“She’s real good,” Carl says. “What do you think? Think Jory would have something to worry about if she got on the job?”
To his astonishment, Vaniok actually smiles as he says, “Yes. For sure.” Carl nods back at him solemnly. It’s clear he feels he’s talking to an ally.
All at once, as if he’s awakened to find himself sleepwalking, Vaniok is uncomfortable with the drift of this conversation, he wishes they’d start talking about basketball again. The idea of someone checking up on them, any one of them, is disturbing. Why do these men want to know anything about the homeland anyway? It’s too small and remote to be of any concern to them. He makes a motion with his hand as if he’s shooting a basketball and then pronounces the name of one of the players. “Oh, he can shoot,” Vaniok says.
Carl smiles and settles back. “We’ve got a real fan here,” he calls to the other men and they all turn toward him. “Do that again,” Carl says, apparently no longer interested in Jory, and now, with the others watching, Vaniok makes the same motion, more hurried this time, and he mumbles the words. As he says them he looks away from the smiling faces at the table and sees Jory and Ila in the street. They aren’t talking, they aren’t looking at each other but they move by silently and, it seems, gravely, as if they have some understanding, so absorbed in whatever they’re talking about that they never even notice their countryman. Vaniok feels a damp chill of despair. All day he’s tried to avoid thinking about the major consequence of the picnic: that from now on Ila will be more distant from him. Now he can’t help recognizing that fact.
In less than a second Vaniok realizes he’s made a mistake. The couple in the street aren’t his cousin and Jory; and yet it makes no difference: he knows he’s right about them, whether or not they actually passed before him. His former high spirits are gone now.
When he looks back to the men at the table, who are smiling, Vaniok remembers that moments ago he was excited to hear Carl’s suspicions about his countryman; in his heart he was willing to betray Jory before these strangers, possibly he even did. “Sign him up,” one of the men says. Carl pats him on the shoulder. Anyone looking in from the street would think they were all the best of friends, innocently happy. But Vaniok is suddenly remorseful, as if in some strange way Jory’s being with Ila is his punishment for having talked so freely about him to Carl.
All betrayals are one betrayal and here amid the cheerful sounds of his friends from work he’s paying the price by remembering Ranush. When the first suggestions were made about going to the mayor’s office to protest the jailing of a journalist, he and Ranush gripped hands and swore to join the others on that street corner. But that was when it was only an idea: they’d just finished dinner in the Old Hunter with its low arches and mounted heads of animals on the walls, they’d been drinking, they were excited. It wasn’t long, though, before things began to change very quickly. After the Thirteen Days started, anybody who was paying attention to the reports coming in from other parts of the country could see that the situation was suddenly much more dangerous, that this protest was no longer just the expression of an opinion that might be changed later. By the time the appointed hour arrived it was clear to Vaniok that gathering in an unarmed group was the equivalent of mass suicide and he’d have said that to Ranush if he’d have had the chance. But they’d been separated, Ranush was hurrying back from his brother’s place in the east, they had no time to talk. “You can’t fight them when you’re dead,” Vaniok told himself again and again in the hours before the gathering was to take place. How could he be sure it was even going to be held? Later he could imagine all too clearly what his friend must have felt seeing the men in the gray uniforms approaching that street corner. He learned the next day that Ranush and the few who showed up with him were taken to the woods where they were shot while Vaniok, who’d managed to find an important errand he had to go on with his uncle Gyorg, was rewarded for his actions by being spared. The following evening in the Old Hunter, as he drank by himself, the liquor brought no elation and the mounted head of a boar stared at him with a blankly accusatory gaze.
A thousand times afterward Vaniok has imagined his friend on that street corner, nervously brushing away the stray lock of hair that always fell across his face. He would have looked around at the shapes huddled against the chill, aware that the numbers didn’t add up. What was keeping Vaniok, he’d wonder. Maybe Ranush died thinking his friend had already been captured. Vaniok prays it was so. Now, while the men around him make the motions of basketball players, shooting, guarding, and Carl throws him an imaginary pass which Vaniok catches mechanically, his heart is heavy again.
