He pursed his lips, looking, for a brief moment, not unlike my grandmother.
“You’re not that thing,” he said. “Here, you can be white and I’ll be black. Do you know some good openings?”
“I used to. One or two, anyway. I’ll have to see if I can remember.”
After staring down at the board for a moment, I nudged a pawn forward. He did the same, and before I knew it, we were off. He beat me easily, but as we traded moves, the feel of the game—that way of thinking into the future, maneuvering based on invisible possibilities—began to come back to me.
“Again?” he asked when we’d finished.
For the first time since I’d met him, I thought, he looked genuinely happy.
“Yeah. I can’t let you get away with that.”
We put the pieces back in their neat rows and started over. It was all so quick, so absorbing, that I almost forgot how impossible the whole thing was: me, him, sitting together in this place as if there were nothing unusual about it at all. I looked up from the board at his lowered head, his expression of concentration, and was about to say something—to ask him, somehow, about the fact of his being here—when he broke in unexpectedly.
“Your grandfather,” he said. “What was he like?”
“My grandfather?” I looked down at the black and white squares, caught off-guard. A laughing man with yellowed teeth, tall and slim despite his age, appeared in my mind’s eye. “I don’t know. Depends who you ask, probably. My grandmother would say he was—well, I can’t repeat what my grandmother would say. He was a piece of work. Let’s put it that way.”
“I see.” His knight advanced toward me. “So you didn’t like him?”
“Oh—no, that’s not it. I liked him very much, actually.” I kept my eyes on the board, lifting a bishop and sliding it forward. “I saw a different side of him than most other people did. He was a nightmare of a husband, and a nightmare of a father, too, from what I can gather. But he wasn’t too bad as a grandfather.” After a moment of hesitation, I took my finger off the piece. “In fact, I’d even say he was pretty good.”
He contemplated my move, scratching his nose. “So he changed as he grew older?”
I thought about it. My grandfather had been a difficult man, I knew, and yet a surprising number of my memories of him were gentle ones. Holding his hand as we walked to buy penny candy at the store that was now Miller’s, listening to his jokes as he knelt to help me try on a pair of shoes, sitting beside him at the church organ and poking at the yellowing keys. He’d had a gift for music, and used to pick out tunes after mass sometimes, until Father MacIntyre politely asked him to stop. It seemed impossible that someone who had been so generally despicable throughout his life—and despicable was the right word, there was no doubt about it—could, at least at times, be such a doting grandfather. I had never been able to reconcile myself to it, the fact that these two radically different men seemed to live inside the same person.
My parents had been young when they’d had my brother and me, and for a time the four of us had lived in two of the upstairs rooms at my grandparents’ house, next to the room where I lived now. One night, I remembered, my grandfather had climbed the stairs with a book of poems in his hand: Emily Dickinson. Smelling of the bar in Carlisle where he worked, he had sat down on the floor of the room my brother and I shared and read to us, coughing in his abrupt, guttural way every now and again. Rumor had it that he’d done terrible things in Korea, and I had seen him hit my grandmother more than once, at one point dragging her across the kitchen by her hair while she screamed. I had been both sad and relieved when he’d died.
“No,” I said, “I don’t think people really change. He was just kind of a complicated person. In fact—” I paused, twisting my hair in my fingers. “I might even go so far as to say he was a bad man.” It felt disloyal, but it was, I thought with a surge of defiance, the truth, and my grandfather himself might even have been proud of me for saying it. “But he was a bad man with good aspects. He wasn’t easy to love, but…I knew him for what he was. He never pretended to be anything else. It was confusing when I was younger, but by the time I got older, I’d accepted it. Mostly.” I ran my fingers through my hair again. “It’s harder when people don’t turn out to be who you expect. Those are the ones that are…hard to take.”
The stranger slowly moved his knight again, capturing one of my pawns. Holding the small piece in his palm, he looked at it, his hair falling forward over his forehead.
“I can see what you mean,” he said after a long moment. “Although I think sometimes people become things they didn’t expect to become.”
I gave a small shrug, waiting for him to go on.
“And sometimes,” he said, “they act as if they were good, because they wish they were. I think we all try that sometimes—pretending to be the person we would like to be.” He put the pawn down with the other captured pieces. “It isn’t a lie; it’s more like a story. Even when we’re older, we’re not so different from children. We all have stories we wish were true. Wouldn’t you say?”
“I suppose.”
While I decided whether to move my queen, he sat back and rubbed his jaw, as if meditating on something.
“I never knew my grandfather,” he said. “My father’s father, I mean. I used to see my mother’s father all the time—he lived in a little flat in our neighborhood—but my father’s father wasn’t from there.”
“Where was he from?”
“We don’t know, actually. My father grew up in an orphanage in Moscow.”
“An orphanage?” I looked up. “Really?”
“Yes. He made his way to Uzbekistan when he was older, maybe seventeen or so. There was an earthquake that destroyed most of Tashkent, and the government sent men from Russia to work on building sites. This was under the Soviets, of course. Someone told him to go, and he went. That’s how he met my mother.”
