“Stupendous,” I said. I didn’t hear Rangers. I heard basic training and then possibly maybe somewhere down the line, the pipe dream of Rangers. I heard Afghanistan. I heard six thousand miles away. He told us he was off to Fort Benning as soon as he returned Stateside.
I couldn’t help myself. I said, “And when would that be?”
Hannah glared at me. I cleared my throat. “I mean, how long do you plan to stay in Europe?”
“Only a few more weeks, man.”
“Us too!” exclaimed Hannah.
“Settle down,” I said to her. “You’re not joining the army.”
“Johnny is on his way to Italy to visit his mother.”
Varda and Carmen clucked approvingly.
Mason asked where his dad was.
“He’s remarried,” Johnny said. “Lives in the States.”
Hannah wanted to know if he was an only child.
Johnny shook his head. “I wish. I have two older sisters and a younger brother.”
Hannah immediately disclosed that she had a twenty-two-year-old brother, and then pointed out the obvious—that I had a brother. Chloe said nothing.
Johnny turned to Chloe. “And how old is your brother now, Chloe Divine?” he said, smiling. Why the hell did he have to use her full name like that?
No one said anything for a moment. I was so annoyed, I didn’t process his question properly. Why would he even mention Chloe’s brother? For a moment the entire table fell mute because no one knew what to say.
“How—how do you know I have a brother?” said Chloe, neutral, and yet I knew—not neutral.
Johnny pointed over her shoulder to the walls of the dining room. Young Chloe and young Jimmy abounded in Otto’s distorted, misaligned frames.
“What’s the matter?” He acted all puzzled. “What did I say?”
Carmen leaned over to Johnny’s slick head and whispered something into his exposed ear. For one long moment, Johnny stared at Chloe with his bottomless black eyes. She did not raise her own eyes from her plate. “There are some losses from which you never recover,” he said. “That’s what my dad keeps telling me. I’m sorry.”
Chloe tried hard to stay composed.
“Haiku,” I said, to distract her, “can you pass me the kvas?”
And Johnny reached over before she could get to it, and handed it to me. I had no choice but to say thanks.
He vied for her attention. “Why does he call you Haiku?”
Lifting her gaze finally, Chloe smiled into what I hoped was my utterly unamused face. “Because he’s the perfect walking shining example, the prime embodiment of too little information being a dangerous thing. He thinks he is being clever.”
“I am being clever,” I said.
“See, you’re not. Want me to tell you why?”
“You’ve told me a thousand times. I stopped listening.”
Chloe turned to Johnny. “He calls me Haiku,” she said, “because he knows my mother is Chinese, and he thinks he’s given me a funny nickname to reflect my heritage.”
“But a haiku is not Chinese.”
Chloe smiled at Johnny, and then from across the table smiled at me. “That’s the point,” she said.
I didn’t laugh. “That’s what makes it even funnier. Is it my fault none of you pedants have a sense of humor?”
“Johnny, has your mother always lived in Italy?” Hannah piped in, diverting him to herself.
“No, just for the last few years,” he replied, offering no details.
“So who have you been living with?”
“Well, for the last two years I’ve been in Europe,” he said, downing the entire tall glass of Black Balsam. “But before that, I lived with my dad, and with my grandparents when my dad had to travel for work.”
“You’re already two years out of school?” Hannah asked.
He nodded. “I’m nineteen in a couple of weeks,” he replied. “Graduated when I was seventeen.”
I had already turned nineteen. Did anyone stare at me like I was the bomb?
So he came to Europe when he was younger than we are, and two years later he was homeless. Was there a lesson there? Why didn’t he go to college? Why didn’t he go back to the States like normal people and get a job, even as a worm-digger? Why didn’t he enlist when he turned eighteen? If he had, we wouldn’t be sitting here appraising him now.
Hannah, having found a kindred spirit, a child of divorce, inched away from me and closer to him. I could tell she felt an instant affinity with him, even though at the Academy every fifth family is separated, and she’s not all elbows on the table, head in her hands with them.
