by Mike Bond
HE WOKE to brush a cockroach from the corner of his mouth and slept again, dreaming he lay in a pathless forest. A bear circled him in the darkness, loomed over him. He roared in anger and terror. It slashed at him and was gone. He lurched up holding his chest as footsteps sifted into silence along the warehouse walls.
His neck was sticky and hot. His wallet was gone. He ransacked the grime beneath the tires, stood and squinted into the darkness, hearing only the slap of waves on pilings and the solitary clatter of a truck on a distant upgrade. Sweat poured over his stomach and widened across his belt in a clammy black line. He rubbed his neck and pain shot down his throat and through his chest. Dizzy, he sat.
The pain came from a deep slit running from his neck across his right shoulder. Blood dribbled through his fingers and down his arm, pattering on the ground. Taking a splintered board in his good hand, he padded down the corridor between the warehouse walls, listening for a step, a breath, the rustle of cloth or skin on canvas.
13
LOADED PALLETS TOWERED like abandoned tenements above him, infiltrating the chill with odors of sea-wet canvas, tarry wood, and grease. He moved forward to listen again, hearing nothing. At the boulevard he stopped. Les Champs Elysées winked through shifting fog. He returned to the tires and rummaged about them, but his wallet and the tall Tibetan's bag of Endless Snow were gone.
The bleeding slowed. I should have taken the shirt, he told himself. Dropping the board, he crossed the boulevard. A phosphorescent clock in a petrol station window said 3:35. Again he felt dizzy and sat on a doorstep. Mists were shifting like windblown veils across the port lights. A fat rat slipped out of the gloom, sniffed his toe, and scampered away. Standing carefully, he emptied his right pocket with his left hand. Seven dinars. Really nothing.
A DOOR BANGED as a man in a white cap left Les Champs Elysées. Cohen staggered past the wet tables chained to the sidewalk and peered through the steamy window. A dark-haired boy was mopping the floor. The door was open. Warm air hit him like a blanket. Fighting the need to fall, he moved across the room toward the boy. The room wheeled; the watery floor zoomed up and smacked him in the face. The boy bent over him. “Vous êtes blessé,” he said.
“J'ai tombé.” Cohen drank the glass of water the boy brought and sat up. His palm felt wet; he raised it and stared at its dirty smear. He wiped it on his jeans and rose to a squat.
“What happened?” the boy asked.
“J'ai tombé,” Cohen repeated. “Fell and cut my neck.”
The boy had golden, freckled eyes. Cohen stood and went to the bar. “Can you make me an express?”
“Aussi un cognac, peut-être?”
The room was stationary now. The taste of the espresso and brandy sank into his tongue. The boy, wordless, was reflected from the waist up in the bar mirror as he bent over his mop and pail. Cohen watched his dinars sitting on the counter. The boy finished the floor, put the mop and bucket in the back. “Ca va mieux?” he said.
“Yes, better.”
“American, you are?”
“Oui.”
“De quel partie?”
Cohen was too tired to lie. “Montana.”
“The mountains? Close to New York?”
“Far from it.”
“Some day I will go to New York. Do you want a sandwich? It's yesterday's bread – the new comes at seven. Otherwise I throw it away. You like pâté?”
“That too is yesterday's?”
The boy smiled. “There's no charge. You fell on the wet floor.”
“Not because it was wet.”
The boy made him another espresso and the sandwich and left the cognac bottle on the bar, next to Cohen's glass. “You will see the doctor?”
“No.”
“You like music?” The boy thumbed a coin into the jukebox. “When I get to New York, I will listen to this song, ‘Strawberry Field’ – it's big there, n'est-ce pas?”
“That was from long ago.” When the boy seemed hurt Cohen added, “Two years I have not been there; maybe it is popular again.”
“Allah! What a long time to leave home. My brother has been nine months in France; he wishes to come back.”
“Why does he stay, then?”
“He makes much money, sends it here. He works, like me, cleaning a bar in Lyon. He was very lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“To get such work.” The boy took away Cohen's plate, refilled the brandy. “When will you go back to America?”