I looked up at him, studying his face. He was leaning over the board, his arms crossed, concentrating. The pose was so unselfconscious that it was almost like watching him sleep. I had never thought of him as having a family, although of course I knew he was married. For a moment, I felt it: the disorienting understanding that he was every bit as real as I was, had his own private world, his own secret thoughts and depths of feeling. Even the idea of it made me feel as if I were intruding somehow, treading in places that belonged to him, that he had a right to keep to himself.
I sat back. “You have brothers and sisters?”
“Yes, a sister. She has a couple of children, actually. Boys.”
I absorbed this. “So, you have nephews.”
“Yes. They’re three and six.” He stopped. “No. Six and nine. I keep forgetting that so much time has passed.”
I touched a captured pawn to my lips, trying to picture these two children. “Is it…is life hard for them there, in your country? Not—I mean, not because of any special situation you were in. Just…in general.” I closed my hand over the pawn and put it back down. “I keep meaning to learn more about what things are like there, but I haven’t.”
“Oh, I’d say life in Uzbekistan is much like anywhere else—it depends who you are. If you have good connections, if you’re well-to-do…” He spread his hands out, as if the end of the sentence were obvious. “My father had his ambitions. He managed a construction operation for a while, and then after independence…things turned out well for him. For us. We were fortunate.” His look grew distant for a moment. “So I think—I hope—they’re all perfectly well.”
Unconsciously, he crossed his arms, seeming to hug them together. Then he said, “I do miss them, you know. They were good boys. I—”
Behind us, the door opened and Jerry walked in, the black rifle hanging in the crook of his arm.
I had experienced panic—sudden, genuine panic—three times in my life. Two had been with Amos, and one had been during the fire, in the instant I realized the smoke I smelled wasn’t coming from inside the
store. The expression on the stranger’s face was exactly what mine must have been in those moments.
In that instant, I understood for the first time that he wasn’t hiding just because he didn’t have some piece of paper he was supposed to have. He was hiding because someone was looking for him.
You can’t stay, I thought, the truth of it entering me like a needle.
“Whoa,” Jerry said gruffly. “Easy, son.”
He stood with his boots planted squarely on the floor, his head tilted back, his beard gleaming blue-black under the florescent lights. My heart leaped into my throat, and I looked from the stranger to the gun and back again.
Something was wrong, I thought, even more wrong than I’d realized. It might be flintlock season, but Jerry’s rifle was not a flintlock. Anyone could see that. I didn’t know how the rangers could have missed it.
I had never seen a gun that large in my life.
The big man seemed to be appraising the stranger from under his cap.
“You’re here early,” I forced myself to say in what I hoped was a light tone.
“Yeah.” Jerry cleared his throat and flicked his eyes at the stranger again.
I looked at him, too. “Would you excuse us?” I asked.
“Of course,” he murmured, and left, brushing by the hunter with his gaze fixed on the floor.
I almost expected Jerry to say something about it, but he didn’t. Instead, he simply followed the stranger with his eyes before turning back to me.
“Hot chocolate,” he muttered, easing his weight from one foot to the other. The gun barrel dangled from his arm, pointing toward the floor.
“Sure,” I replied as evenly as I could, ripping open the powdered mix and pouring it into a cup.
I could feel him watching me, taking in my movements. A few moments later, he took the steaming drink from my hand, and I began digging for my wallet.
“Hey, listen, Kathleen,” he said.
My head jerked up.
He paused. “I’m gonna have to raise the price. It’ll be three instead of two.”
I stopped with the wallet in my hand, staring at him.
“Prescription got more expensive,” he said.
“Oh.” I stood still, looking from his face to the gun. It was still pointed at the floor.
“Yeah.”
A deep apprehension seized me.
Say no, I told myself. But what would that mean? What was this?
“If we make it three,” I said, as if to myself, drawing out the words, “that would be…”
“Sixty. For twenty of them. Yeah.”
I stayed there, my hands resting on the counter. I couldn’t afford sixty. I could barely afford twenty.
But there was something I didn’t like about the way he’d looked at the stranger. Something that made my skin prickle, like an electric current.
On the other hand, refusing would mean either going without the medicine or getting it somewhere else. And getting it somewhere else would mean I wasn’t just someone whose friend’s uncle did her an occasional favor, one she didn’t really need. It would mean I was someone else, someone I knew I wasn’t.
I began pulling fives and tens out of my wallet, stalling for time as I counted. When I looked at him again, the money in my hand, I realized I was holding my breath.
I had enough. Barely, but I did.
When I held out the bills, our eyes met.
He placed the paper bag on the counter, resting his hand on it for a moment. His hat was pulled low, casting a shadow over his face.
“You take care, Kathleen,” he said finally, shuffling toward the door, the gun still dangling from his arm.
When the latch clicked behind him, the air left me. I leaned forward over the counter, my legs feeling loose and unsteady, gripping my fingers together.
I waited, staring at the clock, until ten minutes had passed. Then I swept the chess pieces into the box and went out into the cold.
When I slipped through the hostel door, Martin was nowhere to be seen. I climbed the stairs to the second floor and wandered down the hall, trying to figure out which room was the stranger’s. They were all dark.
