Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  “Do you have those names for me?” she asked.

  Jonathan went down the hallway. Harold thought he heard voices, and the older woman at the table began to speak as if to cover them. She addressed Rosemary in rapid accented English mixed with some other language, and Rosemary asked the young woman to clarify. There was some back and forth before Jonathan returned. Harold understood that nothing had been conveyed.

  Jonathan glanced at Harold as he handed Rosemary a paper with handwriting, which she folded and put away.

  “Why do you bring this man?” It was the older woman. Her English was thick but confident.

  “He needs to know what I do,” she explained. “Don’t worry, you’re safe.”

  “Thank you,” said Jonathan.

  The older woman got up from the table to watch them leave.

  In the car again, Harold was still working over what he’d witnessed. There was no use asking. She would tell him or she wouldn’t.

  “I don’t suppose you’ll let me in on that smile,” he said.

  “It was the look on your face. You were trying to be a good sport and make sense of what was happening there, but your expression was of disapproval – I don’t know what’s happening here but I object to it.”

  “At least it amused you. I’m not quite so naive as you imagine, you know.”

  “And I’m not quite so humourless. You think of crusaders as humourless. What else?”

  All right, then, he thought, let’s get personal.

  “Likely in the aftermath of some trauma of your own.”

  “Let’s say a nasty divorce.”

  “Will we say that?”

  “Yes, actually. But it’s distant now. And I have my humour intact.”

  With a crooked smile she seemed to acknowledge a degree of construction in her outward self. In a serious world, she was a serious person, but with a sense of irony, even play. He didn’t buy it.

  “You haven’t reassured me that you don’t harbour criminals.”

  “Reassuring you wasn’t my intention.”

  Without naming countries, she explained that the couple living with Jonathan and his wife were out of options. They’d applied for refugee status and been denied. They’d applied for help from certain organizations and been denied. They had no place to turn. The man sometimes got construction work but most crews wouldn’t hire him. And his English was bad.

  “He was a member of the military. He wants refuge because he witnessed tortures and executions and he couldn’t stomach it and he went AWOL, and so now the military wants to torture him.”

  “But nobody believes the story.”

  “There’s not much evidence one way or another, but the Refugee Board and GROUND are of the opinion he likely participated in killings.”

  “So why do you believe him if they don’t?”

  “What if his story is true?”

  “What if it isn’t? Suppose they got this one right.”

  “Okay, let’s say they did. Are we then relieved of our obligations?”

  Here was the resistance he’d been waiting for. Rosemary had people to protect and he wasn’t going to be allowed to threaten them. He would have it out with her, more directly than they’d squared off over lunch that day, but just now he wanted to keep things civil. There was more to be won with civility. And anyway, he wanted more of her company.

  “Do you drink? Do you have time for a drink?”

  “So you can work up the courage to accuse me of something again?”

  “Maybe.”

  They headed south to King Street and found a faux British pub with Guinness on tap and cricket paddles on the wall, a place of the kind that survived on brokers at the market close and tourists after shows. They took seats at the bar, angling towards one another, and the moment their drinks came Rosemary excused herself.

  Maybe she wanted him a little loose before they continued. How calculating was she? For some reason he thought it important to establish whether or not she had children. He had theories about how motherhood changed women by revealing to them the incapacities of men for intuitive empathy and selfless love. It was one of the beliefs he held privately, never to be stated. But he’d leave the question unasked or else they were going to knock themselves out trying to open angles on one another.

  When his pint was only half gone he noticed a lassitude in his movements, a strain of fatigue that paid off in a keenness in the senses. The teak wainscotting behind the bottles along the bar. Most days you’d look but never see it. The relative weights of sounds in the distance. If you didn’t know steel on steel, would a streetcar seem metal or wind? The twenty-ton pitch of a breeze.

  “Sorry.”

  She briefly laid her hand on his shoulder as she passed by, a warm, surprise gesture, and took her position on the stool.

  “In that apartment. The man in the back room. If he is a killer, why do you feel an obligation to him? Do you think the country should open itself to every monster who can afford a plane ticket?”

  “He’s not a monster. But maybe he was forced to take part in killing. The Lord commanded there be cities of refuge for the manslayer.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Among the Levitical cities, six were designated as cities of refuge.”

  “Where the murderers lived.”

  “Only those who killed without enmity and were subject to the laws of blood vengeance. They didn’t deserve to die, so they needed a place where they would be safe.”

  “You don’t think there’s enmity between a soldier and the person he tortures and kills?”

  “If there was, he wouldn’t be able to tell the story the way he does.”

  “The Review Board didn’t find his storytelling so convincing. Maybe you’re just …”

  “A bleeding heart? As I’ve told you, the board and I aren’t judging the same thing.”

  The Lord commanded. Harold couldn’t trust anyone who’d begin a sentence this way. If he’d tried to picture such a person, she wouldn’t have been wearing a hockey sweater.

  “There’s a rumour,” he said. “Women have gone missing recently. Women in this sphere of yours. An Eritrean, a Kurd, and a Russian.”

  “Sounds like the start of a joke.”

  “Maybe they came through GROUND. Maybe the attacker met them where he met Kim.”

  “Where did you hear this?”

  “It’s out there.”

  She closed her hands into half fists and pushed her nearly full pint glass slightly forward like so many stacks of poker chips.

  “This is the world we’ve made. Lurid stories are self-generating. They form out of dozens of other stories, some of them true, some not. The pieces break off and recombine.”

  “Well this one grew legs. It stood up and made the rounds.”

  The lights dimmed.

  “These women don’t exist, Harold.”

  “They don’t? You know this?”

  “They do, but not those three. The story’s true in general but not in particular. The rumour would have you believe they’re being murdered. But if it’s true, then it only happens after we send them back where they came from.”

  All of Rosemary’s stakes were in invisible things, her god, the invisibilia, her foreigners who didn’t officially exist. Apparently her devotions had made her a great reader of others, and the more you looked at her, the more she saw in you. Yet he couldn’t help but look at her. Her face, her mouth. He wanted to reach out and touch her neck, to feel her hair on the back of his hand, a gesture from his past he’d made once or twice to make himself understood, though it had conveyed only his need, not his meaning.

  “Take a thousand people in dire circumstances,” she said. “We take them in, a kind of miracle to them, and support them only enough until they begin to see that they can’t really escape their past here, and many can’t ever have a future. And so they begin to rot. Or we reject them and send them running, with no hope even of basic security. Even if by some she
er luck they get ahead, they get work and make money and have families, even when they find one hospital that will take care of them, and will bill them but won’t collect, and they find a school for their kids, even then they’re still not safe. There’s every chance that they might be caught and sent back, and so lose even more than they did when they came in the first place. Now they’re in the position of losing their families.” Loud laughter burst from another table. She waited it out, then continued. “And all their hope lies in the possibility of a change in the laws. But nothing happens unless someone tells a single compelling story, usually involving some rare case, between categories, and it hits the news, and pressures form around it, and a minister finds himself under siege, and then maybe a bill or some amendment gets put forward, and it passes or not. But either way, the thousands who aren’t between categories still suffer, hopeless in a new place. They simply exist. Do you understand when I say they exist?”

  Her eyes had been steadfast on him the whole time. It was part of the schooling.

  “I guess I do.”

  “And so rumours of killers, women murdered, they’re not just lurid, giving the citizens what they want. Violent stories. They’re a way of pretending to look without seeing. They allow people to think they’ve recognized a problem, without doing anything about it. They make things worse. They’re loathsome. They’re wicked.”

  Her voice was level.

  “But people do disappear,” he said.

  “Yes. They get detained and deported, they leave on a bus for Montreal, they move to a new neighbourhood, change their friends.”

  “My concern, Rosemary, is that you aren’t open to certain thoughts, certain signs. That you’ve got too much invested in your faith in these people. And now even when you’re presented with my reasonable concerns, you aren’t hearing them.”

  “I understand them. But on this matter of dangerous foreign-born predators, we each think the other is dead wrong. You should know that I’ve already been through these questions.”

  She told him that not so many years ago she’d become close to a young Guatemalan woman, a successful refugee claimant who used to come to the church. She smiled a lot and learned English in daily sessions of Bible study that Rosemary led. One day the study group read of the translation of Elijah, who ascended on a whirlwind to heaven without dying. The young woman – her name was Mariela Cendes – had stated her belief that her own father, who had disappeared in the time of the death squads, had also gained heaven without dying. Then one mid-June day she herself went missing. Her clothes, all her possessions, were still in her room. There was no reason to think she had chosen to go elsewhere.

  “And she never turned up?”

  “We went to the police, they did their thing. Nothing. She’s still on the books.”

  “I’m sorry she disappeared. But the police probably don’t have forensics for heavenly whirlwinds. Religions and their free-pass categories. In Islam, suicide bombers think they’re skipping thousands of years in the grave and going straight to their reward.”

  “You have to understand that I believe in Elijah’s translation, just as I believe in the resurrection.”

  Like that, she was a stranger again.

  “Not literally, you don’t. Something like the resurrection only makes sense as metaphor. That’s its value. Why it’s powerful, historically.”

  “It’s powerful because it’s the truth. Let us not mock God with metaphor.”

  “Is that from one of Father André’s sermons?”

  “It’s from a poem.”

  “And here I thought poetry was metaphor.”

  “Not this poem. I’ll send it to you.”

  He sat there, dumbfounded that such an intelligence had been carried off by fairy tales. There was a great darkness in her past through which she’d lost her way. He wondered what had happened to her, but more so he wondered at her certainties. In the years ahead for him, his last couple of decades, he would need such certainty, if only he could arrive there. As delusions went, it was the right one for a man his age. Later life was best endured with family and friends – he was not well stocked – a good drug plan, and a hopeful delusion. He saw himself walking out into a summer storm to be taken up by the winds.

