Paris sat with his back against the wall. He was smiling already, having heard the lock being opened. He knew it was me. He held out his hand. In it was my son’s baby tooth. We had elections, I told him. All night the soldiers have been passing through the mountains. We have been celebrating. The junta is gone. Our soldiers tell us that the northerners ran away across the far hills, back into their territory. They ran across the old border—like children in trouble.
Come, I said to him.
Paris leaned his weight against me and took tentative steps toward the cell door. At its threshold, he stopped.
There are no more guards, no more war. Come, I said to him again. You are free.
All across the village the women were waking, tired from the singing, drumming, and dancing that went on until the moon disappeared behind the mountain. Many of them no longer have husbands. Many just have children, or grandchildren. The soldiers were also awake. They were cleaning their rifles, packing up their equipment, preparing to descend the mountains. Last night, as the trucks and jeeps came and went, some men said to us that they intended to continue with the army. Others were enthusiastic about training with the new force of police being established by blind soldiers from foreign countries down in the capital. Still others said simply that they would put down guns altogether, go back to their villages, plant crops, or re-establish their businesses from a decade ago. Carrying on like nothing had transpired. Those men just shrugged, What else is a man supposed to do? And they were right in a way. Getting back to normal life has to start with at least a few people acting that way.
Some men knew where their wives or girlfriends were; others did not and feared the worst. But it had been a night of hope, not fear. We had won an aspect of the war; the past could return now.
Step by slow step, Paris and I emerged from the prison. The business of the village came to a stop as they saw me assisting a gaunt blind man with a long beard. Each step was agony for Paris. He shielded his eyes from the light and colours—I was not sure he could see properly. These steps were the first ones he had taken beyond the walls of his cell in many seasons. The children approached us first.
Mama Oenone, they asked, where did you find this blind old man?
And in our language, as clear as if he’d spoken it his entire life, he answered them: Dead in the ground.
* * *
Paris
MY DAUGHTER, THE FIRST DAYS of freedom were a dream. From isolation, and because my eyesight was so poor, I had seen so few faces in the past years. I had forgotten how interesting they were. I drew them close, one after another, and saw them smiling or frowning. I watched as they went about living. Putting food into their mouths, or bathing, or shaking their heads at this flavour or that smell. They petted dogs and cooed at babies. Oh, babies—the total innocence and helplessness of them as they fed at a mother’s breast. I held one in my arms, putting the foot in the palm of my hand, feeling its reflexive strength, the smooth vulnerability of its tendon.
Oenone stayed close beside me. Always with food, always asking me to move. Get up and walk, she would insist. And I knew she was right. To keep moving was the thing to do, but the onslaught of these new sensations, my fatigue, made it difficult. Still, she insisted and I gave in, climbing to my feet every few hours, eventually walking from one end of the village to the other.
For the first few days I was a curiosity. The children especially wanted to talk to me. They asked me how I knew some of their language. And I told them about the other prisoners in the jail who taught me words over the years. Then, after a while, with so much else that was new and undergoing change in the village, the interest in me moved on. Soldiers came and went. A few men who had once lived in the village returned and began to rebuild huts and buildings. Other men came and reunited with wives and children. Some stayed, opting for the shelter of this village as the country re-established itself. Others left for their ancestral lands and towns.
One man entered the village slowly. During the elections, he had escaped from a prison camp in the night and walked from the northern part of the country here. I heard his voice before I saw his face.
Doctor Paris. My brother! So we both live, Hector said, coming toward me. It was the ghost solider. We embraced for the first time. He was well and fit. Unlike me, he had been fed and had been made to work building roads and fences.
Where will you go now? I asked him.
I have no plans. I have no wife. My sister, my mother, where are they? Should I walk the country in search of them, another ghost on the road serving out a new sentence? That is not freedom, man. I do not believe it. I just wanted to come here, to see if I could find word of you. Once I’d done that, I suppose I was going to go to the town, or maybe to the capital. Catch some fish and sell them. No more politics though. Ah brother, he said, I don’t know who I am anymore.
Oenone put my brother Hector to work in the village. She ordered him about with the same affection that she did everyone. He was strong and intelligent. After some months Hector took a wife, a kind woman with two children and no husband to help her. They built a mud-walled house with a metal roof that my brother carried on his back through the mountains from the market in the town. But I am skipping ahead.
One of the soldiers had scissors. Oenone cut my hair short, and trimmed my beard. She picked the lice from my body. When I could walk unaided, after I’d begun to put on weight and could help with light work in the village, a community she was now the leader of and managed with a series of nods and waves of the hand, she came to me with a cloth draped over something.
What is it? I was sitting in the shade of a tree after a midday meal.
A present, she said. I asked Hector to get it. It is for you, from me.
I pulled back the cloth from her outstretched arms. It was an English language newspaper. Published in the capital only last week, she said. I pulled it to my face slowly and smelled the paper and ink. My eyes were closed. I kept them closed.
Do you read English? I asked her.
