by Michael Helm
They found it in a jewellery box in a basement dresser drawer. A black leather thong tied around a jade disk with a large round hole. She told Teresa to take it as a gift.
“To celebrate today, the day we met.”
The girl’s protests were sincere. She was going to feel bad about it, but Marian didn’t care.
“There’s no one else I’d rather give it to. Kim doesn’t wear jewellery and I don’t want it forgotten in a box. It’s to bring good fortune. Not luck but money. That design with the hole is from ancient coins. All the way back to China, I think.”
“I understand.”
“Now let’s see if I can get up these stairs.”
Though it took long enough coming up that she knew she wouldn’t go down again, she decided that rather than get into bed she’d just keep moving, out to the front porch. Teresa got the blanket and tucked her in and then let her be to sit alone there, looking off to the end of the street where Kim would appear in time. She traced back from the necklace to the memory of buying it. She didn’t like them, stray memories. They didn’t belong in her now. The dying animal turns from memory towards one short tapered thought. At the end of the thought is a shape that grows more certain as the animal closes. Marian knew it was before her but couldn’t see it yet. She didn’t exactly fear it but now and then worried it would be something absurd. It would look to her like a half-dressed opera villain or a drunken town crier, or a shingled outhouse, something in wooden shoes. Harold’s death had been absurd. There was no way to think about it, account for it. Even the timing was comically bad, with everyone focused on her last weeks. Something had passed between Kim and Harold, she felt, but Kim hadn’t said what. His death was not a mishap, but neither could it have been chosen. He didn’t have to drive an hour to catch a train if he wanted to kill himself. And what he was doing on a freight train defied understanding. He was not the kind to go mad when he drank, so the madness of it must have already been in him. There was a thought – Harold had had an absurd ending in him from the outset, even before she’d met him all these years ago. Not that it was fated to claim him, but it lay dormant, and only by chance had something brought it to life.
She could only sit so long but she stayed. She wanted it to be Kim but Donald might be home first. He’d insist that she go inside and lie down, as if it mattered, because he was powerless and so needed to have things to insist upon. And she would have to put up a small resistance and then do as he asked. Their pretend negotiations. Back when, she’d learned to make love to him the same way.
This neighbourhood of porches. The jack-o’-lanterns were not far off. Then their crumpled November faces. She’d rather not have to see them. Strange kids appeared at the door each year. She’d lost track of the turnover on this street. In most of the houses were new families or the grown children of old ones. From the day they moved here there remained only the old man named Betts, who’d outlived his wife and two children and went for a walk each warm day in his dressing gown, looking for anyone to hear his views on the royals or black people. And the family with the delinquent girl who had shouted the worst imaginable profanities at her parents all through her teens and now worked at a daycare. Across the street and a couple of yards over, a woman Marian had never spoken to was raking an early shedding of maple leaves in her front garden. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and every so often it would tilt up at passing cars or dogwalkers. Then a robin caught the woman’s attention, flying by, and she followed its path over to Marian’s yard and then saw her there and for the briefest moment paused, looking at her, then tilted the hat down again and went back to work. What had occupied her in that moment of apprehension? What thoughts or half thoughts? What doubts? Maybe she hadn’t known she was being watched. And now, what did she suppose Marian saw? What picture was she a part of? Could she imagine her way into the wasting woman on the porch? If the sky was closer in these last days, the made world, the human things, went on forever. Marian was aware. It was all composed before her, every facet, every line, ongoing, without frame, until it touched upon the other made world, creation, and there the wind moving in the tall trees, and the day being day, and the light on her own house, and the stranger inside it.
In Zona 1 of the murderous city comes the warning not to go out after dark or you will surely die and so there is nothing the first night but a ceiling fan and the sounds of someone retching down the hall. The next afternoon, moving along Avenida Roosevelt in a veering spangled bus past shops and schools you see beside the eight smog-clotted lanes a goatherd with a bullwhip driving his animals in profile along the narrow sidewalk against the stucco and corrugated metal walls until they stop at a pay phone in blunt tableau. Vendors climb on selling coloured feathers, ice cream candies, fried bananas, moving down the aisle and then appearing somehow through the window on the neighbouring bus, though the traffic has never stilled. Radio music, a machete under the driver’s seat. Negotiated stops and a dozen near collisions every block, and so it continues until the city is gone.
