The 14th Day

by K. C. Frederick

  His eyes remain closed under the damp handkerchief; he feels his blood pulsing through his body. His consciousness sinks into that pulse, the steady, repeated spasm of life. He’s acutely aware that he’s floating on his back over the depths of this lake. Ila is silent and he hears the water lapping the sides of the boat, he feels himself drifting, attuned to the shifting, random movements that are carrying him across the lake’s surface. Gradually he lets go of the last vestiges of his will; he surrenders to the languid weightlessness of his body. He’s moving as wind and current determine. It wouldn’t take much to trick himself into believing there isn’t any boat beneath him at all, that he’s floating freely on the top of the lake, adrift like a leaf on its surface—his breath catches at the idea; no sooner does he think it than he’s experiencing it. In his chosen darkness the last faint pressure of his weight is lifted from him, the surrounding shape of the wooden boat is gone, he feels a sudden ecstasy. Floating, drifting, he’s alone and free. And what if there were no lake supporting him but only the air, a vast ocean of air? All at once the sensation takes hold of him with a thrilling, terrifying vividness: he imagines himself hovering in the air, high above everything: lake, town and countryside are hazy dreams far below while he passes unsupported, unconnected, the horizon itself sliding away. His stomach goes light, he pulls off the handkerchief and sits up abruptly.

  “What is it?” she asks.

  “Nothing. It just got uncomfortable lying there.” His hands grip the sides of the boat as if to reassure himself of its existence. When he notices this, he lets go. “Nothing,” he repeats. He can see from Ila’s reaction, though, that somehow she understands what happened to him as he drifted in the darkness.

  She looks at him appraisingly. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” As he answers he’s aware of averting his eyes.

  “Would you like to row again?” she asks after a while.

  “Yes,” he says. “Yes, I would.” He blinks in the sunlight. Everything around him has changed: it isn’t the same place anymore, a spell has been cast over the lake. He can feel it on his skin. In a few moments he’s at the oars once more, though this time he isn’t able to lose himself in the repetitive effort of stroke and release. Throwing himself into his efforts, he catches sight of Ila only glancingly. Something about her is different, though what, he can’t say. It’s as if when his eyes were closed another Ila took the place of the one who’d stepped into the boat with him, an Ila who could still smell the hay in that barn in the homeland.

  Jory rows on. Even as his back bends, his arms pull, a stray breeze brushes his skin, he can remember his experience moments ago, floating free, attached to nothing—the terror he felt then has entered his bloodstream. A few feet away, Ila has begun humming once more, the same elusive melody that troubled him earlier, as she looks toward the shore, lost in her own thoughts. If he could only call her back; if he could say something to her. But what can he tell her? This morning he awakened from a dream that reminded him of the trip he made as a boy to the port city where his twin aunts lived. Some trouble at home must have been behind this hasty visit, he could tell from his mother’s tearful farewell at the railroad station; but Jory was excited by the prospect of a solitary journey to the exotic old port with its fat seagulls on the docks, wet streets and gray skies, shops with goods from all over the world, old narrow buildings of a subtly different architectural style than he was used to in the capital, mermaids and seahorses carved into stone arches.

  Now, as he rows, he fears that this memory will be his alone, his aunts’ breezy apartment with its silver light, the high windows from which you could get a glimpse, beyond the busy street, of the harbor itself, the dark room with the regal piano whose keys he would sound experimentally, the hard, yellow candy his aunts doled out to him sparingly at first and then with reckless generosity, the excursions they allowed him to take on his own into the port city’s intriguing streets. Suddenly it seems desperately important that he tell her all this, make her share the experience.

  Touching that memory, he’s surprised by the emotion that engulfs him. His eyes are wet with tears and he can only wonder what it is that he’s lamenting. At the moment it seems tragic that Ila might never know about his trip to the port city.

  “You know …” he begins and she turns toward him expectantly. We should be talking, he wants to say. You and I both know there are important things we aren’t talking about. There’s so much to be settled between them. The thought crosses his mind that for all their closeness they don’t know each other at all.

  “Yes?” she asks.