It’s Jory who’s done it. As if sent by the devil, Jory has turned up in this town with his jar of soil. Except for Jory, Vaniok would have been perfectly happy this evening, one of a merry crowd drinking after work on a Monday.
But for all the misery he’s caused, maybe he isn’t so formidable after all, Jory with his false papers. Beware, he says in his mind to his countryman, from now on Carl is going to be watching you.
A week has passed since the drive to the ocean and Jory and Ila have seen each other as often as possible—on campus, in town, at his apartment—yet even their love-making can’t satisfy their hunger to learn and relearn things about each other. Looking into the dark of his bedroom, Jory listens to Ila’s account of her first trip to the capital: “I couldn’t sleep. I actually prayed that God wouldn’t end the world before I was able to take my trip …” He smiles to himself; he leans in her direction as if by sheer concentration he’ll be able to enter her past, to sit beside her on that fresh-smelling train and feel the first lurch of its motion toward the place she’s dreamed of for so long. I want to walk in your dreams, he thinks, remembering what she said on the beach. And in her grip on his arms he can feel the same appetite in Ila. “Tell me again about this scar,” she’s demanded of him, her finger tracing the line on the healed skin, feeling for the cold of that country where Jory stood bleeding over the man he knocked to the snowy street. “When did you first know your Aunt Estrid was dying?” he’s asked her, his thumb seeking out the slight bump of her wristbone, trying to imagine how much smaller that wrist was when the younger Ila sat at the bedside of her dying aunt. In the newly discovered landscape of each other’s bodies, they’ve searched for clues about the other people who existed before they met. “What are you doing?” he hears her call in the dark. “I’m counting the vertebrae in your back,” he tells her. A silence: “I’m sure I have the usual number.” He laughs. “Oh, there’s nothing usual about your back.”
He lies beside her now in the darkness that could be anywhere. His arm is flung out at his side; he’s a shipwrecked sailor who’s reached a warm and tranquil shore at last. His other hand rests lightly on her stomach, rising and falling with the tidal rhythm of her breath. No shimmering archangel, the power of exploding suns in his folded wings, could persuade him to trade places just now and leave this bed. He pushes his face against the damp, rumpled sheet, savors its rough feel. His eyes closed, he plunges deeper into the sweet darkness. A breeze from the open window skims his legs; when he moves his hand Ila makes a sound like humming.
“I love the way you sing,” he mumbles into the bunched sheet.
“Mmm,” she answers from some place far away.
Jory listens, delighted: her answer is a wordless blessing. The soft night pours in through the window: insects chitter, a man’s voice calls goodbye, a car door slams, tires hiss. His hand absently traces the curve of Ila’s thigh as he follows the car in his mind: it speeds along a dark, empty road, its headlights peeling the night’s skin, the vivid, dimensionless illusion created instant by instant, a movie on the windshield that lulls the driver until everything is black.
“Where did you go?” She calls him back from his drive into oblivion. “Were you on that island with your friend Fotor?” she asks. “I can see you there with a big straw hat. You have no shoes, you haven’t shaved in a week.” She runs
her hand along the side of his face. “I know I’m going to lose you to that island yet.” Her voice is a comic lament.
He lifts his head, looks around wonderingly. “Did I fall asleep?”
“I don’t seem to be very stimulating company to you.”
He laughs lazily. Even in the dark he can imagine her pout, can see her eyes fill with mischief. He turns over onto his back, shaking off sleep. “I did drop off,” he says. “I was dreaming of something.”
“Maybe you don’t want me to know what you’re dreaming,” she teases.
“No.” He remembers something. It’s just a fragment, like a detail torn from a very large and complex painting. “It wasn’t a dream, really, just a moment, an image.” He sees it clearly now. “I was back in the capital, in front of the opera house. It was raining and the street was packed with cabs that glistened like black beetles. There was a traffic jam and the drivers were sounding their horns.”
