Radiant City

by Lauren B. Davis

  “Hang on.” Matthew goes to the desk, pulls out some pages and brings them back to the phone. “Ready?”

  “Am I ready, he says. Funny man.”

  Sarajevo. Josh, Philip and I sat in Camila’s kitchen trying to ignore the incessant barking of Camila’s dog standing just outside the door, legs splayed, neck thrusting, nearly choking on its tether. The sandy mixed-breed brute had gone crazy from the long months of gunfire and explosions, and lost its ability to differentiate between sounds that foretold danger and normal street noise. It just barked, all day, all night, relieved only by short periods of calm when it collapsed in a quivering heap, worn out by vigilance. Camila thought it would stop soon, because its throat was so raw. Flecks of blood spattered its muzzle now and she felt that in a day or two its vocal cords would blow out completely. She didn’t have the heart to shoot the dog who had, she insisted, a hero’s heart, and so we lived with the racket.

  Josh, a photojournalist, was a short, wiry Londoner with a deep resonant voice that didn’t match his blond, elfin face. I had worked with Josh before and was happy to be with him in Sarajevo. He was funny and smart and never seemed to panic or be affected by the dread that sometimes overcame me. Philip was also a Brit, from Guilford, with a shaved head and homemade tattoos on his arms. He chewed at the sides of his nails and spit bits of dried skin on the floor.

  Josh and I had arrived in town looking for a cheap place to stay, and a man selling bread in the market told us about Camila Oric, a Muslim woman who took in boarders. Philip had already been there for a couple of weeks.

  “Fucking dog,” said Philip. “I should fucking shoot that dog.”

  “Poor old thing. I doubt his heart can take much more of that,” said Josh.

  Philip glared at the dog with undisguised hatred and fingered the pistol in his belt. “I hate fucking dogs. My mum’d never have one. Covered in fleas, they are.” He wore filthy army surplus pants and jacket. He’d been fighting

  with the Muslims for three months and although he said he’d come in to take a bath, so far it didn’t seem he’d found the tub.

  I thought it best to get the guy’s mind off the dog, off shooting anything. “So, tell me, Philip, what’s a nice boy from Guilford doing in a place like this?” I said.

  “Nothing for me in fucking Guilford, is there? Fucking dole as far back on the family tree as the eye can see and this dozy cow gets herself knocked up and I’m supposed to pay for it. Fucking hell.” Philip sent a tiny missile of skin toward the dog. “More of the same, eh? I end up like my old man, in front of the telly with a lager and a takeaway and that’s it? Not bloody likely. I want to know what the world’s about, right? Everything.” The way he pronounced the word, it sounded like “everyfing.” “I want to know what it feels like to kill someone.”

  “Right,” said Josh.

  We had met young men like this before. I would rightly judge Philip a psychopath if he’d stood behind me in a lineup at the grocery store, but it was testament to the cruelty of the times and the place that, then and there, Philip was neither alone in his desire nor considered strange for speaking of it.

  “And?” I asked.

  “And it’s fucking weird. This whole scene is fucked, man. Pack of fucking liars, all of them,” said Philip.

  I agreed with this masterstroke of unclerstatement. I sifted through the murk to find the clear space of morality, for I wanted that more than I wanted anything. I could, and did, take sides. I was no pacifist. The problem was I took so many sides. I saw the right and wrong in a specific situation—the machete across the arm, the landmine under the foot, the cigarette in the palm—but once I stepped back, beyond the limits of any specific incident, the moral terrain became confusing. Motivation was a fog, obscuring everything. Truth hid behind a great rock of rage and sorrow and perspective, and the heart-rip of regret.

  “None of us can afford to look too closely at the lies we tell ourselves,” said Josh.

  The next morning when we woke, Philip was gone and the house was strangely silent. We found Camila burying the dog in the garden, its throat slit.

  “Is for the best, I think. I could not do this,” she said, but her eyes were red-rimmed. “He was a good dog before. A very good dog once.”

  Brent is quiet on the other end of the phone.

