The Compass

by Tammy Kling

  “The adolescent brain is wired differently. The prefrontal cortex takes time to develop fully, and that’s the area that governs impulses and consequence. Sometimes there are mix ups.”

  I still couldn’t seem to get my point across, and it frustrated me.

  “And you sell drugs for that?” he asked.

  I shrugged, not knowing what else to say that wouldn’t just make it worse.

  Solomon stood in the center of the garden and leaned on the tall wooden handle of his plow, waiting for me to continue. When I didn’t, he changed the subject.

  “You asked me why I call Victorita ‘Mrs. B.,’” he said. “You see, adults are all judged by your professions, so I have nicknames for everyone. The world defines people by their work, no? You go somewhere as a man, yet people aren’t interested in the man. They ask first, ‘what do you do?’ As if what you do matters to what you are.”

  “True,” I agreed.

  “God sees people as what they are inside, not for what they do. So I have nicknames for people that show the feelings they represent. It’s how I see them.”

  “So what does the ‘B’ stand for?”

  “She’s B for bitterness. She has a lifetime of bitterness from years of hanging onto the things people have done to her. And she worries about things that have never even happened.”

  I stared at the boy curiously.

  “Solomon, are you really only ten years old?” I asked after a moment. He seemed much older, like an eighty-year-old in a ten-year-old body. He was an old soul.

  “I do not know,” he said frankly. “My mother came here from Kenya, and she died in the year she gave birth to me.”

  “Who did you live with after that?”

  “My mother worked as a housekeeper for a family, and they kept me until I was six. I left then and lived on the street with a group of others.”

  “At six?”

  “There are many children who survive on the street,” he said.

  “And then you came here to live with Victorita and Cornell?”

  Solomon nodded. “I work, and they let me live here.”

  I looked down at the dirt, which was roughly the color of Solomon’s skin.

  “Why do you call Victorita’s husband ‘Mr. A.’?” I asked.

  “The ‘A’ is for the anger he has inside.”

  A small worm burrowed in the dirt beside me.

  “So who are you then?” I asked.

  Solomon’s eyes lit up. “I am joy,” the boy said.

  I laughed. “You’re joy? But you’re a beggar! You steal for a living!”

  “Ah, but I am a joyful stealer! There you go, defining me for my job. No, I am a joyful stealer!”

  We sat for a while, watching the horizon where the sun began to descend over the mountains.

  “Then who am I?” I asked.

  The boy peered at me, and it seemed as if he looked deep into my soul with the eyes of an ancient teacher.

  “You have only been here for seven days,” he said, “But your journey is a lot like that of any other man who has been broken by sorrow. A monk, or perhaps a mountain climber facing a difficult ascent that threatens his life. You are like Jesus, who went to the mountain alone after the death of his friend, John the Baptist.”

  I turned away, and my heart opened up in that moment, as if I could feel it break.

  “You,” the boy said, “are sorrow.”

  Chapter 8

  ADVENTURE

  In the morning Solomon was at his garden again. I walked down with a cup of coffee from Mrs. B.’s kitchen and watched him for a while. He was a measure of simplicity—as if simplicity had a face.

  “If your seed falls on the path, the birds will eat it,” he explained in all seriousness. “If your seed falls on the rocks, it will not grow. If your seed falls on good soil, it produces a crop. It will only grow in good soil.”

  We talked there for an hour or so before I walked to the café. Along the way, I had time to contemplate him and was surprised at the way I had moved outside of myself and my own turmoil. It was an awareness, more than an awakening.

  I ducked into a small shop that served as half butcher, half hardware store and paid 25 ron for a small hand trowel with a red rubber handle. It was a newer, more modern kind like they had in the United States, and I knew he’d love it.

  “You’re an interesting boy,” I told him when I returned. I handed him the trowel, a croissant roll, and a bottle of water. “How did your mother get up here?”

  Solomon removed the gifts from the brown paper bag and smiled broadly.

  “Thank you Mr. America!”

  He dug the trowel into the dirt immediately and set the food and water aside.

  “My mother worked for a wealthy Italian family as their housekeeper in Kenya,” he said while he worked, “and when they moved here, she moved with them, and then she fell in love.”

  “Your father is Romanian?”

  “I think so. In truth, I do not know.”

  I wondered how he could personify such joy without knowing where he’d come from. Like a tree with shallow roots reaching into sand, he’d be forever wobbling, wondering. The garden seemed like a metaphor for his life. Did he work in it to feel connected to the earth?

  I thought of Pete, then, who had not known either his mother or his father but had now come full circle. He had said he was returning in three days, but many more had passed. I imagined him traveling the countryside and finding an abandoned vineyard or villa he’d decided to buy and renovate, like Under the Tuscan Sun. I envisioned him sitting in a sidewalk café, sipping something, chatting up strangers about the ways of the world.