She leans toward him. “I like those glistening beetles. Was I there with you, maybe? What happened in your dream?”
He shakes his head. “Nothing happened. I was alone. I was just watching.” He gropes toward the memory, trying to conjure the scene: cabs glisten, umbrellas bob but Jory can’t feel the rain, the horns are silent. Already the moment he inhabited in his dream is just a picture, flat and depthless like something encountered in a book. He stares at that picture, aware of an ache, and gradually he comes to recognize what he’s thinking: it’s possible that he’ll never go back there, that this picture is all he’ll have. The realization is a presence in the dark room, a heavy stranger seated in the chair by the window; and by degrees it becomes clear to Jory that another word for the ache he feels is fear.
Long seconds pass during which neither he nor Ila says anything. Then she reaches toward him and runs a finger slowly along the scar on his forearm and he knows that she’s guessed what he’s thinking. “I used to wonder in the early days,” she says as if to herself, “why did this have to happen to our country, what did we do to deserve it? It made me so angry.”
When she withdraws her hand Jory lifts himself and gets a cigarette from the table beside the bed. He lights it and passes it to Ila, happy to be performing this small service for her. After a few moments she gives the cigarette back and he draws the burning tobacco into his lungs, watches the darkness soften in the slowly tumbling smoke of his exhalation. Why did it have to happen to the homeland? “My father said that what was wrong with us as a people,” he tells her, “was that we never had enough respect for order.” He can see his father sitting at the kitchen table, his shoulders bent under the weight of the terrible choice he made. A lifetime of caution was being thrown away in a disastrous gamble. “What we need most of all now is stability,” he declared to his brothers, who were there for his birthday. There was a rising desperation in his voice. “All through our history we’ve torn ourselves apart and let others pick up the pieces. We need order.” Jory remembers the way the man’s blue eyes—exactly the color of his own—filled when his three brothers pushed back their chairs and walked out of the room without saying another word.
His father’s search for order came too late: the men in gray couldn’t undo the flaw in the plane’s engine that took away his parents and ended his childhood so abruptly. Here in this dark room in another country, Jory has a glimpse of the tragedy of his father’s life. He was a limited man but the world hadn’t been kind to him; he’d been asked to bear more suffering than he should have had to. “Christ,” Jory mutters.
“What is it?”
He shakes his head. “My father believed the colonels were the answer to the homeland’s problems.” He looks into the dark: how clear his father’s situation seems to him. “He was naive, he realized he was wrong before he died.”
There’s a long silence. “My family was divided too,” she says. “There was a lot of that.”
Jory nods. The people they’re talking about seem very far away yet they’re as much a part of the two of them as their fingerprints, and just as ineradicable. “What about your half-brother?” he asks. “Was he caught up in all this?”
“No,” she says quickly. “I wouldn’t really call him political at all.” Jory waits for more but after a few seconds he realizes that she’s not going to say anything else. By now he’s learned that her half-brother is someone she isn’t going to talk about. Of course, after what happened to him, Jory can understand.
He gestures in the dark. “I could say the same thing about myself. I never cared for politics.”
“But didn’t you say there was a time when you were political—at the university?” she challenges.
“Did I?” He’s surprised he told her that much. He waves it away. “No, I wasn’t ever really political.” He recognizes that in spite of the satisfaction he feels in sharing his past with her there are things he has to keep to himself. Is it, he wonders, that I don’t want to look like a complete fool? “It’s a long and boring story,” he repeats, though really it was short. Helani. He has no trouble believing she existed; what’s more difficult to believe is that there was such a person as he seems to have been when he knew her.
