She stayed at one of the hotels and took the car the next day to the ruins of Marmaz. Even here the tourists had stayed away. Only a few were walking through the echoing marble halls, sticking close together like the stunned survivors of a disaster. A man who spoke excellent English was leading a disheartened-looking group of Americans on a tour.
She and the tour finished at the same place, the central chamber with its cracked and empty pool made of white marble. “Tour, miss?” the guide asked her. “The next one starts in half an hour.”
“No, thank you,” she said. They stood together looking at the pool. “Your English is very good,” she said finally.
He laughed. “That’s because I’m American,” he said. “My name’s Charles.”
She turned to him in surprise. “How on earth did you end up here?” she asked.
“It’s a long story,” he said.
“Well, can you tell me—” she said.
“Probably not,” he said. They both laughed. Ghosts of their laughter came back to them from the marble pool.
“How do people get news around here?” she said. “I mean, the only broadcasts I can find on the radio are foreign, the United States and China, mostly, and what I thought was a newspaper turns out to be poetry, I think.…”
He nodded. “Yeah, they’re big on poetry here,” he said. “They get their news from the cards.”
“The—cards?”
“Sure,” he said. “Haven’t you had half a dozen people try to sell you a deck of cards since you got here? Used to sell them myself for a while. That’s their newspaper. And—other things.”
She was silent a moment, thinking about the boy who had tried to sell her the deck of cards, the card with Cumaq’s picture, the boy shouting after her that he could get newer cards. “So that’s it,” she said. “It doesn’t seem very, well, accurate.”
“Not a lot out here is accurate,” Charles said. “Sometimes I think accuracy is something invented by the Americans.”
“Well, what about—” She hesitated. How much could she tell him without him thinking she was crazy? “Well, someone, a native, told me that death is different in this country. What do you think he meant?”
“Just what he said, I guess,” he said. “Lots of things are different here. It’s hard to—to pin things down. You have to learn to stop looking for rational explanations.”
“I guess I’ll never make it here, then,” she said. “I’m a journalist. We’re always looking for rational explanations.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “It’s a hard habit to break.”
She did a short interview with him—“How has the shortage of tourists affected your job as a guide to the ruins?”—and then she drove back to the city.
In the next few days she tried to find the shabby three-story building again. It seemed to her that the city was shifting, moving landmarks, growing statues and fountains, swallowing parks and churches. The building had vanished. She showed a taxi driver her directions, and they ended up lost in the city’s maze for over two hours.
She went back to the airport, but the young man was gone and no one seemed to remember who he was. The old man who had sold poetry was gone too.
And finally her time in the city was up. She packed her suitcase, tried to call Jeremy one last time and took her plane to San Francisco. She tried to read on the plane but thoughts of Jeremy kept intruding. She would see him in three hours, two hours, one hour.…
He wasn’t at the airport to meet her. For an instant she was worried, and then she laughed. He was always so concerned about her safety, so protective. Now that it was her turn to be worried she would show him. She would take a taxi home and wait calmly for him to get back. No doubt there was a logical explanation.
The apartment was dark when she let herself in, and she could see the red light blinking on their answering machine. Six blinks, six calls. For the first time she felt fear catch at her. Where was he?
“Hello, Mrs. Schwartz,” the first caller said, an unfamiliar voice. She felt annoyance start to overlay her fear. She had never taken Jeremy’s name. Who was this guy that he didn’t know that? “This is Dr. Escobar, at the county hospital. Please give me a call. I’m afraid it’s urgent.”
The doctor again, asking her to call back. Then Jeremy’s brother—“Hey, Jer, where the hell are you? You’re late for the game.”—then a familiar-sounding voice that she realized with horror was hers. But she had tried to call Jeremy last night. Hadn’t he been home since then? Then the would-be writer—she fast-forwarded over him—and another strange voice. “Mrs. Schwartz? This is Sergeant Pierce. Your next-door neighbor tells me you’re away for two weeks. Please call me at the police station when you get back.”
With shaking fingers she pressed the buttons on the phone for the police station. Sergeant Pierce wasn’t in, and after a long wait they told her. Jeremy had died in a car accident. She felt nothing. She had known the moment she found herself calling the police and not the hospital.
She called a taxi. She picked up her suitcase and went outside. The minutes passed like glaciers, but finally she saw the lights of a car swing in toward the curb. She ran to the taxi and got in. “To the airport, please,” she said.
At the airport she ran to the Cathay Pacific counter. “One ticket to—” Damn. She had forgotten the name of the country. She fumbled through her purse, looking for her passport. “To Amaz, please.”
“To where?” the woman behind the counter said.
“Amaz. Here.” She showed her the stamp in the book.
“I never heard of it,” the woman said.
“I just got back this evening,” Monica said. “On Cathay Pacific. Amaz. In the Far East. Do you want to see my ticket?”
The woman had backed away a little and Monica realized she had been shouting. “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “Here’s a list of the places we fly. See? Amaz is not one of them. Are you sure it’s in the Far East?”
“Of course I’m sure,” Monica said. “I just got back this evening. I told you—”
“I’m sorry,” the woman said again. She turned to the next person in line. “Can I help you?”
Monica moved away. She sat on a wooden bench in the center of the echoing terminal and watched people get in line, check their gate number, run for their planes. She was too late. The magic didn’t work this far away. It had been stupid, anyway, an idea borne out of desperation and something the crazy American had said at the ruins. She would have to face reality, have to face the idea that Jeremy—
A woman walked past her. She was wearing a gold five-pointed earring in one ear. Monica stood up quickly and followed her. The woman turned a corner and walked past a few ticket windows, her heels clicking unnaturally loudly on the marble floor, and got in line at Mexicana Airlines. Monica stood behind her. The glass windows behind them were dark, and the lights of the cars and buses shone through the windows like strange pearls. “One ticket for Amaz, please,” the woman said, and Monica watched with renewed hope as the clerk issued her a ticket. Amaz had apparently moved to Latin America. Monica could not bring herself to see anything very strange in that. “One ticket to Amaz, please,” she said to the clerk, her voice shaking.
The plane left almost immediately. She was very tired. She leaned back in her seat and tried to sleep. Two sentences looped through her mind, like fragments of a forgotten song. “Death is different in this country.” And, “You have to learn to stop looking for rational explanations.” She tried not to hope too much.
She must have slept, because the next thing she knew the stewardess was shaking her awake. “We’ve landed,” the stewardess said.
Monica picked up her suitcase and followed the others out of the plane. The landing field was almost pitch-dark, but the heat of the day persisted. She went inside the terminal and had her passport stamped and then followed the crowd down the narrow corridor.
Jeremy came up to her out of the crowd. She dropped her suitcase and ran to him, p
ut her arms around him, held on to him as if her life depended on it.
AFTERWORD
“Death is Different,” like “Cassandra’s Photographs,” started with a character—in this case Monica, who realizes that she doesn’t need to have adventures vicariously through men, that she can go out and live adventurously on her own. Once I had the character the natural place to put her was Amaz. I was happy to have the chance to revisit the place, to see how it had changed since I had gone there with Charles in “Tourists.”
BREADCRUMBS AND STONES
My sister and I grew up on fabulous stories. Night after night we would listen, spellbound, as my mother talked of kings and queens, of quests through magical lands, of mythical beasts and fantastic treasure and powerful wizards. As I got older I realized that these were not the tales my friends and classmates were hearing: my mother was making them up, piecing them together from a dozen different places.
She seemed like a queen herself, tall and pale, a woman made of ivory. When I was a child I was sure she was the most beautiful person I knew. Yet she changed when she went outside the house, when she had to deal with grocers and policemen and bank tellers. Her store of words dried up, and she spoke only in short formal phrases. Her accent, nearly nonexistent at home, grew worse. But she never lost her grace or became awkward. It seemed instead as if she changed like one of the heroes of her stories, turned from a living woman into a statue.
I rarely thought about my childhood. But now, as we waited at the hospital, my father, my sister and I, all these things went through my mind. My mother’s condition was the same, the nurse had told us: she was sleeping peacefully. There was no reason for us to stay.
We stayed, I guess, because we couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. “They’ve got her in a room with a terminal patient, a woman who’s had three operations so far,” my father said. He was angry and on edge; every few minutes he would stand and pace to the soda machine. “What kind of atmosphere is that for her?”
My sister Sarah and I said nothing. Was our mother a terminal patient too? We knew only that she had been in and out of the hospital, and that her illness had been diagnosed at least a year before my father told us about it. There were so many things we did not say in our family; we had grown used to mystery.
Finally Sarah stood up. “There’s nothing we can do here,” she said. “I’m going home.”
“I’ll go with you,” I said quickly.
Sarah lived in a one-room apartment in the Berkeley hills. She had a couch that turned into a bed and a wall of bookshelves and stereo equipment, and very little else. She made us some tea on a hot plate and we sat on the couch and sipped it, saying nothing.
“Do you think she’s been happy, Lynne?” Sarah asked finally.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if she’s—I don’t think she’s got much longer. Do you think it was all worth it? Did she have a good life? Did we treat her all right?”
“I don’t know. No, I do know. She always tried to be cheerful for us, but there was something—something she kept hidden. I don’t know what it was.” We had been talking about her in the past tense, I noticed, and I resolved to stop.
“Was it us?”
“I don’t think so.” I thought of our father, an American soldier she had met after the war. Did she ever regret marrying such an ordinary man? “Maybe it was—maybe it’s Dad. She felt she made a bad marriage.”
“Maybe it was something about the war,” Sarah said.
We had asked, of course, what had happened to her in the war. She had been born in Germany, but her parents had managed to place her with a Christian family and get her forged papers saying she was not Jewish. She looked like what the Nazis had considered Aryan, tall and blond, so the deception had not been difficult. She had worked in a glass-blowing factory, making vacuum tubes. Her parents had been sent to a concentration camp and had died there; we had never known our grandparents.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Do you ever think—I sometimes wonder if I could have survived something like that. When I was twelve I thought, This is the age my mother was when she went to live with the foster family. And at sixteen I thought, This is when she started at the factory.…”
“No,” I said, surprised. She had never told me any of this.
“And what happened to our grandparents. I think about that all the time, that something terrible is going to happen. That’s why I don’t have any furniture, because at the back of my mind—at the back of my mind I always think, What if I have to flee?”
“To flee?” Perhaps it was the unusual word that made me want to laugh, and that, I knew, would have been unforgivable.
“She hardly told us anything. I used to imagine—the most horrible things.”
“You shouldn’t think of things like that. She had it better than most.”
“But why didn’t she tell us about it? Everything I know about her life I heard from Dad.”
“Because—Because she had to be secretive in order to survive, and she never got over it,” I said. I had never spoken about any of this before, had not known I knew it. “Once when I was a kid, and we were in some crowded place—I think it was an airport—I tried to get her attention. I kept calling, ‘Mom. Mom,’ and she wouldn’t look at me. And finally I said, ‘Hey, Margaret Jacobi,’ and she turned around so fast … I thought she was going to hit me. She said, ‘Don’t ever mention my name in a public place.’ ”
“I know. And she would never fill out the census. She hid it away that one time, remember, and a man came to the door.…”
“And she wouldn’t talk to him. He kept threatening her with all these terrible things—”
“And then Dad came home, thank God, and he answered it.”
“I thought they were going to take her away to jail, at least.”
I was laughing now, a little nervously, hoping I could make Sarah forget her terrible thoughts. But then she said, “Why do these things happen?”
“What things?”
“You know. Cancer, and concentration camps.”
But I had no idea. Why did she have to ask such uncomfortable questions? The best I could do was change the subject and hope she would forget about it.
The next week my father called and told me that my mother had asked for me. I hurried to the hospital and met him and Sarah at her bedside. But by the time I got there her eyes were closed: she seemed to be asleep.
“They had to give her a shot—she was in a lot of pain,” my father said. “They told me she was getting better.” He seemed barely able to contain his anger at the doctors who had given him hope. I could see that he needed to hold someone responsible, and I understood; I felt the same way myself.
My mother stirred and said something. “Shhh,” I said to my father.
“Did you feed the dog?” my mother asked softly.
We hadn’t had a dog in years. “Did you—” she said again, her voice growing louder.
“It’s okay, Mom,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
“Good,” she said. “Sit down. I’ll tell you a story if you like, but you’ll have to be quiet.”
We said nothing. Her eyes opened but did not focus on any of us. “The princess came to the dark fortress,” she said. Her accent was very strong, the “th” sound almost a “d.” “It was locked, and she didn’t have the key. Did I tell you this story before?”
She had told us so many over the years that I couldn’t remember. “No, Mom,” I said softly.
“I’ll tell you another one,” she said. “They went to the woods.” She stopped, as if uncertain how to go on.
“Who did?” I said.
“The children,” she said. “Their parents took them to the woods and left them there. Their father was a poor woodcutter, and he didn’t have enough to feed them.”
To my amazement I realized that she was telling the story of Hansel and Gretel. She had never, as I said, told us conventional fairy tales; I think she con
sidered the Grimms too German, and she avoided all things German after the war.
“The woodcutter’s wife had convinced him to leave the children in the woods. But the children had brought along stones, and they dropped them as they walked. The woodcutter told his children that he and his wife would go on a little ways and cut wood, and they left the children there. The children went to sleep, and when they awoke it was dark. But they followed the stones back, and so they came home safely.”
I hadn’t ever heard this part. The way I knew it Hansel and Gretel had dropped breadcrumbs. But all fairy tales were hazy to me; I had trouble, for example, remembering which was Snow White and which Sleeping Beauty.
“The woodcutter was pleased to see his children, because he had felt bad about leaving them in the woods. But his wife, the children’s stepmother, soon began to complain about not having enough food in the house. Once again she tried to convince her husband to take the children to the woods. And after a while he agreed, in order to have peace in the house.
“The children overheard their parents talking, as they had done the last time, and they went to gather stones again. But this time the door to the back was locked.”
She closed her eyes. I thought she had fallen asleep and I felt relieved: her story had made me uncomfortable. “The door was locked,” my mother said quietly, one last time.
When I think of that summer I see my sister and me in her apartment in the hills, sitting on her couch and sipping tea. She was an elementary school teacher on vacation for the summer, and I had taken a leave of absence from my job to be available to my mother. By unspoken agreement we started going to her place whenever we left the hospital. We were trying to understand something, but since we weren’t sure what it was, since our parents had chosen to reveal only parts of the mystery at a time, we had long circular conversations without ever getting anywhere. It was the closest we had been since childhood.
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