No Country: A Novel

by Kalyan Ray

  For me, the great unknown was the world of the dead where our mother, Gabriela, had departed when I was three and Lucia was only a few months old. Sometimes I think I remember Mamma clearly, but at other times I am not really sure. Nonna Rosa told me once that I resemble my Mamma. The next day, when I was certain no one was home, I draped Mamma’s shawl over my head and looked in the mirror. But I could only see myself. There were no pictures of her.

  During Easter week, Christmas, and other occasional holidays, I would plead with my father to be sent to my sister Daniela. Pasquale always accompanied me. We would wander around the raucous lanes of Napoli, but it was very hard to tear ourselves away from the harbour filled with sailors from so many different lands. From them we heard of many ports: Liverpool, Aden, Caracas, Bombay. I knew what both of us were thinking: as soon as we were old enough, we would get on a ship and return years later when some distant harbour wind touched me in that one restless spot within, tugging me home.

  • • •

  I WAS AWAY with Pasquale at Daniela’s place that winter of 1905 when our father, Gianni, died, four days after Christmas. My brother Michele arrived to take me home. Over dinner, he announced his decision, as the new head of our family, in exactly two sentences: I would be taken, not to our house in Boscotrecase, but to San Giuseppe; I was to begin an apprenticeship with his master-builder.

  “But I do not want to be a builder!” I burst out.

  Michele continued eating, picking out a fish bone or two. With a morsel of bread, he sopped up the last of the brodetto and, with his mouth full, said, “Tomorrow, have your things ready,” as if I had remained as mute as our Lucia.

  I, too, had made up my mind.

  • • •

  THE SHIP SAILED south from Napoli, with Pasquale and me on board. Capri sank from view as we sailed past Stromboli toward Stretto di Messina. The next evening, the lights of Reggio rose to our left and those of Messina to the right. We were kept constantly at work, helping the crew, learning about the million things to be done on board and belowdecks. A week later, we swaggered about in the port of Alexandria, where I bought a strand of garnets for Lucia and mailed it home. Next we sailed for Genoa, where on the first day of February1906 we found work on a ship that went to New Orleans, then on to Panama. We gave in to our wanderlust, deliberately choosing ships that sailed farthest away from Italy, to Recife and Rio de Janeiro, to Calcutta and Cape Town. Months slid by, and before we realized it, four years had passed.

  I had grown a fine black beard; Pasquale preferred to shave, but was attempting a moustache. I treasured a photograph of the two of us on shore leave in the pretty port town of Montevideo, a stone’s throw from Buenos Aires. We were leaning on a short Corinthian column, before the painted canvas backdrop of a villa. The painted sun shone above, a perfect circle with its shafts drawn in straight lines.

  But the real sun was hidden for days on the voyage after as the ship headed into the grimmest of storms a little north of the Caribbean islands. The waves rose and fell eighty feet, more. I remember seeing a wall of water, black and wavering, stand over the ship’s side, as if suspended. When it hit, I lost my foothold and was slammed into the metal side of the stairs to the hold. I reached out in the whirling darkness, gasping for breath. Hands—I never knew whose—pulled me into some nook of the shuddering ship. I was dizzy, choking with nausea, with a ringing in my ears when I tried to sit up. A misty rain surrounded the ship. The ocean was heaving with slow, momentous swells. So it went on for another day and night. When finally I could stagger around, I searched for Pasquale, hoarsely shouting his name again and again. The sun came up, a vivid smear on a sky of ground glass.

  They finally told me that two men had been swept overboard. One of them was Pasquale Centangeli.

  • • •

  I COULD NOT bear to talk to anyone. When the ship reached New York harbour, I slipped away. I wanted hard soil underfoot.

  In the city’s throng, I walked without purpose or direction. I sat an entire morning on the warm marble steps of the Customs House. The park nearby was full of playing children and their families. Each blanket on the grass was a hub of activity—the fathers leaning back to enjoy the sun, smoking a cigar or pipe, some even attempting a nap, the mothers keeping an eye on the children as they frolicked, calling out in a variety of languages. As I sauntered toward the Hudson, I heard an unmistakable snort of laughter, and stood facing my old schoolmate Giuseppe, larger now, his hair receding.