Aware of Ila’s silence, he adds, “Maybe I should have said it’s contemporary politics that I don’t like. I actually enjoy reading about politics in earlier times. Ever since I was a boy I loved history.” He’d spend long, gray afternoons following the mythical accounts of his people’s earliest conflicts, pondering the meanings hidden in the proclamations of rulers whose very existence was in question, running the antique words through his hands as if they were the richly embroidered vestments of kings. In those old stories Jory would look for the threads that bound the present to the past, trying to rescue some meaning from the howling gales of time. History isn’t only something we read about, Helani would tell him later. It’s what we do.
“Maybe,” he says, “I’m a citizen of a country that exists only in history books.”
“You’re a strange man, Jory.” Ila looks at him. In the dark he can see her still shape. “I like that strangeness.”
He smiles. “And you,” he asks her. “For all that you say, don’t you have your own dreams of going back there?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t want to go back. That place is gone.” He hears the determination in her voice. He thinks of a child who’s in pain but will not allow herself to cry. Both of them look toward the open window, where the curtain dances in a gust of warm night air. The breeze carries the fragrance of nameless blossoming flowers, and suddenly the scent is powerful. Jory runs his hand along the side of Ila’s arm, feeling the tense muscle under the smooth skin. “You’re still hurting,” he says. “You’ll heal.”
She draws herself up, shakes her hair free. “You and I have different ideas of healing,” she answers. “For me, healing is forgetting.” She turns her head. “Mmm, I love the smell of that flower.” Jory remembers white and pink blossoms in the university gardens. In the twilight they looked like moths. But even as he smells the sweet fragrance of the blossoms outside his window he’s seeing the scene before the opera house in the homeland, black cabs glistening in the rain. A picture, only a picture.
“It will happen, you know,” he says. “The people who are running the country now won’t be there forever.”
“Jory.” His name on her lips is flat, toneless. She might be a foreigner pronouncing the syllables exploratively, not sure she has them right. His own name sounds strange to him. Then she adds, “You can’t keep looking backward.”
“But I’m talking about the future,” he answers immediately.
“No, you aren’t, my friend.” She runs a finger across his shoulder. Seconds pass in silence. “My sweet friend,” she says after a while. Her voice is softer, making the darkness more comfortable, and yet there’s a note of sadness in it. She kisses the place her finger has left. “Did you know it took all my willpower to keep from touching your shoulders when I first met you? You have the most erotic shoul
ders of any man I know.”
The silence that follows is steep, as if the pedal on a piano has been lifted, abruptly cutting short a note, and Jory feels an anticipatory tremor: their time together will be over soon and he knows that when she leaves there will be a vast absence, that for all that Ila’s told him about her life, his hunger will be even greater after she’s gone.
When she speaks again there’s a different note to her voice, a touch wistful, meditative. “Did you ever think what it would be like to live in the desert?” she asks.
He looks into the dark spaces of his room. “I suppose it would be bleak and empty.”
“But maybe it isn’t so empty,” she answers. “They say the air there is sharp and dry. You can see things that are far away as clearly as if you were looking at them through a telescope. Imagine that! And there’s a wind all the time, a dry wind, like a constant breath.”
“Then sand would get into every corner, I’d think.”
Ila responds quickly, as if she’s ready for that kind of reaction. “I imagine that the sand keeps things clean, it scours them.”
Jory smiles. “You’re making it sound very attractive. Is this the Desert of Eden?”
“Don’t laugh,” she punches gently at his arm. “I’ve heard that nothing is more beautiful than when the desert floor is covered with blossoms that come out all at once after a rain.”
“When would that be?” he asks. “Once a year?”
Ila is silent a while. Then she says, “Well, it appeals to me. I like the idea of a place where the air is so dry that static electricity crackles between people when they touch. And where your fingers get so smooth from the dryness that it’s as if you had no fingerprints.”
“No fingerprints—it sounds like a great place for criminals.” All at once he’s seized by something very much like dread.
He feels Ila’s grip. “Let’s see your hand,” she says, and runs her fingers against his in the dark. “No, my friend, you’ll never lose your fingerprints.”
The 14th Day Page 13