The Book of Jonas

by Stephen Dau

  She tells him that, were the earth the size of an apple, the surface would be as smooth as its skin. This bit of trivia feels vitally important to him, as though it says something fundamental about their lives. He finds it amusing when she tries to show him the correct way to hold a fork. He tells her that if you hold your hand at arm’s length out to the night sky, an area of the night equivalent to the space of your thumbnail would contain a million stars, most of which cannot even be seen by the naked eye. By which he means that present between them are infinite possibilities.

  And they are only dimly aware that, to an outside observer, someone lacking their interest or enthusiasm or imagination, they are talking a kind of silly code, a special language known only to them.

  43

  Paul has read an article, and is struck by the coincidence.

  Jonas does not want to talk about it.

  He was called Christopher.

  “That’s amazing, don’t you think?” says Paul.

  Jonas says nothing.

  They know only that he was involved. He was called Christopher. And now Paul has read a story in the newspaper. He was from a town not too far away. His mother still lives there.

  Jonas looks out the window.

  They know he went off to war and that he did not come back. He did not, as they say, make it. But he was there, and he was involved, and maybe, just maybe, says Paul, that is something.

  44

  The first time Shakri asks him up to her apartment, it is all he can do to keep from bounding up the stairs ahead of her. They have been seeing each other for more than a month, and her sudden forwardness surprises him.

  They kiss as she searches for her keys, kiss as she opens the door, kiss as she does not turn on the light. It is as though she has made up her mind. They fumble around over their clothes, awkwardly at first, as though learning the intricacies of sign language, but then with increased fluency, and then one of them suddenly learns how to undo a button, and it is all downhill from there.

  45

  Occasionally he is asked: Why America?

  Sometimes he gives the long answer. Sometimes he says the question asks him, he feels, a larger question, asks him to place his experience in a global context. Secretly he enjoys this, likes being thought of as part of a movement, although he would never openly admit to this. Instead, he says that he had nothing, and that they came to him and offered him a choice.

  Sometimes he mentions the Pakistanis and Indians living generations deep in Bradford and Manchester, or the Congolese in Brussels, or Algerians and Moroccans in Paris, or Vietnamese throughout California. He has read about them, studied them in school, and even though he feels more alone than he imagines any of these other people must feel, secure as they are in their mobile communities, he tries to place his experience into the frame of these movements, into the complex relationship between victor and vanquished, colonizer and colonized.

  A diaspora. A sociology professor first used that word to describe him, and he likes it, although he is careful not to reveal the satisfaction he derives from it. He practices using the word casually, in conversation. Diaspora. “As a member of the global diaspora, I feel…” And then he is off, propelled by the authority of membership. He likes how it sounds, but mostly he likes the word because of its hints of mystery and power, its implication of choice, all of which are entirely removed when the word “refugee” is used.

  Sometimes, though, he doesn’t give the long answer. Sometimes he gives the short one. Why America? Because he had a choice. The same choice we always have. Stay or go.

  And, given the choice, he went.

  46

  But the thing is, in all that time, I don’t really remember making a decision. I don’t remember saying to myself, “Yes, I will do this,” or, “No, I will not do that.” They tell you what to do, and you do it. You don’t reflect on it. You don’t ponder its meaning. You don’t explore its ambiguities or consider its consequences. These burdens are removed from you. In theory, these burdens are removed from you.

  But you are still human. Eventually, you do reflect on it. The consequences make themselves known. The results of your actions persist. Eventually, you are struck by their meaning. At some point, an accounting is made. Eventually, if you are human, and sane, you examine what you have done.

  47

  Together, Jonas and Shakri go to movies, to clubs, to parties at the homes of friends and acquaintances. They are seen walking hand in hand across the cathedral lawn after dinner. In public, they are reserved, formal, but they devour each other with their glances. Sinhal claims to have seen them kissing, but is thought to be exaggerating. Trevor catches them on a late Saturday morning at Bart’s Café, sitting in the low lounge chairs set around vast coffee tables. Shakri drinks hot chocolate and Jonas tea, while they both read newspapers.

  “You two’s already like an old married couple,” says Trevor as he sits down, forcing himself between them, cheeky and smiling and pulling an earphone out of his ear. “Sitting reading your papers. Me, I don’t want a married life till well after thirty!”

  Jonas and Shakri look up from their reading.

  “We’re not married, man,” says Jonas.

  “Get your feet off the table, Trevor,” says Shakri.

  48

  Paul has read an article about Christopher, but Jonas does not want to hear about it. During a session Paul mentions it, and Jonas does not respond.

  The next session, Paul brings it up again. Christopher’s mother is called Rose. Rose Henderson. Jonas is not interested. He says only that he is comfortable not knowing, but in reality he feels his stomach tighten each time Paul mentions it.

  “You have to admit, it’s quite a coincidence,” says Paul.

  The next session, Paul has brought the newspaper article, which he hands to Jonas like a summons. Jonas doesn’t want to look, doesn’t want to know, but sees no way to get out of it.

