Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  There’s a sound the earth makes in its transit, a streaming without music or echo, not coloured or pleasing or solemn or one thing so much like another. If god speaks to us in murmurs, she heard them.

  There came hours when she thought the violence had involved her only by chance, and others when it seemed that she’d consciously placed herself in its path. As if it had been not a singular event but a kind of sounding within a slow pattern much older than she was. At first she could see no pattern, could not even put the past together in her mind, but she was full of a need to return, and what she returned to were the days before violence found her. The days made no sense at first, then built to sense and beyond it, to a near-unendurable clarity.

  What she remembers.

  The night of the attack, her visit home. It had been hot and close that afternoon until thunderstorms moved through and tore the smog down into the gutters and knocked out the power for minutes here or there. She’d biked up to the house around noon and she and her mother had cleaned the place together, laughing now and then at things like end tables and hassocks, objects they knew Harold would move to his preferred positions from long ago, and Donald would have to haul back again when he returned the next morning. Harold arrived around four with his usual greeting and gave Kim a hug that as usual was not fully returned. They’d not seen each other since April. He and Marian didn’t actually greet one another – they never did anymore. Marian simply asked if he’d remembered the fish and he said of course. He was dressed with his signature note of slight incoherence in dark blue cotton pants, a winter-weight mauve shirt with the sleeves rolled unevenly, and brown sandals. He’d made the effort to put his grey-brown hair into some order but there was a film of grime on his glasses. Everything he came with including the fish was wrapped separately inside a canvas bag he’d picked up at an academic conference long ago with the ghosts of words on the side and the outline of some equatorial country Kim didn’t recognize.

  Now Marian was lying down in her room, Kim and Harold in the kitchen, their own old family kitchen, slicing peppers and preparing the sea bass for grilling.

  There’d been a joke about her night-shift work at the museum. “My pretty, green-eyed daughter,” he said, “the security muscle.” He glanced at the digital clock on the stove and dropped everything, washed and dried his hands, and began fiddling with the radio. He left behind a jazz station Donald liked and dialed down the FM band, passing blues, hip hop, the news in French, and then on to the end of the lead story on the CBC. That the worst news of the day was a development in a government financial scandal was somehow quaint, even reassuring, given the times.

  He resumed his position across the island from her and went back to work on the salsa as she consulted the printed-off recipe and patted dry the fish. The scents were coming up now in the travertine flesh. It was hard not to tell him that buying Chilean sea bass was a way of killing the planet.

  “Have you read anything good lately?” His usual point, inserted bluntly. If she wasn’t finishing her doctorate, then she was letting her brain go to waste. “Don’t tell me. You’re too busy with, whats-itcalled – Group?”

  “GROUND. The Group for the Undocumented. And okay, I won’t tell you.”

  He cocked an eye at his mango, as if to signal to her that this was just sport for him. They both knew it was more than that.

  “You can think and you can write. You have talent. Use it.”

  “Remember my old rubber bath toy? You’d squeeze it and it sounded the same note every time.”

  “Beloved duck. What was its name?”

  “You named it Lawrence,” she said.

  “He ended up a dog toy. He lost his toot.”

  “I loved him more when he lost it.”

  Harold nodded, or gave the sense of nodding.

  “And I guess he didn’t seem such an idiot. Sorry, stranger.”

  They sometimes called each other “stranger.” He used the term jokingly, Kim to draw a pinprick of blood, in reference to the day he returned to her life when she was sixteen. Or returned again – he’d disappeared for four months when she was thirteen, and then left Marian for good a year later – but on this second return her parents were promising the establishment of a new order. She had walked home from school with a friend, Alyssa, now long disappeared from her life, who’d confided that she’d just that weekend given a boy what she called “mouth sex,” and Kim was still unsettled by the secret as she entered and saw them there in the living room – Marian, Donald, and Harold, who she’d been told was on sabbatical in Mexico for the semester. They stood apart from one another, turning to her as she entered, each wholly occupied with her presence, as if the others weren’t there. Donald gave her a thin smile. Marian watched her reaction to seeing Harold with a delicate attention Kim could feel. And Harold stood rigidly, his eyes slightly wide, as if surprised by some change in her appearance, and then there came across his face something familiar to her, his regret at having missed yet another increment of her growing up. The three of them tried to fool her into thinking that Marian had forgiven Harold and they would all be better off if they just tried starting over again, with Donald as the live-in father and Harold as the ongoing presence who wanted to spend as much time with his daughter as she would allow. Kim stood just inside the door. She’d been trained to be physically confident, but now felt a little small, a little thin, and with the others looming there it was as if her size was being used against her. Marian had asked her to sit down but she’d not moved or spoken. Marian had said that they all understood Kim’s feelings, and Donald said in a rehearsed but concerned way that they respected her feelings. Kim unslung her knapsack and set it down on the floor. Then Harold said it was important that everyone not settle into “a ruinous estrangement.” And then, because he had never had a grasp of his daughter’s vocabulary, he defined “estrangement” for her – and Kim walked across the room and hit him in the face with the side of her fist.

