Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  When she got up there was something wrong with her body, like it wasn’t really hers or had shrunk a size since she last used it. She stood hunched a bit or something and looked like she was about to step wrong. Her head was cocked out and her face was tilted down like she was about to fall forward but she stood that way for a while, then went inside the house and she had missed the sky, didn’t know it was gathering, didn’t know he’d been with her today. In the sky was the last thing they shared, he saw it now, the way the dark strip he looked out of, that she had looked at, was like the vertical tear in the storm clouds behind her, with the blue beneath like gasoline flared on a wet shop floor.

  In minutes there was a motion out beside the house and he opened the door a little more to see her flying away on a bike.

  He waited for her return but in time it didn’t come and instead there came the rain.

  He made himself leave. He walked out into it. It came down hard, fell like wedding rice and jittered on the street and the car roofs. It was still raining when he caught a bus and took a seat with others smiling at his sopping condition. There was nothing to see through the pouring windows but he had a compass the size of a watch face and when the bus took a curve he watched it turn and stay true. The woman she was was still out there, in Kim or in someone else. This Kim or someone else was open. She would know him right off as lost and unsponsored. Any day now, she would turn her face to him, and he would say her name.

  Kim,

  Back in the ’90s an anthropologist colleague of mine named Zazic was working on the genocide in the Ixil region of Guatemala. He collected first-hand accounts from the villagers and farmers about the atrocities they’d suffered as the army terrorized them in the belief they were aiding the guerrillas. Rapes, tortures, massacres by the dozens. Entire villages wiped out, thousands murdered. I’m sure you know the history.

  One survivor told the story of soldiers rounding up all the men and boys in his village. About half were taken into a church and beaten and made to lie in a heap, then covered with leaves and dirt. Those on the bottom suffocated, but if anyone moved they were shot. Then the other men were led in and told to climb onto the heap and jump up and down on their children, fathers, friends, and neighbours. They too were shot if they didn’t comply. At some point the soldiers collected all those still alive and marched them out to the cemetery. They designated the ones who’d been buried as “hell” and the ones who’d climbed on them as “heaven.” The men in heaven were then ordered to find their sons in hell and claim them. Once they’d done so, they were told to choose which of their sons they would save. For every one saved, another would die. When the condemned had been designated they were made to stand at the edge of a mass grave and they were shot. Then the rest of the men in hell were pushed into the grave and shot. Many died slowly.

  The man who told the story told it neutrally, as I’ve tried to do here. When Zazic asked what had happened to him personally, the man said nothing. Only then did Zazic realize this man had never told the story from his own viewpoint. After a long pause he thanked him for his time but the man took hold of his arm, asking him to stay. It was a minute or two, the man looking away, gathering himself, before he lifted his head and said, “My beautiful son died by my hand.” He held out the palm of his right hand. It was covered in ugly ropes of scar tissue. Someone, perhaps he himself, had sliced it repeatedly.

  Zazic never learned the story of how the son died, nor of the sliced palm. And so they have never been entered into the record. But in seeing the man’s hand, he says, he felt closer to the horror than at any other time in his researches. What happened was truly unspeakable.

  We can guess at what happened with the man and his son, but we shouldn’t.

  We know only ourselves, and ourselves thinly. What happened to the ruined and the dead? Inside acts of evil, what is witnessed is never what happened. What happened belongs only and always to the victims. If we acknowledge this solemnly, we won’t live in ignorance, and we won’t make the mistake of thinking we can pretend our way into knowing.

  The story of the hand, such as it was told to me, and I tell it to you, is not to be mistaken for the hand itself. And even if we were to meet the survivor, that scarred hand held before us is one thing to us, another to him.

  I would never presume to know, Kim, what you thought or felt on the night of the attack. Neither do I presume to know what it was like for any of those who suffered more than I did in Santiago.

  Your imagination has led you into folly. Maybe you suppose that because you had no audience other than me, who at least knows your intentions were loving, your little fiction about my days in Santiago isn’t irresponsible. In fact it is much worse than that. You have committed an abomination, all the more vile – I’m sorry, but that’s the word – for its believability. Good aesthetics don’t promote good ethics. They often nurture evasion. Or worse. Powerful myths drive history. Ideologies, religions with their playbooks, messianics of all stripes blindly trusting in the inerrancy of ancient, made-up stories.