Only a little. Directions. Food. Numbers, she said.
I handed the newspaper back to her, and asked, What does the date say?
And she told me. And I nodded, first figuring the distance between the time on the newspaper from the café and now. Then I calculated my age.
You don’t want it, she asked.
I don’t think so, I said.
Later that evening Oenone came to me and took me by the hand. She led me along a winding path, through rock walls, and down and down until we came to a pool of water. In silence, she undressed me and then herself. Together we entered the spring water, step by step until we plunged in together no longer touching the bottom. I was swimming, the feeling of a miracle itself, strokes done by memory from childhood, to keep my head above the water. There was only starlight and I could see nothing but shadows and light, the reflected brightness of Oenone’s eyes and teeth, which I kept close as we became lovers on a smooth ledge, in that echoey chamber of rocks with the heavy air so needed by ferns and moss.
I had been held as a prisoner of war for no reason at all. My incarceration was precipitated by no act of my own, no crime. I was never used as ransom, never traded in exchange for other prisoners held by the other side. I was never rescued by my own government. In that pool with Oenone, clean and alive, I was overcome with gratitude. She was the first human in so long who had been moved to act selflessly, with my interests in mind. While I remained a man with the courage to reject faith, was I to be given no answers, no insight, nothing to explain my lot, except circumstance, chance, or misfortune? Then Oenone pulled my face to hers. The water upturned the night sky and she smiled broadly. Here was my answer to why, right before me.
* * *
Oenone
I LEFT THE VILLAGE ON a donkey ride into town where I’d heard blind doctors had a hospital tent and cured people. I did not tell Paris. I knew our m
ountain village was his home. I was to be his wife. Arrangements were being made for a celebration.
Paris had recovered, but there was a different sickness growing in him, something else. I could feel it. He must not become sick again. I made him eat the root of the tree that heals. But I also went to foreign doctors for their medicine too.
Their tents were white with strong ropes. They moved quickly and spoke in languages I did not understand. They began to examine me. No, I am not sick, I explained. It is my husband back in our village. Yes, I used the word husband early, to help along the seriousness. I spoke the name of what I believed was wrong with Paris, in English. They nodded and talked among themselves. They explained that I was to bring him for them to examine. They refused to give me medicine to take to him. I did not tell them who Paris was, that he would know what to do with the medicine.
It was up to me, to the ancient ways.
When I returned, Paris did not ask where I went for those two days, but instead he left for a short while to help a number of the women gather the fruit that was ripe on the trees in the next valley. They returned and we peeled and ate the fruit all evening, the juice running down the children’s faces through the dust on their cheeks.
Paris began to go with Hector to fish and hunt for crabs on the other side of the mountains on the coast. It is a long journey, several hours there and back, and it was heavy for him to share in carrying the baskets of crab up the mountain to our village. But he insisted on going, on sharing in the work with Hector. He was stronger now, but I could see in his eyes, feel on the surface of his skin, that the sickness was spreading deep within him.
On the night of the wedding, the youngest girls made chains of purple flowers and put them in my hair. Everyone sang and danced around the fire. Paris and I were seated beside one another under a tree, as is the custom. He knew more and more of our words by then and played with the children so they could teach new ones to him. He no longer wished for me to speak to him in English.
He asked Hector to find him a stack of clean paper and a writing pen in the town on his last trip there. My child, Paris began to write every evening. He holds the pages close to his face so he can see his way across the lines. At the beginning he seemed unsure of how to do it, to write words, but he pushed himself every night and page after page became filled with his words crossing them. He kept them in a neat pile in our house, in his room. He told me he was writing to someone, telling a long story so it was no longer trapped inside him.
It was the sickness that made him write. He still did not know of its presence. I grated the amber root and put it in his soup. He believed I was continuing to nurse him back to life from the prison cell. I made him suck the darkest leaves of the shade bush, the one with the white flowers in the spring. He wrote and wrote. We did not talk about it further.
* * *
Paris
MY DAUGHTER, LIFE IN THIS village moves in purposeful waves that I quickly become used to and understand. We collect water each day. We pick fruit, find plants, herbs, and roots in the mornings. Other days I trek with my brother down the mountain pathways to the coast and catch crabs on the rocks, throw a net out into the surf to catch feeding fish. We lie in wait at the water holes for thirsty wild boars or other animals to shoot.
Oenone and I are married.
Many in the village are doing this, stabilizing life for the children. The people treat me warmly. I am not strong, but I go with my brother or the other men fishing or hunting so we have items to sell in the town’s market.
I do not leave the village’s world. Aid workers are now established in the town. There are rations being flown in to ensure there is enough food in the regions outside the capital before the first harvest can be reaped. There is a field hospital, the very kind I once worked at.