  “Nothing.” The port city is gone, they’re here on the lake near the university town in the host country. As Ila said, there is only this moment. But what will come after? The moment is always vanishing. This one too.

  His spirit fails. Why not just continue their progress across the lake, row to the other end where they’ll drift among the lily pads? They can turn around then, loiter on the water; they don’t really have to talk. The sun is still high in the sky.

  He rows in silence, the strokes of the oars sounding with the regularity of a clock’s ticking. One moment. The next. The next. It could go on like this forever, except for the words that are being shouted in his chest, the questions that can’t be put off any longer. “Ila,” he says at last, pausing at the oars, “what’s going to happen, what’s happening to us?” He looks at his hands, callused from work: they’re the hands of a stranger. “What is it?” he asks again and he resumes rowing.

  Across from him, she says nothing, as if challenging him with her silence to answer his own question. I’m losing her, he thinks. I’m going to lose her. I can’t.

  “Ila,” he says desperately, “we’re not going to stay here forever, in this country. I intend to go back some day.” She looks at him guardedly and Jory is aware that they’re on the verge of a question that she can only answer in one way, a question that shouldn’t be asked but has to be asked nevertheless. Waiting, Ila has pulled in her lower lip, as if carefully pondering, even before the question has been put to her, the words to her answer, and Jory is swept by a wave of feeling for her. Even he can’t say what he wants from her. For a few moments he’s silent, watching a dragonfly that hovers above the upraised oar. Possibly it’s the same one he saw before. When it darts off over the water Jory says at last, “I have to know: will you come with me? Are you and I going back there together?”

  Though they’re both in the sunlight her eyes seem to look out at him from shadow. Once again her silence tells him he knows the answer to his question.

  Still, something drives him. “Ila,” he says again, his voice quiet but insistent, “I’m asking you now: will you go back there with me? I’m asking if there’s a future for us.”

  For a long time he hears only the splash of his oars, the grunts of his own exertion. “No, Jory,” she says at last. “I’m not going back there with you.” The words are familiar, something remembered: he’s heard this in his dreams. “I’m going to be leaving here myself,” she says. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time—thinking about it carefully—and I’ve decided it.” Her voice is quiet, almost casual, as if she’s describing something that’s already happened. Without thinking about it, Jory relaxes on the oars, he feels the boat’s progress slacken. “I’m going to take a real estate course,” Ila goes on. “Then I’m going to go west with my friend Zita.”

  Jory continues to row, though more slowly now, toward no particular destination. Well, he thinks, now it’s happened, now I know this. Absently he takes in the scene around them: the calm surface of the lake, the wooded shore. What does it all mean? He looks at Ila. “And us?” he says quietly, as if to himself.

  She shakes her head and once again he covers a good stretch of water before she answers, “But we knew this wasn’t going to be forever, didn’t we?”

  Jory pushes harder on the oars. “I suppose so,” he admits. And for a long time a
fter that neither of them speaks.

  At last she leans toward him. “Jory, you’re a wonderful man and you know I mean that. But I have to live my life. After … what happened back there only I’m responsible for what I do with my life. And I want to do this.”

  And me? Jory thinks. But he won’t say anything aloud, can’t say anything just now. Besides, how could she answer that question? She’s living her life, as she said, it’s up to him to live his. He looks at her as she settles back into her seat and glances toward the shore. He remembers her saying that when they were in that little town on the way to the ocean it was like walking in somebody else’s dream. Maybe, he thinks, that’s all they’ve managed to do: to walk for a time in each other’s dreams. He wishes he could tell her this. Instead he says, “Ila, you’re going to turn this place into a wasteland for me.”

  “It isn’t a wasteland,” she insists. “Look around you. Does it look like a wasteland?” She smiles solemnly and his heart twists as she makes a gesture. “Look, the sun is still high in the sky,” she says. After a while she adds, “And the future hasn’t arrived yet.”

  Yes, he nods in agreement, the future. There’s only this moment, he tells himself. And the next moment. And the next.

  They stay on the lake for a while longer. They comment on what they see: a tree on shore that’s been split by lightning, a half dozen glistening turtles sunning themselves on a log, a boat pulled close to a remote shore so that the couple in it can have privacy behind the overhanging leaves of a willow—but now they’re seeing these things separately. They’re being civilized, they’ll still be friends, Jory tells himself. At the same time he feels a familiar terror. Ila, he wants to say, sometimes I’m afraid I’m doomed to be an exile for the rest of my life. Worse, there are times when I think that’s my vocation, the only thing I know.

  Where can I go? he thinks. Where will I go after Ila?

  “Hot, isn’t it?” Strangers Vaniok encounters on the street shake their heads, old people on benches look up at him with weary smiles, they fan themselves with newspapers. “Real hot.” The bald young man who sells cigarettes jerks his head toward the window. “It’s going to be a scorcher,” he prophesies. “Look at that temperature already.” Vaniok nods accommodatingly, letting his shoulders sag in apparent agreement but in his heart he welcomes the heat. Summer has stolen into the town before the calendar is ready for it, exactly as it did last year, a remembered emotion from a forgotten dream, and it stirs him. Back home even the warmest days held the countryside in a loose grip; here the heat gathers in layers, it rises up out of the red earth and fills the air, a thick presence that has to be pushed aside when one moves. The heavy-headed trees are as still as sculpture; the horizon dissolves in a haze.

  The canopy of green that covers the campus has overwhelmed the more delicate colors of spring: the snowy blossoming pears, the bright smears of redbud, purple wisteria pouring down from trellis and porch; pink and white dogwood floating everywhere—these are distant memories from a time when he and Ila walked through the university’s garden and she pronounced the names of the sweet-scented flowers. Like Adam and Eve, he said. He kept asking her to repeat those names just to hear her say them—keep talking forever, he wanted to tell her. And yet, even as he listened to his cousin he was waiting for the season that needed no language, the hot, heavy time after the blossoms when only the green remains, so dense it’s almost black. These are the days Vaniok loves, when the thick heat searches out every corner and whispering leaves foretell storms that will shake the sky.

  On his break at work, he leans against the warehouse wall and exhales cigarette smoke into the bright sunlight, mulling over his decision to pay a call on Ellen Bird later today. After the chance meeting this weekend he doesn’t intend to let the opportunity pass. He pulls the smoke deep into his lungs, trying to quiet his sense of anticipation. He reminds himself to be sensible, not to expect too much. She was friendly when he saw her with the priest; he’ll be content if she’s friendly once more. He can’t deny that he’s thought about something closer between them but he doesn’t really need that: her friendship would be enough. Because the most important fact of recent days is his recognition that he wants to stay in this town. The hair on his arms bristles as he thinks it: I choose to live here, it’s my choice. It’s a momentous idea, that his wanderings on both sides of the ocean are going to stop in this quiet university town where they speak a language he never heard as a child; and it brings a shiver. So far from where he came from. And why here? Why not some other place? He can’t explain the mystery. But you have to choose finally, he knows that much, and those choices determine who you are. It’s something he’d like to talk about. Possibly if he and Ellen Bird do become friends he can try to make her see how he feels. Maybe she’ll understand.

  “Vaniok.”

  The woman’s voice startles him and at first he believes he’s conjured the librarian; but it’s Ila, dressed in her housekeeper’s outfit, who’s coming toward him. “What are you doing here?” he asks. Her sudden presence in the bright sunlight brings an instinctive rush of energy, though seeing her only reminds him that she isn’t going to be here very long. “Ila,” he says her name quietly, a private lament.

  “I have to talk to you.” Her voice is disappointingly businesslike. “I can’t stay long.”

  Vaniok is attentive. There’s no missing the urgency about her. “Yes?” he asks. It’s clear something is wrong. Could it be that she’s already decided to leave and has come here to bid him goodbye?

  “It’s Jory,” she says. The sweet melancholy Vaniok has let himself feel at the thought of his cousin’s impending departure turns bitter, the heaviness he associates with the man’s name descends on him. Will Ila never stop talking about Jory? “I’m worried about him,” she says. “I want you to look out for him.”

  “Worried? Look out?” He fights a rising anger. “You’re going too fast for me, Ila.”