  You’ve used the name of someone real – Carl Oakes – someone I knew, and ascribed it to a character you’ve invented. The real Carl was not at all as you’ve imagined. Neither were the other housemates. Neither was I. You did get something of the city then, the events, of course. But there’s a dramatic arc in your story that wasn’t an arc in reality. I probably wasn’t paying attention enough to have felt a building drama.

  I’d forgotten the jacaranda.

  You do intend good, I know, but what does your imagining add to the world? What you’ve added to our lives here, yours and mine, is presumption and self-pride. You’ve not characterized me well. I don’t think you’ve got my writing voice down (I would never write “We are such a couple of brats together”). Moreover, you haven’t guessed well at my thoughts, or the degree to which I know them (“everything I think to be true about those days in Santiago is in question” – well, it isn’t, I know what I know). I am not haunted by guilt. I am not caught inside an ambiguity.

  I hope you’ve found it therapeutic to write your own story, and that you’ve begun to put the attack behind you. But if you hope to inspire me to answer with mine, I can only say that I’m not in need of therapy. I was hardly a victim, barely a witness. It has always seemed self-dramatizing to tell it. People can get a better sense of it by reading the histories, as you have. You should have left it at that.

  If only to settle your imagination, I’ll tell you what I remember. It’s not long, and not much colour. Your version is much more alive. On the day of the coup I stayed in my rented room. The next day I ventured out, as I’ve already told you, to my teacher Orlando’s apartment. There were a few people there, most I didn’t know, some coming and going. Orlando told me to get to my embassy. I asked him if he wanted me to help him and his wife get asylum, and he said he did not, that their place was there, whatever happened. I left in the early afternoon and was a few blocks along when I was stopped by a soldier, a commander of some sort, with a machine gun, I guess it was. He questioned me. I said I was a Canadian studying at a language school. He said I was a communist. He said my leader was a communist, too – I remember he alluded to Trudeau – and then he asked for the name of my school and my teacher. If he really cared about these he would already have had the names. The question was just to humiliate me. And though I knew that, I told him that I wouldn’t betray my friend. He laughed and said I was a good student, and then, as if I no longer amused him, he let me go. I phoned Orlando right away but the call wouldn’t connect. There was no way to warn him, and anyway, the soldier had been inventing his threat as he went along.

  That’s it, the hardest moment. I eventually flew out of there and went on with my studies. But then I learned a lesson about experiencing a near miss – the truth of it, how close I might have come to harm, arrived on delay, as more stories of what happened that day began to be told. The next year, at school in Montreal, this was about February of ’74, I borrowed
a classmate’s car to visit a professor in Sherbrooke who’d offered to introduce me to his visiting academic friends from Mexico City. I set out alone at just before noon, and in about forty minutes lost my presence of mind, you might say, and came to consciousness bouncing to a halt in a snowy farmer’s field, with a view of ice floes in the St. Lawrence, and a pain in my thigh where it had bashed against the steering wheel. The constable who questioned me decided I’d fallen asleep. I didn’t argue. There were no charges, but I was made to agree that I might have killed someone.

  I had not fallen asleep. The feeling, when it came on me, had been quite the opposite, a waking sense of awakening. Because it was the past I’d waken into, I lost the present moment, for however long it took to slow down and drift off the highway. I would learn week by week that I was in trouble – that I was possessed by trouble, there in my imagination of what might have happened, and couldn’t expel it. I prepared myself for a life of sudden dislocation. And, in fact, I came to experience other such moments over the months ahead.

  And then, within another year or two, it was gone. The event was truly passed.

  In the weeks after I arrived back in Canada I wrote two letters to my teacher, care of the school, and heard nothing back. I do feel guilty that I didn’t try harder to learn his fate and admit I failed to do so out of fear of what I might discover. I learned to live upon an unanswered question (all right, there’s an ambiguity). And when the truth commission report was published, I didn’t have the heart to read it.

