Stranger

by David Bergen

  He paid my mother, she said. A good amount. I didn’t have to do anything except arrive at his house when he asked for me, dress up for him, watch soccer, eat pizza, kiss him on the mouth and stroke his feet. He liked to lie on the bed in his Adidas shorts and he’d speak to me as I rubbed his body with ointments and lotions. I returned to my mother in the morning. He had a guard named Julio who was much more dangerous, and it was Julio who sometimes visited my shanty and tried to get in and I always shouted at him that Daunte would kill us both, which was true, and so he sat outside my door and he wept. He was sentimental. Men can be very stupid. This is why it is easy to talk to them. They listen. Especially if you are young and if you praise them and call them handsome and kind and generous, which they might not be, but who will not believe lies dressed up as flattery?

  She said that when she turned eighteen, Daunte found a younger girl, perhaps even two or three more, and so she was no longer wanted. Her mother had died two years earlier, and she was alone, and so she took the money she had saved, and she left and rode La Bestia up through Mexico and crossed the Rio Grande into America. I had a friend here, in this city, and so I came. Otherwise I would have gone to Los Angeles or San Francisco. My friend left last month.

  Vitoria sighed. Yawned. Her story was just a story to her. The tale of her life. No better or worse than anyone else’s tale. This was her nature. She asked about Íso, what was her story?

  It’s nothing, Íso said.

  I’m sure it’s something, Vitoria said, and she fell asleep.

  Íso lay awake for a long time. Vitoria’s story had given her courage. She felt strong. She thought that tomorrow she would begin to eat more. She would gain weight. She would store up fat for the time when she needed it.

  THE couple was young. The woman was taller than her husband, even in bare feet, but she liked to wear high-heeled boots or shoes, as if it gave her great pleasure to look down on her husband. Íso always knew when the woman was home because she heard her heels on the floor and she smelled her, a citrus scent that she wore. The woman’s name was Barbara, the man was called Chris. He worked in information and she was in finance. They had a driver who took them downtown every day and returned them to their house in the evening. Íso’s job was to clean the bathrooms, of which there were four, and to vacuum, and to polish the kitchen from top to bottom, and to walk the dog, and to iron and fold laundry. Dry cleaning was taken care of by the driver, whose name was Oliver, and who sometimes drove Íso back downtown in the evening, if the husband and wife were late coming home and the buses had stopped running.

  When they had interviewed her, she sat on a chair in their front room, and they sat on a white leather couch. Barbara had a notebook, and she kept referring to it, as if the notebook might tell her something important about Íso. Chris was more relaxed, he liked to joke, and he seemed impatient to get the interview over with. Barbara asked her if she had ever worked with foreigners before. She told them that she had. In her village, where tourists came because of the beauty of the lake. She described the lake and she told them about the volcanoes and she said that one could ride on horseback to the cloud forest and from there look down on the lake. It was popular. She said that she was an intern, and that she had worked at the hospital in the town, and that she had worked with doctors from America who had come there to volunteer. She did not make mention of the clinic. She understood that Barbara and Chris might speak to their neighbours, who in turn might speak to theirs, and in that manner the doctor and his wife might hear that there was a Guatemalan girl in Zone 7 who had worked at a fertility clinic. This was her reasoning.

  Her English was good, of course, and this surprised Barbara, and it made Chris flirtatious.

  He asked if she had a boyfriend.

  She said that she didn’t.

  Barbara looked at Chris but she didn’t say anything. She just looked.

  Chris said that he’d love to visit the lake where she lived.

  Do you have papers? Barbara asked.

  She handed them her health certificate, which she had picked up the day before. She was clean.

  Permit papers? Barbara asked.

  Íso shook her head. No.

  We might be able to arrange something, Barbara said. In any case, it’s impossible to find workers. Everyone is struggling.

  Íso agreed that everyone was struggling.

  If you’re asked by the authorities where you work, Barbara said, you can’t say.

  Of course.

  This job isn’t a job.

  Yes.

  It doesn’t exist.

  Yes.

  Chris laughed. What can happen? he said. They arrest us.