  “Tell me your story,” the boy said. We stood in the center of the courtyard, surrounded by tall masonry walls painted white. A woman hung sheets and thin towels on a line stretched across a balcony and watched us.

  “My story?” I asked.

  The boy stood and stared.

  “You are locked up, like a vault. That is not good. Tell me your story.”

  “I don’t have a story. Forget about it and explain something for me. How is your English so good?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “We all know how to read in this country,” he replied. “English is a primary language in the schools. Most of the world knows your language, so it is only you Americans who do not feel the need to understand the other languages of the world.”

  Mrs. B. passed by on the path and barely nodded at us, and Solomon and I shared a smile. Sure enough, I thought, I’d cure her bitterness.

  “Buna!” I shouted joyfully, the greeting for hello. “Buna!” I said again, this time louder.

  Mrs. B. continued on without even a glance in my direction.

  Solomon laughed out loud, until he was holding his stomach.

  “Oh, Mr. America. Nice try.”

  I shrugged and broke out laughing myself. Solomon and I stayed there for the longest time.

  “We are all teachers,” he said finally, “In one way or another. Now the man came to Jesus and said, ‘Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?’”

  “You talk in parables,” I observed.

  “In that verse, the man asked about eternity. Don’t we all wonder about the meaning of life? Your destiny is like this garden, and you must water, weed, and repeat.”

  Later that night I lay in bed and thought about the words Solomon had spoken.

  Like the other people I had met recently, he had a mystical quality about him, and I couldn’t help but wonder about the meaning of it all. In all my time in suburbia, I had never encountered such magical people. Yet here, on this journey, there was magic all around me, in every word spoken.

  Surely back home there had been people with wisdom bottled up inside of them, yet it seemed as if everyone had been too busy working and striving to talk about anything philosophical.

  Or could it be that I was too busy striving myself to hear it?

  I pondered Peter’s concept of
angels, and how each person I met along my journey had seemed to know things about me before I even knew them myself. Pete had known that I’d be at the cabin for five days, and he’d been right. His dream about the rainbow on the airplane seemed to be a foreshadowing of the future.

  Marilyn, the photographer, had said a few things that no one else could have possibly known.

  And then there was Solomon, who seemed like the oldest of old souls. I didn’t know how to process it all, but I knew for certain that there was something happening here, something beyond the simple things I could see with my eyes.

  I heard a noise outside my room and I got out of bed to find a slip of paper Solomon had slid under the door.

  1. zero - zero

  2. unu - one

  3. doi - two

  4. trei - three

  5. patru - four

  6. cinci - five

  7. flase - six

  8. flapte - seven

  9. opt - eight

  10. noua - nine

  11. zece - ten

  I looked at the list of numbers and said them out loud. Getting back into bed, I repeated them until I fell asleep.

  In the morning I awoke with the numbers in my head, smiling at the thought of my littlest teacher. I would make an attempt to learn his language.

  Unu, doi, trei, patru . . .

  When my feet hit the wood floor at seven in the morning, I was transfixed, stuck in the feeling of déjà vu. It was the way the wood floors felt cold and splintered beneath my feet in my old house the day I had slid out of bed alone for the last time.

  I froze there in that tiny room in Romania, locked up at the memory of my old life. I had come to escape, but in a flash it was all back. Lacy and Boo. The text message. Anger, bitterness, grief. The stuffed bear, the cars in a tangle of metal.

  I glanced out the window again to see the rain falling, spattering the earth and flooding Solomon’s garden. He was out in it, frantically moving the soil, digging small narrow trenches to hold the water away from his plants. The rain pelted his dark limbs and it seemed for nothing, but he ignored it and worked anyway.

  I ran down and tried to help him, following his lead, using my hands in the dirt. We built a long trench on the outside of the greenery, but, in the end, the hard rain washed his garden away.

  He had been growing tomatoes because he’d heard somewhere that his father was a tomato farmer.

  Late into the evening we sat in the dirt in what was left of the garden, the mud pooling around us. We were both covered in it, but we didn’t care. I saw tears in Solomon’s eyes, and my heart felt heavy for him, though his words offered no hint of sadness.

  “You have to be willing to let go,” he said when I offered my condolences. “There’s freedom in the brokenness.”

  “But the garden was your baby, Solomon,” I protested. “I know it was everything to you.”

  The boy looked up, into the mountains.

  He closed his eyes.

  “I will have another garden one day.”