  But I now teach the Chilean coup with no more passion than I do the dirty wars in Argentina and Uruguay, the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City, the genocides in Guatemala and El Salvador, and, sadly, so on. There was one conference in Santiago I might have attended if I hadn’t been needed here for a thesis defence. I know a few scholars in Chile. They know my friend Zazic.

  Gather the facts as they’re available, Kim, and then leave them be. You have failed that time and place. Fiction, no matter its scope, will always fail history. Beautiful artifice, there’s nothing true in it. Real stories have no endings, except the one that includes us all. I do believe in that story. I respect it. But it has no teller.

  There was something happening in the light. When she looked up from the screen, the last lines stayed before her like a burning afterimage, as if printed over the opposing houses and yards. He could only have written this to her, she told herself, if he’d forgotten her again in the writing, as he had in his letter to her years ago, when he’d left them. But he hadn’t forgotten. The letter had been aimed.

  It wasn’t intentional or an oversight that he hadn’t typed his name. It was just how he saw things. She knew there was something eternal in a person’s owning up to their authorings, and her knowing separated them. Something else was eternal in her father.

  A uniformed figure was approaching from another plane.

  “Here you go, hon.”

  The woman handed her the bundle and turned and went back down the porch steps, back into the sun. The mail was held together with a blue elastic band, fully in its own possession, yet she held it as if it were hers. She drew out a single sheet, a real-estate flyer with small dim pictures of homes like those around her, and wondered at it. Across the street the light deepened the brick of the houses, the early-fall gardens and trees. A breeze stirred the paper in her hands, made a crepitated sound and moved on, only a lungful, really. She tried to imagine herself a year hence and sensed that the light would be different.

  She clicked on the truth commission bookmark and scrolled through the day in question, down to the teacher named Orlando.

  On September 12, 1973, Orlando Ropert SARMIENTO, 29, a university student and teacher, and his wife Maria Alicia SARMIENTO, 30, a homemaker, were arrested with others at their apartment by government agents. According to testimony given to the Commission, the couple was detained in the apartment after the others were led away. They were found dead that afternoon in the entranceway to their building. The death certificates list “bullet wounds” as the cause of Orlando Ropert Sarmiento’s death, and “blunt head trauma” as the cause of Maria Alicia Sarmiento’s death. Given these circumstances, the Commission concludes that Orlando and Maria Alicia Sarmiento were executed and suffered a grave violation of human rights at the hands of government forces.

  She retrieved the phone from the house and called Eduardo Jofre’s cell number. She was leaving a message when he picked up. She asked if he had anything for her.

  “Yes, I’ve prepared something, but I’m in Chicago. I intended to give it to you in person but I can send it if you want.”

  “Please do. As soon as you can.”

  “I’ll send it now. Call me again if you want to talk about it.”

  Her thoughts stood outside her, converging in the slow burning street. Somewhere a woodpecker was tapping at a tree trunk at a speed that made a texture of the beats. She recalled a distant scene from the music store. Eduardo had told her that every day he would tune two guitars and hang them back on the wall ten minutes before a father and son would come in, saying nothing, and take them down and play. She saw them once. They were short, dark, maybe Roma, and when their music began it was the surest creature in the room. Immaculate folk jazz in black canvas shoes. When they stopped, the new absence had whole lost gods in it.

  The air suggested rain. The day was lapsing, and implicit in the now deadening light was something very hard.

  She clicked on the inbox.

  Hello Kim,

  My contact has had some back and forths with witnesses. I’ve attached a letter (in Spanish) from her with the details but, to summarize, 3 names on your father’s list were unknown to anyone, the German and the 2 Americans. Of the remaining 12, my friend has identified all 5 on the list not in the Rettig Report through their connection to the 7 who were. I died in 1981 of illness. The other 4 are still alive, 3 still live in Santiago. These 3 were asked if they recalled a young Canadian student named Harold Lystrander. None knew the name. 2 knew of a Canadian only after their arrest, from the 3rd. The 3rd, Bastio Eyzaguirre, though not recognizing the name, had met or been in the presence of, on at least one occasion, a Canadian student of Orlando Sarmiento, in whose apartment he and the others were hiding on September 12, and believed that, as he and the others were being led outside and into a military bus, he saw the Canadian across the street, standing with army officers, unrestrained.

