A Time of Miracles

by Anne-Laure Bondoux

  More and more wounded soldiers arrive in Souma-Soula. Some have lost an eye, a leg, an arm. Some have lost their minds and wander around shouting like crazy. That’s all we see of the war. Mr. Betov says that “the theater of operations” is far from us, somewhere up north, and that we are refugees. I like the word “refugees.” It must mean that we are sheltered, which reassures me.

  In my mind, war looks like a ferocious and famished beast hiding in the nooks of the mountains and the dark forests shown on page 79 of my green atlas. I put my finger on the winding roads and imagine the unavoidable advance of armies looking for one another. Bombs crush and rip villages open. War chases families away, destroys pasturelands, gobbles up soldiers. It is voracious.

  Sometimes I think about Zemzem and about Gloria’s brothers. This monstrous animal may have devoured them. I don’t dare ask Gloria what she thinks, because I don’t want to make her sad.

  “And what if the war comes to Souma-Soula?” is the only thing I say. “What will we do?”

  “What we’ve always done, Koumaïl,” she answers. “Walk straight ahead toward new horizons.”

  “OK, but we’ll go with the Betovs, right?”

  “Who knows? There are so many ways to get lost. Especially in the Caucasus!”

  I study the maps again and I see the dotted lines of borders that get entangled from one valley to the other. I see Georgia, Abkhazia, Armenia, Chechnya, North Ossetia and South Ossetia, Ingushetia, Dagestan.…

  Gloria shakes her head. “Too many countries,” she says. “Too many people! Borderlines move and names change constantly. At the end of the day, only ruins and unhappy people are left. It’s useless to try to understand the Caucasus, Monsieur Blaise. Leave it alone. It’s not your concern, little French guy, OK?”

  “OK.”

  I turn the pages. My fingers slide west, following winding paths, until I land in France, as usual. No war. No militia. Things are much simpler over there, thanks to the republic.

  “What would be nice,” I say, “is for all of us to go there. Even Vassili, Zemzem, your brothers, Emil and Baksa. And my father, too, if we can find him. That would be a good surprise for my mother. We could organize a big reunion!”

  I get overexcited: we could even go farther, per page 17, up to England! Gloria bends over my shoulder to study the route with me. We jump over the mountains, the dotted lines, the rivers, and my finger reaches France, where there is a town named Calais.

  “We’ll take a boat because there’s no bridge,” I say.

  “No need. Even better, there’s a tunnel,” Gloria explains to me. “Engineers spent a lot of time studying the best way to dig it. It was finished last year.”

  “A tunnel under the sea?”

  “Exactly!” Gloria says. “A tunnel with a train.”

  I can hardly believe this. My finger stays on this part of the world where people were digging under the sea. “I want to cross the English Channel through the tunnel,” I say. “The two of us.”

  “OK,” she says.

  Gloria never discourages my dreams. But she tells me that in the meantime I have to go to sleep because it’s late. I ask her to tell me my story, with every detail, like always. As I lie half-asleep, the trains get jumbled and I see the express train catch on fire as it cuts through waves and shoves aside bewildered fish.

  chapter fifteen

  WINTER returns to Souma-Soula, and a rumor circulates from shed to shed that a curse has fallen over the dwellers of the lake area. It seems that several women have given birth to monstrous children.

  “The first one didn’t have a head!” Suki tells me.

  “The second one had two of them!” Maya says with a grimace.

  “Who told you that?” I ask.

  “Chief! He saw them!” they both say.

  After further investigation it turns out that Chief didn’t see anything, but that he knows an older Russian man whose sister-in-law gave birth to a child with three arms.

  “Ugh!” the girls cry out. “Three arms!”

  The grown-ups refuse to believe us until Gloria meets a special convoy on the road to the factory.

  “Men in armored cars,” she tells me. “They were wearing coveralls, glasses, and masks over their mouths.”

  “Like astronauts?”

  “Exactly! And they were going straight to the lake. It must be serious!”