“It costs money.”
“That's easy for you,” the boy laughed, “you're American. In the world it's easiest to be American.”
The door squeaked. An old, turbaned man in a tan, worn djellabah slippered across the floor. “Abdul, salaam,” the boy said. The old man stared at Cohen with currant eyes. “Salaam, Hassim,” he nodded to the boy.
Cohen sat half asleep as the old man slurped his coffee with nervous, shuffling motions. A sailor entered, doffed his cap with a smile at the boy. They talked in Arabic by the jukebox. Cohen ignored the urge to drop his head on the bar. He could not remember, already, what the boy had just said. “Tu peux me faire un autre?” he called, lifting his cup.
Beyond the café windows night was surrendering to the first mist of day. A white-robed woman crossed the street, a black sack balanced on her head. “How exciting, to travel,” the boy said.
“You don't like it here?”
“This country's like my family: good but poor. I want something besides work and sleep. And always, hunger.”
Cohen nodded at the bread, cheese, and pâté behind the counter. “You haven't enough to eat?”
“Of that, yes. But we always hunger. We hear about America, Paris.”
“In America is the same hunger, even worse.”
“You tease me. In America, everyone has a car, n'est-ce pas?”
“Some have two or three.”
“So they are happy.”
“Many perhaps less than you.”
“They have each a house?”
“Many. Some have two houses, even more.”
The boy laughed. “So they are very happy.”
“You will go to France?”
“Like my brother, I will invite myself on a boat.”
“You'll be caught. It happened to me, now, coming from Greece.” Cohen described the Petr Vyazemski. The boy's eyes, with their shifting yellow flickers, stayed on his. “But they let me work,” Cohen added.
“And now?” the boy raised his eyebrows.
“Now, as you see, I am hurt.”
“Your money?”
“Stolen.” Cohen nodded his chin at the dinars on the bar. “That is my all.”
“Alors, you are poor like me.”
A beetle-browed policeman entered and waited, fingers tapping the bar, until the boy served him café au lait. He watched Cohen, wiping his moustache after each sip. Cohen tried to lean naturally over the bar and not reveal the blood down his shirt.
“He asked about you,” the boy confided after the policeman had left. “I said you're my friend from the mountains of New York.” The boy leaned over the bar. “You're going to take another ship, aren't you?”
“Perhaps.”
“I'll go with you.”
“Hassim, you're too young.”
“I'm nineteen. I'll show you mon certificat.”
“I don't believe you.”
The boy leaned over the bar, whispering although no one else was in the room. “Every morning the paquebot leaves at ten for Marseille. We can stay with my brother in Lyon. He will find me work. He has a Deux Chevaux. I've saved nearly a hundred dinars.”
Cohen stilled his shivering. “France is a very expensive place. And cold. Bring a warm coat.” Thinking of the lifeboat on the Petr Vyazemski, he added, “and food.”
A tremulous wail echoed through the street's tenuous light. An old man put down his bundle and knelt toward the east. “Excuse me,” the boy said, and went into the rear, behind a bead curtain. �
�We can leave at seven,” he said when he returned. “I will make you some breakfast. Oeufs plat. Every American likes oeufs plat.”
At seven the owner appeared, pulling at his moustache. Ten minutes later Cohen and the boy stepped into the soggy, sharp morning, their pockets jammed with bread and pâté. “I asked him for my pay, until tonight.” The boy grinned. “Told him I wished to buy a bicycle.”
“Alors?”
“With my pay, he should know I cannot afford a bicycle.”
THE SCENT of sea, wet garbage, and docks hung in the air. The boy's apartment was in a streaked stucco building above the waterfront. “My mother will cry,” he said. Cohen waited outside. The pain in his chest had expanded to a crushing, nauseating ache that filled his whole body, triggering a spasm of dizzy agony with each breath. “I'm not afraid to pray,” he decided. “I pray we get to France. I do.” The boy came down and gave him a coat and a small piece of paper with Arabic lettering. “A port pass, old, of my brother. I have one also.”
“They'll notice me.”
