The rest of the afternoon was spent in much the same way, with Mama dealing with complaints petty and large, real and imagined… somehow the pettiest, most imaginary ones seemed to take up the most of her time, but she knew from decades of experience that they blossomed into very real, very large problems if she ignored them.
The day being Friday, her goal was to complete all of her appointed tasks before the sun set. As with the other strictures of her faith, her position did not always allow her to strictly observe the Shabbat, but she did her best. G-d was good, and would ask no more than that.
She did make a point never to touch money after sundown, though. She was very careful about that.
As the day wore on, Ivan reacted to her requests for greater haste with a sense of understated mirth, though he also willingly complied.
“Is something about my faith amusing to you?” Mama asked him. She had emerged from a fairly tense meeting with three rival gang leaders and a tribe chieftain whose territory butted up against a disputed zone, and was in less of a mood to tolerate his attitude.
“Faith of any kind is amusing to me,” Ivan replied. “My sense of humor is very ecumenical in this regard.”
“Everybody’s got to believe in something,” Mama said.
“I believe otherwise,” Ivan said.
“Do you believe in tribe?” Mama asked.
“After a fashion,” he said.
“How’s that?” she asked.
“I believe that it exists,” he said. He paused, and then added, “after a fashion.”
“And that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” Mama asked him. “You said you wanted to disappear… where better than into a place that doesn’t quite exist, an organization that nobody could prove existed?”
“Somebody could prove it,” Ivan said. “They’d just have to know where to look.”
“But that would put paid to your little hidey-hole, wouldn’t it?” Mama said.
“It’s good you have excellent security, then,” Ivan replied.
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I don’t quite get Mama’s last comment.
Mama means that if someone could prove that Tribe exists and expose it to the rest of the world, Ivan wouldn’t have a place to ‘disappear’ anymore. At least, that’s how I interpret it…
There’s something that looks wrong with it, I think. I just tried to be discreet about it…or is there a meaning to “put paid” that I don’t know of?
Cernael san: “Put paid to” means to finish off or bring to a close… from the idea that you mark an account or bill “paid” when you’re done with it. “That’s put paid to that idea.” I don’t think it’s a very common phrase nowadays, probably because bookkeeping is done with computers rather than with big rubber stamps.
wow, I really love Tribe. redirected here after reading MU and being frustrated that I ran out of archives to read.
did you start Tribe after MU? In my humble opinion, the writing here is a little better/more cohesive than the *early* writing of MU… I still love both of them equally though.