by Mike Bond
“No.” Sophie closed her eyes, took a breath. “I don’t think it ever will.”
The old woman seemed mollified. “Why did he go there! Why?”
“Leo loved what he did. Then we met. And he didn’t want to do it anymore.”
“Without you,” the old woman said ruefully, “maybe he wouldn’t have died.”
“I hope that’s not true.” But maybe it is.
“I shouldn’t have said that... Sometimes my heart aches so I can’t breathe.” She massaged arthritic knuckles. “We have some of his things – toys he had as a boy, a few clothes, a yellow and blue soccer ball... Maybe you should take them, for little Leo...”
“No, you keep them.” Sophie wiped her own tear from the baby’s face. “I do my work, but I’m living inside a shell. It’s been a year now... but it doesn’t go away.”
A gaunt man came in, white-haired with ragged stubble. He took her in his arms. “So, daughter, you’ve come to see your Russian family.”
Sophie fought her tears but they streamed onto his shoulder. She felt the old man’s ribs against her breast, his narrow spine against her arm. The baby began to cry. “Achh what a voice! A true Cossack.” He held the baby high. “Aren’t you, little Leo Gregoriev?”
Leo’s father sat beside his wife, took her hand. “Our son...” He paused, gathering his breath. “He wrote many things about you. How brave you are, working in the operating rooms with the bombs going off, the children you’ve saved.”
“I’ve lost too many.”
“And now?”
“Now I work in a hospital in Paris. Emergency Room. And take care of little Leo.”
“You should come here and work. Such good Russian as you speak. We have the best doctors in the world... Except, of course, the French.”
Sophie smiled. “I learned Russian because I fell in love with Leo. I would’ve learned anything – Sanskrit, Chinese – to be with him.” This is crazy, she thought. I’ve got to stop. “I speak to little Leo in Russian. With my bad accent. But at least he’ll grow up learning it. There’s a Russian school in Paris. I’ll send him there, part time. When he’s older.” She got up, opened her suitcase and took out several packages. “I didn’t know what to bring...”
“You brought our grandson, child...”
She gave them the packages, a cashmere sweater for Leo’s mother, a leather jacket for his father, French cheeses, a bottle of Armagnac.
“So many people lost their sons in Afghanistan,” Leo’s father said. “You could say we’re lucky... At least we have this little boy.”
“In our war against the Nazis,” Leo’s mother said, “every family lost its sons, its fathers... Why do we humans keep doing this?”
“Katerina’s fixed a lovely dinner,” he said. “There were beets today. Do you like beets? And we’ve fixed up our bedroom for you and the baby. We’ll sleep out here.”
Through the half-open window came forlorn laughter from the alley. I have to get out of here, Sophie thought. I’m a doctor – why am I so afraid of pain?
JACK WAITED TILL THE WATER in the blue enamel pot began to boil then poured in a handful of coffee. He opened the lid on the woodstove and brushed the grounds off his hands into the fire. He shoved the pot back over the flames.
When it had boiled for a while he poured some into the blue enamel mug that went with the pot. He took the green bottle of Jack Daniels from under the table and dumped in a judicious bit. That cooled the coffee enough to drink right it away.
This, he raised the cup to the dawn-tinged Sawtooth peaks beyond the cobwebbed window, this is the life. Here in Idaho, Afghanistan and Beirut were months away. Somenights he didn’t even dream much of Loxley, