Free The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende Page B

should they do so now? Some of them were very restricted, finding it hard to walk or move, and yet there was nowhere they wanted to go. Others were absentminded, confused, or forgetful, but this worried their carers and relatives more than it did them. Catherine Hope insisted that the residents of the second and third levels remain active, and it was Irina’s job to keep them interested, entertained, and connected.
    â€œHowever old one is, we need a goal in our lives. It’s the best cure for many ills,” Cathy insisted. In her case, the goal had always been to help others, and her accident had not altered this in the slightest.
    On Friday mornings, Irina used to accompany the most active residents on their street protests, to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. She also took part in the vigils for noble causes and in the knitting club; all the women who could wield a pair of needles (apart from Alma Belasco) were knitting cardigans for Syrian refugees. The recurring theme was peace; there was argument about everything apart from that. In Lark House there were 244 disillusioned Democrats who had voted to reelect Barack Obama but criticized him for being indecisive, for not having closed the Guantánamo facility, for deporting Latino immigrants, for the use of drones; there were more than enough reasons to send letters to the president and Congress. The half-dozen Republicans were careful not to voice their opinions out loud.
    Irina was also responsible for helping with the spiritual needs of the residents. Many of them who were from a religious tradition sought refuge in it, even if they had spent sixty years denying God, while others sought comfort in esoteric and psychological alternatives typical of the Age of Aquarius. Irina brought in guides and masters for transcendental meditation, courses in miracles, the I Ching, the development of intuition, Kabbalah, the mystic tarot, animism, reincarnation, psychic perception, universal energy, and extraterrestrial life. She was the organizer of religious festivals, a potpourri of rituals drawn from several beliefs, so that no one could possibly feel excluded. At the summer solstice, she took a group of the women to the local woods, where they danced barefoot in circles to the sound of tambourines, with flowers in their hair. The rangers knew them and were happy to take photos of them hugging trees and talking to Gaia, Mother Earth, and with their own dead. Irina stopped mocking them inwardly the day she heard her grandparents in the trunk of a sequoia, one of those millenarian giants that unite our world to that of the spirits, as the octogenarian dancers had been quick to remind her. Costea and Petruta did not have much to say when they were alive, and nor did they from within the tree, but what little they did convey convinced their granddaughter that they were watching over her. At the winter solstice, Irina improvised ceremonies inside Lark House, as Cathy had warned her of a possible outbreak of pneumonia if they celebrated in the damp, windy woods at that time of year.
    Irina’s salary would barely have been enough for a normal person to live on, but her ambitions were so humble and her needs so modest that sometimes she could even save money. Her income from her dog-grooming business and as an assistant to Alma, who always looked for reasons to pay her more than they had agreed, made her feel rich. Lark House had become her home, and the residents, whose lives she shared every day, replaced her grandparents. She was touched by these slow, pallid old people with all their ailments. Faced with their problems she was infinitely good-­humored; she didn’t mind repeating the same answer to the same question a thousand times, and she enjoyed pushing their wheelchairs, encouraging, aiding, consoling them. She learned to deflect the violent impulses that occasionally swept over them like fleeting storms and wasn’t frightened by the avarice