Radiant City

by Lauren B. Davis

  “What’s that?” The words are spiny burrs against his tongue.

  “Atonement, my friend.”

  Matthew looks at Jack, his face ravaged with all that he has done and cannot undo, all the acts of violence and cruelty he has committed. Each act and each denial written like an unhealed scar along his skin. And something shifts in Matthew. Shifts to pity. To grief. It makes him sick, and he wishes the killing anger were back. It was so clean, so simple, that anger. But it is as though something dark and swollen has been blasted out of his

  belly. It is all quite clear. The only difference between him and Jack lies in circumstance and trajectory. And what Matthew chooses to do next.

  “And how will you atone, Jack? Kill yourself?”

  “Cops will be looking for me. I’m gonna let ‘em find me.” He speaks slowly, precisely.

  “And let them kill you?”

  Jack shrugs. “Let life take its course.”

  It is unclear what that course will be, but Matthew nods. It is always unclear.

  Jack stands and holds out his hand. “I’m going back up. I do need you to do something, Matthew.”

  “What?”

  “Make sure Anthony’s all right, okay? I mean, see that his body gets home to New York. Don’t let him be buried in fucking Potter’s Field, all right? He’s got a sister there. Arcola’s her name. Same last name. Find her. Tell her I’m sorry. Bury him with a fucking cookbook or something, okay?”

  “Done.” It has become very difficult to speak.

  “And listen—” His hand is like cement surrounding Matthew’s. “You make the call to the cops, all right? You be the one.”

  “No. I can’t do that.”

  “You have to. For both of us.” He steps back. “For Anthony.”

  “Yes. Fine. I’ll make the call.”

  Jack gives Matthew a hug, fast and strong enough so that his spine pops.

  “Fuck, I hate cops,” says Jack, and before Matthew can say anything in response, Jack disappears into the back of the cave.

  Matthew looks at his watch. It is two-thirty in the morning. His feet are rooted. He does not want to go, because if he does this part of their lives will be over and it will be true that Anthony is dead and that Jack is a ghost. Like the day he stood at his mother’s grave. It was his leaving that had been the final good-bye, not hers.

  “Good-bye,” Matthew says to the cave. He will say good-bye to Anthony later.

  Ever after, he will find it difficult to remember the walk out of the wood or much of the walk across the west of Paris. Only that it was filtered through tears that made the city glitter, hard and cold and mockingly radiant.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  He intends to go home, and he almost makes it. He lusts for a bottle of whisky and a bottle of blue pills and several days, or weeks, or months of oblivion. He actually makes it to his building. He stands outside, fully intending to press the code and open the door and go inside. And then he doesn’t.

  He walks to the phone booth on the corner. He tells the police he knows who is responsible for the dead man on the Champs earlier that night. He tells them where to find him and that they are expected. Then he goes walking, and when he passes a garbage can he takes the sap out of his pocket and drops it in.

  Half an hour later he enters Saida’s building. As he nears her door he hears voices, hers and Joseph’s. Raised voices. The words, however, are in Arabic and he understands nothing. He hesitates for only a moment, and then knocks. Instantly, they stop speaking. Joseph opens the door. His face is swollen on one side, the cut on his cheek has been bandaged, but the eye is also black and swelling. The other one is red as well and swollen from crying.

  “Matthew!”

  “You tell me!” Saida pushes past her son. “You tell me what is going on now. He will not.” She pulls Matthew into the room and stands with her hands on her hips, scowling at them both. Then her expression changes. She goes pale and her hands fly to her mouth. “My God, Matthew. What is it?”

  It seems he has started to cry.

  “Sit down. Sit down. You are going to tell me,” she says, taking him by the arm. “Joseph, make coffee.”

  It is some time before he gets control of himself. “What’s happened? What’s happened?” she keeps saying.

  There is coffee in front of him. He sips, scalding his lips. He tries to breathe. “You don’t know? Joseph?” He glances at Joseph, who shakes his head slightly, then drops his eyes to the floor.

  “Would I be asking if I knew? I will slap someone in a moment!”

  “It’s Anthony,” Matthew says.

  Saida sits down abruptly. Her hands move to her neck and involuntarily cover her scar.

  “Anthony is dead,” he says. The words are like something heavy, wet, fallen from a great height. Black-hole words, sucking up all the oxygen.

  “How?” Saida says, tears already in her eyes.

  “Jack,” Matthew says. “He didn’t mean to. But it happened anyway.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “On the Champs Élysées. There was a fight.”

  Saida’s head snaps around to Joseph. “You were there.”

  “Imma.” Joseph starts to cry, his lower lip loose and trembling.

  “Oh, poor Anthony,” wails Saida. And before Matthew knows what is happening Saida is out of her chair, her hands flying, slapping Joseph on the shoulders, the head. “And this is your big hero! This killer! He is the one you want to be like? You still think so?”

  “Saida!”

  Joseph holds his hands up to shield his face, but doesn’t try to stop her.

  “Stop,” Matthew says, rising. “Please, stop.”

  She looks at him, stricken. She sits down again, and her spine is very straight. “You must tell me everything. Everything.”