  “So?” Matthew says finally.

  “This Josh, same Josh as in Hebron, I’m assuming.”

  “Yes. Same Josh.”

  “Right. Okay. It’s good. I don’t think I could have shot the dog either.”

  “No.”

  “You got more like that?”

  “Yes, some. It’s hard going, I’ll admit it.”

  “Send what you got. It’ll keep them quiet for a while.”

  “Bye, Brent.”

  “Ciao.”

  Matthew hangs up and spends the rest of the day sorting through the pages, scraps and fragments, organizing them as best he can. The structure, overall, is a problem. He digs narrow tunnels into the past then hits lumps of resistance which, when tapped, crumble. The cave-in begins and he has no option but to run, abandon the mine and begin again. At last, he stuffs a folder’s worth into an envelope addressed to Brent. He looks at his watch. It is after eight. He will mail it tomorrow. This day is over, he thinks.

  The next morning he drops the package to Brent off at the post office and decides to devote the rest of the day to being a flâneur, a wandering, idle, man-about-town.

  It is late November now and November is not a merry month in Paris. It is grim. It is damp and chill, but not bracing. The leaves fall but do not turn the cheerful riot of colours he had always looked forward to in Canada. The days are shorter and it is full night by five-thirty. Matthew does not mind that so much, though, because during daylight hours he feels obliged to be doing something constructive and feels guilty when, like now, he is not.

  He has made his way into the 6th arrondissement, and ambles down rue des Canette. It pleases him, this thirteenth-century street with its fine houses and the bas-relief of three ducklings playing in the water painted on No. 18. There is not much of this old sort of Paris left, and he tries to imagine what it must have been like when the priests of Saint-Sulpice frequented Miss Beety’s famous brothel. Neither priests nor prostitutes seem to have much to do with the neighbourhood anymore. Fancy stores and fancy clothes and joggers in the Luxembourg Gardens and motor scooters everywhere, loud and arrogant.

  He wanders into the place Saint-Sulpice to browse through the book fair. The square in front of the church bustles with merchants under tents fronted by book-covered tables. He meanders through the stalls, stopping to look at a nineteenth-century diary filled with drawings of flowers and poetry written in spidery, embellished script. He tries to translate the florid handwriting. He imagines some young Parisian woman, now long dead, trying to find something inspiring in her narrow world of high garden walls and the strictures of respectability. Judging from what he can make out—his French is almost as bad as the poetry—he concludes that she failed and remained trapped, and he pities her.

  He puts the book down with a stab of regret, as he sometimes does with inanimate objects. It is an old childhood fantasy that he has never been able to shake completely, that things have feelings and careless abandonment harms them. As a young boy, he cried at the thought of toys left rusting and lost in the woods, wept to think of their terrible, immobile loneliness. His weakness irritates him.

  He catches sight of a table of photography books and makes his way toward it. In the centre of the table is a book with a black-and-white photo on the cover. It is of a man Jack’s size, his face like a piece of meat, fleshy, full of appetites. His shirt is open and his gut bulges rudely. One arm hugs a girl young enough to be his youngest daughter, a walleyed child in a low-cut dress. She holds her fisted hand up to the side of her neck between them. In the man’s other arm he cradles a naked baby, the child’s head thrown back, his arms limp and his mouth open. The proprietary, smug exp
ression on the man’s face makes it clear the baby is his. The grip of the man’s blunt fingers on the girl, so fragile she looks as though she might snap, makes Matthew wonder what the man’s relationship to her is. Daughter? Wife? Appalling. Fascinating.

  A hand reaches out for the book at the same time his does and he looks to see who his competition might be.

  “Anthony! I’ll be damned. Go ahead.”

  “Paris is smaller than you think sometimes, isn’t it?” He picks up the book and opens it. “Bill Burke. Quite a collection. White trash, man. Every photo’s like staring at a car wreck.” He flips through the pages and stops at one called, “Couple in a bar.” A man, his face showing decades of abuse by harsh weather and hard liquor, wearing an undershirt, has his tattooed arms around an exhausted-looking, dark-haired woman with two black eyes. “These people are us, I guess. Reminds me of Jack, of his pictures, I mean. You seen any of them?”