Mason didn’t want to talk about divorce. He wanted to talk about the Rangers. “Is it hard to get into?” he asked. As if he planned to join them himself. He wanted to know how long the training would be, and what was required of new recruits.
“When I was sixteen,” Johnny told him, “there was a man living down the road from my grandparents who was a retired Ranger. Clemente. He was sixty, ancient, but still strong like a bull, and he trained all the kids in the neighborhood who were thinking about the Ranger program. He knew a lot of shit, pardon my language, ladies. He was phenomenal. If you passed his kickass neighborhood training school, you were one hundred percent ready for Benning. He was one tough motherf …” He trailed off, delicately. “The way he tortured us, you’d think he was getting paid for it. But he wasn’t. He did it because he was a sadist and he liked it. We had to swim five hundred yards in fifteen minutes. Run two miles in fifteen minutes in a hundred-degree heat while wearing a thick jacket and long jeans. He had us doing forty push-ups in two minutes. Kids dropped like flies. That was the idea. I almost did. But I stayed. I wanted to prove to him that I was tough too, that I could do it. He taught me how to fight, and how to fire a weapon—”
“You know how to fire a gun too?” Hannah said, nearly squealing.
I nearly groaned.
Johnny grinned. “I come from a long line of gunslingers,” he replied.
Chloe spoke. “Were you trying to prove something to Clemente, or to your dad?”
“Very good, Chloe Divine,” Johnny said with a smile.
I interrupted them. “Is there a difference between Rangers and Navy SEALs?” I asked. “Because I heard, and I could be wrong, that the SEALs are tougher.”
Staring at me for a moment, a puzzled Johnny said nothing. Then, his gaze clearing, he opened his mouth and laughed. “You’re right, Blake,” he said. “I agree the SEALs are badasses, but this is what I have to say about it. The Rangers have to do all the things the SEALs do, except we have to do it on only one meal a day, while the SEALs never stop stuffing their faces. So you tell me. Which is harder?”
Do you see why I hate him?
Mason
The dude the girls brought home is awesome. The thing that impresses me most is I don’t know how he could be a tour guide. He’s not from Latvia, wasn’t born in Latvia, doesn’t really speak Latvian, though he made quite a go of it to win over Varda. He’s got panache. But also—he knows his shit. The girls went to Liepaja to find a small boy and brought back a fully grown dude. Blake has his hackles up, but I don’t get why. I agree with Hannah, this is exactly what you’re supposed to do when you travel. Meet different people, go off the grid. I liked him immediately. The stuff he knew about Liepaja, I don’t even know how he knew it. He told us that in the Soviet era, Liepaja was not on the map. On any map. “Find an old map of Latvia, or Poland and vicinity, and you won’t find it on there. And yet it’s the single largest port on the Baltic Sea.” He repeated it in case we didn’t hear. “The single largest port on the Baltic Sea. The sea that contains Copenhagen, Leningrad, Kaliningrad, Helsinki, Stockholm, Tallinn. And little Liepaja is larger than all of them. And yet it wasn’t on the map. Imagine that.”
“Maybe it wasn’t that important,” said Hannah.
“Just the opposite,” Johnny said. “It was indispensable to both Hitler and Stalin. Whe
n it was in German hands during the war, it was Stalin’s main bombing target in the region. And it was the first city in the Baltics Hitler had occupied.” Johnny smiled. “Of course, Hitler being Hitler, the first thing he did was eliminate all of Liepaja’s Jews.”
“When you say all of them …”
“I mean all of them,” said Johnny. “There were seven thousand Jews in Liepaja before the start of the war, and when the Soviets ‘liberated’ it, on 9 May 1945, they counted thirty.”
“How do you know that?” Hannah exclaimed. Even she was impressed, and she knows nothing about history and cares even less.
That’s what I mean by obscure knowledge. Why would a kid from America, penniless, homeless, starving, traveling on the cheap, know something that esoteric and that specific, and yet so fascinating? Maybe that’s why Blake doesn’t like him. Because Blake is also full of odd bits of trivia. Just different kinds. He knows how to do a lot of stuff, and sometimes he knows things about bees, or fish, or even the best river for fly fishing in Idaho, which on balance is as crazy as Johnny’s knowledge that Liepaja was first invisible and then destroyed in the war. With only ruins of old forts remaining, he told us, the Soviets built a new concrete city on these, and kept it off the map until 1991.
