Real Life Read Online Free

gravel.
    The monastery itself was much larger than she’d imagined, built of faded red brick, crumbling and patched-looking, with obvious newer additions on one end. The park surrounding it was bigger, too, than she’d thought when she’d seen it from amile or so away, and through the trees to one side she could make out a neat row of smaller frame buildings. Her nervousness rising, she parked, pulled her briefcase out of the back seat, and crossed the parking lot to the wooden double doors.
    A monk stood just inside them, evidently waiting for her. He held back the heavy door for her and introduced himself as the abbot.
    “It’s good you arrived a little early,” he said. “I always show the new faculty around the first evening, answer questions, that sort of thing.” He was perhaps sixty, a little stout in his worn black cassock, going bald, and so close-shaven that his face shone with a pink light.
    “Thank you …” She couldn’t think how to address him and bowed her head to hide her confusion.
    “Call me Dominique,” he told her, “or Father Dominique.”
    He led her down long corridors with either polished and echoing wooden floors or worn vinyl tiles, opening doors as he went to show her classrooms, the cavernous, gleaming-clean kitchen, and the stark guest rooms.
    “Sometimes faculty uses them when a winter storm blows in unexpectedly,” he told her. They turned this way and that, climbed stairs and descended others, until she was lost. At one point he’d gestured toward a narrower hall to their left, it seemed to her less brightly lit than the others, and said that it led to the monks’ residence and that it was, of course, offlimits to everyone else. Then he hurried her on.
    “This is our library,” he said, and stood back to allow her to cross the threshold into a long, high-ceilinged room full of rows of book-laden shelves. A half-dozen stern-looking old men in plain, dark-wood frames frowned down on the few students, all young and male, lost in study at the oak tables which ran in a long column down the room’s centre. She smiled at the abbot, nodding politely, although the picturesoffended her and the smell in the room of old floor wax or of oiled wood was distasteful.
    “I’ll show you our chapel and then you’ll have had the inside tour. We run a full-scale farm here too, and we have an orchard and a very large vegetable garden, plus cows and laying hens.” He turned to her now, and smiled down at her in a friendly, easy way that suddenly, frighteningly, made her want to nestle her head against his plump chest. “We’re pretty much self-sufficient here.”
    “No women,” she pointed out before she could stop herself. She hoped she’d said it in a joking tone, but she could hear her voice hanging in the air, forlorn, like a minor note on a piano.
    “No, no women,” he agreed amiably. “But many women come here for spiritual retreats or to attend programs. We aren’t like those monks on Athos who don’t even allow females on the premises.”
    The chapel was even larger than the library, and in contrast, very modern, with sleek pews of polished blond wood, white walls, and a stylized, terra-cotta crucified Christ on the altar. It was empty, but in their moment’s halt so she could look around, Christine became aware of a sound invading the chapel’s intense quiet, a deep-voiced, rhythmic murmur. The abbot was glancing about as if to check if anything was out of place or needed fixing. Beside him, Christine stood motionless, listening.
    Male voices were filtering through the unbroken wall behind the altar, and though the sound was muffled, rising and falling, sometimes fading out to return on a louder note, it gradually came to her that it was chanting.
    “It is our monks at evening prayer,” the abbot murmured, oddly formal now.
    She found herself advancing a few steps toward the sound, her head cocked. It’s like the beating of a human heart, shethought, full of wonder,