“It's no matter. Anyone may unload the ships. Pull the coat collar, so, around your neck. Face down when you show it.”
The civilian at the booth said nothing. They entered the port. Freighters lay, hatches gaping, aside oily quays. Strange flags dropped from their masts. Seagulls complained overhead or sat stoic in the seedy water. Men in worn djellabahs waited by canvas-wrapped pallets.
The paquebot was old and rusty. Several people were mounting her forward gangway. A man in a blue shirt gathered tickets. The rear gangway was chained off. At the top, a sailor leaned on the rail, smoking.
“Wait.” The boy pointed amidships, to a door open just above waterline. A man in a black stocking cap leaned out of it and spit into the water. A gull dove at the white speck, veered away.
“There's no gangway.”
“One can jump!”
A swell rocked the paquebot, squeaking her gangways against the quay.
Behind them a warehouse ran the length of the quay, a single line of cars and panel trucks parked along its middle. In the warehouse, stairs descended to an unlit corridor beneath the quay. The boy lit a match. Compartments lay off the corridor to the seaward side. He entered one and unbolted a steel plate door. “Merde!” he whispered. “My finger.”
In the expiring matchlight Cohen saw gouts of blood piling on the floor. “Now we are both poor and hurt,” he said. The boy shoved the door open. The paquebot's black hull faced them, its door to their right. They stumbled into the next compartment. Its door would not unbolt.
“Should've brought more matches,” the boy whispered.
The next door was also rusted shut. They found a scrap of iron and wedged it between the door and the wall. The door gave. The paquebot again faced them, the open door in her hull to their left. Above them a whistle blew. Feet ran up the forward gangway. With the iron scrap they levered open the door of the middle compartment.
The steamer's hull tapered up like a canyon wall into a slit of sky. The gangways soared, concave like high wires, against the glare. The boy leaped and grabbed for the door's rusty sill, one foot sloshing. He faced back at Cohen out of the ship's cave gloom. “Avance,” he hissed. “Vite!”
Cohen glanced up. The gangways were empty. He dove for the door, snatched at a hinge, knee-deep in greasy chill, pain wrenching his chest. The boy yanked him into the shadows. “C'est ça,” the boy panted.
Stairs ascended into darkness. Oil smells and chugging came from below. Cohen swore at the sensation of blood coiling down his arm. They felt their way down a dangling catwalk into the lightless hull. The boy lit a match, illuminating the metal grid of the catwalk. Cohen noticed with annoyance that his wet shoelace had untied. Roaches stippled the flaky walls like beads of rain, their antennae flexing in the sudden light.
Voices rose and fell behind a bulkhead on the deck below. The boy backed up. Cohen moved to step around him and fell off the catwalk. The bulkhead boomed against his head.
The boy was pulling him up. There was a reason to do something, but he could not remember it, nor the thing there was to do. Claws tore into his shoulder; he fought to brush them away but found nothing. Perhaps I'm shot, he wondered, giggling.
Brightness and voices poured in on him. I've caught Isom's laugh. Pain doubled in his shoulder as someone lifted him. The light was glazed with silence. “J'ai attrapé son rire,” he giggled. “C'est fatal.”
Dark angry faces hammered at him, out of the cottony glare, “T'es fou, toi? T'es fou, toi?”
“Je m'en fous, moi,” he answered.
“Il est malade.” It was a faraway voice, the boy's. Someone shoved them together. Pain cut like a razor, sharpened his sight.
“Christ, tu m'as blessé,” Cohen said to a thick-lipped, bearded face. “See, I'm bleeding.” Pipes receded whitely into the horizon. His shoulder banged against the bulwark as they hustled him up the catwalk. Stained water flashed through an open door. The boy was talking loudly beneath him.
Sailors held them on the deck until a tan Land Rover, klaxon welling, dodged through the pallets and stopped at the forward gangway. Four soldiers ran up and handcuffed them. One spoke briefly at Cohen in Arabic and called to the others. “He's decided you're not Algerian,” the boy said. A soldier slapped him, pointing a finger into his face.