  Matthew looks at Joseph, who nods. And so he tells her what happened, as best he remembers it, and leaves out only that he thinks Jack was making a drug buy—let her have that at least, that it was only Jack’s influence that concerned him and nothing more. When he is finished the three of them stare at the table and don’t speak.

  “In Lebanon,” Saida says at last, “I thought I’d left the violence behind. It is like a curse, following you. When the Palestinians and the Syrians came into Damour, they killed more people than we could count. They burned the houses with people inside. For months afterwards I could not bear anyone to strike a match near me, the smell gagged me. They shot babies in the back of the head. My little nephew, he was your cousin, Joseph, your cousin. They shot him. They shot my brother, Khalil, and his wife. They shot Habib, your father. Your grandfather took Ramzi and me to the church, the Church of Saint Elias, which is his patron saint, you see. There, huddled between the pews, we listened as Father Labaky preached a sermon about the slaughter of the innocents. And then two young men from our village came and stood in front of the church and shot their guns, acting as a diversion so we could escape. It took ten minutes for all of us to get out through the back. There were five hundred of us and we ran to the seashore and got away in boats.

  “But my mother was not with us. She would not leave her parents. They were very old and frightened. They lay on a pallet under the dining-room table, too weak to get up. This Libyan mercenary—a mercenary like your hero Jack—he shot them all, my grandparents where they lay, my mother, whom they raped first. All this a neighbour told me, you understand, a neighbour who was also raped by many men, but survived. He even took a picture, this mercenary, with a flashbulb, our neighbour said. This is what those men are like.”

  Joseph hugs himself. “You never told me this.”

  “I didn’t want you to know. But I was wrong. I see that now. You need to know.” Saida turns to Matthew. The expression on her face is difficult to read. There is grief, more than anything else, but also there is something softer. “I’m sorry for you, Matthew. You cared for them both and that is the hardest of all.”

  “Yes,” he says.

>   It is a long hour as they go over things again and again, trying to make sense of the night’s shattering events. Talking about Anthony and what he was like. Matthew thinks of Jack but keeps his name behind his teeth. They talk of funerals. “I will have to come forward. Talk to the police, say that I know them.”

  “Yes, you will have to do that,” says Saida.

  “I have to call his sister.”

  “Yes. That, too.”

  “And what will you do?”

  “Me?” she says.

  “Without Ramzi, without Anthony …”

  “Oh. The restaurant.” She rubs her forehead. “It’s not right to talk of these things now.”

  They sit, each in their own sorrows. Matthew thinks, and tries to find words, feeling the sack of skulls on his back shifting, pressing down on his shoulders, his ribs. And who will we be good for? Anthony had said that, the day in the Passy Cemetery. Matthew wants to explain to Saida what her family means to him. What she means to him, except he doesn’t really know. He only knows he wants to find out. He doesn’t want to wander in the dark lands alone anymore. How to explain the hopelessness of self-loathing, the terrible treadmill of it, bringing him always, irrevocably, back to his own loathsome self? How to explain that he wants to spend the rest of his life not thinking about himself at all, for doing so seems merely selfish, merely still self-centred, merely useless, exhausting. How to explain that for a moment or two sitting inside Jack’s cave, he had balanced, stretched, inched toward another person, one who was as unlovable as Matthew feels himself to be—and that in doing so the appalling ache of self-hatred, indeed, of self, had disappeared. Just for a moment, and he hadn’t even been aware of the moment until it was gone and left a glimmer of longing for its return, but still. The problem was only compounded by words. What to do, that is the question.

  “I want …” he starts, “I want to, I don’t know, get out of my own way. I feel so guilty all the time. It does no good and I want to do something good. To be good … for someone.” He has the urge to cover himself in some way, and crosses his arms over his chest, but this makes it difficult to breathe and so he uncrosses them. But it doesn’t help. He feels undefended, embarrassed and exposed, and yet not unsafe, oddly.

  Joseph stares at him.

  “I thought I might like to learn the restaurant business.”

  “Don’t be silly, Matthew. We are fine. And you are a journalist.”

  “Not anymore. I almost picked up a gun once …” He stops. It is a tale he doesn’t want to tell again. “I’m going to finish my book. And after that I’d like to maybe write novels. I’m not a journalist anymore. I’m done with that. It’s done with me.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “I mean it.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Joseph starts to cry again, and he puts his head down on his folded arms. His shoulders shake. As she caresses her son’s shaved head with her left hand, Saida’s right hand lies on the table next to her cup. Matthew sits there, looking at her hand with the burn scar on it like something glowing, a piece of cloth rippled over the top of her flesh, red and ivory-bone. He wants to take her by the hand but cannot because he is afraid of hurting the fragile parchment of her skin. So he places his hand next to hers, and waits.

  The kitchen is lightening, the shadows becoming less inky in the corners of the room. It is almost dawn, when the sun is still hidden behind the buildings, but through the green leaves of the bamboo that grow in front of Saida’s windows comes the argent promise of impending light.

