When spring comes, we ask Abdelmalik to teach us the art of fighting. He agrees, and so we find ourselves in the courtyard bare-chested, dancing from one foot to the other. With fists raised to face level—whoosh!—we punch the air. We bend down to avoid the counterattack and thwack! A kick! Our hands smash jaws, our thin legs cut and whip; we are dancing with Abdelmalik.
All of a sudden creepy Sergei appears in the courtyard. He’s holding not his razor but his old pair of boxing gloves. He comes near Abdelmalik.
“You stink!” he provokes him.
“Sorry,” the other says.
“Wimp!” Sergei shouts. “What did they teach you in jail?”
Sergei puts his gloves on. He shakes a little because he drinks too much, but he’s scary anyway.
“So? What did they teach you? Come on! Show me!”
Abdelmalik turns around to give us a look of apology. Bam! Sergei takes advantage of this and sends him a right hook to the nose! A murmur of fear and excitement ripples through our group.
Emil is the first one to react. “Defend yourself, Abdelmalik!” he shouts.
Right then Abdelmalik becomes our champion. Thirty voices chant his name and echo against the Complex’s walls. Soon inquisitive faces appear at the windows. I notice Gloria’s in our second-floor window. She frowns.
The fight begins.
Galvanized, Abdelmalik stretches his muscles. Our attention is riveted on his strength and his insolent youth. He dodges, he jumps, he lets blows fly in Sergei’s face, and the drunk loses his balance several times, but without falling. The old man takes the blows and finds his legs again. Abdelmalik’s eyebrow is split. A veil of blood comes down over his left eye.
“Watch out!” Emil shouts at him hoarsely. “Stay on your guard! Bend down! Lay into him!”
Sergei’s good eye burns with hatred. He spits on the ground, and the deep rancor he’s bottled up against the Armenian who nearly killed him years ago floods out now.
“I’m going to pound you to a pulp, you African scumbag,” he says, boiling with rage.
Insults start to fly in the crowd.
“Straighten his nose, so he won’t be as ugly!” Emil yells to our hero. “Go ahead, hit him!”
Abdelmalik pounds on Sergei, following the advice. With three well-landed blows he sends the old man down and two of his teeth fly away. A last blow and creepy Sergei collapses on the wet cobblestones, his body broken.
A silence as dense as a cloud of fog hangs over the courtyard. Abdelmalik stands up, proud and magnificent, ready to fight some more. But it’s over. The drunk crawls toward the canopy. He drools, he groans in shame.
That very evening rumor spreads that Sergei is gone, that he packed his belongings and that we won’t ever see him again.
Gloria shakes her head. “Good Lord, I don’t like this,” she says. “Not at all.”
I notice that she looks at our gear on the shelf.
A few days later Emil and Baksa come to get me, and we go to the garbage shed where Abdelmalik lives. We pinch our noses because it stinks so much.
We knock on the door. No response. I turn the knob. The door opens, letting out a flow of pestilence that makes us want to throw up.
Old Max appears. “It smells like a slaughterhouse,” he says. “Move away!”
We stay behind him as he enters the shed.
“It’s darker in here than in a chicken’s backside!” he grumbles. “Wait a second.”
Old Max finds the light switch and turns it on. We see Abdelmalik’s body propped up against the wall. His throat has been slit. With a razor.
chapter seven
IT’S winter again and I am eight years old. Since Abdelmalik’s death everyone is scared that Sergei will come back or denounce us to the militia. Miss Talia no longer gives us singing lessons, and Mrs. Hanska chased us from her apartment. She says that we should stay as we are and not try to know too much.
Old Max is still willing to tell us about the different cuts of beef—flank, skirt, rib, loin, sirloin, round—but we’re so hungry that his words are like torture.
We go back to our games in the staircase. But I can tell that Tasmin, Rebeka, and Faïna don’t feel like playing anymore. They would rather whisper together as they take turns brushing their hair, and draping themselves in pieces of material found here and there. They don’t believe our stories of ships lost at sea anymore. Emil, who is smarter than me, nudges and points toward their growing breasts.