  “Nicolina,” he whooped, turning to his wife, “it is Frankie, the pirate!” His Italian was as vividly Neapolitan as ever. “Frankie, the runaway from our Boscotrecase, come back from the dead. I almost told him how close to the truth he was, but kept silent in the face of Giuseppe’s unbridled joy, as he insisted I join him, his small daughter, and Nicolina, whom I recognized from Boscotrecase.

  “I’ll be poor company,” I said, but Giuseppe swept me along, fairly singing with joy as we walked to his home, which was not far. As I entered, I saw a picture of Mount Vesuvius on the wall. It was a familiar print, sold everywhere in Napoli, common in homes from Portici to Salerno.

  “Will you be in New York long, Frankie, or off on another ship?” asked Giuseppe, handing me a glass of wine he had overfilled. No, I shook my head to all the queries, and lifted the glass. “To Boscotrecase,” I said.

  “Lucky Frankie,” he continued, slurping his wine and swishing it about in his mouth. “Vesuvius erupted and took Boscotrecase and everything around it. But you and Pasquale were off seeing the world. So where is he?”

  I stared at my glass of wine, but its garnet hue seemed to turn into something far darker. I sat down abruptly, spilling some of it. “Pasquale drowned,” I told Giuseppe as he stood shaking his head.

  “And Boscotrecase?” I asked him.

  “You don’t know!” he was incredulous.

  The moment was a teetering droplet of rain on a sill. Then I asked him, “Lucia? Michele? Everyone?”

  Yes, he nodded, yes.

  I got up and left, abandoning Giuseppe, the waiting dinner, my childhood in Boscotrecase. “Stay with us,” Giuseppe called after me as I stumbled downstairs. “Come back to us, Francesco, please,” shouted Giuseppe from the top of the stairs. I did not know where I was headed.

  I had wanted to discover the world. Frankie Talese, Traveler. I got what I wished for. Only the doors behind me had shut in ways I could not begin to comprehend.

  • • •

  THE TRAIN RACED upriver, its glint to the left of me, then made its way up the undulating landscape of green hills and wide valleys. When it stopped at a station, I got down on an impulse without caring to find out its name. To outdistance a burden whose phantom weight wearied me, I walked. Beyond a long meadow, I drank at a cistern which sat like an oblong cup under the sky. Dozing against a sagging fence, I watched a flock of wood doves flit from a bank of trees to sit at the edge of the same cistern to drink.

  I spoke to no one for two weeks, walking without purpose or direction, resting when I wanted, an invisible visitor to this great and strange land of the living. Someday all these people would be dead and others would live, doing everyday things on these very fields and streets. Nobody noticed me, nobody spoke to me, no one needed me.

  I woke under some maple trees to the first seep of dawn, and the sparrows and cardinals were stirring overhead. I lay next to a stone fence, watching for the sun. A squirrel came out twitching its tail and watching me. From a piece of bread I took from my satchel, I made a pellet, and flicked it. The creature picked it up, rolling it in its front paws for better purchase, and ate it avidly. From a crack farther down, now peeped a tiny snout from its rock hideout. The mother moved there, unafraid and in full sight of me, and nursed her baby in the growing light.

  I sat there wondering what such minutiae could mean in my life, until it dawned on me that. I was being tutored about the small things on the earth, having had my eyes on the desolate vistas of water for so long.


  • • •

  I STRODE PAST fields of corn and wheat. It was nearing harvest season. I walked until I was footsore, and in the late afternoon I lay down and slept under a flowering tree near a farmhouse until I woke to a tickle on top of my head and then my toe. I sat up with a start, still half asleep, thinking Pasquale was teasing me, and full of longing to talk to another human being. Two piglets which had been examining me, head and toe, trotted away as fast as their plump legs could carry them. I could not help laughing out aloud, sitting on the calm green earth below the broadleaf tree.

  Then I noticed a young woman, her sleeves rolled up, looking at me with curiosity. Her eyes were pale blue and her hair was unruly and flaxen.

  “Where did you come from?” she said, not at all put out by my presence.

  “Most recently,” I said, “Buenos Aires. But I was born near Naples.”

  I could see that I had not made any impression at all. “You know—Buenos Aires, in South America?” I repeated.

  “Sure you have!” she said, tossing her head. “If you are looking for work, you’re in luck. We could use extra hands for the milking.” She gestured at the barn with her head. She had picked up one of the piglets as if it were a pet.