  She meets his eyes first. And then, when she takes his hand, the burning in her skin travels up his arm, into his chest. And nothing, thank God, is the same after that.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Immeasurable thanks to my agent, Dean Cooke, who always believed in this book and who did much beyond-the-call-of-duty hand-holding, as did the ever-efficient Samantha North. I am grateful as well to my editor at HarperCollins, Iris Tupholme, for her confidence in me as a writer and her keen editorial vision. Thanks to production editor Katie Hearn, managing editor Noelle Zitzer, copy editor Pamela Erlichman, the wonder-publicist Rob Firing, and Norma Cody for unending good cheer and all those warm welcomes.

  There are many other people to whom I owe thanks: Isabel Huggan, for sound advice; Matthew Campbell, for reading an early draft and sharing his experiences as a journalist; Nina Burleigh and Sparkle Hayter, for extremely helpful conversations on what makes war reporters tick; Khahil and Joseph Medawar and their family, who shared not only their wonderful food at La Pinède restaurant in Paris, but also their stories of life in Paris and Lebanon; Monsieur Michel Ruminski, who provided details of the Parisian police’s Brigade des Mineurs, as well as unending book deliveries; and the Very Reverend Ernest Hunt, Rector of the American Cathedral in Paris, now retired, for allowing me to quote from one of his sermons. The writing of this book was supported by a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, for which the author is profoundly grateful.

  Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Ron, for his support, patience, good humour and kindness. Had it not been for you, this book would never have been written.

  Some readers may find a similarity between the Hebron scene and that of accounts of the death of Mohammed al-Dura and the wounding of his father, Jamal. I feel it is important to say that it is in no way my intention to bolster the polemics presently existing in the Middle East, although I admit the account of Mohammed al-Dura and his father inspired the scene in the book, particularly in its symbolic insanity, regardless of which side was ultimately responsible for Mohammed al-Dura’s death. However, this is obviously not a factual account and for this reason I have changed the sex of the child involved, as well as the geographic location and narrative details. The Radiant City is, above all, a work of fiction, and should not be interpreted any other way.

  For those interested in reading more about the various subjects covered in this book, I offer the following list of books that were invaluable to me.

  American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.

  Arnett, Peter. Live from the Battlefield. New York: Touchstone, 1995.

  Ben Jelloun, Tahar. French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

  Darrow, Siobhan. Flirting with Danger. London: Virago Press/Little, Brown and Company, U.K., 2000.

  Hargreaves, Alec G. Immigration, “Race” and Ethnicity in Contemporary France. London: Routledge, 1995.

  Hedges, Chris. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York: PublicAffairs/Perseus Books Group, 2002.

  Herr, Michael. Dispatches. New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1991.

  Keane, Fergal. Season of Blood. London: Penguin Books, 1996.

  Loyd, Anthony. My War Gone By, I Miss It So. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999.

  Mertus, J., Tesanovic, J., Metikos, H., and Boric, R. (eds.), The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1997.

  O’Nan, Stewart. The Vietnam Reader. Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1998.

  Politkovskaya, Anna. A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya. London: The Harvill Press, 2001.

  Prochnau, William. Once Upon a Distant War. Toronto: Vintage Books/Random House, 1996.

  Rohde, David. Endgame. HarperCollins Canada, 1997.

  Steele, John. War Junkie. London: Corgi and Transworld/Bantam, 2003.

  Tzonis, Alexander. Le Corbusier: The Poetics of Machine and Metaphor. New York: Universe Publishing, 2001.

  THE TYPE

  This work is set in Garamond, a typeface created in the sixteenth century by the eminent Parisian engraver and letter founder Claude Garamond. For over four centuries, Garamond has remained a typeface of high repute; almost every manufacturer of type or typesetting equipment has produced its own version. This adaptation was produced in England in th
e 1920s by the Monotype Corporation, under the supervision of Stanley Morison.

  P.S.

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  Lauren B. Davis

  Meet Lauren B. Davis

  An only child, I was born and raised in Montreal. Always an avid reader, when I was fourteen I discovered two authors—James Agee and Graham Greene. In Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men he wrote about sharecroppers during the Great Depression. His desperation to make the reader understand their plight, and the intensity of his prose, inspired me to be a writer. With Greene it was his compassion and his understanding of the human heart. During my teens and twenties, I turned my hand to poetry, inspired by Sylvia Plath and Anaïs Nin. My poems were exceedingly bad and were wisely rejected by the best literary magazines.

  Eventually I moved to Toronto, and it was there that I met my husband, Ron Davis. We moved to France and stayed for ten years, living first in the Alps and then in Paris. In France, liberated for the first time from working for the rent money, I concentrated on writing and realized just how much I had to learn. I enrolled in a distance education program with Indiana University and after that in Humber College’s Mentor Program, where I worked with Timothy Findley. He and his partner, Bill Whitehead, were incredibly generous, and we became friends. They helped me wrangle my short stories into something readable, and in 2000 I published a collection called Rat Medicine & Other Unlikely Curatives (Mosaic Press). The novel The Stubborn Season (HarperCollins Canada, 2002) came next.

  I was living in Paris, working on The Radiant City on September 11, 2001. As a result of that day’s terrible events, what had begun as a book about wanderers and dreamers in Paris took on a new direction and the character of Matthew Bowles was born.