  “Vaniok, I need your help,” she says.

  He throws up his hands. “Why? You see him more than I do.”

  Ila looks away. Her words are rushed, barely audible. “We’re not seeing each other anymore,” she says and Vaniok momentarily forgets to breathe. Did she really say what he thought she did? When she resumes her voice is more controlled. “I told him I’m going to take that real estate course next week, I said I was going to leave town.” Vaniok nods solemnly, unsure of how to react. “It all happened over the weekend,” she adds.

  Vaniok stands there, cigarette in his hand, looking at his cousin. Behind her the sunny campus is peaceful. A minute ago he was contented, savoring the moment, thinking hopefully about the future. Now his cousin has come here to ask something of him, to burden him with an obligation; and instinctively he wants to return to the time before she showed up. Still, he can’t simply dismiss what she’s just told him, that it’s already over between her and Jory. The thought consumes him. His irritation subsides, he feels vindicated, justified, he experiences an inner shout of joy. Ila’s news has made him happy. “I see,” he nods, trying to mask the satisfaction he feels at his countryman’s misfortune.

  Ila doesn’t look happy, though. She looks steadily at Vaniok and he realizes that all she’s said so far is only a prelude. “Jory is so …” She throws up her hands. “So passionate, so unpredictable. I don’t know what he might do.”

  “To you?” His anger jumps to the foreground, he’s suddenly clear in his emotions.

  “No.” She shakes her head. “Jory isn’t that kind of person.” She looks at Vaniok chidingly. “I mean to himself.”

  To himself. Vaniok shrugs, ashamed of the swiftness with which he was ready to accept a picture of Jory as a man of violence. Abruptly, he’s emptied of emotions, his feelings have to catch their breath. Really, this is no concern of mine, he wants to tell her, let Jory look after himself—he wishes he’d never have to hear the man’s name again. But, after all, his cousin has come all the way from the inn in order to ask him to
do something for her. “You want me to keep an eye on him?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she says. “Keep an eye on him. Have a word or two with him from time to time.” Her voice is softer. “I know,” she says, “this isn’t any of your business. I don’t have a right to ask you to do anything.” She pauses a moment. “But would you, please, anyway?”

  But Vaniok doesn’t want to agree to this. He tries to give all his attention to his cigarette, he pulls the smoke deep into his lungs. He wants to feel it burn, he wants it to hurt. No, I should tell her, he thinks, I don’t have to keep an eye on your Mr. Jory. He holds the smoke in his lungs for a long time and exhales it slowly so that its heat rakes his throat. He says nothing.

  “Vaniok,” she continues, “I know you don’t have to do anything. I don’t even know what I’m asking you to do, but you’re my friend and I don’t know who else to turn to. I suppose it would make me feel better knowing you were paying attention.”

  He shakes his head. “I’m not Jory’s keeper. He has a mind of his own. He’ll do what he wants.” Ila nods in glum agreement and all at once he feels sorry for his cousin—after all, like himself, she has dreams of her own and only wants to pursue them. He feels a familiar tenderness toward her. “I’ll do what I can, though,” he sighs. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  She smiles sadly. “Thank you, Vaniok,” she says. Though they’re standing close to each other she makes a movement in his direction as though she’s about to kiss him but she pulls up short, remembering where they are. “I’ll appreciate anything you can do.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says as she begins to move away.

  She stops and looks at him.

  “About you and Jory, I mean.” He does feel sorry about something, though it isn’t exactly clear to him what it is.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  When she leaves he watches her gray housekeeper’s uniform getting smaller as she moves between the bright sunlight and the deep shade of the campus. So Ila and Jory are finished, he thinks. He has a fleeting memory of the Constitution Day picnic: Ila speeding along the highway, the bridges flying overhead, the talk in the language of the homeland, himself running along the beach, a dog trotting beside him, the pounding ocean on one side and the ominous sky on the other. These are moments he’ll never recover, none of them will recover, as lost as the country they came from. Yet even as these scenes sweep over him, Vaniok is determined to resist the sadness that’s encroached upon his memory—life moves forward, not backward—and he reminds himself that his cousin trusts him, she depends on him.