  No, Barbara said. They arrest Íso. And we lose her. And she is deported. She turned back to Íso and said that she would be given a test run. For a week. And then they would re-evaluate. She would have a key to the house. And the security code. She would have a pass to enter Zone 7. She was not to give that pass to anyone else. Barbara told her how much she would be paid, and when. Íso did not let on that this was a large amount, much more than she’d earned at the clinic.

  She worked in the afternoons, starting at one. After the first week, Barbara told her that she was good. She could stay on. The house was silent, and if she had been inclined towards loneliness, she would have felt terribly isolated. As it was, she was happy to be alone. The house had security cameras, inside and out. Of course, there were cameras everywhere in the city as well—on the buses, on street corners, in restaurants and malls—but she was surprised to see cameras in the house, where Chris and Barbara lived private lives. Only the bathrooms were free from cameras. She liked to spend time in Barbara’s bathroom. It reminded her of the tiled and scented massage rooms at the clinic. The low hum, the cleanliness, the soft white towels, the privacy. She went through Barbara’s toiletries. Makeup, lipstick, eyeliner, pills, vitamins, face wash, tweezers, four different sizes of nail clippers, condoms, bars of soap, facial scrub pads, deodorant, perfume, shaver, cream, hand lotion. She sometimes took a little lotion for her hands when she’d finished cleaning. It was rich and creamy and thick. It had no scent.

  She didn’t have to cook. Chris did that. Though she was required to help at dinner parties, alongside the caterers. During these dinner parties she usually stayed in the kitchen and helped the chef, or she cleaned up the bathrooms if someone had left a mess, which seemed to happen quite often. One time she came upon a couple in the shower. She heard voices, caught a glimpse of the couple, stepped back, and went downstairs to the kitchen. This was the same dinner party where Barbara had hired five young women to walk around topless and serve hors d’oeuvres and canapés. Íso was in the kitchen, and when the girls returned to fill up the platters, they talked amongst themselves, and a few of them, later in the evening, stepped out into the garden to have a cigarette. Smoking bare-breasted. Íso did not know where to look when the girls spoke to her, asking for something, and so she looked at their feet, but the girls didn’t seem to notice Íso, and so she stopped looking at them altogether. She simply responded to their requests by pointing or gesturing. The one time she’d gone out into the main room, to help with the lighting of candles, the guests had appeared not to notice the young women.

  Oliver drove her back to the city in the limousine late that night. He rarely spoke, though the one time she heard him talking to Barbara she knew instantly which country he came from. She was hungry and tired and her hands were shaking and she wanted to talk to someone, even if there was no response, and so she said to Oliver that the girls were very pretty.

  He grunted.

  You’re from Russia, she said.

  If he was surprised he didn’t show it. He shrugged and asked how she knew.

  I recognize the voice.

  The accent, he said.

  Yes. The accent.

  He said that a girl was pretty for only a moment. He said that being beautiful was like a fog—it made everyone blind. You understand? The boy, the gi
rl, the other boy, the other girl. And then you grow up and the fog is gone and you find out the truth.

  Íso was surprised by this long speech. She said that the girls were smoking in the garden. Without their shirts.

  Oliver grunted, and then he said, You’ll get used to it.

  Do you have family? she asked. This was forward of her.

  He was quiet. Then he said he had a little boy who was still in Russia. And you? he asked.

  No. Nothing, she said.

  ONE night, late, there was a large fire downtown. Someone said it was a mall that had been broken into and looted, and she watched the fire from the balcony, along with Chaz and Rita and Sutt and Vitoria. Neighbours gathered in the street below, and folks settled on chairs to watch the smoke pluming. It was like a carnival. Chaz said that the smell of tear gas meant there was a revolution happening. He grinned. The following day police on horseback rolled through the neighbourhood, gathering up vagrants. They clubbed those they caught, and chased down the runners, and threw the captured into black vans. There were shouts and sighs and cries for mercy, but none of those watching, of which Íso was one, intervened. People were just happy to be above the fray.

  She learned that those who had nothing to lose are the most dangerous. She learned that the young children who ran in packs didn’t have fathers, and sometimes they didn’t have mothers, and she thought that even where she came from, a family might be poor, but it was still a family. She learned that Sutt’s father was in prison. She learned that Rita was adept at finding food in the dumpsters behind the supermarkets, and when she heard this she thought of her mother, who had arrived in this country years earlier and foraged for food in this manner. She learned that the “best before” date meant little, except for milk and cream. Yogurt and cheese could be eaten weeks after that date—you simply had to remove the mould. And so she learned to eat yogurt and cheese, even though these things made her mouth curl. She learned that Vitoria was fond of Chaz and vice versa. Sometimes at night Vitoria was absent and Íso knew that she had gone to visit Chaz in his room. This did not bother her, though she missed the comfort of Vitoria’s body and she missed her voice. She had not yet told Vitoria about her baby, and she realized that she wouldn’t tell her. It was too dangerous. She learned not to think too much about what might happen, and she learned not to dwell too much on the existence of her child out there. She learned that her employers, Barbara and Chris, were fearful, not so much of the day to day, but of the possibility that what they had might be taken from them—their advantage, their safety—and this being so, they celebrated their fragile security by living extravagantly, by throwing large parties, and by spending large amounts of money on objects they would never use. She learned to be silent, and never to ask questions, and to do whatever was bidden. This was not difficult. She had learned the art of igual long ago, at the clinic, with the women who had come to take the waters at Ixchel.

  FOR the most part, she was alone in the house four afternoons a week. She did her chores and then walked the dog, Champ, a dachshund. She carried plastic bags to clean up the dog’s shit. She didn’t like dogs, and she didn’t like picking up shit. Barbara adored Champ, though Barbara rarely took Champ for walks, and if she did, she wouldn’t pick up his shit.

  She of course had a reason for being there, and so she became familiar with the neighbourhood. Because the streets were oddly placed, with many dead ends, it took her some time, but while out walking one afternoon, she found the doctor’s house set back in a bay. A single manor sitting by itself, surrounded by fields of grass and flowers, with a view of a small river out back. She had the house number, and she had the correct street, but now that she had arrived, and was standing across from his house, she wasn’t clear what her next step should be. There was no movement outside the house. In fact, no house in Zone 7 showed life. She walked back and forth along the far side of the street so as not to draw attention to herself, but as she was the only sign of life thereabouts, it was a fact that she would have been paid all the attention. If there’d been someone to pay attention.

  Champ peed on the boulevard. Tugged at the leash. She backed away and then walked on. She returned the following day to find that nothing had changed. She was breathless, and she was dizzy with dread.

  The river that wound through Zone 7 arrived via a tunnel that ran beneath the guard wall and passed behind the doctor’s house and then moved south and eventually through another tunnel and back out into the unprotected world. There were paths on either side of the river, and footbridges, and there were benches placed in copses of trees for people to take advantage of the bucolic scene. There were public washrooms as well, situated at the beginning and the end of the path. This is where Íso took to walking Champ. It was quiet and away from the streets, and the path passed behind the doctor’s house and she could pause and survey it.

  It was on this path, late one afternoon, that she ran into the doctor. He was walking alone, and he was pushing a stroller. She saw him from a distance and she knew immediately. He was walking with long strides, as he had always done when they walked through the pueblos that surrounded the lake. Back then she had to skip or run to catch up to him, or she had to tell him to slow down. Now, as he approached her, he had both hands on the stroller and he was talking to himself, or perhaps he was talking to the baby. His hair was cut short, and he wore a paisley shirt and a purple scarf. He was so involved in talking that he did not see her, though she was standing on the path. The river was gurgling past. Or perhaps it was the child making noises in the stroller. She was aware of the stroller and of the noises. At first, when she recognized Eric and realized that her baby was with him, her legs had gone weak from surprise and fear and dismay. She had even considered turning away and walking in the opposite direction. But she didn’t turn away. She stood in the path and as he drew near she grew calm and she said hello. He looked up. And then he said hello and in that moment she remembered everything about him.

  THEY met on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, when he walked Meja for an hour. By the river path that led past the water wheel and down towards the elms that offered shade and privacy. On a bench near the footbridge beyond the public washroom. She was always there first, waiting, her dog at her feet. She heard them before she saw them—the sound of the stroller wheels on the packed gravel, his footsteps—and her heart leaped and she sat up straight and when they came around the bend in the path, she was always surprised, and grateful.

  Sometimes he brought her a little treat, a piece of chocolate, or a candy, and she always said thank you and put the treat in her pocket. There was something childlike about this, the giving of candy. He was not the same man, he did not have the same confidence. And once, when he asked if he could kiss her, she said, Not here, not now, and she realized that the Eric Mann she had known at the lake would never have asked that question. He would simply have kissed her.

  He had no curiosity about her. Did not even ask for her name. He just accepted her as a girl on a bench. Someone to talk to. He gave her the bare facts of his life. His name, his wife’s name, the baby’s name. He was very willing to answer all her questions, though he said that some questions might be more difficult than others. He had suffered a brain injury and his memory was confused. Though he remembered this, didn’t he? He shrugged. She said that she was sorry for him. She asked him about Susan, and about the baby, Meja. She asked who had named the baby. Susan had. She asked if Susan breastfed. Oh no, she didn’t. She asked if the baby was happy. Very. She asked if he was happy. He said yes, and then he said that he wasn’t sure what happy meant, or what it felt like. This was the strange thing about his head. He couldn’t even recall where Meja had come from. He said that Susan had brought her. Or that the baby had come to them.

  Come to them!

  The first time she met him, when he was talking to himself as he walked along the path, she had said hello, surprising herself with how calm she was, and he had looked up and then said hello, and in the m
anner he said hello she realized that he did not remember her. She said that it was a beautiful day and he agreed. She pointed to her dog and said, This is Champ. Hi, Champ, he said. He gestured at the stroller and said, This is Meja. Your baby? she asked. Yes, he said. And he bent to lift back the blanket. She bent with him and saw her child and she stopped breathing. She was whole, and alive. Her hands were bare and they were clenched in fists. Very small fists. Her knuckles. Her eyebrows. He covered the baby up and stood. She stood as well. She asked him if he lived nearby, and he said yes and pointed back over his shoulder towards his house. His voice was his voice. No different. His eyes, though, were different. Less clear, and his face was blanker. She said that she was going to sit on the bench. Do you want to? He did. He sat and clucked at the stroller. He smiled. He was still very handsome, even with short hair. His forearms were still strong. His fingers the same. She thought that she should hate him, but she didn’t. He was ignorant. But perhaps he had always been ignorant. And selfish. And unaware. She had loved him so dearly that she might have missed some bigger flaw in him.

  She had many questions that she could not ask, simply because they were too dangerous, and also because he wouldn’t know the answers. She asked him his wife’s name. Susan, he said. She’s at work. He smiled blandly at his own statement. He did not ask her name, not then, or after. It was as if she was an object that had been placed on the bench beside him. She was angry, and then sad. She asked if she could look at the baby again. Of course, he said. She peeked into the stroller and saw her baby and she wanted to scoop up the child and run and run but she didn’t. Her heart was full. The baby’s eyes were black, and her lashes were long and black. Her cheeks were fat. She was well fed and healthy. Íso touched the baby’s face and spoke Spanish and then realized that this revealed too much about her, and so she changed to English. She asked if she could hold the baby. Yes, he said, and he went to lift Meja from the stroller, but she said that she could do it. She bent forward and picked up the baby. She sat beside him on the bench and she looked down at her child and she said her name, Meja. She said it again. Meja wore orange socks that were rolled down and Íso touched the chubby flesh above the socks and she smelled Meja’s head and she touched her ears and she passed a hand over her crown. The girl’s hair was black and there was a lot of it and she felt its soft silk and realized that she might swoon. She swallowed and said that the baby was so strong. Meja had taken her hand and was gumming one of Íso’s fingers. At some point Meja leaned back and studied Íso. Stared at her as if gauging how safe she was, but of course that was impossible. She’s very smart, Íso said, and she drew Meja towards her chest and Meja clutched at her. A little monkey. The softness of Meja’s wrists against her own neck. Meja made noises, as if she were a small truck starting up. Listen to you, Íso said. Listen to you.