  Shortly after that we learn that fishing is forbidden and that all access to the lake has been cordoned off. The men in coveralls have set up tents. According to Mr. Betov, they are scientists sent by the government to analyze the water, the soil, and even the innards of the fish. It seems likely that the lake has been spoiled by toxic waste coming from the former lightbulb factory. This would explain the birth of monstrous children. But how, exactly? Nobody knows! Everyone is fearful. Several families have already left the area, and others are beginning to pack up.

  As a result, Mr. Betov gives me sideways glances, as if I were headless or had a third arm growing out of my back. Suddenly I feel ill at ease.

  “Sorry, Koumaïl, but you fell in the lake’s poisoned water,” he tells me. “One has to be careful. As long as we don’t know what’s going on, Suki and Maya can’t visit you anymore. And I have to ask you to work at a distance from us. I hope you understand?”

  His words strike me like a blow. To be kept away is the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I cry a long time in Gloria’s arms, shouting that it’s unfair, that I’m not sick, and that if I hadn’t fallen in the lake, we would have eaten fish and would all be contaminated.

  But it’s too late.

  Suki and Maya avoid me. They keep their heads down and walk faster when they see me. As for Stambek, he looks very sad but he obeys his father.

  * * *

  I no longer have a sense of belonging on the mountain of glass. I’m like a wounded soul, alone with my grapnel and my sorrow. To cheer myself up, I dig through the trash and look for strings for Oleg’s violin and batteries for Fotia’s radio. I manage to find what I need; now instead of playing cards at night, I fix the precious things. When I’m done, the violin squeaks a sinister sound and the radio crackles.

  “Better than nothing!” Gloria says encouragingly.

  But I can see that she’s forcing herself to smile.

  More and more families are leaving, and army recruiters fall on us like locusts on the harvest. They come to recruit volunteers for the front. One day I see Chief in a military truck with other men. He makes a V sign to me as they take off, and I remain alone in the gusts of autumn wind.

  I wander the streets, which feel chilled with an atmosphere of doom, as Gloria struggles to keep driving the now half-filled truck. She will drive as long as possible because each coin earned is a step toward the future.

  “What future?” I ask with a sigh.

  “Come on, Koumaïl, cheer up! You’re much too young to say such things!”

  But one morning I discover that the Betovs’ shed is empty. Nothing left. No pots or pans, no blanket. They left without even saying goodbye.

  I stand in the deserted room, my throat so knotted that I cannot breathe.

  When I turn around, I see one of my playing cards pinned on the door. I remove it. It’s the ace of hearts: the only message of love that Suki and Maya had time to leave me.

  chapter sixteen

  I am ten now, with a broken heart and bleeding feet and an empty stomach. And once again I’m walking on endless roads toward the unknown with Gloria and our gear. We’re refugees without refuge, and I really believe that I’ve caught a despair.

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk!” Gloria says. “If I give you a thorough inspection, Koumaïl, I’m sure that I won’t find any parasites!”

  I shrug. “Don’t bother. I’m older. I know that what I feel has nothing to do with lice.”

  Abruptly Gloria stops walking and gives me a sideways glance. She throws the gear on the ground and opens it. We are in the middle of a snow-covered field, under a he
avy sky filled with circling crows. What is she doing? I wonder. Does she think I want to camp here?

  “It’s true that you’ve grown a lot, Koumaïl,” she says as she looks into the opening of the gear. “It’s time that I confide in you what my secret remedy is.”

  I sigh. The snow is drenching my pants up to the knees and I ache all over. We’ve walked for at least a million kilometers. The scientists at Souma-Soula ordered us to evacuate from what they classified as a “dangerous zone.” What can Gloria possibly find to make me feel better? I want to know. Is she going to pull Suki, Maya, and Stambek out of her bag like a magician?

  “Ah, here we are!” Gloria smiles as she shows me her old tin box.

  She removes her gloves, and for the first time she opens the box in front of me. In spite of my bad mood, curiosity makes me come closer.

  “I knew that one day we would need this,” Gloria says. “And that day has come.”