  I went to bed that night and tossed and turned due to the sadness of it all: Pete, Marilyn, Solomon, Lacy, and Boo. Each one was a shard of glass entering my soul, a part of me but not.

  A whisper.

  I considered my future then. I lay there on the small pillow and thought about my next journey, wondering where it would take me. I had given up on Pete and the hope that he’d come to Brasov. Something had kept him in Italy, and I thought perhaps it was his family. I hoped so, for his sake. Maybe he’d inherited a small house he needed to restore. Maybe he’d met long lost cousins he wanted to reconnect with.

  In the days that passed, I spent as much time with Solomon as I could, taking long walks up high into the mountains, surrounded by the tallest trees I’d ever seen. It had been three weeks since I had arrived, the day I found Solomon sitting in the dirt where the garden used to be.

  I told him I had made a decision. He spoke before I could tell him what it was.

  “You’re leaving, Mr. America?”

  “Yes, how did you know?”

  “You Americans have a saying,” he replied. “All good things must come to an end.”

  I nodded softly. A knot formed in my stomach like a piece of Play-Doh.

  “It is not true,” he said. “Nothing ends. Even in death, we do not end.”

  I explained that I felt it was time for me to leave although I admitted I had no idea where I was headed. He considered my plan to drive to the airport and pick a destination and a plane. There was an old globe in Victorita’s parlor. I had looked at it and decided to head to Norway or Holland, two places I’d never been.

  “Good,” he said. And then, “Remember that there’s danger in a divided heart.”

  “My heart is not divided,” I answered.

  “Yes,” he said, “it is. Half of it wants new life, and half of it wants to shrivel up and die.”

  I looked at him.

  “You’re just a kid.”

  “It is time to water the garden.”

  “What does that mean?”

  The boy smiled. He said nothing and walked away. I knew without words that he meant it was time for me to go, and time for me to think about getting unstuck, time to stop the escape.

  But where would I venture to? The journey was far from over, and I couldn’t fathom the thought of going back. Back to the States where I’d be nothing more than Mrs. B., filled with bitterness, or Mr. A., a ball of anger.

  We traded addresses, and I told him I’d fly him to my country anytime he wanted to come.

  “I’ll see you one day for sure,” he said. “And on that day you will no longer be S for sorrow. I will have to think of a new name.”

  “Solomon, you’re a piece of work.”

  He looked at me curiously, the phrase lost in translation.

  The goodbyes with Victorita and Cornell were brief but pleasant. To my surprise, Victorita packed me lunch in a paper bag. There was a muffin wrapped in foil, a bottle of Coca-Cola, and a hard-boiled egg.

  The goodbye with Solomon was harder. His face was drawn tight as he took my backpack and insisted on carrying it to the waiting car. He climbed in behind me and said he was making the journey to the airport along with me and would head back to Brasov alone.

  “Solomon you can’t do that,” I said, “It’s too far.”

  “I do it all the time,” he said.

  And then I remembered who he was. A street-smart adult in a child’s body, who had spent many days in the center of Brasov and Bucharest conning money out of tourists.

  We rode silently, and Solomon never cracked a smile. We barely spoke, the air between us thick. Eventually I reached over and put my arm around the boy. His shoulders slumped into me, and he caved into my chest, sobbing.

  I was frozen by his emotion.

  At the airport we held each other for a long time, and when I let go, he was smiling again. I hoisted the backpack over my shoulder, walked inside, and found the first ticket counter I saw—Alitalia.

  “How much is a flight to Amsterdam?” I asked the ticket agent.

  “Four hundred fifty-six U.S. dollars,” she said.

  I gave her my only credit card and held my breath.

  Chapter 9

  HOLLAND

  Amsterdam hit me like a moving train. The airport was thick with human traffic whizzing in all directions, and I decided to avoid the tourists and get out and away from the city as fast as I could.

  I rented a car and asked for a map from the car rental agency. The agent outlined the journey to Amersfoort, a small village that dated back to the 17th century. It was a town I’d heard about from my mother, who had traveled there decades earlier on a university exchange program. My brother and I had joked that mom had left an old boyfriend in Holland because she had such fond memories of the tiny town she had lived in for a short time when she was just nineteen.

  Amersfoort was situated at the junction of the A1 and A28 motorways. The town was located almost e
xactly in the center of Holland, near the old town of Utrecht. I clutched the map and keys and slid inside a vehicle smaller than I’d ever been in before, prepared to drive on the left, but surprised to be driving on the right. I made it safely out of the airport through a spider web of canals and waterways as I wound away from the sultry city toward the serene countryside. Flowers blossomed everywhere alongside the road, and the one thing I noticed was an abundance of bicycle traffic, which brought me back to my riding days in college, traversing every inch of the California highways.