Prison Boy

by Sharon McKay

  “It is made of bread,” the doctor continued. “I took the liberty some years ago of having it preserved. I had it done professionally, by an art restorer. I was afraid that it might fall apart before I found you.” He placed the sculpture in Kai’s hand.

  Kai’s breath caught in his throat. It was as if he had been walking on ice only to slip and plunge into deep, bitterly cold water. He sat down on the edge of his bed. Ezat stood above him, although Kai did not remember him getting up out of the chair and crossing the room.

  The object had no real color and the form was crude. Still, Kai could see what others could not—brown shorts and yellow shirt, matted hair, bony legs with knobby knees.

  “Pax?” Kai whispered.

  “He made it in prison. Perhaps I could get you a glass of water?” Ezat spoke gently.

  “No, please. I will make tea.” He wanted out, to run away, if only for a few minutes. Kai placed the little figure on the bookshelf, stood back to make sure it would not tip over, then went off to make tea.

  He stood above the kettle and waited for it to boil. His hands shook. His knees threatened to give out. He hung his head, then leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes.

  When the kettle whistled he made the tea, prepared a plate, and took a deep breath.

  “Biscuits?” Kai held out a plate of Nadia’s homemade cookies.

  The doctor was standing in front of Kai’s bookshelf. “Thank you.” He did not turn around.

  “Professor Ampior, do you take milk in your tea? It is just Tetley’s, I’m afraid. And I don’t have lemon.” Kai held up a small glass that doubled as a creamer.

  “Please, call me Ezat. We do not use the title professor for people with Ph.D. degrees. We use Dr. as a prefix or Ph.D. at the end of the name. I personally prefer my name without any title. No milk, thank you.” As Ezat accepted the tea, Kai noticed the man’s scarred hands.

  Ezat sipped the tea, then reached for a book by Rumi. “You like poetry.” Was it a question or a statement? Kai nodded. Ezat turned to place the cup on the edge of the desk. The photograph on Kai’s desk caught his eye. “And this?” Ezat picked the picture up.

  Kai cringed. He had forgotten about it. “I, we, Pax and I . . . lived in an orphanage. It was called the Pink House. It was painted pink. Peter, my father, took the picture. Nadia, my mother, had it framed. I didn’t mean to bring it with me . . . to college . . . but she slipped it into my bag . . .” Kai’s voice trailed off.

  Ezat nodded. “And who are they?” he asked.

  Kai had no choice but to stand behind him and point.

  “That is Santoso, Bambang. I am in front. That’s Bell, who ran the orphanage. She died many years ago. That’s Mega, Bhima, and Guntur at the end.” He skipped over Pax.

  “Do you keep in touch with them?” Ezat asked.

  Kai shook his head. “My mother, Nadia, talks to Bell’s sister in London. She is in touch with them.” There was a note of regret in his voice, or perhaps embarrassment.

  “Do you know where they are now?” asked Ezat.

  “Mega is a nurse. She is married with two children. Bambang drives a train. He has two children, too. Bhima is in university.”

  “It is wonderful that they have all done well, but their education must be expensive!” said the professor.

  “Bell’s sister pays for their education,” said Kai.

  “And these two?” He pointed to Guntur and Santoso.

  “They were in an accident when they were kids. The Red Cross arranged medical care for them. They were adopted after that. I think Guntur is an apprentice to an electrician, and Santoso is a chef,” said Kai.

  The professor nodded and pointed to Pax. “Pax was a handsome young man.”

  Kai twitched. He took the photograph and slipped it back in the drawer. “Where did you meet him?” Kai asked the question simply, with a breezy air. Of course he knew the answer. Prison.

  Ezat began. He spoke without drama, without inflection. Great Tom, the bell in the clock tower, struck noon. An hour had passed. Kai’s shoulders sagged despite his best efforts to sit up straight.

  “Perhaps you are aware that we were tortured,” said Ezat.

  Kai nodded. Perhaps he did know, as one knows things in the bones. But did he know it in his heart and mind? No.

