Sanctuary Line

by Jane Urquhart

  But I came to know that she could not talk this way to the man she loved, and what she saw as her own failure in this caused her to withdraw even from those men and women of whom she was so fond. Oh, she still went through the motions, but, as she said, eventually all her relationships became pure performance, and she hated herself for this. I could barely hear their voices, I remember her saying, but by then I was skilled at hiding absolutely everything, including the fact that I was hiding. One half of me never left the room where I had last been with him, while the other half of me was dressed in the costume of the day, saying my lines, playing the role of the sympathetic, understanding officer. Even when there was danger or horror, she told me, her reactions were studied, not real. It was as if she couldn’t feel anything except the feelings she had for him.

  I told her this was crazy, that she certainly felt something for me, for her mother, her brothers. And who was this man anyway? What did he give her? How could she be willing to accept his reticence, his ambivalence? He could make it clear that he is committed to you, I said. He could at least do that. He must love you. He’s been with you for years.

  No, I don’t think he does love me, she said. He has never once told me so.

  Mandy, back home on leave, was wearing the same pyjamas she had worn almost two decades ago, at the time her father disappeared. I wondered if she was aware of that.

  She turned away from the fire, which she had been studying while we talked, and gazed directly at me. There was such a helpless look of exhaustion and sorrow on her face. But, she said, aren’t people like him, the smart, powerful ones, the ones everyone is drawn to, aren’t they always almost monsters? They are an exaggeration, and everything around them becomes an exaggeration. As a commander, he is composed, stern, and then for one moment … one moment only … he will give evidence of feeling, and that moment moves like a tidal wave through the company. I’ve seen people weep because he closed his eyes once, in pain.

  I ignored this for the time being. Mandy, I said, it’s time to stop. You can not keep doing this, allowing it to bulldoze your life. I tried to remember how many years it had been. Five? Six?

  What life? Her voice was shaking. It makes no sense really, but the only time I feel authentic in my life is when I am with him. This, coming from a woman who had held dying children in her arms, had lost friends and colleagues in battle, a woman who knew every kind of authorized and unauthorized weapon, and walked on the edge of death every day of her working life. This statement came from that woman. But it also came from the girl I had known, the one who was so gracious and so sociable. Every one of us had basked in her light: her brothers, her cousins, all her schoolmates. And now these soldiers, who not only adored her but needed her. Surely there would be something in that, some antidote. She quoted a poem by Emily Dickinson then, something about the soul choosing its own “society” and ending with a line that struck even me as powerful. “I’ve known her from an ample nation. Choose one; then close the valves of her attention. Like stone.” Mandy and her poetry, I thought. What the hell is she doing fighting any kind of war?

  She turned back toward the fire. In the face of this, of him, she told me, I am utterly powerless. She was twisting her long blonde hair around and around her wrist. They had wanted her to cut it off when she was in active service, but she had been able to wear it in a knot at the back of her head, covered by a net. And I know he’s leaving me, she added, or preparing to leave me, slowly, by degrees.

  Why, why have you chosen this? I said to her. I know now my tone was that of a person full of exasperation. I was almost angry with her. I should never have been angry with her.

  I didn’t choose it, she said. It chose me. Her cellphone rang then and she answered it, walking into the adjoining room, looking at the pine floor and engaging in some kind of brief, intense talk. A call from Kandahar, I suspected. Apparently, the arrangements for their meetings were as anxious and secretive and deadly as any kind of undercover military operation in which she had been involved. Right on cue, I thought. But then I realized she would have been thinking about him all the time, wherever she was: any conversation with him would have been right on cue. In her life there would have been various grounds: the pine floors of home, the tarmac of the air base, the linoleum floor of the troop planes, the tiles of Shannon airport where the aircraft refuelled, the hot dust of Afghanistan. Had her cellphone rung in such places?

  I asked what they had talked about. Nothing, she told me. Mostly we exchange pleasantries. You know, she said, the usual. Are you well? Is everything okay for next Thursday?

  That or nothing at all, she told me. Sometimes the phone would not ring, and the emails she sent would remain unanswered. She would settle for the pleasantries.

  Clearly, she would have given up anything for him, or so I thought: her career, what remained of her family, her life. I asked her again and again, What about you, what about your life? She would look at me with blank defiance. I think, she once offered, that he is what makes me want to solve whatever problem presents itself on the ground over there. I know this sounds like a cliché, but it is as if he has some kind of appointment with destiny … you can’t imagine what this mission means for him … and when we are at our closest I can feel some of that in myself. I’ve seen Afghans build an entire life around the disintegrating fragments of the kind of social order we take for granted. And once I’d seen that, I knew that I could build an emotional world around the smallest splinter of him, the idea of him, perhaps even the memory of him. I perform well because of him. Her voice lowered, and she admitted, with what seemed to be a hint of embarrassment, that she felt affirmed when he noticed she had been insightful or courageous in some way or another. I perform on a mission, as if … as if he were watching me and this, well, this gets me through.

  Approval, I thought, the one thing she was never going to fully receive from him. It would make her take more and more risks. Her focus had narrowed so completely, she was like a slender artery clogged by romance and by war. Seizure was inevitable. I’m so thirsty all the time in this godforsaken place, he had told her once. Yes, he was referring to Kandahar. You can’t imagine the heat, she had told me. Ninety degrees is a chilly day.

  But, she said, now he wasn’t just referring to heat and thirst. He was also talking about her. In his mind, she believed, she had become that godforsaken place.

  An older man, she had told me, by five years. Not that much older. But old enough that he should have taken some responsibility.

  She disagreed. And anyway, she said, he does take responsibility. He keeps it private and safe. And, she said, he’s so tender when he’s able to be with me.

  It was late at night and the wind had dropped; every detail of the view outside the windows had disappeared into darkness and nothing at all seemed to be moving. Still, I could hear the faint sound of the lake nudging the beach stones, making a fractional readjustment.

  What was wrong with this man? Protecting himself, I decided. And throwing her to the wolves. Emotionally, even physically to a certain extent; perhaps more than I knew. She was not safe and she did not survive. And, privately, I blamed him, I blamed him.

  I once believed that nobody but me would ever understand her pain, how she couldn’t break the threads that braided them together, ones that I imagined as heavy links of iron but that she must have – at times – envisaged as golden. And, even now I can only understand it in the way that I understand butterflies; I know what they do, but I am at a loss to explain why they do it. Perhaps we are drawn to the beauty of difficulty, the limited access to a sacred space, the arbitrariness of one species surviving while another vanishes overnight, a magnificently complicated relationship.

  Mandy once said that if she let the difficulty go, her belief in poetry would disappear, along with her belief that her presence – and the presence of the others – in that faraway country might finally cause something good to happen. She said that the belief was a kind of poetry in itself. How co
uld I argue with that? I have never been moved to participate in impossible situations. I have never fully understood poetry. I have never been a soldier. I have never been a butterfly. I have never loved in the difficult way Mandy loved.

  I remember that on that final strange night lights from all the downstairs rooms of the house were spilling out onto the grass. There were outside lights as well and a moon bright enough that my cousins and I – and Teo – were playing Monopoly on the picnic table near the beach. I remember the plonk, plonk of the wooden pieces being moved from property to property. I also remember Teo and I looking at each other across this board game that I had had to explain to him because the monopolizing of urban property as a game was something he couldn’t quite comprehend. Why would someone want to own a street? We sought each other’s gaze with frank affection and seriousness during this interchange of information and with something else that I did not yet understand and would never name. I recall his brown eyes and thick lashes, the generous sweep of his eyebrows, the way he was able to concentrate both on me and on the game. It is somewhat startling to find how well I remember his face after all this time. And I remember that Monopoly board as well, how it remained in place for weeks after, curled by moisture, baked by sun, until all the properties and their streets – Boardwalk, Pennsylvania Avenue, Park Place – faded and their names became lost, unreadable.

  The previous day, after my uncle and the boys had moved what furniture they could into the living room, Mandy and I had spent a couple of hours washing the kitchen walls in preparation for the painters who would be arriving later in the week. While my aunt and my mother carefully lifted the glass collection from its shelves, my aunt said she had doubts that things would go as planned with her not there to oversee things. There was some family problem concerning the farm across the lake, and she was leaving that afternoon to spend a couple of days there. Was it something to do with estate matters? I can’t recall now, or perhaps I never knew. She said that my uncle was given to interfering with her decorating plans and could quite possibly come up with ideas contrary to what she wanted. He’ll be busy outside, my mother said, adding that she would keep an eye on him, though I could tell that my aunt didn’t believe for a second that my mother would stand up to him if he took a notion to get involved. I was looking out the window at my mother’s car while all this was going on. I wanted to be inside it.

  I had spent many more hours of that summer practising how to drive. Teo would join me now whenever he could, though he never again asked for the keys. But mostly I was alone at the wheel and in the landscape through which I drove. The lake glinted on the left- or the right-hand side, depending on which direction I was going, and then there were the apple trees. Because it was late in the season they were filled with the Mexican pickers, Teo among them, their cotton shirts splashes of colour through the branches. Sometimes I could spot him on a ladder or in a field, other times he was hidden.

  Recently I have become aware of how far this house really is from Sanctuary Line – the public road – of how long the lane is. I drive it each day and watch the old sugar maples cruise by the car windows. I drive it at night and see the two paths of the narrow track picked up by the headlights of the car and wonder if on that particular night the headlights were illuminated or if the driver navigated by the light of the moon.

  Without making a statement of withdrawal, Teo and I abandoned the game. Neither of us had properties worth defending anyway, so we sold out to Mandy, her brothers, and a couple of their friends. Mandy, I think, had all the railroads. Shane had Boardwalk and Park Place. Neither of us could win, and we knew it, but that wasn’t what made me want to walk away. I had lost interest in everything but Teo’s face across the table, the intensity of his regard. The days were growing shorter and we hadn’t much time.

  Walking up the beach, he told me about his grandfather.

  “An old man,” he said, “very old. And always poor. We are, all of us, very poor.” He spoke the word poor in two syllables. “But a great man,” he added, “a fighter for the revolution.”

  He said the word revolution with such vehemence, it made the term electric and meaningful to me. But this was something so far from my own small realm of experience there was nothing I could say about it.

  “Neither one of us has a father,” I said. “I don’t really remember mine.”

  “No.” Teo stopped walking for a moment. “I can’t remember either. But my mother said he was a good man.”

  I was pleased that Teo couldn’t recall his father. It made what was developing between us feel even more important, less accidental. The fact that we were semi-orphaned was a link between us, one that could never be broken. “And your school?” I asked.

  “There I am good.” He smiled. “I will go to agricultural college. This” – he moved one arm back toward the fields and orchards – “this is how I will make money for that.”

  “Will you come here then, to go to college?” I had been gradually gaining a bit of knowledge of his life in a country that, until only two weeks ago, was connected to sombrero hats and what I had learned about certain vanished tribes when I studied the explorers in grade school.

  “No, no, I will not come here. Here I can only be a worker.” We had taken off our shoes and were walking on the edge of the sand where the cool water touched our feet. I remembered our little paper boats but did not bring that memory to his attention.

  “You dance with your mother,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, “we dance. She has taught me, and sometimes we dance for tourists, for money.”

  “With your mother?”

  “No, she has only taught me. At home I dance with other young people she has also taught. We have special clothing. And shoes.”

  I imagined there might be girls involved in this dancing, and this troubled me a bit, so I didn’t ask. He would be graceful: the dancing would be electric, like the revolution, but I didn’t want to discover any more about it. By now we had come to the rocky part of the shore. I stumbled, and he held out his hand and clasped my bare upper arm to steady me. The first moon of the autumn was rising, large and orange in the sky. A silence fell between us, and when he dropped his hand I moved in front of him and continued to walk along the shore. We rounded the point where the platforms of ancient limestone moved out into the lake, and eventually we came to a large smooth area where the sand was more plentiful than it was near the house. There was a log here where one could sit, and the cold remnants of a half-burnt campfire made by Shane or Don sometime earlier in the summer.

  Teo wandered through the moonlight collecting kindling, and when he had found a fistful of twigs he dropped them on the partly charred wood and produced a packet of matches. I knew that he sometimes smoked in the bunkhouse with the men, and I remember the glow of the lit match in the shelter of his palm, how adult and masculine the image seemed. Once the fire was blazing, he sat beside me on the log, his arms on his knees and his hands clasped in front of him. The moon had diminished in brightness because of the fire, and now everything outside of the circle of warmth had become darker. Teo began to hum softly, and then he sang:

  “La Chamuscada” le dicen ’onde quera,

  porque sus manos la pólvora quemó

  entre las balas pasó le pelotera,

  la “revolufia” sus huellas le dejó.

  I asked him to tell me what the words were saying.

  “‘La Chamuscada.’ The Burnt One. A song from the revolution about a woman. A soldadera. A woman fighter. The burnt one, they call her everywhere,” he translated, “because gunpowder burnt her hands. The revolution left its mark upon her.”

  His grandmother fought, he told me. It was how she met his grandfather. “He was only my age, she a few years older. Now she is dead.” He hummed the tune for a moment. “My grandfather was only fifteen when he went to fight. The rest of his life, the rest of their lives were not so important because they remembered always this fighting. My great-grandfather too.
He went with Pancho Villa in the mountains when the Americans were looking for him, for Pancho Villa. And my great-grandfather, he took his son with him.” Teo turned to look at me. “My grandfather was younger than you and me are, and he was in the mountains fighting to keep some small bit of land for a farm.” He stopped talking and threw a stone he had found in the sand into the path the moon was making on the lake. I wanted to ask who this Pancho Villa was, imagining him, because of his name, as a Mexican covered by a blanket and wearing a sombrero.

  I wanted to ask, but I didn’t, out of embarrassment, I think. The history I knew was so narrow it concerned only the British Isles, their kings and queens, their wars; that and the folk history of my own family. Instead, I told him that my uncle, too, had gone to be a soldier when he was very young, that he had had to run away to do this. “He didn’t go with his father,” I added. “And there wasn’t any war then.”

  “You see, we are not so young:” Teo seemed almost defensive. “We are not too young to have love.”