  At first I see nothing but a pile of papers. Then Gloria unfolds them, and I stare wide-eyed when I understand what they are: a fat wad of bank notes—of American dollars. And, rolled inside them, two small notebooks with the universal word “passport.” Inside the passports are lines written in an alphabet I can’t read.

  “This passport is in your name: Blaise Fortune,” Gloria explains. “The other one is your mother’s passport: Jeanne Fortune. The pictures are missing, but we’ll get new ones before we board.”

  “Board? But …”

  I’ve grown up, it’s true, but I’m not sure that I understand. Gloria laughs when she sees the puzzled expression on my face.

  “The one and only remedy against despair, Koumaïl, is hope! That’s what I have in my box: hope!”

  She puts the lid back on, satisfied.

  “We’re going to use the passports?” I ask in disbelief.

  “Exactly!”

  “But … you’re going to take my mother’s place, then?”

  “Yes.” Gloria smiles. “And at last you will officially be Monsieur Blaise.”

  I can’t believe my ears. Around us there is only snow, sky, and crows, a kind of hazy landscape without limits, where dollars and passports are of no use.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “To France!” Gloria answers cheerfully as she lifts the gear over her back. “So, are you coming?”

  chapter seventeen

  THE next million kilometers seem much easier to me. Knowing we have a destination is like having wings! Snowfields, gravel fields, bare forests where invisible owls hoot—it makes no difference. I walk relentlessly. And relentlessly I pester Gloria with questions: France, but where exactly? I want to know. There are so many towns! And what boat will we board? What is its name? Once we get to where we’re going, what will we do? And how is it that she has my mother’s passport?

  Gloria explains that Jeanne gave it to her, together with mine, when she was in the train wreck, before she lost consciousness.

  “You never told me that!” I protest.

  “Well, now you know.”

  “And the photos?”

  “I was afraid. I burned them.”

  I frown. “And the money?”

  “Zemzem gave me the box. He wanted to give us a chance to get away, to cross borders and controls. Being called Bohème is not enough to leave a country at war.”

  “So that was his gift? A box and dollars?”

  “Only part of the gift,” Gloria confesses. “I might tell you the rest … but later.”

  I am both troubled and vexed that Gloria never mentioned these passports to me. What if she hasn’t been telling me the simple truth about the Terrible Accident and about my mother? I start to think. Yet I have no choice but to trust her.

  We trek across villages with muddy streets and telephone poles whose torn cables swing in the wind like people hanged; we trek across flooded fields; we trek along roads that go nowhere and vast countryside where nothing grows.

  The people we encounter have emaciated dogs and hostile faces. They lock their doors when they see us. Do they know that we come from Souma-Soula’s “dangerous zone”? I wonder. Is it written on our faces?

  “Don’t pay attention to them,” Gloria advises me. “Move on as if you were a ghost.”

  I do my best to imagine that I am nothing, just a draft of air.… But days go by like this and I begin to feel sadness weigh heavily again on my chest, worse than if I had swallowed a grapnel.

  From time to time, having no strength left, we have to steal something to eat—some warm bread on a windowsill, some dry meat, or some pickles in vinegar.

  Along the way we come across trucks covered with tarps that move more slowly than a hearse and are headed north with their loads of ashen-faced soldiers. No one makes the V sign.

  At night we sleep in barns, in churches, even in henhouses. In the morning we stink of droppings and rotten straw.

  “Courage,” Gloria keeps repeating. “We’ll be there soon.”

  But I don’t see any port. Never mind a boat on which to embark. France is a faraway and out-of-reach dream, more so now that we don’t have any coal to boil water in the samovar.

  Gloria takes my hand. “Soon we’ll leave the mountains, Koumaïl,” she tells me. “In the valley you’ll see a river. At the end of the river, there is an estuary that opens onto a large sea and a city that opens onto a port. The air will be sweet and you’ll see palm trees, Koumaïl. Over there we’ll find people to help us. I’ll manage, I promise.”

  I move on, trying to imagine this improbable city from where we will board a boat to go to other, just as improbable cities. But something nags at me.

