Amberville by Tim Davys Page A

of the room and up the stairs.
    All of the guests, with Mother in the lead, followed.
    When they came into the nursery, Father was already standing by my crib. I was the one who was screaming. I continued screaming, despite the fact that Father lifted me up and held me to him. It was silent from Eric’s bed. Nonetheless Mother took the few steps across the room in order to see to her other twin.
    It was her instinct, to see to Eric first. But the suspicion that that’s the way it was—that she set one twin before the other—was, and is, the most shameful thing in Mother’s life.
    Not even now will she admit it.
    Nonetheless, all her friends from that time bear witness to that.
    That time she relied on her intuition. Subconsciously she understood that her twins’ symbiosis was such that what one of them saw could be perceived by the other, and vice versa.
    I was screaming because Eric was in danger.
    Mother saw it.
    “A moth!” she screamed.
    Father more or less threw me down on the bed again, where I immediately fell silent. It’s unclear whether I fell silent due to Father’s brusque treatment or if I stopped screaming because I had done my duty.
    With a tremendous leap Father threw himself across the room and killed the moth before anyone had time to react. With that the drama was over. It was only when the guests returned to the dining room and the cooling food that they realized what had happened.
    I had saved Eric’s life.
     
    Deacon Odenrick taught me to distinguish good from evil. The penguin was one of many deacons who worked in Amberville, but the only one with whom I came in contact.
    The structure of our church is simple.
    In every district of the city there are several parishes. In Amberville there are four. Working in the parishes are all-deacons, a kind of apprentice, who are paid by the church. Each parish has its own deacon who leads the organization and does most of the preaching. Among the deacons in the district, a prodeacon is chosen. In turn, the four prodeaconsof Mollisan Town have a leader, the church’s highest representative: the archdeacon in the cathedral Sagrada Bastante. No one in my surroundings would have guessed that the hard-tested Odenrick would, in time, come to be the new archdeacon in Mollisan Town.
    At that time, Odenrick was completely lacking in such ambitions.
    Perhaps that was why he was chosen?
    The pious penguin with his worn deacon’s vestment came to visit us on our light-flame-yellow street a few times each week. Every time he came by he took time to sit a while on the edge of my or Eric’s bed and say a bedtime prayer with us. This started when we were six years old. We lay on our backs with our heads on the pillow and paws on our stomachs and closed our eyes while Father Odenrick spoke with Magnus, the creator of all things, on our behalf.
    “Deliver them from evil,” the penguin prayed tenderly.
    “What is evil?” I asked.
    “Things that make you feel bad,” said Eric precociously, without being asked.
    “So the stone I fell down on yesterday is evil?” I asked, just as impudent and precocious as my twin.
    Odenrick wrinkled his gray plastic beak and became absorbed in reflection. He was sitting on the edge of my bed, and in the glow from the lamp on the nightstand I could see how his large eyes became cloudy.
    “Things that make you feel bad in your heart, Teddy,” he said at last, looking down at me. “The kind of things that cause pain in your heart, inside you, are evil. The one who wants these bad things makes you sad and unhappy, and the sadder you get, the more evil the one who wishes you to feel bad is.”
    As soon as he finished the sentence Odenrick heard how frightening this must have sounded to a six-year-old’s ear, and he tried at once to cheer us up.
    “But thank goodness,” he said, “there are also those of us who want what is good. The church wants what is good, all believers want what is good, and with good it’s exactly the