“Do you see?” he says in a voice I don’t recognize.
I go sulking back to our small room. I lie down on my mattress and Gloria asks me what’s wrong.
“I’ve caught a despair,” I say.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk!”
Gloria comes near me and inspects me from head to toe. She pulls my toes apart, rubs my tummy, scratches and tickles me gently. I end up bursting with laughter.
“If you want my advice, Monsieur Blaise, you’re not sick!” she declares. “No despair has gotten hold of you.”
I catch my breath and tell her that she’s wrong. Ever since Abdelmalik’s death everything has changed. Without the university I feel like I have an empty stomach in place of a mind.
“That’s how it is with fear,” Gloria explains. “Every person for themselves. But we’ll leave soon. And over there it’ll be better, you’ll see.”
“Where is over there?”
Gloria makes a vague gesture with her hand.
I think of Vassili’s large mustache and snapping suspenders, of the pear and apricot trees, of the railroad track, of Zemzem, and of Gloria Bohème’s five brothers. I think of Jeanne Fortune and of the French Republic. I feel torn between several wishes and I am unable to make a choice.
The water simmers in the samovar.
“Why are we at war?” I ask.
Gloria sighs. “To understand such a complicated thing, I would have to explain about the Caucasus,” she says.
“And you can’t?”
“No. Nobody knows how to explain about the Caucasus.”
I take my green atlas. “When is the war going to end?” I press her.
“When the people are exhausted, I guess. When there are no fighters left. But it could go on for a long time because there are many of us. Children are born every day, and they grow up to become soldiers.”
“Will I be a soldier?”
Gloria bolts up. “Good Lord, surely not! This war has nothing to do with the French, you know that.”
I walk around our room in circles and rub my arms to keep warm.
“Nobody knows that I’m French, right?” I think out loud. “People think that I’m Russian and that my name is Koumaïl. I don’t even have my mother’s honey-colored hair.”
“And yet, you look like her.”
“Really?”
Gloria is positive about that. When she takes a close look at me, when she pushes aside some of my darker hair, she says she sees pale highlights. Honey highlights.
She hands me a cup of tea. We’ve been without sugar for a few weeks now, and my stomach is like a wineskin filled with sour water.
“In fact, you look like your father, too,” Gloria adds.
I shake my head. “How would you know, since you’ve never seen him?” I ask.
“All kids look like their father, Monsieur Blaise. It’s the law of genetics,” she says.
I don’t know what genetics is, so I keep quiet. There are so many mysteries surrounding my past that I would rather think about the future. I daydream in front of page 16 of my atlas: Paris, Nice, Lyon, the Atlantic Ocean, and Mont Blanc.
Worried, I suddenly ask, “If I go back to France one day, you’ll come with me, right?”
“I’ll go with you as far as I can, Koumaïl,” Gloria answers in a muffled voice.
chapter eight
THAT winter I am granted the right to leave the Complex with Gloria. Until now it was out of the question. When grown-ups have work outside, the youngest have to stay protected insid
e. It’s the rule. But I cry so hard that Gloria finally gives in.
It’s not even daybreak and hail is falling. We dress, layering our clothes on top of us to brave the cold. Emil and Baksa watch me go, feeling jealous, which makes me proud.
We cross streets where drafts whistle, and we go through some dark and muddy lots. We walk along the walls of a factory, behind which chimneys appear. I hold tight to Gloria’s hand. This part of the city seems sad and oppressive. The few passersby we meet walk fast, their heads down.
Finally we reach a place with crisscrossing railroad tracks, and Gloria explains to me that we are going to take the streetcar.
When we board, she pushes me to the rear and follows me, out of breath. Her weight hampers her; I snuggle against her reassuring roundness. We’re compressed in the middle of a wet crowd; unfamiliar faces, tired and mute, shake around us in rhythm with the chaos. I think of the train I was on with my mother when it derailed.