  “At the border they’ll see that you’re not French,” I say.

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk! And why would they?”

  “You can’t even speak French.”

  “So what? You can’t either, Monsieur Blaise! Yet you’re French, aren’t you?”

  When I make a list of my French vocabulary, I know only a few words in the language of my country of origin: “Helpmehelpmeplease.” Gloria’s argument leaves me speechless. So I keep on walking and try to believe that my feet are somebody else’s.

  * * *

  We finally reach the river, then the estuary and the port of Sukhumi. Beyond the palm trees, cargo vessels and military ships adorned with cannons lie hull after hull.

  Night falls over buildings in ruin. It rains. The docks are littered with debris but also with men, women, and children who have nowhere to go and who sleep here and there, taking shelter under tarps. I am so tired that I am ready to sleep under the rain with the dogs and the garbage.

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Gloria tells me. “There is better for us tonight! Come on.”

  She drags me through backyards and smelly streets up to the entrance of a bar, the Matachine.

  The room is dark, with wobbly tables and cigar-smoking men who stare at us. Gloria pushes me toward a bench and asks me to wait for her.

  As Gloria heads toward the bar, I make myself cozy and put my head down against the sticky armrest. I can’t hear what she says to the man who is opening the beer bottles. They talk a long time, while I fall into a deep sleep.

  When Gloria wakes me up, she smiles broadly.

  “Everything is arranged,” she tells me. “We’ll board a boat in a few days. For the time being, we’re going to settle in upstairs.”

  Her finger points to the ceiling of the Matachine.

  We climb a stiff ladder up to a narrow trapdoor, and Gloria breathes with difficulty because of her weight. Finally we put our gear in a sort of cupboard in the attic: our new refuge.

  The place is dusty, cluttered with boxes, but it has a dormer window. Gloria unfolds two camping beds right under it. This way, she tells me, we will see the stars and it will be wonderful.

  I lie down. I look up. The sky is pitch-black.

  “Be patient,” Gloria murmurs. “There are stars behind the clouds, always. Don’t fall asleep, Koumaïl, watch the sky.”

&
nbsp; Drops of rain crash onto the glass, and Gloria coughs a little. I wrap myself in Dobromir’s blanket, sheltered, struggling to keep my eyes open. I try to remember the names of the stars that Mrs. Hanska chose from her old book: Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, Merak, Vega.…

  Suddenly, thousands of sparkles illuminate the sky.

  “There they are!” I say.

  But Gloria doesn’t answer me. She’s fast asleep.

  The points of light disappear, and I hear the humming of engines and then muffled noises that shake the walls of the Matachine.

  Those are not stars.

  I hide my head under the blanket and close my eyes. Far away a bomb explodes in the port of Sukhumi.

  chapter eighteen

  IT’S early in the day still and I don’t know where we are going. Gloria drags me along demolished streets, where there are mangy dogs and people pulling carts. She explains to me that Sukhumi was a nice town before the war, a seaside resort where people came on vacation to soak up the sun and enjoy the beaches. In summer, under the palms trees and the flowering tangerine trees, people used to eat ice cream, barefoot in sandals. It’s the pure and simple truth. Now Sukhumi is an ugly place, and if people walk barefoot, it’s because they’ve lost their shoes under the ruins of what was once their home. Only a few vestiges of the past glory days remain: big, empty hotels; waterless fountains; rusty pontoons on the shore; and collapsed walls. Still, I try to imagine how magnificent it must have been here, before the bombs, before the soldiers and the fear. I’d like to understand why those days are gone, but I know that it’s a waste of time. Gloria will only tell me again to leave the Caucasus where it is, that it’s not the concern of a French boy. That we have to hurry along.

  “Why don’t you tell me where we’re going? Is it a surprise?” I ask her.

  She doesn’t answer, so I grow suspicious.

  “Good or bad?” I ask.

  Gloria pulls on my hand. I jump over the deep, rainfilled potholes of the avenues.

  Finally we arrive in front of a large building. There are letters, partly erased, above the door. I read: PU_LI_ BA__