  It had been a stabbing motion. She hung in the sense memory, the flesh and knuckle of her hand meeting his nose and forehead, thirteen years ago. It must be by chance that she’d tangled up Harold in these small, violent connections before the attack.

  Out on the back deck at the grill he was saying that history separates us. They sat drinking wine, looking out at the flower garden and the ivy on the brick of the neighbouring houses. The shaded leaves were still wet from the rain. It had been a very long time since they’d sat there together. Harold’s legs were stretched out and resting on another chair, his trimmed toes protruding from his sandals. He told her he’d just been invited to give a paper at a conference in London on recent popular upheavals in Latin America, and the explosion of evangelical Christianity in the region in the void left by anti-Catholic movements in the nineties. He summed up the phenomenon for her with the image of New World peasants somehow swimming the Tiber.

  “It’s an amazing part of the world, those lands below Mexico. I’d like to do more work on them.”

  She said he hadn’t described it that way when she’d wanted to travel there a few years ago.

  “You shouldn’t travel alone in some places. And I didn’t want you in that army of young, idealistic nortamericanos who go down to pick coffee beans and come back over-pronouncing Nicaragua.”

  “So I shouldn’t be alone but I shouldn’t be with others.”

  “I get waves of students who insist we’re all the same under the skin. We are not the same. History separates us. We celebrate skin and the surfaces of things in the well-to-do West. Culture is a difference-maker. And usually it fuels oppression and war. We like to pretend otherwise and pick beans and buy blankets and invite everyone to our house. And hide them in the basement if necessary.”

  The argument against her volunteer work usually ran that she was in over her head and didn’t know it. She did in fact know it, but admitting doubt to him won her nothing. She had to seem sure of herself, not at all who she’d been in university. Long befor
e quitting her Ph.D. there were signs she didn’t belong on her father’s career path. Her work lacked scholarly rigour. Her undergraduate history papers had admitted quite a lot of speculation. She’d even slipped into the voices of runaway slaves in the mountains of Jamaica and the last thoughts of Jean de Brébeuf, a Jesuit tortured to death by the Iroquois in the seventeenth century. The problem, as one of her profs had said, was that critical understanding didn’t interest her as much as empathy. “But you can empathize on your own time, Kim. On mine, you just need to play by the rules.” And so she had. She had played pretty well. But her heart was never in it.

  Inside the house a band started up and along came Sarah Vaughan. Moments later Marian appeared in their midst with a glass of wine, already half-consumed. She was wearing one of her muumuus, the red one with white orchids. For Marian, this hour in the dead of winter was sober and solitary, often accompanied by Glenn Gould or a Schubert sonata, reading by the front window wrapped up in a Hudson’s Bay blanket. In summer the hour was for drinking.

  Harold moved his feet for her and she angled the chair away from him and sat. Kim told her she hadn’t missed anything. They’d been recycling old arguments.

  “Historians do that, don’t they?” They were all looking out at the ivy. “It’s why I ended up with Donald. Historians argue about religious wars. Mathematicians decode the language of creation.”

  “You’re quoting him,” said Harold. “I’d rather be an historian who can cross-multiply than a mathematician who calls himself a ‘history buff.’ Dressing up for battle recreations. Eating gruel and sleeping on hay. Christ.”

  Dinner moved along a little too quickly. Marian and Kim sat across from one another, Harold at the head. As always his hands traded the knife and fork repeatedly as he cut and ate, correcting himself when he noticed he was gripping them like gavels. His uncultured use of utensils was the one marker of his origins – poor, rural, and for some months in his boyhood, itinerant – that he’d chosen not to erase. It reminded them all that he’d had to make something of himself.

  In the street beyond the dining-room window, a car thumped by in musical assault.

  “Never work in a uniform,” said Harold. “I should have told you that as a kid.”

  Marian looked up, paused. “A rare lapse in your fathering.”

  “Oh, please, the both of you. I’m not an aimless child you need to blame each other for. I don’t like being wielded. Let’s not do this tired thing again, okay?”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Harold. “I’m all for defeating cliché.”

  He’d had more to drink than usual, Kim noted. She hadn’t yet worked through how Marian’s illness, returned from a long remission, had force in herself, let alone in him.

  Harold proposed a toast. “To the war on cliché.”

  “I’ve heard that one before,” said Marian flatly.

  They toasted.

  At some point Kim asked about Donald’s trip to Quebec City. He’d delivered a paper on the current focus of his interests, Kurt Gödel, that would allow him to use research money to be in town for a re-enactment of the battle on the Plains of Abraham.

  “Apparently he wandered into the middle of a battlefield to correct the choreography.” Marian was smiling without complication. “But he was a good sport. He joined the French side and mimed a great death. Donald, as you may have noticed, likes to play the fool.”

  “He’s not playing.”

  “I know the real from the false, Harold. That’s news to you, but Donald knows that about me.”

  Marian lifted her chin slightly. Kim understood it was the moment her mother most wanted to look beautiful. Her father missed it.

  “Wandering onto a battlefield,” he muttered. “The man believes in observing codes, no matter what’s actually going on around him. Did you know that he asked my permission to take you to dinner?”

