The Mango Man and Other Stories. Georgina Prasad
were nothing more than a bit amused and entertained with all his fanciful, though interesting, narration.
He turned helplessly towards the girl and shrugged his shoulders with a foolish smile on his face. The girl, now seated on the floor on a small rug, chin resting on her knees, hands wrapped around her legs, spoke up for the first time.
"Bubba seldom speaks. When she does, it is only to express the wish that before she died she would hear something about her only sister, to whom she was very close, who left Galicia over eighty years ago."
Larry reached into the left breast pocket of his jacket and produced an envelope. With trembling hands he opened it and carefully pulled out a half of a torn page. It was from a Bible printed over a century ago, from the book of Genesis. He held it out to the old woman. "Shortly before she died, bubba Elena expressed the hope that this half page would one day be returned to Galicia."
The old woman gazed for an almost unbearable length of time at Larry’s outstretched hand holding the tattered piece of paper. She slowly lifted a shrivelled, wrinkled hand and took it. The tear on the page was through the middle of verse nine of chapter thirteen, the narration about the parting of ways between Abraham and Lot. The text ended at the rip: "... if thou wilt take the left hand, ..."
Her eyes were too dim to read the words, but seemed to recognize the piece of paper. Her hand gently dropped to her lap and for a long, long time she stared across the room, past the broken window pane, past the fields outside, to a moment in time that swept aside several decades. She looked up at Larry, then slowly bent over, reached under her mattress and pulled out a small, dark, stained and frayed leather bag. From within it she eased out a tattered envelope, yellow with age. She opened the envelope and slipped out a piece of paper which she unfolded with great difficulty.
The tear that ran along it seemed to reciprocate the tear on the paper Larry produced. It was the other half of the page. The text started at the rip with, "then I will go to the right ..."
The father of the two sisters could afford to help with the journey abroad for only one of them. So with heavy hearts they had drawn lots, using the two halves of the page from Genesis. Before they parted they promised each other that at least a part of each of them would one day be reunited. They were two halves of a whole, as much as the halves of this page, each ripped asunder to fulfil the dictates of their own private destinies.
A single tear streaked down the old woman's face. The genealogist whom Larry had hired to trace his roots had done his job well.
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