The Cult of Loving Kindness by Paul Park, Cory, Catska Ench Read Free Book Online

today?”
     
    Interrupted in midspeech, Mr. Canan bowed his head, his mouth constricted in a narrow line. He sat back on his heels and was silent. It was another of the senior students, the third in the semicircle, who raised his voice to answer: “Sir, he is not here. Forgive me, but I thought that it would serve no purpose to distress him with talk that he could never understand. Also, he finds it difficult to distance himself from his own passions. He loves you very much, and I was afraid that he might disturb the serenity of this last gathering with childish tears.”
    At ten o’clock the day was achieving its dull heat. The children in the room were restless; the adults fanned themselves with square pieces of banana leaf. The master’s face was covered with a sheen of moisture, and also at that hour, the smell from his gangrenous leg began to penetrate to every corner of the room.
    “And you,” he said to the third student. “What do you feel for me?”
    The third student was a small, potbellied man named Palam Bey. The knot of his belt was only lightly touched with pink. Taken by surprise, he stammered, “Sir … a great affection and a great respect… .”
    “Yet you would not willingly spare yourself this moment. My friend, you cannot protect Honest Toil from my death, for I will die today, and I am dying now. It is a false compassion to protect a person from his own experience—go and get him, please. If I ask him not to cry, he will not cry.”
    At that, Mr. Goldbrick stood up in the back of the room next to the screen, where he was sitting with the novices. “Sir,” he said. “Honest Toil and I were on the almond path and saw three people, someone from this village and two human children. Now they’re at his house.” But the master had turned his face into his pillows. Palam Bey got up to leave, but he lingered for a moment first.
    The master put his hands together in his lap. He joined his ring finger and his thumb together on his right palm, and his left hand he made into a fist. That is the way he is represented in most statues from the period: propped up on some pillows with his face turned to the side, his fingers arranged in a way that was always associated later with a certain school of teaching, though it is unlikely that he meant much by the gesture at the time.
    He said: “It is true that my friend Honest Toil is not able to appreciate much that I have told him, and there is much that is obvious to the simplest of you which is still a mystery to him. Yet there are other lessons which he understands in all the deepest fabric of his heart, lessons which are at the center of everything that I have taught you, and which many of the cleverest of you would never understand, even if I lived forever and I told you these things every day.”
    After hearing these words, Palam Bey nodded his head and went out past the screen to the veranda. He went out down the steps. When he was gone, the master raised his voice. And with his hands joined in his lap he delivered his last great sermon, his lesson on humility and love. Alone of all his sermons it was never written down. Later it was darkened and distorted even in the memory of those who had first heard it, even in the memory of those whose lives it changed. Later on, the memory of the master’s words were twisted into just another reason to believe a lie, but at the time, many of the people in that stifling room felt they caught a glimpse of some new country through an open door, and everything that here is dark and strange and terrifying, there is clean and plain. Or that they had been taken up onto some clean mountaintop, and they were standing where the air is bright and hard to breathe, and they were looking down on where they used to live and all the people that they used to know. To them suddenly the small streets of the village were laid out in a pattern, and they could see the pattern of the reeds upon the river, and even the minute pattern