6/ Each One Different, and Yet One
For anyone who wasn't there at the start of this story, here it is in short. Since that morning at the well, Spark no longer shines in just one place, but everywhere two people are really together. And when she tells the children, "Close your eyes," they can see the threads that join the people of the valley.
The day before, Mr Wheeler and Mr Sadler had quarrelled over the fence about pears. It hurt Spark, even though she was with the children in Luna's kitchen, and the children helped the two men by swapping places with them. But there was one question nobody could answer yet. Spark had asked it one evening while she was looking at the moon over the Crag: isn't there somebody like her between the sun and the moon, too?
On the fifth day Luna asked a question that wouldn't let her sleep.
"Spark, when you're on the upper street, and at the well, and in the bakery, all at the same time, are you still you? Or are there lots of you?"
"I don't know," said Spark. "I've never looked at it from the outside."
So they went to look at it from the outside.
The first spark was at the Pearsons'.
She hung above the counter in the butcher's, between Mr Pearson and his apprentice, who were weighing sausages together. With every single sausage they argued about whether the scales were showing the right weight.
"These scales show a little more than they should," said Mr Pearson.
"No, they show a little less," said the apprentice, though both of them were looking at the very same scales. The rest of the sausages lay on the counter and waited for the two of them to agree.
"By the time we agree, this sausage will have grown old," said Mr Pearson.
The spark above the counter shone yellowish, and she burst out laughing before he did. Then all three of them were laughing.
Luna asked her, "Who are you?"
"The one who laughs," said the spark. "And only then do I ask what the joke was."
The second spark was under the shelter by the well, above the bench where Mr Shelley was sitting with Granny Dora. They were both breathing on their hands to warm them, and neither of them was talking. The spark above them shone slowly, the way an ember glows when nobody is blowing on it.
"Who are you?" asked Luna.
The spark said nothing for a long time. So long that George thought she hadn't heard.
"The one who waits," she said at last.
The third spark was in the bakery, by the oven, between Mr Sparrow and Mrs Rowan. Mrs Rowan had come in for a loaf of bread and, as usual, had stayed far longer than it takes to buy one. This spark shone so warmly that the children wanted to warm their hands at her.
"Who are you?"
"The one who's up from two o'clock," said the spark. "And right now I'd like to go and lie down."
The children went back to the well and sat down on the rim of the well.
Spark, their own Spark, lit up between them and waited.
"Well?" she asked. "Is that me?"
George opened his notebook and looked at the three lines he had written down. The one who laughs. The one who waits. The one who's up from two o'clock.
"Each of them said something different," he said. "And each of them is right."
"And each of them shone a little differently," said Luna. "But it was the same light. I could see that."
Then she thought for a moment and tried to say it exactly, because it mattered.
"It's one light. It just sits in different places. And from each place it sees something different."
Above them, Spark shone for a long time, and she turned greenish, which she had never done before.
"So I'm one," she said. "But I'm not the same."
"And who are you, then?" asked George, because three sparks had been asked that question today, and only their own Spark had not been asked yet.
"The one who's between you," said Spark. "And the one who's learning with you what mine means."
Later, George wrote one more thing in his notebook, and he showed it to Luna only when it was time to go home.
Luna and I are different too. But maybe only because each of us stands somewhere else.
Luna read it twice.
"Or the other way round," she said. "Maybe we really are different, and the only thing that joins us is what is between us."
They didn't agree. Spark shone at full brightness all the while, which meant it didn't matter.
2. A Thread to the Moon
On the sixth day the children got up before five.
It wasn't George's idea, and it wasn't Luna's. It was the moon's idea, because the moon hadn't gone to bed on time that morning. Luna had noticed it already on Monday: the sun was rising, and the moon was still hanging on the other side of the valley, as pale as a plate somebody had forgotten to wash.
Both of them in the sky at once. That was the moment when you could check whether there was anything between them.
By the time Mr Jacobs rang the five o'clock bell, the children were already standing at the end of the upper street, where you could see out over both sides of the valley. On the way there, Peekaboo, slung on Luna's shoulder, had caught on two fences and one washing line. There were still two hours to go until sunrise, and the children stood through every minute of them, because they were children who had stood through a whole night once before.
The frost nipped at their ears. Below them, smoke curled up from the chimneys, but to one side of the valley and to the other they could see right over the roofs to the sky. The children could see the threads only when Spark showed them. Otherwise, as she used to say, a person's head would start spinning. And for now, she wasn't showing anything.
Luna set up Peekaboo, aimed it at the moon and looked for a long time.
"Nothing," she said.
Then George looked.
"Nothing," he said too.
Spark shone between them and said nothing, and that was strange, because it was her own question. Back in the autumn, she was the one who had asked whether there wasn't somebody like her between the sun and the moon, too.
Then the sun popped up from behind the hills.
First just the edge. Then half. The first light ran across the roofs of Betweenhills, and George noticed that the moon on the other side of the valley grew a little brighter at that very moment. Not by much. By a hair.
And then Spark said what she had said once, on the night she was born.
"Close your eyes."
The children closed their eyes. Behind their eyelids there was complete silence for a while, just as there had been that night.
"Now."
Over the valley the threads lit up, just as on that first night. From window to window, from the well to the Crag, from the lime tree to the swallows' nest, which was empty now.
