nodding at his end. As if the priests at his side had surrendered their pull he fell. And he fell as only a dead man falls.

After that all of our eyes were pulled away from the scene as if a general revulsion had invested all of us. In our ears though, the sweet, soothing sound of the priest continued to speaks his words

Who thought fate can make a mistake

Who offered his pain without any shame

Who thought he was worth a new birth,

Who smiled as if his sacrifice would suffice the price.