Taking a guess, I knocked.
“Hey,” I called.
I started tapping on doors as I passed them, touching them lightly with my knuckle. “Come on,” I said. “It’s me.”
Finally a door to my right opened, and the stranger and I stood facing one another. As soon as I saw his expression, my heart sank. There was a sheen on his face, and his teeth were strangely gritted, as if he were suffocating as he tried to smile.
“Hey,” I said, trying to convince myself at the same time that I tried to convince him, “Listen, that was—it was just Jerry. Someone I know. I’m sorry he surprised you, but…it’s fine. I know him. It’s fine.” I took a deep breath. “It’s got nothing to do with you.”
“Yes,” he said, his voice too thin and bright, like an echo of a sound someone else had made.
“Really. Please don’t worry about it.”
“Yes,” the stranger said again.
I remembered that I was carrying the board game and held it out. He took it from me, and I could see how shallow his breathing was.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have kept an eye on the time. I didn’t realize—”
“It’s not your fault,” he replied, giving a strange, jerking bow and turning away, closing the door.
* * *
—
The inside of the library was distinctly bluish, as always. My boots left tracks on the fading blue carpet as I wove between the stacks of black- and blue-bound books, past the librarians with their long blue skirts and pinched, blue-looking faces. The computers with their plain blue screens were in a corner, under a window. I scraped a folding chair toward one of them, ignoring the librarians’ glances, and opened the browser. Outside, it was snowing again. Sometimes it seemed as if it would snow forever.
As I watched the flakes fall, I thought of Jerry with his gun, imagining him standing before me, his eyes following the stranger with that unreadable look. But I pushed the image out of my mind. My interaction with Jerry had had nothing to do with the stranger. It couldn’t have, and I would simply be paranoid to think otherwise.
I pulled myself closer to the monitor but didn’t know how to ask what I wanted to ask. Uzbekistan, I typed, but that didn’t give me what I wanted—just statistics and weather and some pictures of buildings. I sat back and bit a hangnail. What I wanted to know, I thought, was something that almost couldn’t be put into words: why the stranger seemed at once so worldly and so vulnerable, what was behind the look in his eyes when Jerry came in. I didn’t really know him at all, I realized; or rather, what I knew was impossible to express. The way he spoke and gestured, the hesitation in his movements, his face as he looked out over the mountains on those mornings when we sat together on the porch. His patient resignation as he’d waited for the bus that would never come. His crossed arms as he’d sat behind the chessboard, talking about the place he thought of as home.
The cursor blinked.
Why people leave Uzbekistan, I tried.
That was somewhat better, although still unsatisfying. There were articles about a dictator, more or less what I would have expected for a place so far away with such an obscure-sounding name. Some of them talked about shuttered newspapers, tapped phones, children and elderly people bused out of the cities and forced to pick cotton. A few years earlier, it seemed, soldiers had opened fire on people in the eastern part of the country and killed a number that would never be known. Reporters talked to women who stood outside a hospital with pictures of their sons and husbands, waiting for news, their faces stoic but heavy with grief. There was an American military base that had been closed in the wake of the killings, I read, sitting forward as I did so and wondering if my brother had ever passed through there. But the thought was so unexpected, so incongruous, that I dismissed it quickly.
Then there
were articles about the dictator himself, and even more about his glamorous family, especially the daughters. My hand on the mouse, I looked at them, the two women. They belonged to a world I could only imagine, and not only because they lived so far away. The oldest daughter, especially, seemed to skip across the globe, dressing in furs and dancing until dawn in places like Moscow and New York and London, shooting movies and singing in music videos, donning suits to speak at the UN.
I shook my head. Life was the same everywhere, I thought. Some people were born into a different universe from the rest of us, and they stayed there, floating around like angels in the heavens, their feet barely scraping the earth on which the rest of us walked. We could look up at them, but we could never touch them.
I kept clicking, almost aimlessly, beginning to give up hope of understanding the thing I was so clumsily trying to grasp.
Then, as if a shadow had fallen across the sun, I found the photographs. Page after page of them, in merciless color. Photographs I immediately wished I had never seen.
There were many things I had learned to face, to think about, after the accident. Blood, bones, nerves, skin and the various things that could be done to it. Even so, the images on the screen were so upsetting that my breath caught in my throat. I pushed the chair back, as if to distance myself from what had appeared before me. Inhaling, I placed my hands on my knees, looking away before forcing myself to look back again.
I had thought I understood most of the ways a person could inflict pain on someone else, most of the ways a limb could be twisted, flesh bruised or burned or broken.
I was wrong.
The images were from a place with bars, and the worst thing, I saw right away, was the eyes. Most of the photographs of the inmates, or detainees, or whatever they were, didn’t show faces; they only showed torsos, backs, arms, the skin striped—the captions said—from whippings with electric cables, bruised from beatings, swollen from having been immersed in boiling water. Hands were missing fingernails; feet were broken or maimed. But the eyes, the eyes looked as though they belonged to dead people, even though everyone in the pictures was alive, at least when the photos had been taken.
Ways to Hide in Winter Page 13