In the square of the colonial town that she had loved are firecrackers, white couples with dark bought babies, kids selling tickets to the volcano. In a cool dawn you ride up and find yourself on the same path she once climbed, through the green terraced hillsides and pastures, with tourists and stray dogs and a young running guide. In an hour you’re on the lava field of shifting rocks, some white and red hot, stepping over melted water bottles and sunglasses onto the smooth dark hollow back of a whale, hearing the very blood of the earth burning inside it. The dogs show the way, like the dogs that had rescued her in the story she used to tell, when her guide had moved ahead and she found herself in a spot of hell, far from the others, farther from anyone she knew, and the home where she’d been abandoned by her husband. You stop and let the others, your others, move on, searching for the moment when she’d felt saved, but of course it’s unavailable, lost to the years and geology, to the distance between the pain or knowing or received grace of another, and the story of it. You walk on to the end and the open vein burns on your eye.
On the phone your lone contact describes the place you’ll be arriving. This is where it all happened, she says. The whole team’s assembled. The forensics people, the psychologist for the families has been here a week. You’ll be with us by dinnertime. We’re digging up graves in the morning.
The woman is American, famed among justice seekers, is said to be older than she looks. She warns you not to take pictures en route. They’ll think you’re a spy or a kidnapper. And no pictures at the graves. These are crime scenes.
Don’t state your business to anyone. No one can know why you’re here.
As if you knew why you were here. You tell yourself that tomorrow’s unearthed dead are not yours, but that your dead can’t be served except through them. This is not quite true. You do not feel elected to this duty. It’s that there’s no one left for you now. No one and nothing except the solid earth and what it might hold.
The woman’s voice is with you saying mercy all along the last leg, winding up into the mountains, into hard towns of unfinished buildings, with plastic roofs, rebar spikes, the illusion of perpetual improvement, and exactly on the median of the highway is the deadest dog in the world, legs splayed out from what looks like squashed watermelons, every torn moment dressed with newness. Then down into the town, past fruit and fabric stands, toddlers in the streets, signs reading micro-credit, the open doorway to a room of kids at typewriters, and a row of trees painted with election graffiti for a party run by killers, the woman’s voice saying love and god’s blessings, words once no more than a flutter in a cage now seeming all-resolving. You arrive here with only her name.
You promised to arrive in one piece.
She promised to be waiting for you.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Ron Poulton, Victoria Sanford, Holly Dranginis, Carmen Aguirre, Susan McKeown, Stephen Streeter, Nasrin Rahimieh, Stuart McCook, Alicia Viloria-Petit, Nelofer Pazira, Sandra
Helm, Tracy McDonald, Thomas Lahusen, and Ellen Levine. For valued readings, Ken Babstock, Richard Helm, Alayna Munce, and Michael Redhill. For being a part of this novel, and the others, I am deeply grateful to Juanita DeBarros. Thank you to Lara Hinchberger for keen editorial suggestions and, especially, to Ellen Seligman for lending this book her unfailing heart and great talents. And to Alexandra Rockingham, for her artistic wisdom, bravery, and the ever-present mindfulness that guides all who know her.
I’m happy to acknowledge the support of The Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
The novel owes a debt to several text, on-line, and film sources, especially Virginia Garrard-Burnett’s Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem, Marc Cooper’s Pinochet and Me, Brian Loveman’s Chile: The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism, Samuel Chavkin’s Storm Over Chile, and Joanna Bourke’s Fear: A Cultural History. The story told is partly invented, and partly drawn from the events of the Acul massacre of April 21, 1981, recounted in Victoria Sanford’s Buried Secrets.
Copyright © 2010 by Michael Helm
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Helm, Michael
Cities of refuge / Michael Helm.
eISBN: 978-0-7710-4042-9
1. Title
ps8565.e4593c48 2010 C813’.54 c2009-905217-2
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Lines from “Seven Stanzas at Easter” are taken from Collected Poems 1953—1993 by John Updike. Copyright © 1993 by John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
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