  The article takes up most of an inside page, its only illustration being a black-and-white sketch of Rose Henderson. Despite himself, Jonas is transfixed. When he is finished reading it, he reads it again. And when he has read it for the fourth time, he looks up at Paul and says, “Could this … I mean, is it possible?” And then he sits silently, looking down at the newspaper in his lap.

  Eventually, Paul says, “Would you like to go and talk with her?”

  49

  Shakri is by far the more dedicated student, planning to follow her family’s expected path and go to medical school. She studies for hours at a stretch, biology and chemistry, and a measure of her dedication seems to wear off onto Jonas, who to this point has gotten through school by, as he puts it, “brains and bullshit.”

  “I go to class,” he says, his voice almost a whine. “Do that and you barely have to read anything! We were doing The Odyssey, and I only read the last three chapters. Wouldn’t you know it; the final exam was just one question: ‘Analyze the major themes of The Odyssey, referencing only three chapters.’ The professor called it the best essay she ever read on the subject.”

  “She mustn’t have read many.”

  50

  On a Saturday afternoon Shakri and Jonas sit in low, open lounge chairs at Bart’s. Shakri drinks hot chocolate, which she loves, going through two or three tublike cups of it a day, even in the summer.

  Jonas drinks tea. He has kept only a few connections to the past, and this is one of them. He likes it sweet and strong, and if it is just the right kind—spiced kava, served with a hard sweet the way they do at Bart’s—then even the smell of it is comforting. He usually has at least a cup of it a day, more if he drank too much the night before. It’s one o’clock, and he’s on his fifth cup.

  It’s a pretty day, autumn and cold, and the sun streams in through the window and highlights Shakri’s dark skin and eyes and hair, and Jonas thinks to himself that she really is striking, and he also thinks that maybe he should tell her this. And then he thinks that maybe he shouldn’t. He does
n’t want to mess anything up by drawing attention to it, does not want to appear fawning or overly demonstrative, refrains from outwardly valuing anything he fears may be taken away. He prefers to appreciate things from a distance.

  And then finally he opens his mouth and says: “I was so trashed last night.”

  “I know,” says Shakri, and Jonas avoids her glare by looking studiously out the window. “You passed out cold on my couch. I woke up and you were gone.”

  He doesn’t seem to remember all of this, although he does vaguely remember seeing her, and being surprised to find himself on her sofa with the sun streaming through the window, and then walking home in the early light, not wanting to wake her. The rest of the night, though, is a blur. But there is a detail, an image from the night before that he does remember, that stands out in his mind, and he tells this to Shakri, explains it to her. Then he tells her that you have a choice about how you react to things.

  They sit for a while longer in their silence. Jonas is not too distressed by the hangover, and in fact he takes a certain pleasure in the distance it gives him from reality, the tingling fingers, the vague light-headedness, which somehow seems to heighten his other senses. He is fascinated by the intricate dance of waiters to and from the kitchen, the busy clink of plates and glasses in his good left ear, the sunlight falling through the large window and into his sparkling teacup, the hum of conversation and New Agey music. For just a second he thinks that he might be able to hear something out of his right ear, high and distant, like someone whistling, or birds singing on the wind.

  “Jonas!” says Shakri, and it is apparent from her tone that this is the second or possibly third time she has called to him.

  “Sorry,” he says, turning to meet her eyes.

  “Over here, man,” she says, snapping her fingers up next to her head. “What did Paul say yesterday?”

  Jonas thinks back to his session the previous afternoon, which seems a very long time ago. “He said my mental health is surprisingly good.”

  “He always says that.”

  “He said I might want to consider not drinking for a while.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He said I might think about going to see her, this lady, this soldier’s mother, thinks it might help me fit things together,” he says, realizing even as he does so that to say it out loud is to give shape to something he had wanted to remain formless.

  “And what do you think?”

  They sit there for a moment, Shakri looking at him ex-pectantly, and then he is certain that in the middle of their silence he can hear something in his deaf right ear, some kind of signal coming through, like strings faintly plucked.

  “He said it might give me a sense of closure.”

  “So you’ll do it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “I’ll drive you, if you want.”

  “Maybe,” he says.

  “You should do it.”

  “I don’t know.”

  The noise fades in and out, the soft, high song, and he turns to look out the windows, convinced he’ll see some mysterious musician strumming a sitar, but there is only the street, filled with afternoon light and bustling pedestrians.

  51

  It was supposed to have been a mellow evening.

  Hakma, Trevor, and Jonas take the crosstown bus to listen to jazz on the South Side. They are going to relax. They meet up with a few other people, acquaintances more than friends, who seem to converge every time they go out. Mike, or maybe Mark, from Philadelphia. Luca, who just broke up with his girlfriend. The weekend unfurls like so many weekends among people who might be known to one another by a first name and a single personal detail, these details providing the basis for an evening’s lurching conversation, more fluid as the night and the drinks carry on, forgotten by morning until the next weekend, or maybe the next, when the same conversation rolls around again, fresh.

