All That Followed: A Novel
Page 22
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THE HALLS of the old fortress are empty now—it’s my favorite time to be in San Jorge. I lock the heavy exterior door behind me, but instead of walking along the sidewalk that leads out to the faculty parking lot I follow one of the small paths the children have worn into the grass, dropping down into the empty moat that surrounds the ramparts of the fortress. I circle around the north side to where the gymnasium door has been cut into the thick limestone walls. The area around the doorway is littered with broken sunflower shells and snubbed-out cigarette butts, the wall scratched over with nationalist slogans. I retrieve a plastic lighter wedged between two blocks in the fortress wall, flick it a few times to warm my fingertips in its flame, and then return it to its hiding place. I’ve been noticing the group that huddles here during recesses. They’re a tough bunch, friends since primaria that are often being reprimanded for ditching class or for drinking beers in the lavatories, and I wonder if this lighter will be used to light cigarettes or to ignite bottles filled with gasoline.
I can remember Iker sitting in this same place with the Díaz boy in the autumn before José Antonio’s death. It is hard to recall them as they existed in that empty doorway, in the blue oxfords of the San Jorge uniform, laughing and conspiring as all young men do. Instead, it’s easier to remember them as Muriga does: as the flat, uncomprehending faces that were shown over and over on the news during their trial. I tap a cigarette from the pack and sit down on the cold stone of the threshold. There is still a bite to the spring air, but the sky is unnaturally clear.
I remember the story Nerea told me that afternoon as we lay in bed in the apartment above Martín’s grocery store, about hearing her father taken out this same door in 1937, about how the Falangist captain had fired a shot through her father’s forehead without warning, without ceremony.
I remember the saying I heard once, how the Basque Country’s history can be divided in half by the Civil War, and it occurs to me that perhaps that bullet has never stopped moving through our town. That it is still traveling through Muriga, striking one of us down every now and again.
Inevitably, I think about Nerea and our girl. I come back to the picture in the investigator’s report, of the police officer holding a tape measure out from the edge of the road to the place where the Peugeot had come to rest in the rocks at the sea’s edge. Thirty-eight meters, it had read.
I smoke the cigarette down to the filter and watch the lights begin to appear below as the sky darkens. In between drags my lips move silently, and it isn’t until I have finished the cigarette that I realize the word that they have been saying.
Txirimiri, they say.
Tsk … tsk … she had said, touching her lips to my fingertips so I could feel how little air escaped her mouth. The sound of a drop of water on a hot skillet, of a cup sliding from a saucer. Tsk. Tsk.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GABRIEL URZA received his MFA from the Ohio State University. His family is from the Basque region of Spain, where he lived for several years. His short fiction and essays have been published in Riverteeth, Hobart, Erlea, The Kenyon Review, West Branch, Slate, and other publications. He also has a degree in law from the University of Notre Dame and has spent several years as a public defender in Reno, Nevada. You can sign up for email updates here.
ALL THAT FOLLOWED. Copyright © 2015 by Gabriel Urza. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
www.henryholt.com
Jacket design by Lucy Kim
Jacket photos; bus on fire © Awie Badenhorst/Alamy,
Basque village © Ainara Garcia Azpiazu/Getty Images,
sky © Peter Zelei/Getty Images
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Urza, Gabriel.
All that followed : a novel / Gabriel Urza.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-62779-243-1 (hardback)—ISBN 978-1-62779-244-8 (electronic book)
1. Basques—Spain—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3621.R93A55 2015
813'.6—dc23
2014041150
First Edition: August 2015
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
e-ISBN 9781627792448