  “Just the one at your place,” says Matthew.

  “That’s a good one. But a lot of them are like this. I don’t want the book. Do you?”

  “Yeah, I think I do.”

  Anthony hands it to him and waits while he pays. “I’m going into the church. You want to come?”

  “In the church?”

  Anthony smiles. “Yeah.”

  “I guess.” And he follows Anthony in.

  The day is dull, the sky an oddly rose-tinted grey. Inside the church, the light is such that it might have been deep night outside, the murk broken only by the flickering candles. It smells of incense and wood polish. Anthony closes his eyes and breathes deeply.

  A few old people pray silently in the chairs in the nave and several tourists stroll about in the aisles. Above them is a magnificent organ loft and the walls are covered in murals. Matthew ambles along in tourist mode, reading the descriptions: St. Michael killing the demon, Heliodorus driven from the temple, Jacob struggling with the angels.

  “You gotta see this. Follow me.” Anthony leads Matthew to the back of the church, to an ornate niche containing the statue of the Virgin and Child standing in front of a great scalloped background, a serpent beneath her foot. “I brought Jack here once. He said it looked as though it had been built by a drunken Italian gardener, and maybe it is a bit over the top, but I kinda dig it.”

  “Well, it’s impressive.” Matthew thinks that whoever designed it might have been on acid.

  Anthony takes a ten-franc piece out of his pocket and drops it in the little brass box before he lights a candle and closes his eyes in prayer.

  Watching Anthony pray, Matthew is not sure what to do, and he feels like a voyeur. He wonders if he should just leave. At last, he sits down on a nearby chair and waits, wondering how long Anthony intends to pray and if he has brought Matthew here in the hopes of a conversion. He does not think so, and after seeing Anthony’s room full of spiritual literature and paraphernalia, is not convinced he is even Catholic, but there are conversions and then there are conversions. Even if it is not Catholicism Anthony is recommending, but a more general sort of God-consciousness, Matthew remains unconvinced. The idea that he can be brought to God at this late date is laughable.

  Still, the church atmosphere is soporific and he is lulled into a sort of waking trance after a few moments—the quiet, the candles, the placid expression of the Virgin, all creating an enchantment. Matthew might even have fallen asleep if not for a growing awareness of people behind him, laughter and voices, growing louder. Anthony opens his eyes and turns to look just as a priest, a bride and a groom, surrounded by a large group of friends and family, passes between them. Judging from their accents they are French North Africans. The bride’s skin is the colour of mahogany against the white of her fabulously embroidered gown. One of the little boys pulls off his blue velvet tie, looks at Matthew and giggles.

  Anthony says, “Come on.” He follows the wedding procession and Matthew follows Anthony.

  It is such a jolly ceremony that Matthew’s spirits cannot help but lift, and it is only then that he realizes how glum he has been feeling. This happens often—that he is not aware of his emotions until the moment of their passing, or their intensification. It began out in the field, after some narrow escape, when he would look down at his hands and see them shaking, and then think, My God, that was terrible. Without the shaking, he might not have realized the depth of his terror. Now there are afternoons when he sits at his desk trying to work and finds himself near tears, when just a moment before he hadn’t known he was sad, and with no reason, or none that he can name, like that night with Denise. But now he feels lightened as he watches the women who are like bright birds, their dresses peach and turquoise and daffodil. The priest is old and clearly delighted to be performing the rites. He jokes with the bride and groom, and although Matthew doesn’t understand all of what is said he finds himself laughing too, as does Anthony, and he is happy to see so much joy.

  Then the little boy who had been pulling at his tie a few minutes earlier throws himself down on the stone floor and lies there, his arms and legs spread out as though he were about to make snow angels. The grown-ups ignore him. A little forgotten body on the stones. Like the red-winged blackbirds that swept down on Matthew when he rode his bike beside the fields as a child, memories fly at him and he feels himself slipping, sliding, down into the sloping lands …

  “I have to get out of here,” he says and walks up the aisle to the front of the church, not waiting to see if Anthony is following, nor caring.