  Ezat went on. Another hour passed. Pax was beaten. He withered away in pain day and night for weeks. He was constantly thirsty. Hunger did to his body inside what the torture did to it outside. There was a wall—women and children were imprisoned behind it. There was a jailer named Stink Boy and a giant bird Pax called a goddess. She had wings, a crown of jewels, and blue eyes that sparkled like sapphires. Pax flew on her back. There were soldier birds with gold beaks.

  Through it all Kai’s face remained composed, his body still, rigid. In his mind, he was raging. He was at the bottom of a well screaming up into the light.

  “Pax found comfort in his imagination. He loved poetry. He loved stories. He loved you. Towards the end he was obsessed with the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. He said that he had seen them, flown over them. He could describe them in amazing detail.”

  “Yes, as children we had a book. Here.” Kai’s voice, even to his ears, was surprisingly controlled. He pulled the book from his bookshelf. “It is not the same book, of course. We were given the original when we lived in the orphanage. I found this one a few years ago in Arcadia, a secondhand bookshop off St. Michael’s Street.” Kai handed Ezat the book. Why did he say that? What did it matter where the book came from? He was sweating.

  “Ah, this is why Pax could describe the places so accurately.” Nodding, Ezat flipped through the pages. He did not seem surprised. He paused as if considering, perhaps struggling, with what to say next. “He was delirious towards the end. He was infatuated with this Goddess Girl. She gave him peace, perhaps resolution.”

  “There was a poster on a wall when we lived with Ol’ May, the woman who took us in after the orphanage was closed. Pax loved that poster. So did I.” Containing his emotions was getting harder.

  “That explains it,” Ezat said softly. He placed the book on the shelf and sat back down in the chair.

  To Kai’s eyes Ezat looked calm—too calm. Rage rushed up Kai’s throat. His legs felt like jelly. The other part of his brain—the part that analyzed, observed, kept him sane—thought, Why did he come here? What does he want? And why is he trying to turn Pax’s death into some sort of fantasy? Then there was the other part of his brain—the part that felt wounded. He thought, This is what it feels like to have a soul ripped away from a spirit.

  Kai rocked back and forth on his heels. He thought he might be sick, and then words rushed out.

  “Pax did not visit the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. He did not fly on the back of a great winged, diamond-studded bird. It is all nonsense.” He spoke through clenched teeth. “Pax was a teenager. He died at the hands of monsters, and here you are telling me a story about winged creatures? Trying to say that the imagination is a way to fight torture is like telling a man to hold back the ocean with his hands.” Kai stopped, breathless. His face was red, his ears hot. For a moment they were both surrounded by a thick, suffocating silence.

  “I apologize. I have hurt you. Pax died in my arms. I had hoped . . .” The old man bobbed his head slowly. The sadness in his eyes intensified. Cane in hand, he stood and slowly shuffled towards the door. “I must go. Perhaps, another time . . .”

  Kai did not look up. He heard the two doors close and muffled footsteps on the stairs.

  He waited. He opened the doors and listened. He counted each step. The old man was on the second-floor landing. More steps—he was in the downstairs hall. Door opened. Closed. Gone.

  Kai closed both his doors—tight. He roared like an injured animal. He raised his fists in the air and pounded his mattress. He lifted it up over his head and threw it against the wall. He knocked over the tea tray, smashed whatever he could reach. He did it over and over again. W
ith his hands cupping his face, he cried.

  Exhausted, Kai slid down onto his haunches and pressed his forehead against the wall. He could smell lemon wax that had been polished into the centuries-old wood.

  He hung his head. His chin bobbed on his chest. If his head fell off its stem and rolled on the floor, he would be dead. The pain would stop. He would be at peace.

  Kai staggered to his feet, went to the window, and looked out onto the quad. Everything remained as it had been two hours ago, a year ago, hundreds of years ago. But now he could also see Pax tied to a bed and beaten until bloody. Fifty lashes a day. Rations they called it.

  Kai grabbed hold of the windowsill and then turned. There it was—the tiny sculpture. He picked it up in his hands and cradled it against his chest. Pax must have been hungry. He must have wanted to eat the bread. Instead he had made this for him, a gift.

  “I should not have left you there. Pax, I’m sorry.” Kai lifted his face to the ceiling and howled like a dog at the moon, except there was no moon and he wasn’t a dog—he was just a boy, alone, and forgiveness was nowhere in sight.