And higher up, far higher than the hilltops, a thread ran from the sun to the moon.
It was so thin that the children could hardly see it against that huge sky. And how long it was, George couldn't even guess, for the first time in his life. It didn't sag like the threads between the windows. It was straight as a ray of light.
And light was running along it.
From the sun to the moon. And from the moon, along another very thin thread, down into the valley, to somewhere above the square, where it got lost among all the other threads of Betweenhills.
Luna took George by the hand and didn't know she had.
"So there is," said Spark quietly. She shone so brightly that George had to squint. "So there is something between them after all."
Nobody knew how long they stood there. Down below, Mr Sparrow the baker had opened his shutters long ago, the buckets had long since begun to rattle, and smoke was rising from the chimneys.
Then George said what interested him most of all, because he was George.
"The moon doesn't shine by itself. We knew that. But now we know which way the light travels to get there."
"Along the web," said Luna. "The same web that is between us."
Spark floated down between them.
"When I was born," she said, "you asked me how far the web goes. I told you, 'I haven't found the end anywhere yet.'"
"And now?"
"Now I've found another piece."
George asked whether there was somebody between the sun and the moon, then. Somebody like her.
For a long time, Spark shone blue.
"I don't know," she said. "I was born where two people truly joined. Perhaps, one day, somebody will be born up there, too. Perhaps somebody has already been born, and is just far away."
Then she laughed, just like the spark at the Pearsons'.
"But I do know that the light that shone on your roof last night was sunlight. The moon only bounced it back to you."
3. The Empty Page
In Betweenhills they celebrate the shortest day of the year.
They always have, and nobody remembers why any more, only that it's what is done. When the days are shortest and the dark is longest, people decorate their little houses, and the trees in front of them, with twigs. They put candles in the windows, and Mr Sparrow the baker bakes for three days in a row. And then people give each other gifts. Not big ones. The kind that fit into the palm of a hand or into a heart. Depending on who has more room where.
The shortest day was still weeks away. But the little town had already begun getting ready, because in Betweenhills this celebration takes longer to prepare than it lasts.
George didn't go home. He went to the woodshed, sat down on the log and looked at the three drawings hanging on the nail.
The little wind-powered windmill thing for the neighbour's cats. The kite. The little roof with the slanting triangle.
Luna sat down beside him. Spark floated up between them.
"What are you thinking about?" asked Luna.
George told her, because ever since he had found out that Spark couldn't hear what a person only thinks, he had been saying more out loud.
"I'm thinking about Mr Wheeler and Mr Sadler. They were quarrelling, and we knew what to do, because we had Spark. They can't see her. They can't ask her anything."
"They have each other," said Luna.
"They do. But Mr Sparrow was still wondering how we knew about the salt. And Spark knows everything that travels along the web. If anybody could ask her, not only children..."
He stopped, because something had just come to him.
"Luna," he said. "What if that light were in something that grown-ups can see, too?"
"In what?"
"I don't know. In something I'd build. Something you could ask. And something that would help. Mr Jacobs, with his bad foot. Mr Barr at the old sawmill. Anybody."
Luna looked at him the way she looked at stars she hadn't yet been able to give a number to.
"Like a gift," she said at last. "For the shortest day. For the whole little town."
George nodded, because it couldn't have been said any better.
"And would it know whose the hoodie is?" asked Spark.
George laughed for the first time that whole day.
"Probably not straight away. But that's what we have Luna for."
Then he opened the notebook EXPERIMENTS WITH SPARK at a new page, and at the top he wrote in big capital letters: A GIFT FOR BETWEENHILLS.
And he wrote nothing more.
He wanted to draw what it would look like, but his pencil hung above the paper and wouldn't go down. Because the same old rule still held, the one he used to like forgetting so much: first you have to see it in your head. Only then can you build it on the table.
And George couldn't see it in his head yet. He could only see light running from the sun to the moon and down into the valley. And he didn't know how you put light like that into something that has hands.
He put the pencil down.
"I can't see it," he said.
"Then we'll see it together," said Luna.
"And I'll show you where the web is thickest," said Spark.
Outside the woodshed window, the first snowflake of the year fell. Nobody saw it coming. But it was there.
Under the heading in the notebook, the page stayed empty. This time it was the good kind of empty page, the kind you wait for.
Below the line
What Is Hidden in This Story
Below the line. For anyone who wants to know what the story was really about, said plainly and without imagery.
The web joins everything. Spark showed the children a thread between the sun and the moon, and light running along it all the way down into the valley. The moon really doesn't shine by itself: it reflects the light of the sun, which reaches it across space, and that light then falls on the Earth as well. In the real world, too, nothing exists that is entirely on its own. People, animals, plants, the ground, the sun and the moon are all connected with one another, and each one affects the others. The world is like a great web, and each of us is one knot in it, separate, but not cut off.
One and many at once. The sparks in the valley were each different, yet it was one light. People, too, are each different, and yet we have a great deal in common. Variety and unity don't contradict each other. And whether at heart we are one or many, nobody knows for certain, not even grown-ups.
Something new can be born from joining. Spark was born where two people truly joined. When people truly join, in friendship, in working together, in a family, something grows between them that wasn't there before and that none of them could have made alone.
Juraj Tušš