The villagers dismantled the jail for materials. They left the main building standing and we used several of the locked cells to store grain or other supplies that are occasionally brought in by truck or jeep. Oenone and I manage the old jail for the village and guard the supplies. We charge a modest storage fee. We use the money to buy food and tools. We live in a hut adjoining the end of the jail. We are the former jail’s caretakers because, for many nights following my release, I was inconsolable. I became delirious and anxious. Finally, I did fall asleep. Oenone found me the next morning. I had wandered into the jail, back into my cell where I had crawled onto the floor, as I had done for so many years, and fell deeply asleep. I found I had to continue to sleep there. So my brother and I punched a hole in the outer wall and mudded in a doorway, and we built a hut against the jail wall. Oenone and I have lived there since. We sleep together in my cell. It is our bedroom.
Something new is wrong with me. I was gaining weight easily then it began to fall away. Lately I have had nausea in the evenings. I have a pain in my abdomen that comes and goes, and last night it radiated to my back. My stools are pale. I know she suspects there is a new sickness inside me. Her healing instincts are profound. We cannot face a new threat. We choose not talk about it. She wants me to live. She has work to do here, and she wants me by her side. Oenone went into the town alone. I know she saw the physicians there. Of course, even if they understood her, what prescription could they offer?
My daughter, why am I still here? Why do I not take Oenone to the town, contact the embassy, be found, saved and if not healed, at least tell my story, and briefly rejoin the world? I know this is cancer. I am far, far along. By the time I recognized it, paid attention to it with the last wisps of my medical memory, it was too late for choices. My body is echoing my father’s.
Why am I still here? The answer is simple and complex. Simple, in that I may finally do whatever I wish. Complex, in that she loves me with the force of a great shame. She understands I have given my life over to her and her country; and that her former husband was a traitor. She is a leader. She loves her country and these people. But she is shamed at the inhumanity of the war—that she is connected to people, especially one man, that would have perpetrated it, that she was unable to prevent it beginning or stop it after it had begun. I am impossibly drawn to her honour and devotion.
Are she and Helen so different? For all I know Helen is right back in the town, not a day away from here, saving lives. But no, I believe she is looking after you, my daughter. She has made the choice of motherhood; it is the only choice. I became a memory, a turning point in time. Does she think of me now? Maybe. Maybe not. In the end, if we are each able to find home in some way, a connection to place and country and another person who would die for you and for whom you would die, then that is more than can be hoped for from life.
I am simply Paris. I work as a caretaker of a building. I feed my family, and I love and am loved by a strong, beautiful woman. I often break bread with a brother. I survived a war. I belong here because I am accepted here. Simple. And complex. Crab. Pear fruit. Marriage. Oenone gives me her body as an apology. Weekly, a truck goes with our meat, or fruit, or wild harvest bound for the town’s market. In the night sky the outlines of clouds roam free over the mountains, but they do not send me to sleep. I need a room with no windows. I desire the certainty of solitude, the answers brought by captivity. The truck, it just comes and goes; I do not get on it.
Unless she can save me for a second time, we understand I am again choosing to die in my cell. I cannot explain my decision other than, as I reach the end of this writing, it is different than before. Oenone saved me, showed me life as I had never understood it, all so I might write it down, pass on to you the story of my life, your history.
My daughter, I often dreamed of Helen’s swollen belly floating in the sea, the wind pushing it like a sail. She runs aground on an island and takes you from inside herself, washing you in the sea, pulling you to her breast. I am not on the island, but I can always see the two of you there. You are safe.
Oenone is pregnant. As I continue to lose weight and stren
gth, hers seems to increase. This village has lost its middle from diseases, war, hunger, droughts, and floods. We are mostly old and children, the beginning and the end. The centre of the story was largely torn out. It continues this way unless war does not return, unless this child chooses to stay here and insists on building upon these new beginnings.
One day strong, young foreigners come walking through the middle of the village. Suddenly, there are four white people before me. I have no time to retreat, or perhaps hide. They are travelling, hiking the country on foot. That is all of their business. These mountains are so beautiful, they say. They talk about themselves. They do not ask me who I am, or why I am here. I say only I have been here a long time. From before the war? they ask. Yes, I say. But what this really means—doesn’t actually mean much of anything to them. So I offer them food at our hut. They want to know how to get to the coast, and ask can they camp there easily enough, or should they be worried about wild cats or panthers? They leave with smiles and easy laughter, which brings unexpected brightness to me.
The entire world has moved on from the war. Now foreign young people—with money for bribes and the stomach for adventure—can walk this country and be worried only about wild cats and poor infrastructure.
They leave a Lonely Planet book for me as a gift. It is about this county, my country, they are passing through. They no longer need it. They’ve seen it all, they say. Tentatively at first, then eagerly, I read it cover to cover and learn about my adopted home through my old eyes. It is all lies. Or else, it is the colourful, happy gaps around the truth. From ten years of civil war comes a single paragraph mentioning generals, coups d’état, governments that came and went. The village is not on the map, but the larger town is, and is presented with some photographs as “a must-see.” I read about the Colonial Hotel—it has the best pastries and coffee in the plains region. Plan to stay several nights. Take a hike through the nearby mountain foothills.
The Colonial Hotel Page 13