Runaway Saint

by Lisa Samson

  “She’s probably at the park. She takes her sketchbook and spends hours there during the day. Maybe having to run your camera to the studio threw her schedule off.”

  “You’re not worried about this man who showed up? Her reaction to the note?”

  “We can ask her when she gets back, Sara. Getting worked up isn’t going to accomplish anything.”

  “Fine,” I say. “Watch your TV. I’m gonna go find her.”

  He reaches for his shoes.

  “No, really, Finn, you stay put. It’s okay. Call me if she comes back. Seriously. I just think there’s something weird going on, and I don’t like it.”

  I find her sitting on top of Hampstead Hill, under the shadow of the Pagoda with its stunning view of downtown. If she sees me, she gives no sign. Bel is in her own world—wrapped, too, in the chunky cardigan her friend Katya gave her. She is perched on the observatory steps much as the women in the Spanish painting at the Walters sat perched, her arms folded around her bare knees, pulling them tight in a kind of upright fetal ball. The scattering of cigarette butts around her feet attests to how long she’s been sitting here.

  “Hi, Aunt Bel,” I say.

  She doesn’t respond. I climb the steps and lean against a stone pedestal holding one of several ornate urns that circle the Pagoda. Some kids on skateboards scorch past us, kicking their legs for speed before they reach the downward slope. As the sound fades, I stare down at her, watching the wind play in the edges of her hair.

  “I wasn’t sure where you’d gone. I’ve been looking for you.”

  Aunt Bel shifts her weight and squints over her shoulder at me before glancing away.

  “Diana told me about the man who visited the studio. What did the note say?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Can I see it? Do you have it with you?”

  “I need to think,” she says.

  “Is that what you’ve been doing? This is a good place for it, I guess. Who was the man? Someone from Kazakhstan, I’m guessing.”

  “From Uralsk,” she says.

  The way she pronounces the word, it’s like the last syllable has to be swallowed or else she’ll choke. I repeat the exotic word, trying to imitate that sound: “Uralsk.”

  “A place in Kazakhstan,” she says. “Near the western border. One of the places I lived.”

  “So he’s someone you knew. What does he want?”

  “He isn’t someone I knew,” she says. “Just someone I knew of. I don’t want to see him.”

  “According to Diana, it’s me he wants to see.”

  She looks up at me. “No, you can’t. You can’t talk to him or listen to anything he says. Don’t call him and he won’t come back—he has no reason to come back. He had no reason to come in the first place.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t come here on a whim, Aunt Bel. So what does he want?”

  “Promise me, Sara, that you won’t contact him.”

  “How can I?” I ask, making a joke of it. “You took the note.”

  “This isn’t funny. It would be very bad to talk with this man. It would be dangerous for me.”

  “Dangerous?” I crouch beside her, putting my hand on her slight shoulder. “What’s going on, Aunt Bel? Are you afraid?”

  “You can’t tell him I am here. You should have nothing to do with him. Will you promise me that?”

  “Tell me what he wants, Aunt Bel. Why does he make you afraid?”

  She shrugs my hand off and gets up, descending the stairs down to the sidewalk. I follow behind, my mind racing with possibilities: human trafficking, smuggling, espionage, dark secrets that have followed Aunt Bel home, things too terrible to acknowledge. All ridiculous, I tell myself, imaginings that result from having no other knowledge of that part of the world except what I’ve seen watching crime shows on TV.

  “You have to level with me, Aunt Bel. If he’s dangerous, you’re putting us all at risk. I understand your need for privacy. But when your privacy puts Finn and me at risk, I’ve got a problem with that. Either tell me what’s happening or I will talk to this man.”

  She spins around on me. “What? What did you say?”

  “Look, if you’re not going to be honest with me …”

  “But I’ve told you, this man is dangerous.” Pleading now, her hands clutching at mine. “Don’t even joke about him. Can’t you see? This man will destroy everything. You have to promise me you won’t let him into our lives. Promise me.”

  “You’re hurting my hands,” I say, pulling free.

  “All right.”

  “All right, what? This is serious, Aunt Bel.”

  “All right, I’ll tell you.”

  “You’ll tell me what he wants?”

  “I’ll tell you everything. Just for you, Sara. You cannot tell anyone. Promise me that.”

  “Okay.”

  We walk down the hill side by side, and for a minute there’s nothing between us but silence. Not an empty silence, though. On the contrary, this silence is full. I wait for her to speak, tingling with anticipation.

  “What I have to tell you,” she says, “is going to change things. I am sorry for that. I wish it could be different.”

  “It’s okay,” I tell her. “Nothing will change.”

  My aunt hears this and gives me a look that suggests just how little I understand about the world.

  She goes back to the summer of her arrival in Kazakhstan, where she’d gone with four other young women and seven young men to serve the Lord. They had one backpack apiece, and most of the packing requirements had been spelled out in advance on a photocopied sheet. Their destination was the capital, Almaty, where they would work with a missionary group for four weeks before being divided into smaller groups to travel west, assisting smaller enclaves.