“But why?” Blake demanded. “Why would they do that?”
Johnny continued eating. “They built underground nuclear-weapon warehouses,” he said, mouth full. “Sixteen nuclear submarines. They needed the port. Liepaja is virtually ice-free during the Arctic winter because of its relatively high altitude. The winter is mild, usually doesn’t get below twenty-six degrees Fahrenheit, minus two to three Celsius.” He stopped eating for a moment. “Man is mortal,” he said. “But mankind is immortal. And yet Liepaja is proof positive that the Soviets and the Americans managed to find a way to make mankind mortal, too. It’s all on display in Liepaja, the secret stores of the Soviet nuclear arsenal that was kept in the Karosta forts for forty years and hidden from the world.”
“How do you know all this?” Blake asked.
“About the temperature?”
“About nuclear weapons!”
Johnny shrugged. “I know a little bit of shit,” he said. “Useless, but vast.”
“Blake,” said Chloe, “it’s like you knowing that Taiwanese funeral processions usually include a stripper. You just know, right?”
Blake wasn’t in the least amused, but Johnny roared with laughter.
Later, he became fascinated that Chloe’s parents would know anything about the Liepaja orphanage. I could see poor Chloe didn’t know how to answer. She said that her father’s mother was originally from Latvia, was related to Varda, and her parents wanted to sponsor a child from Moody’s birth country.
Johnny listened, and then said, “But Varda is not related to your grandmother.” We all fell quiet. “Varda is related to her only by marriage. It’s Otto who is your family. Otto and your grandmother were cousins. Almost like siblings. Born and raised under the same roof for eighteen years before the war. They’re nearly the same age.”
How did he know this?!
Johnny shrugged. “Everyone, everywhere is dying to tell you things,” he said. “Dying to tell you everything. All you gotta do is listen.”
Carmen furrowed her brows at Chloe. “Chloe, I tell you this your first night here. Grandmother told you. You have it wrong, she said. Otto and Moody like brother and sister.”
So that odd fish of a man was Chloe’s only real link to her grandmother’s past! Unbelievable.
To change the subject, Johnny asked the girls why they hadn’t partaken of the white-sand Liepaja beaches. Before they could answer, Blake jumped in.
“What do we want with cold northern beaches when we’re headed to Barcelona?”
“Oh yeah, that’s right,” Johnny said, tutting into his food. “Hmm.”
“What?” Blake snapped.
“Nothing. It’ll be fine.”
“What will be fine?” Hannah asked. “Have you been to Barcelona?”
“I’ve been everywhere.”
“Of course you have,” Blake muttered. Poor bro. He had been priding himself on researching Barcelona and all the great things we could do there. Poor Chloe. She’d been dreaming of Barcelona half her life.
“Thing is,” Johnny continued, “you really don’t want to go there in August.”
“Why? We’re used to the heat.”
“It’s not the heat,” she said. “Most stores, markets, restaurants shut down in August. Everyone’s away on vacation. Oh, I’m sure you’ll find a few things open. They love the guiri in that city.”
Guiri were tourists that the locals could spot half a town away. Blake had told us about them. We apparently were not allowed to look like guiri. But clearly, coming to Barcelona in August was a blatant guiri move.
We had no choice, Hannah told Johnny. We couldn’t go earlier because we were working to save money for the trip, and we couldn’t go later because some of us are starting college.
“That’s right.” Johnny studied Chloe. “University of Maine, as I recall.”
Chloe, true to form, said nothing. Of course I said nothing. Blake said nothing because he was still seething about the guiri.
Johnny excused himself and left the room, and we were alone in the dining room.
“Are you sure we can’t cancel our tour guide and go with Johnny, Blakie?” Hannah said. “He owes us, so it’ll be free.”