  Outside, he stands on the church steps and looks upward, sucking the cold air into his lungs. A pair of kestrel hawks swirl in the air near one of the towers. One of them hovers. It gives Matthew the creeps.

  Anthony comes up behind him. “The French say they’re making the sign of the cross when they do that,” he says.

  Matthew keeps breathing, which is taking more effort than it ought to.

  “Well, it’s not my favourite church either, really,” Anthony says, still watching the kestrels.

  “The church is fine. Sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry for.”

  “Isn’t there?”

  Anthony turns from the hawks to Matthew, and then back to the sky again, but the kestrels have disappeared. “Matthew, listen, I’m glad I ran into you, man. You seen Suzi in the past couple of days?”

  “No.” Something begins to prickle in Matthew’s chest.

  “She’s got a split lip. Some pretty bad bruises.”

  “What happened?”

  Anthony shrugs. “She’s not talking to Jack, I can tell you that.”

  “You think Jack—?”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  The prickle turns to twitching heat. “What does he say?”

  “Not much. He doesn’t want to talk about it.”

  “What does she say?”

  “Last I saw her, she threw a beer in his face and walked out of the Bok. I thought Dan was going to have to use the crowbar on him.”

  “I’d like to hear what happened from Suzi for myself, wouldn’t you?”

  “She won’t talk to me.” He looks pointedly at Matthew.

  “Don’t suppose you know where she lives, do you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do. I helped her carry a table home that she bought at the flea market near my place one day. I’ve got the door code, too.” Anthony reaches into his inside jacket pocket and produces a ragged, swollen address book. He flips through it for several minutes because apparently there is no particular order to the entries, and at last comes up with Suzi’s address.

  Matthew copies it, and the code, onto a piece of paper.

  “You want me to go with you?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll talk to her,” Matthew says, and then wonders why he prefers to go alone.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Suzi’s apartment is in the 13th arrondissement, on the rez de chaussée. Matthew uses the code Anthony gave him to gain access to the hall. The tile floors need sweeping, but it is well lit from a sky
light high above and the wide staircase has a graceful curve that tells him this must have been a good building, once. There is only one apartment on the ground floor. Originally, back when the building had aspirations, it had most likely the concierge’s apartment. He hesitates at the door. The name on it is “M. Roussel.” Perhaps Anthony has given him the wrong address. But no, the code worked, so that can’t be it. The wrong apartment? But it is the only one on this floor. He knocks. No answer. He listens for any sound of life inside but hears only the meowing of a cat. This is stupid, he thinks.

  He decides to wait outside for fifteen minutes. Let fate dictate what will happen next. He leans against the wall, staring at his shoes. Maybe Anthony is wrong. Maybe Suzi threw a drink in Jack’s face because she was pissed at him for some reason totally unrelated to her bruises. Either way, like most things, it is none of his business. He looks at his watch. Five more minutes and he will leave.

  “Matthew?” Suzi stands before him, her swollen lip discoloured, with a fair-sized scab. A bruise stains the skin on her neck, purple and green above the collar of her wool coat; another mars her cheek. Still, her face is not as bad as he imagined it would be if Jack had taken his fists to her. “What are you doing here?” She does not sound pleased.

  “Anthony told me you’d been hurt. I wanted to see if you were all right.”

  “Anthony told you my address?”

  “Yes. Is that a problem?” He is confused. This is not the Suzi he knows. The Suzi he knows is always happy to see him.

  “I thought Anthony understood. I give my address out to people I want to have it. I do not expect them to pass it along like a number on a phone booth wall.”

  “I only came because I was concerned.”

  “Oh, you are worried about me? Is that it?”

  “Well, yes.”

  She shrugs, in that way that only Frenchwomen can, pursing her lips, raising an eyebrow. “And now you see me. I’m fine.”