EACH JOLT of the Land Rover across the potholed quay drove new, impossible pain into his shoulder. The mountain city before him misted over and reappeared gleaming like shattered wineglass. “Neither is true,” he said, and began to laugh. They gained the boulevard and swung west. Buses, trucks, and taxis flew past. The Land Rover tilted them crazily to the left as it cut around a guard post and down a narrowing roadway gauntleted by cyclone fence.
The soldiers pushed him up rickety steps into an office. A mustached man glared at him out of a nicotined photo. A grilled window gave on a courtyard where men paraded with their hands atop their heads. “It's over now,” he said. Dead flies lay on the window sill and on the floor below. A few bumbled weakly against the glass; one brushed his wrist.
In the center of the room a desk and folding chair. He leaned on the desk. It moved, one leg splaying. He sat in the chair. The world was still. He felt grateful. Isom was leaning beside him on the rail of the Petr Vyazemski. Isom faced him and spoke, but he could not understand the Arabic. Or is it Russian? Isom's black-bearded shape swelled into a bear that slashed at him. Isom nodded at the window. “Go,” he indicated with his chin, “go there.”
Cohen went to the window. The parading men were guarded by a soldier with an automatic rifle. One momentarily raised his head, and in the man's eyes Cohen saw the cause of Isom's laugh: the awesome indifference of the universe to individual pain.
The door grated. With difficulty Cohen turned. The Algerian colonel, a clipboard in his hand, stood grinning beneath his narrow moustache. “It was good, your hotel?”
“I didn't have a ride to Algiers – I came from there, in a 403. I wanted to go to France, but my money was stolen. My visa, my passport, too.”
“Your visa, from the sleepy little town? Que c'est triste. And your Noces?”
“I wasn't going to be married.”
“Where'd you get that cloak?”
“From my friend.”
“You'd take a loused coat like that from him while refusing a shirt from me?”
“He didn't pull a gun.”
“He'd fuck you, though, just like me.”
Cohen felt his sole smack on something sticky. He leaned giddily on the sill.
The colonel caught him and pulled open the coat and shirt, glanced at the wound, and pointed at the chair. “Sit down.” He placed his palms on the table. “Shall I give you to them?”
“Who?”
“You pretend not to know? I shall, then.”
“Then I'm dead,” Cohen said flatly.
The colonel ran a slender finger along the wound. He wiped it on Cohen's shirt. “Alas for your self esteem, it's not fat
al. But,” he smiled, “we'll have to send you home.”
“As I said…”
“Why lie to me? I checked France. They've no interest in you…a common sailor. And your accent – Grenoble? Fuck Grenoble. You're from Toulon. Joe? Fuck Joe. You're a nothing named Luc Seghers, a lousy sailor!” The colonel shook his head in disgust. “Perhaps a medic can lend your emblem of courage, there, a little honor.” He halted in the doorway. “Then we'll return your Carte d'Identité and money – and insist that you leave Algeria at once, or stand trial for trespass on a military port and for attempted passage clandestine.”
He called in a stooping, bespectacled youth who inspected the wound with agile fingers, then smiled and said perhaps three words. “It's deep,” the colonel translated, “but he affirms my belief you won't die. Perhaps you'll find aid in France?” A soldier entered with slips of paper. “It's the law to deport stowaways to their country of origin. You leave at once on the paquebot for Marseille.” The colonel glanced at his wrist. “You have twenty minutes!”
The soldier handed Cohen a French identity card. Folded inside it were a hundred-franc and a fifty-franc note. He held out a pen and a yellow form. “A receipt,” the colonel said, “to affirm you've received your valuables. Sign your name, Monsieur Seghers.” The colonel grinned. “You are surprised we caught the mecs who beat you up? And that they still had your Carte d'Identité and money?”
Cohen gritted his teeth to slow his dizziness. “Please. Tell me who they are! They've killed my friends…everyone.”
“Nonsense. Give up your past, become a new man, and you never need fear them again.” He grinned, bowing slightly. “Stay off docks at night.”
“No, I mean…”
“I understand.” The colonel pushed Cohen toward the door. “Your boat leaves.”
“But Hassim?”