Gloria and I get off at the end of the line, in a neighborhood totally different from ours, with large boulevards, stores, sidewalk vendors, and advertising posters on top of buildings. I look around as Gloria drags me at a quick pace toward the entrance of the largest store. I manage to read the sign: Kopeckochka.
“Is this where you work?” I ask.
Gloria smiles at me. “Here and there,” she says.
Working at Kopeckochka means sitting in the entryway, close to the sliding door, and putting your hand out toward the customers who go in and out with their shopping bags. Hot and cold air alternate with the opening and closing of the door. I cling to Gloria and try to guess which person will stop to give us a coin. Most people go by without seeing us, as if we didn’t exist. Sometimes a purse opens and someone bends down.
“Thank you,” Gloria says. “God bless you.”
I look at her, perplexed. Usually when Gloria talks about God, it’s to swear or to say that he doesn’t exist. If he did, she says, he would have brought order to the Caucasus a long time ago. So is Gloria lying? I wonder.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk! I never lie, Monsieur Blaise. I may embellish things a little from time to time, that’s all.” She strokes my hair. “There’s nothing wrong with making up stories to make life more bearable.”
The door opens and closes. People go in and out. After a while I doze off on Gloria’s knees. I don’t feel the heat or the cold anymore. I just recognize Gloria’s familiar scent of tea and laundry, a scent that I would recognize anywhere.
Gloria shakes me awake when the day draws to a close. I stretch and rub my eyes. I don’t remember where I am. Gloria shows me the coins she collected.
“Come,” she says. “It’s our turn to shop.”
We search between the shelves of Kopeckochka. Flour, tea, sugar, dark rice. When we’re done, all the coins we earned during the day disappear into the store cash register, except for one.
“Here, Monsieur Blaise,” Gloria whispers. “This one’s for you.”
As we leave Kopeckochka, I notice that other people are sitting in the entryway, extending their hands in the draft. I come near a man who looks like Abdelmalik. He’s shivering and has a dog on a leash. I give him my coin.
Before we take the streetcar back, Gloria promises me a surprise. We drag our bags along small streets that run parallel to the boulevard. The wind freezes my fingers and splits my lips. Like wreaths of smoke, food smells escape from basement windows and excite our nostrils. I am so hungry that I feel dizzy.
Gloria points to a large metal bin that sits against a wall at the back of a Turkish restaurant.
“I’m too fat to climb, but you can take a look, Koumaïl,” she says.
I put my bag on the ground and jump up to grab the edge of the bin.
“Look on top!” Gloria advises me. “Take your pick!”
I can’t believe what I see in the bin! I jump down with a large piece of meat—flank steak, I think—and pastries dripping with honey, which we put in a cardboard box that we happen to find.
“They’re crazy to throw all this away!” I say, my mouth watering.
Gloria winks at me. “The cook in the restaurant is a friend of mine,” she tells me. “We have a deal. You don’t believe I’d just let you dig through any old garbage!”
In the evening I ask Emil and Baksa to meet me in the staircase. We smear our faces with honey without saying a word. It’s total bliss.
Emil sighs. “Next time ask your friend to leave you some loukoums,” he says. “I love loukoums.”
I promise him that I will, and for a while we dream about incredible desserts overflowing with cream and stuffed with chocolate. It’s one of the best moments of my life, to be seated in the staircase, my fingers all sticky, and my friends smiling from ear to ear; a moment when we forget about the war and the worries that come with it.
That night, as I sleep like a sated bear, Gloria pulls me out of the blankets.
Her face is deathly pale. In the courtyard someone is ringing the bell like crazy.
chapter nine
THE chair! The gear! Our stuff! Quick!
The Complex shakes and echoes with strange sounds. I hear bings and bongs on the courtyard pavement. In a panic, our neighbors start throwing their belongings out the windows. People are running toward the wobbly stairs. But nobody shouts, nobody cries.
Gloria picks up the khaki canvas bag with the samovar, which sticks out, and we run toward the exit of the U, hand in hand, our hearts drumming in our chests.