  Why? Why torture a boy? Why torture anyone? The questions pulsed in his head. Why do people do this to each other? Animals don’t torture each other. Just people. WHY?

  “Why? Why do all children ask ‘why’?” said Bell. Her voice was back. He had locked all the voices away, and now they were back.

  Kai looked down at the tiny sculpture. “Pax, did you really believe that this would be given to me? The odds . . .” And, like all revelations, it came suddenly, without warning. And then there was clarity. Kai knew. HE KNEW!

  Kai’s eyes darted around the room. It was a mess. Wallet. Where? There. Mobile? He flung clothes aside and reached under a pile of papers that had fallen on the floor. There. He unplugged his mobile, ran down the stairs, out the door, and sprinted across the quad.

  “Hey, Kai, wait up.” Albert jogged towards him. “Where are you going? Althea said that you two were going out to lunch. Henry and I . . . What’s wrong with you? Slow down.”

  “Tell Althea that I will call her, okay? Just tell her that.” Kai kept on running. His heart beat hard, his arms pumped.

  Two Bulldogs stood at the gate.

  “Good morning, sir.” A Bulldog tipped his hat.

  Kai nodded back and gulped air. “There was a man here, Dr. Ampior from Cairo University. He was using a cane. Which way did he go?”

  “He took a cab, sir. I heard him tell the driver to take him to the train station.”

  Kai stepped out on the road. Luck. An empty taxi.

  Chapter 33

  Kai barged through the train station. It was not yet midday. Summer tourists had replaced students and commuters. An American, by the sound of her voice, spoke to a legless man in a wheelchair, then dropped a few coins into his cup.

  “An American tourist is coming to give us money,” said Pax. The voice came out of the fog. More words that he had locked away were filtering back.

  Kai spun around, once, twice. “Have I missed the train to London?” he asked a ticket-taker.

  “I’d say. But there will be another along in an hour, every hour on the hour,” replied the man.

  He had missed Ezat, likely by just minutes.

  Kai sat down on a bench. He rubbed his hands across his face, up into his hair, and down the back of his neck. He could find him again, of course. Cairo University. But now, he wanted to talk to the man now, now, now. Kai closed his eyes.

  “Please, please tell me.” Kai hugged his knees into his chest, and leaned his head against Pax’s shoulder.

  Pax took a deep breath. “On a planet far away, past all the stars and heaven too, a beautiful queen had a baby. War came to the planet. The queen asked a magician to save her baby from the enemy. The magician used his wand to create a rainbow. The queen put the baby on the rainbow and the baby slid down to earth.”

  “Kai?”

  Kai looked up into Ezat’s face. Ezat stood above him, shoulders hunched, head forward as if walking against a wind.

  “I thought that I had missed . . .” Kai leapt up and stammered out the words.

  “I did miss the train. I wish I had even a bit of the strength of my youth.” He smiled sadly.

  “I came . . . I came to apologize.”

  “There is nothing to apologize for. I should not have told you as much as I did, certainly not in one conversation.” He looked tired.

  “Could you stay a little while longer? There’s a train every hour. ”

  “I must sit.” Ezat sat down on a bench, both hands cupping the knob of his cane. Kai sat beside him.

  “Was it hard on you—your time in prison?” What a stupid question. He could have kicked himself.

  “It was harder on my wife and infant son.” Ezat spoke sadly, without anger.

  Strands of the story came back to Kai—the wall, women and children behind the wall. Were his wife and son behind the wall?

  “How, I mean, why were you arrested?” Kai stopped. Perhaps that was too personal a question. Nothing he said seemed right.

  “They called me a radical. I was a poet, a professor. The police came in the middle of the night. My wife was feeding our baby. She did not even have time to reach for the diaper bag.” Ezat took a deep breath. “But I think you have heard enough sad stories today.”

  “Is that why you took such good care of Pax, because you could not care for your own son?” Kai asked.

  “All the political prisoners cared for the children. We gave them the best food and tried to find them medicine. In a place where we were treated worse than animals, I found some comfort in caring for him,” said Ezat.