  “I’m Bibi. What’s your name?”

  “Frankie,” I said in my best accent. I have finally arrived in America, I thought. “Frankie Talese.”

  I followed her across a meadow. The piglets pranced and circled about us as we walked down the sunlit slope. She gathered her mane of hair and, twisting it into a bun, headed toward a stone cottage. “Have you ever milked?” she asked over her shoulder.

  “In our village,” I confessed, “but it was our goat. Nonna made cheese.”

  “Nonna?”

  “Grandmother,” I explained.

  “My Grandpa Brendan lives with us. He’s old,” said Bibi, adding, “Our Belinda—she is our tetchiest cow—will kick you if you try to milk her as if she were a goat. And it would serve you right too,” she chortled. But before I could make a rejoinder, she had flung open the back door of the cottage and entered a large stone-flagged kitchen, cold and spartan. The only touch of color came from a few bottles of pickled beets and peppers in glass jars which caught the light at the window ledge. Above these, from the wall, depended heavy copper-lined pans. The dark bulge of a substantial stove dominated a corner. I was startled to see a woman, almost invisible in black, her hair tinged with grey, sitting still at the table near it, next to the unlit and scoured fireplace.

  She was unmistakably Bibi’s mother. She had been beautiful once, I thought, as I watched her sit, rigid and watchful. There was a cicatrice of severity that marked her forehead as she looked intently at her daughter, who had begun to speak excitedly. Disconcerted by the old woman’s expression, I had not paid attention to Bibi’s words.

  “From Buenos Aires!” she concluded breathlessly.

  “We need no hands,” the woman said sharply, not moving her eyes from my face.

  “I do not stay then, basta!” I retorted, stung by her manner. But Bibi was determined to ignore her mother. “Oh Frankie, you’re just afraid of Belinda!” she teased, and I could not help but laugh.

  “No,” broke in her mother, “we need no hands, as I told you.” She was standing now, her palm pressed hard against the table. I could see her work-reddened knuckles and feel the hostility in her scrubbed kitchen. I turned quickly to leave, but bumped into an old man who had just opened the door. His book fell to the floor, as did my rucksack, which lay open.

  “Grandpapa Brendan,” Bibi remonstrated, “we’re short of milking hands, you said, but Ma won’t hear of Frankie’s working here.” I bent to retrieve the old man’s book with a murmur of apology, but as I did so, he picked up my treasured photograph from the floor: Pasquale and I under that painted studio sun. He peered intently into it, and then he looked up at me, his eyes direct and guileless as a child’s.

  “He’s just come from South America. His name is Frankie. His folks are from Italy,” said Bibi, full of news, “like Amerigo Vespucci. And they have a goat.”

  “Is your friend here too?” asked the old man, nodding at the photograph.

  I shook my head, the loss suddenly touching me to the quick. “I lost Pasquale. On the high seas.”

  The old man studied my face, then reached out and touched my sleeve. “I too lost a friend,” he whispered as we walked into the sunshine. Bibi followed us. The grey-haired woman stayed back in her kitchen as if she were guarding it.

  “This picture,” murmured the old man.

  “It was taken in Montevideo,” I explained, “in a studio.”

  “I have no picture,” said Brendan, as if to himself.

  “We do need more milking hands,” broke in Bibi. “He can learn.” I looked at Bibi in the dazzling green countryside.

  “Tell us about Montevideo,” said Brendan. And I did, standing under the trees. I told them over many subsequent days about all my travels, of far places. Cádiz, Recife, Calcutta, Lisbon, Cartagena.

  I could make sense of all my aimless travels now, for they had brought me here to this place, to Bibi, so that I could tell her about them.

  Bibi

  Lake Champlain, Vermont

  1909

  I used to open my father’s books, turning their pages. One was a fat book bound in black; another was thinner, but neither had pictures. When I was nine, years ago, I was sitting during vacation under the slow summer sun with the fat volume, my eyes on the strange script like vertical figures, imagining what it would be like to be able to read them. I had momentarily closed my eyes, when I had the strange sensation that my father held the same page, and I was sitting next to him, my hand on the very surface he had just touched.

