The Other Aloe

At the funeral in Strašnice in 1987 the priest read the bit about Nicodemus, a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes for the body, and Olga, who had come in with her coat buttoned wrong and the cemetery cold in her shoes, heard aloes and thought of the plant on the windowsill in the kitchen, the fat grey-green one, and went home and moved it into Jiří's room, onto his side of the desk, and has kept it there thirty-nine years, cutting the pups off every spring and giving them to anyone who sits still long enough in her kitchen in Vršovice.

For the body, she says, when people ask. It's in the Bible. Jiří gets aloes. Her son-in-law calls it the Holy Cactus. Her daughter has stopped arguing.

Then in November her granddaughter Bára comes round with her phone and reads her the news from Marburg, two things out of twenty-four, a skull from the eighth century before Christ and a jar of mummy from a pharmacy in Offenbach, and in both of them, after all that time, the chemistry of aloe, and Olga sits back as if she'd been asked to stand up in church and says, well. Well. There you are. Thirty-nine years.

And Bára, who is nineteen and honest in the way that's still a little loud, scrolls further and says, Babi, though, the aloes in John, people think that was wood, some sweet-smelling tree from India, they called that aloe too. Different thing. Your one's the right plant for the mummies but probably the wrong plant for Jesus.

The kettle goes. Neither of them gets up for it.

Then Olga laughs, the big one from before, the one Jiří used to say you could hear from the tram stop, and says, so I was right by accident, and Bára says, by a really long accident, and Olga says those are the best kind, and gets up, finally, and in the kitchen burns her thumb on the kettle, of course she does, and goes into his room and breaks a leaf off the plant on his side of the desk and stands there with it on her thumb, cold and green, and says to the room, Well, it's the one that works on burns. So somebody in this house knew what they were doing.