“It won’t be free. And we’ve already paid the other guide. No. He’s on his way, and we’re on our way. Besides, I suspect he’s a con artist. He’ll lure us into some alley and rob us. Assault us.”
Chloe looked as if she was nodding in assent but then said, “This is not your story, Blake. This is real life. You can’t make up details about him just because they suit you.”
“How does getting robbed suit me? Explain that.”
Before Chloe could explain, Johnny returned. “Y’all sure lug a lot of stuff with you.”
“What’s it to you?” Blake said. I elbowed him in the ribs. He ignored me.
“Well, what it means to me,” Johnny said, “is I can’t find a place on the floor of the porch to perch. Maybe we can move your suitcases out for one night? Otherwise I’ll have to sleep on the floor with the girls.” He smiled. Blake inhaled sharply. “But more importantly,” Johnny went on, “it’ll mean something to the thieves who haunt the trains from here to Spain. If you take a sleeper car on one of your legs to Barcelona, I’d sleep on top of the suitcases if I were you. It won’t guarantee no robbery. But at least you might wake up as you’re being robbed.”
“And who’s going to rob us?” Blake wanted to know. “People who travel the trains, um, like yourself?”
Johnny laughed. He winked at the girls, and went out into the backyard, leaving the four of us stumped and wary, even me. We saw him through the porch, kneeling in the dirt talking to Otto. He talked to the old man for a long time. We were all crazy curious what they talked about. And in what language?
Before turning in, Johnny thanked Varda for the hospitality and the girls for inviting him. (“Inviting him?” Blake demanded. “I thought he invited himself.”) He shook our hands, and said he was going to be up real early and would probably not see us again. He said it was fun getting to know us a little bit. He wished us well on our travels. He told us to stay safe.
We slept poorly with him on the porch with us. He was an extremely restless sleeper. Blake had the couch, I was by his side in the long chair, and Johnny was on the floor. I heard him get up at least four or five times in the night and go out into the yard. Once, near blue dawn, I peered through the glass to see what he was doing. I think he must have been smoking by the shadowy rows of fat tomatoes. His head was down in his hands and his long narrow back was turned to me.
21
The Guider of Guiri, the Singer of Songs
Chloe
Gorgeous Livu Square, beautiful day. Street performers, crowds, humid
sunshine. Chloe didn’t want to do anything except breathe in the air and maybe have an ice cream near the red roofs and the sparkling blue walls.
But no.
Blake had booked Gregor.
Gregor turned out to be an uptight dick in maroon loafers, who majored in geology at some fancy university Chloe had never heard of. Geology and tourism, he told them. “Geotourism.” What an ass. She had been accepted into the best schools too, she wanted to tell him. The best of the best. Did she bore him with her resume?
“Oh yeah, he’s much better than Johnny would’ve been,” she whispered to Blake.
“That’s right. One bazillion points of light better.”
That was at ten in the morning. Blake changed his tune by noon. Gregor tortured them by never, and she meant never, stopping speaking. He led them on a walking tour that included that hideous example of Socialist Classicism, the Latvian Academy of Sciences built in Stalin’s pompous empire style. The four of them sounded an objection, said they didn’t want to go, but Gregor wouldn’t hear of it. “I have a plan, ladies and gentlemen, to show you everything important in Riga in the most sensible and effective way possible. The building is on our way. We simply must see it. It’s the heart of our city.” He convinced them it was for the best, sort of like a rectal probe. All poor Mason wanted was to see inside the black dome of St. Peter’s. “We will get to it,” said Gregor, adding, “if there’s time.”
“Oh, so for Stalin there’s time, but Jesus is a maybe?” Mason hissed.
“Shh.”
They followed Gregor around like slaves. He walked five steps ahead of them at all times and never ceased yammering. They bleated gently like lambs that they desired to partake of the Jewish ghetto. Gregor said no. He said it was completely destroyed in the war.
“Why does everyone keep referring to it as the war?” Hannah whispered to Chloe, doggedly keeping up behind Gregor. “There’ve been other wars, no?”
“No,” Gregor said, who overheard. “Maybe other wars, but they are all completely inconsequential.”
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