  On the drive back to his car she told more stories about her missing Guatemalan girl with the musical name, a name made for prayer, and he tried to understand how biblical characters could be as real to her as this person who’d existed for her in flesh and blood. He asked her to spell it out for him as plainly as she could. She said she believed in the resurrection, she believed in the translation of Elijah, and she could as easily believe in the translation of Mariela Cendes.

  Maybe this Mariela was an invention, a ploy of some sort, he thought. But then no, that wasn’t it.

  She pulled up by his car. They got out and he stood and watched her wave goodbye and walk away and disappear into the church.

  By now she had to remind herself that R wasn’t real. He was there in her world but he wasn’t real. He had being but he didn’t exist. They were made for each other as surely as they were missing from one another. It was partly the absence that drew her, and that made his life personal for her. They could never reach one another, never inhabit the same plane outside of her imagination, though they felt loss in similar ways, and if she could write it well enough, they’d feel it in the same way. She would grant him the full apprehension of his loss.

  She wanted to tell someone about him, tell Marian here on their late-morning walk, the ritual they’d formed to talk about things. The walk had become shorter every few days. They wouldn’t make the end of the block this morning. There were small moments of shock that she came to expect, though expecting them didn’t console her. What consoled her was the thought of R.

  The front yards began to widen as the street grew older in this direction, the houses Victorian, brick. Every morning, in one way or another, Kim asked her mother how she was doing. Usually Marian dismissed the question lightly, but today she said that she was trying to hit a moving target, to get used to a condition that kept changing. The only way to mark it, and her adjustments, was against the constants in her life, Kim and Donald. There might come a time, she said, when she’d ask Kim to give her a read on herself. “It matters that you tell me the truth,” she said. “I trust your eye. It consoles me to know there’s a good witness to my exit.”

  “I’ll try. But one truth is that I don’t think I’m much of a witness.”

  And so Marian asked her what she felt now, at this distance, when she thought of the attack.

  She felt she’d been upside down.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was working a night shift, which was half-normal to me by then, but upside down to everyone else. Everything was backwards.”

  “Sounds like it’s still close if you allow it to be.”

  There was something else, something new. She had tried to remember the sound of her footsteps that night, and the indistinct measure of another’s step beneath them, but she simply couldn’t hear it. Then yesterday, writing a fresh scene with R, she thought of him walking again, this time from a work site to a subway station, and she realized he wasn’t alone, that someone was with him, and she heard the steps, syncopated and a little uneven, and then she suddenly closed her laptop and dropped her head and hugged herself.

  “I think he had a leg injury.”

  “Before you kicked him?”

  “I can hear his last few steps before he tackles me, and they don’t fall quite evenly. And then when I kick his leg, his left ankle, he cries out like I’ve broken it, but there’s no chance, and so maybe it was hurt already.”

  “All right. And his skin tone. His eyelashes you said.”

  “Yes. And his hands. He works with them.”

  “And you told the detective about the leg injury?”

  “I called her this morning. But it doesn’t matter. I got her to admit that the trail’s cold. There neve
r was a trail.” Marian reached for her hand and squeezed it lightly. “It’s okay, Mom. I already knew they wouldn’t find him.”

  They never would. Not unless he did this again and her description matched another, and then the pieces started to lead places. The pieces always led her to the same place. To get there, she is upside down. She carries a tray of coffees, a bag of treats. She stops at a bookstore window, she passes by a makeshift church. He’s there behind her but she can’t see him. She thinks to turn north but stays west instead. She sees the chain hanging loose on the clasp. She hears the uneven footsteps, feels the shoulder in her back. The coffee scalds her leg but she doesn’t know it yet.

  “So I’m dealing with it, as they say. Though I guess I’m distracting myself a little from … the state of things with you.”

  “Is that why you’re in your room tapping all day?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I love having you around but I don’t want you underfoot. I think we’re both holding up just fine. It’s your father who’s crumbling. Last week Donald found him in the garage, going through boxes. Drunk.”

  “What boxes?”

  “Presumably his boxes. He stores his life in there.”

  She’d felt something like this coming.

  “I can’t picture the scene.”

  “Harold lurching around. Donald standing there with a phone and a can of wasp killer. Each calling the other an intruder.”

  They stopped and looked around at the day, then started again. As a child this had been the limit of her world. Now it was the limit of her mother’s.

  “Why are you only telling me this now?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think I was going to tell you at all.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t like your father in his pathetic mode. I must be reminding him of his mortality.”

  “Did you ask him what he was looking for?”

  Marian laughed. “God, no.” She was smiling but her tone meant she wouldn’t say more.

  They had made it to the corner but could they make it back? There was no place to sit but a little wooden retaining wall, about eighteen inches high, fronting a neighbour’s garden. Kim had marked it on their first trip, when they’d started this routine. Some day soon they would need it, but again today they passed it by, as if floating a little on the thought of how well they were addressing things, so much better than the men, with the simple down-and-back, the same to-and-fro of their slow lines every morning.