  The tears in Kai’s eyes were sudden. Anything left of anger in Kai had evaporated.

  “How did you get out of prison?” he asked, gently.

  “Several months after Pax died, I was told to go home, and so I did. There was no reason, no explanation, just an open door. Only then did I learn that my wife and son had died months after our arrest. Perhaps it is best that I did not know. I would have given up.”

  “Have you . . . did you . . . I mean, are you over it?”

  Ezat thought for a moment. “I sleep with the lights on, like a small boy. In the dark, when I close my eyes, I hear screams. No more . . .” Ezat stood and stumbled. Kai grabbed his elbow. “I’m sorry. I did not mean . . . Could you stay? Maybe just for lunch?” Kai was suddenly desperate. “Please, I need to know . . .” His voice drifted.

  Ezat paused. He nodded and then, as if changing channels on a television, he said, brightly, “Perhaps I could treat you to a bit of what you Brits call pub fare. And maybe you could tell me how it is that a boy such as yourself ended up at Oxford.” Ezat smiled.

  Chapter 34

  “This way.” The hostess showed them to a dark, woody booth with deep leather seats. It was late spring, but still a small fire burned in an open hearth. “Your server will take your order.”

  For a moment the two perused the menu.

  “Decided?” asked Ezat. Kai nodded. They closed their menus.

  Ezat waited, patiently.

  Kai considered. He never spoke about the past—ever. His mother and father often tried to get him to talk, to open up. He refused. “When you are ready . . . ,” Nadia, his mother, would say. Then she would add, “We love you.”

  He sometimes thought that his mum and dad were the gentlest people on earth, and he was the luckiest. Not because he’d won a strange sort of life-lottery, but because he had been loved every minute of his life. First by Pax, and then by Bell, and now by Nadia and Peter . . . and maybe Althea, too.

  “You do not talk about your past,” said Ezat.

  Kai shook his head. “There was a door . . . in the prison. It was made of metal. It slammed shut. I was on one side of the door and Pax was on the other. I never saw him again.” Kai held himself very still.

  “And I have forced you to open the door,” said Ezat quietly.

  “Yes.”
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  “My name is Tamarah. I am your server today. Ready to order?” Tamarah hovered above them both. She had a wave of pink in her hair. The tattoo that trailed up her arm said “Carpe Diem.”

  Kai looked at the closed menu as if he had never seen it before in his life.

  “Soup of the day,” said Ezat, and to Kai he added, “A lasting effect of my time in prison is a delicate stomach.”

  Prison? Tamarah’s eyes widened.

  “I’ll have the same,” said Kai. He didn’t ask what kind of soup. He didn’t care. Nor, apparently, did Ezat.

  “Anything to drink?” Her eyes went from one to the other.

  “Water, please, and tea,” said Ezat.

  “The same,” said Kai. But he didn’t want tea any more than he wanted soup.

  Tamarah picked up the menus and went on her way.

  “Please, go on,” said Ezat.

  Kai hesitated and began again. “I didn’t know what was happening. I suppose I was screaming for Pax. I walked into a bright room. A man stood in front of a barred window. He turned. It was Peter, Dr. Peter Bennett. I had met him before, you see. He had been kind to me. He opened his arms and I fell into them.”

  Tamarah set the table with utensils wrapped in napkins, paper placemats, and glasses of water. She placed a basket of buns and a plate of butter in front of them.

  “There was a white truck outside. No guards, no guns. The sunlight was shocking. He held me tight. I was seven years old but small for my age and weak from hunger. I could hear gravel crunching under his feet, a car door opening, and a woman’s voice. She said, ‘Put him beside me.’ He tucked me into the backseat of the vehicle. She smelled sweet, like flowers. Her first words were, ‘My name is Nadia. I am Peter’s wife. You are safe now.’ I felt a strap circle my middle and then a click. She said that the seatbelt would keep me safe.”

  “But how . . . I don’t mean to pry . . .” Ezat’s voice trailed off.

  “How did he know that we were in prison?” said Kai.

  Ezat nodded.

  “The photograph, the one taken by the security camera, went around the world. Today they would say it went viral. Peter saw the picture in an English newspaper. He recognized us.