The Rescuer by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online

understood the intent of the manuscript clearly, as if the author were not an ancient scribe—male, more likely than female—but a kindred soul; yet, the next day when I sat down to work, I felt that I did not understand at all, and that the arcane and forbidden vocabulary would never yield to my attempts to decode it.
    I did know, from my conversations with Professor A., that Professor A. would not favor any text-translation that suggested that the ritual cleansings were ritual murders—ritual infanticide. I knew this, and hoped that I would have enough integrity to insist upon my own interpretation, eventually.
    How I wished that I could work with Nyame manuscripts—the famous text of ancient times in which the “sacred trinity” is established: God the Father, God the mother, and God the son. In all, to the Nyame people, who’d once lived in the general region of Zimbabwe, God was not a singular individual, not a master-monster, but a family.
    (Too bad, there wasn’t God the daughter, too. But this notion of a family-God seemed wonderful to me, enviable.)
    Once, I’d said to Professor A., “Why is so much of primitive life ritual? What is ritual?” and Professor A. said, as if he’d answered this question many times in his career, “Ritual eliminates chance. The originality and errors of chance. Ritual is repetition. Repetition becomes ‘sacred.’ Our ancestors know, as we know, that we can’t trust ‘chance.’ We must have reasons for what we do, even if they are unreasonable.”
    I knew that I had misspoken: I should not have used the expression primitive.
    But when I tried to apologize for this politically incorrect, anachronistic term, Professor A. laughed as if conspiratorially saying, “Well, let’s be frank, Lydia. There are ‘primitive peoples’ even today—‘aboriginals.’ Much of the world—the African continent, surely—except for South Africa—is primitive. Witch doctor drilling holes in people’s skulls to release demons. Worse than the Roman Catholic exorcism—though that’s ‘primitive’ enough. And when the patient dies, it’s the demon who killed him, not the witch doctor.”
    Hesitantly I said, “ ‘Infanticide’—it’s the most powerful taboo. But animals commit it, we know—in the service of evolution. I mean, an animal mother will kill the ‘runt of the litter’ or let him die—or be eaten by his siblings—because she can’t care for him, and too much of her strength will be squandered in a lost cause.” I had not meant to say squandered but it was too late to retract it.
    Professor A. stared at me in surprise. Now truly I had misspoken.
    Darwinian evolutionary theory was not so very welcome in Professor A.’s field, for its simple, much-reiterated theorems about the instinct for survival at all costs and the instinct to reproduce the species trumped more complex scholarly speculations of a kind that required a lifetime to master. What if infanticide wasn’t a ritual taboo but—just a commonplace in animal and human life? Arcane texts, beautiful extinct languages, decades of struggle to define single words and phrases—what did precision of translation matter, if each ritual had as its primary concern the evolutionary advantage of the individual, and through the individual, the species?
    Coldly Professor A. said, “I think, Lydia—that is your name, isn’t it: Lydia?—it will be wisest for you to stay very close to your texts. Word by word, line by line, passage by passage—you are walking a tightrope over an abyss, as a responsible translator. All speculation—the lifeblood of other sciences—is abhorrent to the anthropologist, who deals in facts .”
    You will not disobey me. You are the captive daughter.
    In Grindell Park, at my makeshift desk, I puzzled over the Eweian text as if I’d never seen it before. Originally I’d been thrilled by the challenge—if my translation was a good one, and Professor A. approved it, very likely it would be