  The jazz is modern stuff, which is usually not really Jonas’s thing, but the trumpeter is particularly good, playing high and wailing off the piano’s depth in unexpected ways, here a mass of unrelated notes, there a perfectly balanced chord progression, unexpected, discordant when they expect harmony, harmonious when they least expect that, alternately keeping them on edge, then lulling them.

  They drink. By the end of the set they are convinced that they have just witnessed the future of musical expression: subversive, glorious, embodying all to which music should aspire.

  When it ends they cross the street to the Astrid, their conversation loud and animated, and as usual Hakma is talking about Kurdistan. The incarnation of injustice, what the Turks do to us, he says. You just don’t understand. Has he ever been there, someone asks, one of the stragglers, obviously, someone who does not yet know this question’s inadvisability until he asks it. Yes, says Hakma, and his parents were born there, and his parents’ parents, and their blood is his blood, and almost everyone, except for the person who asked the ill-advised question, starts to pay attention to other things, because this is the conversation they have every week, fueled by injustice and rounds of drinks.

  The room starts to whirl ever so slightly from the edges, left to right, and Jonas focuses on a knot on the wooden tabletop, only to watch it move slowly to the right, along with the rest of the room, and he has to move his eyes to keep up with it, but he can’t get the timing right and his eyes slip past the knot, then move back to try to focus on it again.

  Of course you understand me, Hakma is saying; you are my brothers, my sisters, my comrades against evil, my long-odds risk takers, my fellow freedom fighters. He is really going for it, trying to impress the inapt questioner with the nobility of his plight. Jonas remains silent for much of this conversation. Hakma looks over at him occasionally; they all do, as though looking for permission, or affirmation. Jonas has never spoken directly of his childhood to any of them, but people hear things, divine things from what is left unsaid, and it is widely believed that he holds the trump card in the suit of injustice.

  Across the table, Hakma grows louder. They don’t get it. Nobody gets it. He raises his voice to a level that seems very loud, but for all anyone knows may simply be appropriate. They have no idea what his people have suffered, goddamned Turks, and he no longer looks around to see whether any of them might be present. The uselessness of NATO, and Europe, and America, America the cowardly, America the impotent. They don’t know, can’t know, can’t understand. And then someone comes over, someone big, with a backward baseball cap and very white gym shoes, comes over and tells him to be quiet, to shut the fuck up, and there’s some shoving, and the room spins again, and then they’re grabbing their coats, and they’re hustled out into the yellow-lit street.

  Someone has the idea to go to another bar. A better bar. A cooler bar. This bar is loungier, big chairs, low tables, and Jonas sees that the trumpet player they saw earlier is at this bar, and it’s a small neighborhood, so he’s not really surprised to see him there, tall and skinny and wearing a captain’s cap, and his music is playing over the sound system, the same music they had all just heard, but perhaps because of this it strikes them as a thin echo of what they heard live. He knows the bartender, this musician, and they are in the midst of an animated conversation about the music, both of them bopping their heads in time to it.

  They all sit down and order beer and resume the conversation, injustice and power, but like the music, it is all getting old for Jonas, thin, and before long he says he’s going home. What he really wants to do is go back to Shakri, collapse into her. He gets up and puts on his jacket. Hakma grows quiet. They all shake hands and exchange loose hugs. Trevor drifts off with another friend, and Hakma is left at the table by himself.

  Jonas turns around to leave, pulls his coat collar up around his neck. The door opens and he rides out into the cool street on a current of warm air and plaintive trumpet. Once he’s outside, he looks back in through the bar’s big picture window, and sees the image he will tell Shakri about the
next day, while he sits with her sipping tea.

  The bar’s canned light spills out through the window and onto the street, so it’s a little like looking at a giant TV screen. The left side of the bar is awash with people milling about, talking, a series of animated heads and dark clothes, laughing, carrying drinks. On the right side of the barroom is a low table at which Hakma sits alone, lit from above as if by a gentle spotlight, his half-finished beer on the table in front of him, his arms resting on his knees, fingers together, interlaced, his head bowed as if in prayer.

  52

  Tuesday, September 25 (AP)—Johnstown, Pennsylvania, resident Rose Henderson has only questions, and she wants only answers.

  “At first, when they told me he was lost, I thought they just meant lost as in misplaced, like maybe he caught the wrong plane somewhere and he would turn up eventually,” she says, referring to her son Christopher, who went missing in action while serving with the Seventh Cavalry Regiment. She speaks with the practiced weariness of someone who has repeated a story many times. “Then, a few weeks later, I got this very official-looking letter that said he had been formally declared missing in action. But they wouldn’t say where he was, or how it happened, or why.

  “Eventually, we learned a few more things about it,” she said recently over a cup of tea in her living room, which has been turned into something of a shrine to her eldest son. A large portrait of him hangs over the mantelpiece, and commendation letters, school trophies, and snapshots are displayed on shelves in a bookcase.

  Years later, she says the worst part is not knowing for sure, not having closure. “We were going to hold a memorial service a few years ago, but it just seemed wrong. If there’s even a chance he’s still alive, however small…” At this, Rose’s voice trails off, before she is able to take in a breath and continue. “At the same time, I wish there were some kind of end to this.”