  “You have to understand something about me,” she says. “The reason I was there, the reason I’d gone to Bible college in the first place. It wasn’t piety. It wasn’t missionary zeal. No, my parents had become convinced in high school that I was a ‘troubled’ person, that without discipline and structure, I was going to ruin my life. In some ways I believed them, I guess. It’s hard to reconcile this with the way I think now, because I look back at that girl and she seems so innocent and naive to me. But according to Grandmom and Grandpop, I had a wicked way in me, as the song says, and after I ran away as a teenager—scared me to death, by the way—I figured I might as well try the program and went off to Washington Bible College. They were thrilled with my apparent turnaround. Everybody figured I went to Kazakhstan for the same reason.” She rubs the palms of her hands down her thighs. “Whatever the reason, it was exhilarating when we first got there.”

  She recounts how the initial weeks in Almaty fulfilled all of her expectations concerning the trip. Working side by side with the other volunteers, rolling out their sleeping bags on the hard floor of an old building, they spent their days renovating to host worship services. It was as if she’d joined a commune of Christian hippies, a selfless unit intent on loving one another and serving the strange and marvelous people they found themselves among.

  Traveling behind the Iron Curtain so soon after its fall felt the same as traveling back in time. Surrounded by real deprivation, it was hard for a well-fed American girl to keep thinking of herself as troubled. It was hard to think of herself at all—and when she did, she realized she was blessed.

  After the building work was complete, the volunteers fanned out into the surrounding neighborhoods, rounding up children for an improvised Vacation Bible School, where the language barrier resulted in much more humor than confusion as they talked to the kids about Jesus, made crafts, and ate the only snack the youth in charge thought appropriate, punch and cookies. The fact that they were Americans made them a popular attraction. They could hardly have been more exotic to the kids of Almaty if they’d come from outer space.

  As Aunt Bel recollects these events, she channels some of the exuberance she must have felt then. The worry lines
recede from her face and she seems quite young. “My sense of myself started to change,” Aunt Bel says. “I had always thought of myself as a Christian growing up, because our mother took us to church. Then in my late teens, I’d become a Christian for myself, finally owning the faith for myself. But if I’m honest, I don’t think I ever knew Jesus until I met him in Almaty, living in a musty old tear-down surrounded by people whose language I couldn’t understand.”

  Part of the change was thanks to the missionary enclave in Almaty, men and women from a variety of organizations, most of them fresh to the work and fearless. When the Vacation Bible School netted no converts—an unthinkable outcome back home—instead of lamenting their failure, the missionaries took heart: “The country had been in darkness for so long that, regardless of the outcome, it was a good thing just to spread some light. For us, the fact they were even there after so many years of being kept out meant that God was on the move. They used to say that a lot: God is on the move. God is doing things, whether we see them or not. And it was exciting to be around that kind of confidence. The world had changed. You are too young to appreciate this, but I had grown up in a world divided in two, East and West, and now suddenly it was one again. Anything seemed possible.”

  Another thing that impressed her was how lax these missionaries seemed. Their work left little time to invest in perfecting their personal piety. At the Bible college, she had internalized a sense of spiritual competition, always striving to outdo the people around her in word and deed (though mainly in word). Here that seemed not only irrelevant but counterproductive. It required more attention to self than their labor allowed.

  “They taught me so much there,” Aunt Bel says. “The attitude they took was so different from what I was used to in America, where we have so much anxiety about people’s souls. I remember being so worried about saying the right words, having all the right answers. The missionaries in Almaty never worried about things like that, because they thought God was doing something through them, even in spite of them at times. I never slept so soundly in my life.”

  When their month in Almaty ended, their hosts threw a feast. Everyone they had met over the past weeks was there, smiling and joyous. This was the happiest moment Aunt Bel could remember in her life up to that point, partly because she had finally lost herself in the group.

  “It was like we were a family,” she says, “and we all had the same calling, which was to serve.”

  “It sounds wonderful,” I say.

  “If only it could have lasted,” she says.

  After the feast, the plan was to divide the volunteers and send the smaller teams to several sites in other parts of the country for the rest of the summer, bringing everyone back together in the capital at the end of August. The missionary efforts in Kazakhstan were quite new, and while a cluster of families from various mission organizations had gathered in the capital, the volunteers would now find themselves working alongside much smaller groups—perhaps just a family or two. Most of the volunteers—four men and three women—traveled northwest to Astana, which would become the nation’s capital in the late nineties. They left first.

  Following some phone calls to the western part of the country, the rest of the volunteers were told they would be heading to Uralsk in western Kazakhstan. The morning of their departure, a change was made. The three young men continued to Uralsk, but Aunt Bel and the other remaining girl were shipped five hundred kilometers south to a depressing oil town at the mouth of the Ural River on the Caspian Sea, where they lived in a grim Soviet-era apartment building with a newly arrived family of missionaries named the Galts.

  “You know the painting American Gothic, with the farmer and his wife in front of the house, holding the pitchfork? That was the Galts. They were an older couple who’d spent twenty bitter years on the field in Turkey before the Curtain fell. They were nothing like the missionaries in Almaty. Living with them was a trial.”