  I heard someone coming out, and turned quickly. It was Grandpa Brendan, who saw me with the book, and sat next to me. “I had asked Jakob to teach me Hebrew,” he said, “but we got only as far as the alphabet. See, Bibi,” he said, turning the pages to the first page, “there is a name written on it.”

  “That says Jakob Sztolberg, this writing?” I peered at the writing, its black coils seeping into gray on the old page.

  “No, dear,” he said, “it spells out Ephraim Sztolberg. Your grandfather. And this is the Hebrew Bible.”

  “Wait one moment, right there.” I rushed off, returning with the other book. “See, I can tell the writing on this book is different.”

  “Yes it is, Bibi. This is a book of poems by Solomon Ibn Gabirol. And the name inscribed on the first leaf here is Jakob Sztolberg.”

  I kissed his name. I felt Grandpapa Brendan’s palm on my hair.

  “Jakob came from very far away, Bibi,” he said. I nodded.

  “Very far away,” I repeated to myself.

  • • •

  EVERYBODY FELL UNDER Frankie’s spell, especially Grandpapa Brendan. His tales of far places shook me loose from the earth under my feet, and I wanted to become part of all his future stories. We had begun to go fishing at the lake, just the two of us, seldom catching anything, our kisses leading us deeper and deeper into our own secret wood. And I, romping Bibi of the northern farm who had heard dread talk of the first blood, marveled at those silly tales. After our lovemaking we would speak of the world we might travel, Travancore or Trinidad, Valparaiso or Bombay. Lying by our placid lakewater, I felt transported beyond the far seas.

  “Why don’t we,” he said, “first go to see Jedwabne, Lemberg, and Odessa from where your father sailed?” I held him close. No one else could have thought this.

  “Will you take me to Burlington first?”

  Frankie laughed. “I shall do better. Let me make arrangements to visit New York.”

  My mother watched me balefully when I returned, lips bruised with kisses, my aching body sated. I knew that battle lines were being drawn. Before she could open fire, I took the wind out of her sails by announcing that I was going to New York City for a visit. She was so furious that, at a loss for words, she sat
rigid at the kitchen table, clutching her hands together. I wanted no dinner that night.

  • • •

  THE TRAIN WAS a swift planet, clacking and whooshing through the black night, rocking me. I dozed for a while and sat up in that somber hour when light cracks the day open, and the light turns pale as the underwing of a predatory owl, and through the window I saw the sky, still and hard as a forgotten bowl of milk left outside on a frozen morning. It was already the time when the dairy milk would be collected, and the farm astir within the barns. I laid my head on Frankie’s sleeping shoulder, burrowing my face into the curve of his neck, breathing him in, and fell momentarily asleep, a bird with its head in its feathers, on a branch that moved with the urge of the wind.

  • • •

  WHEN I WOKE in the tumult and came out clutching Frankie’s hand, dry-mouthed and wide-eyed, the ebbing crowd washed us through the channels of the platform into a vast hall. Above the marble floor on which the people surged, the roof was a sky of lights, and a huge clock ruled. Echoes moved round and round as in a vast milk churn.

  I sensed the pulsing city all about me as we emerged on the street. I glanced back at the looming marble statues above the gateway. The gas streetlamps were still lit though it was light. New York, New York, I whispered, watching the welter of people and horse-drawn cabs. Careful of the steamy dung on the streets, we walked east, to the river. Prows of moored ships leant over the riverside road that ran along the length of this island. We could see sailors on deck, hear their occasional shouts, the creak and clatter of numerous ropes and tools. A few gulls flapped overhead, and the sun bounced off the water from the east across the sparkling loop of a great bridge in the distance as wagons inclined over its arched surface to another island.

  I struggled to keep my balance as I walked with my head tilted up, staring at the great heights of the buildings, their ornamented corniches and water towers that stood like huts on stilts. Cars coughed by, bumbling one after another, like gaggles of geese past newspaper vendors, chestnut sellers, peddlers with cigarettes and candy. We walked on until the streets got narrower, the houses huddled together. Men sat on the stoops and boys played stickball or ran up and down the block. Frankie led me by the hand to a corner of a leafy park at whose center stood a white arch. Paved paths merged upon it, and people were walking about, and children ran here and there. We sat down on one of the many benches, footsore but happy, gazing all around at the imposing buildings.