Sacred Vow – Chapter 14

In another day or so, Ian was still too sluggish to function well at work, but he could have managed well enough at home. Ian was certain that Djalma stayed partially to make sure there wasn’t another rushed journey back to Katerina—and partially just as a good friend, visiting. Ian thought of telling Djalma he could go back to the mountains—but he didn’t know how his friend would get there—and besides, he was enjoying the company.

Card games passed the time. Some of the games Djalma knew; some of them Ian knew. Djalma’s poetry readings revived Ian’s interests and he in turn shared some of his own favorites, such as Emily Dickinson’s “Much madness makes divinest sense,” and pieces from a locally published collection called,?Strike a Chord of Silence. Ian came to enjoy the Taoist poetry that Djalma introduced him to. The poets’ uncomplicated attention to nature, along with the accompanying ink drawings in one of the books, made Ian think of Katerina.

When Ian felt up to it, he told Djalma the story of his last visit—which had put him in the state in which his friend had found him. It was a way of thanking Djalma for his care.

“Thank you for making sure I knew to look for the reason Katerina and I were in contact with each other,” Ian started.

Djalma looked up from his book and smiled. “So, you know what that is now?”

“I think I have a starting point. And that bit of information probably saved my life. How did you know it would be so important?”

“I didn’t know,” Djalma replied. “The suggestion was based on pure intuition. I knew how remarkable what you were experiencing was, the reality expansions. It’s barely possible that one might encounter a sequence of random contacts over a very achieved lifetime, but this has been a repeating communication with a specific person. And if the contact isn’t random, I speculated there would have to be some powerful initiator to make such a thing come to pass.”

Djalma paused for a moment and then laughed to himself. “Most of all, I was making my suggestion out of a blind emotion. You could say I was being a mother hen.”

“Whatever your reason, Djalma, I don’t think I would be here if not for your insistence to repeat the?Vow if I got lost. I am sure it allowed Katerina to help me out of a terrible situation.”