  “When? What are you talking about?”

  “Back in the beginning. He came to my office, of all places. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t blow up at him there. We were both junior faculty, watching our step in parallel wings of the building. He shows up as if I were your father and asks what I’d think about the idea. I assumed the scene was out of some old foreign novel he’d read. I’m surprised he didn’t want us both to drink from a chalice or something.”

  “I think I’ll wait to hear his side of the story.”

  “What did you say to him?” asked Kim.

  “Nothing. I just stared at him until he left. Seems he interpreted this to mean I’d given him the all-clear.”

  “You were never one for gallantry,” said Marian. “Quite the opposite.”

  He pretended to ignore her. Here was a conversational place he wouldn’t be led, at least not in front of Kim. Whether it concerned Donald or some distant episode was not clear. In Marian’s exchanges with Harold, Kim saw something of the prize student her mother had once been. She’d practised criminal law at a small firm for three years before Kim was born. Since then she’d mothered and travelled with her husbands. But when drinking around either of her husbands, it was evident that the woman’s life had disappointed her. In recent months Kim saw that even the disappointment wasn’t real, but rather was a mask for a great dark despair. The mask hadn’t worked for some time now.

  “At what point do I ask you to let up on the wine, Mom?”

  “The wine makes me feel good. The drugs don’t. All the best things are contraindicated. But there’s something to be said for chalices.”

  How does the past bear upon us?

  Harold had once told Kim that the question mattered less than it might seem to. “The past belongs to itself first, and its value is the same whether an old war still turns heads on the nationalist holidays or it’s been completely forgotten.” He’d been driving her home from a high school gymnastics meet in which she’d sprained an ankle on the beam. It was the only competition he’d ever attended. She badly wanted to impress him, and when she’d fallen, it took great determination not to cry. She looked at him there in the stands, his mouth open, an “o” of concern she didn’t recognize, and waved to him, and he nodded and smiled and assured her afterwards that it was “all a good show,” as if he’d been watching a dance number. Beside him in the car with light snow falling on the windshield, Kim began telling him about a new trick she wanted to learn for her best apparatus, the floor, and he interjected that the tumbling had brought to his mind past Olympic Games, and Nadia Comaneci, a name he remembered, and then Romania and tyranny, and the whole destabilized, capitalizing world. Then the lesson about the uniform values of pasts.

  The evening had ended with Marian back in bed and Kim and Harold in the living room. He sat in his favourite armchair, his hands palm down on his thighs as he stared out the front window.

  “When it came apart for your mother and me, it felt inevitable. It felt right. Sad but right. But you don’t think about this state of things up ahead. You don’t think about illness. And when it comes, you see things are backwards.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean she has the wrong man looking after her.”

  It was small of her not to relieve him of the self-punishing thought.

  Kim knew the guest room had been prepared but she pretended to go check it. Harold would stay over until mid-morning, when Donald returned. Her three parents could have a late breakfast together, but wouldn’t. Sometime after Kim had made the bed that afternoon, she now saw, Marian had come in and placed on the night table Harold’s preferred night reading, books on architecture and art.

  Just past eleven she changed into her uniform. Before leaving she woke Marian with a kiss on the forehead and told her she’d come around again in two days. For a minute she held her mother’s hand, her thumb in Marian’s palm as if pressing into it a lucky coin.

  She went out and loaded up her saddlebags for the ride to work. The streetlights had taken up in the maple branches. Harold emerged and walked her to the sidewalk and along the bl
ock, feigning an interest in her bike. By now he’d have realized he’d said more than he should have inside. It was odd to see him out in open, public space. How could this ever have been his street? He seemed incomplete in it. She recalled, then and now, accidentally meeting him in a bookstore, one of his women friends standing by, waiting to be introduced.

  “Is this volunteer work you’re doing dangerous? Be honest.”

  And it was as if he’d struck the final note of a chord, and she felt it as a vibration. Was it then or later that she thought it wasn’t just worry in his voice, but a foreknowledge he couldn’t expel?

  “How could it be dangerous?”

  “These people you work with, the rejects, you don’t know them. There are reasons they get rejected.”

  “We don’t hide torturers or terrorists. Haven’t we been through this?”

  “But the truth is, you don’t know whether they’re dangerous or not. You can hardly take them at their word. It’s not enough to say it’s the price of living in an open society.”

  “Sometimes it frightens me to think of you in front of a class.”

  Down the block the little parkette sat bright and dead. In the playground, far below the lone vapour light, a small green whale smiled on its coiled spring.

  “What sorts of people are they? Where do they come from? The ones you hide under your rug.”

  She said if they had money they’d be immigrants. She said the usual something about the highest immigration rate in the world, three times higher than the U.S. He said pressure on screening mechanisms.

  She said, “We screen by sending back the poorest unless they’re in danger, so we’re bound to make mistakes and send people off to their deaths. We already knowingly hand them over to torturers. It might do you good to get a little more involved in history instead of shuffling its footnotes. I work with real people, not national weaknesses or products of my misplaced idealism.”