  They had more experience than the Almaty missionaries, but it had consisted mostly of failure. Things had been hard for them in Turkey, which had taken a toll. Now in a country that was sixty percent Muslim, Herman Galt resented the people, their religion, their food, their dress, and anything else he could come up with. He spent more time holed up in the apartment than he did among the people. There were no renovations to work on here, no children to sing Bible songs with. Instead, the Galts put their volunteers to work mailing letters home to their supporters. Anxiety about failing financial support was a common theme at the Galt dinner table.

  Along with Aunt Bel and her companion (a solid, sunburned girl who had never adapted to the diet in Kazakhstan and was always struggling with intestinal maladies), the Galts had a twenty-year-old son named Alan who lived in the apartment with them and a younger son who lived back in America with relatives. The girls rolled out their sleeping bags on the living room rug every night while the Galts slept in the bedroom. Because the quarters were tight and Mrs. Galt wouldn’t have Alan sleeping in the same room as the girls, Alan was forced to bed down at night in the bathtub.

  “Every morning there was this elaborate ritual. Alan’s mother would wake him up, the family would dress, and then Mrs. Galt would come into the living room to make sure we were covered up before the men went outside. They would walk three flights of stairs down to the street, then come back up when she signaled them from the window.”

  We have walked all the way from the Pagoda past the bandstand, and now we’re following the lights of Eastern Avenue, largely unconscious of the surroundings.

  “What was the point of helping the Galts if they weren’t actually doing anything?” I ask.

  “Oh, but they were,” she says with a strange laugh I have never heard from her before. “The Galts were arranging a wife for their son.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yep,” she said, raising her eyebrows and shaking her head.

  13.

  Missionary Imposition

  Mrs. Galt had weighed Aunt Bel and her companion in the balances and found the other girl wanting. In her defense, the girl was often sick. She would have rallied—as she had in Almaty—had there been something definite for the volunteers to accomplish. In her state, however, if the Galts were content to leave her be, then she was content to lie on the little sofa, to read, and to sleep. After the first week, she started running a fever and throwing up every couple of hours.

  “Herman made some phone calls and the next day someone from Uralsk showed up to collect her. I heard later that they flew her home early. But me they left behind with the Galts.”

  The more she learned about the family, the more uncomfortable her status as sole guest became. Alan Galt, as it turned out, had rejoined his parents on the mission field after a profligate spree at a Christian college in Florida that ended with his expulsion. What the boy needed, Mrs. Galt confided regularly, was a godly influence in his life, and she could think of no influence godlier than that of a pretty young woman who aspired to become a missionary herself. While Herman Galt sat at the desk beneath his bedroom window drafting financial appeals to churches in the States and working on what he called the Big Plan, a stack of typewritten instructions to the missionaries who would follow him to the banks of the Caspian Sea (he spent a lot of time pondering the great work he would do once properly supported), his wife invented errands in the city for Aunt Bel and Alan to undertake.

  The first time they were alone together, Alan Galt confessed quite freely that he didn’t believe in God or the Bible any more than he believed in Homer or the gods of Olympus. He wanted to be a film director or, failing that, a novelist, and he’d only agreed to come to Kazakhstan for life experience. By this time next year, he told her, he would be heading to Western Europe. Either Paris or Berlin, he wasn’t sure which.

  “Alan was a skinny, dark-haired boy not much taller than I was,” Aunt Bel says. “But you know something? He could talk. I could listen to him talk for hours. He had this way of building a world around you wi
th his words, bricking you in somehow. It’s not that I gave up my beliefs for his. What happened was, I divided myself up, so there was the real me, and then there was Alan’s me. Two different people, and I liked being both of them.”

  “Maybe you were both of them.”

  “There wasn’t room for that kind of thinking in those days.”

  This idea of Aunt Bel’s dividing herself in two reminds me of the first day she arrived on my doorstep, when I’d had a similar impression—one Aunt Bel shy and innocent to the point of coyness, the other world-weary and intimidatingly dark.

  Through Alan she made other friends, including an old lady in the building who’d been deported long ago during one of Stalin’s resettlements.

  “She’s the one who gave me the porcelain doll,” Aunt Bel says. “As a wedding present.”

  “A wedding present?”

  “She was very sweet,” she continues, ignoring my exclamation. “And the two of us had so much in common. We were both exiles making lives for ourselves far away from home.”

  “Are you saying you married Alan?”

  “I didn’t really have a choice,” she says. “I knew I couldn’t come home.”

  Mrs. Galt’s plan had been to throw the two young people together, letting nature take its course. Unfortunately, her grasp of nature proved faulty. Where she had imagined sweet purity triumphing over licentiousness, what actually happened was that, after a graceless fumble, Alan managed to get Bel pregnant, which forced her into a tearful confession before the Galts.

  “I thought at least she would be sympathetic, but they were both extremely cruel. They said terrible, terrible things …” Her voice trails off, leaving me to imagine the worst. “And by the end of it, the crazy thing is that when Herman said there was only one solution—he would have to marry us—I actually felt grateful to him. I was bawling my eyes out over his kindness.”