  Eyzaguirre is quoted as saying that he thought he recognized the young man but didn’t place him until later. It is possible, he says, that now or then he confused the Canadian with some other foreign student, but at the time, he was sure it was the Canadian. He is quoted as saying that it was his impression that the soldiers’ attitude toward the young man suggested a complicity. The young man and the soldier next to him were both smoking cigarettes, “como si ellos contemplaran el enfoque de una tormenta,” as if watching the approach of a storm.

  Eyzaguirre sat near the back of the bus. As he looked out the back window, he saw the 2 people whose apartment he’d been hiding in led out of the building and stopped in front of it. The young Canadian, if that’s who he was, was led across the street toward them by a soldier. There were soldiers on all sides and some confusion and, he admits, the view from the bus wasn’t perfect. But Eyzaguirre says the young man stood before Orlando and Maria Alicia and there was a moment of talk. Then the bus, though it wasn’t yet full, began to pull away, and Eyzaguirre remembers thinking first that his friends would be spared arrest, and then that it was bad for them to still be on the street. The last thing he saw was Maria Alicia stepping forward and slapping the face of the Canadian.

  I relayed the question, Was the Canadian there in the apartment at any time on September 12?

  He was not present when Eyzaguirre was there. Eyzaguirre was in the apartment for about two hours before the soldiers arrived.

  I relayed the question, Does the section in the Rettig Report addressing the deaths of the Sarmientos seem
in any way lacking? Eyzaguirre points out that he and the others had been led away but were still present, in the bus, at the time the Sarmientos were led out of the building. None of the survivors in the bus testified as witnesses to the deaths – they didn’t see the killings – but the full story should include the fact that the couple was in the street before they ended up dead back inside the entryway, and that there was a confrontation between Maria Alicia and the young foreigner.

  All of these exchanges were electronic. I then called my friend and asked her opinion of Eyzaguirre. She said that she’s known him all his life, and that though Eyzaguirre isn’t the smartest of her friends, and in fact in his youth he talked a lot of shit, he had grown into a reliable man.

  Kim, I can’t judge the accuracy of Eyzaguirre’s story or whether it should be admissible to the record. You might be surprised how many such stories, however well intended, however much their teller believes them, turn out to be full of error. So before you believe too readily, let me write Eyzaguirre myself. Do you have a photo of your father from that time? We could scan it and send it to him and see if he thinks it’s the man he saw that day.

  There is a great responsibility in gathering these stories and trying to make them fit. But they don’t always fit. We mustn’t speculate without sound proof. Whether or not we have that here is a question I’ll leave to you.

  Eduardo

  She got onto her bike and she rode. Down through the upscale neighbourhoods, then south under the train tracks and into her favourite streets, emptying onto Bloor and up onto the sidewalk, then out and along in the heavy, honking traffic to the museum and then south. She rode into Queen’s Park and there was the homeless woman named Fran who’d once told her about seeing wolves bring down a deer in the snow. She was asleep under an oak tree and a torn wool coat. The last morning she left work at the museum, without waking her, Kim had opened her saddlebag and brought out the danish she’d been saving and wrote a hello on a paper napkin – “From Kim, who works at the rom” – and placed the note and the treat wrapped in wax paper by her side, and as she left, two mangy squirrels hopped near Fran’s head and froze, staring at the pastry. But now she rode past Fran and nearer the legislative buildings and past the statue of Edward VII and the balls of his horse painted another lurid colour in prank and vaguely directed protest, out into traffic, along the curb, where ahead a border collie tied to a signpost greeted her like an old friend and then she rode hard, feeling herself working, thinking of the dog’s instinct to cower and wag all at once, into the residential streets east of campus, and saw a woman on a porch spank a child with two measured smacks and a tossed towel falling from an attic window, unfurling the word “Resort” into a garden.