It’s dark. We knock into other people without recognizing anyone, just like cows entering the slaughterhouse where Old Max lost three of his fingers. I can just make out Old Max, Kouzma, Jalal, and Nasir, our lookout team. They’re armed with shovels and hammers, and they protect our escape by barring the street. I can hear noise farther away, along with shouts and the thumping of boots.
“The militia is making a sweep of the area!” someone whispers.
In an instant the Complex is empty. Like a disorderly stream, we flee toward the shore of the Psezkaya River. Gloria is crushing my fingers. She moves her stout body as fast as she can, while I try to make myself light, as if I hardly exist.
I don’t see Emil or Baksa or Tasmin or Rebeka.
When we reach the river, there is a bridge. Blocks of floating ice reflect the moonlight. We join other fugitives who are loaded down with boxes, wheelbarrows, old mattresses, and we go across.
“You’ll see how beautiful it is on the other side,” Gloria whispers to me. “We’re free, Koumaïl, and the world is so big!”
I hang on to her and think that Vassili was right to call her Gloria Bohème, because no militia, no river, no amount of fear can stop someone like Gloria. In my opinion, I was very lucky she found me the day of the Terrible Accident.
After we’ve been walking for several hours, the dawn reveals a barren countryside. I ask Gloria whether we’ll go back to the Complex. She says no.
“Not even to Kopeckochka?”
“There are better stores in other places,” she assures me.
“What about your friend at the Turkish restaurant? Isn’t he going to worry if we don’t pick up what he leaves for us in the bin?”
“He’ll just give it to someone else.”
I look around me. The small valleys powdered with frost, the thick pine trees, the road that disappears in the distance. The fugitives have all dispersed. I can see only a few tired silhouettes and a family that follows a cart. I am cold and hungry, as usual.
I would like to know why the militia is after us, why we don’t have the right to stay in the same place a long time. I often ask Gloria about it, but her only answer is that the world is full of mysteries, take it or leave it. The only thing that comforts me is knowing that one day I will go to France. Over there, Gloria told me, there is no war.
“Is everybody rich in France?” I ask.
Gloria’s face is red under her kerchief. When she talks, a cloud comes out of her mouth.
“What do you call ‘r
ich,’ Koumaïl?” she asks.
“I don’t know. Maybe people give you lots of coins when you put out your hand.”
“They give bills,” she says.
“Oh,” I say, impressed. “OK!”
Thanks to Mrs. Hanska’s lessons, I know that a bill is worth more than a coin. I know the names of foreign currencies—franc, dinar, peso, dollar, crown, ruble, cruzado, zloty, lev, forint, yen.… I even know that there is a country where you pay with sugar, which seems pretty strange.
“I promised Emil that I would find loukoums for him,” I say, sniffling because of the cold.
Gloria smiles and says nothing more. After a while, when it gets so cold that it hurts your lips to talk, it helps to think about pleasant things. And if your feet hurt, you have to pretend they aren’t yours. They belong to somebody else. And somebody else’s feet cannot be hurting you, right?
chapter ten
OUR new refuge is called Souma-Soula. It’s a vast village close to mountains made of recycled materials, like bricks, wooden boards, plastic, and galvanized iron. Everything is built haphazardly, but everyone manages to find a spot, and Gloria says that we’ll be living in clover. I don’t want to contradict her, but I think that the Complex was much better than Souma-Soula.
“Come on, Monsieur Blaise,” Gloria makes fun of me, “don’t annoy me with your French manners, and help me hammer this roof.”
We become friendly with the Betov family, the one that was walking with a cart on the road. There is the father, the mother, the grandmother, and the five children. They are our new neighbors. They lend us a hammer and nails, and their son, Stambek, helps us carry what we need to build a shed. Now Gloria and I have to get busy.
I learn to mix dirt, straw, and stones to fill in the gaps between the pieces of wood. I dig and flatten, I plant and lift. Gloria is very clever with her hands, thanks to what she learned at Vassili’s: she covers a window opening with plastic and puts a latch on the door so that it closes.
A Time of Miracles Page 3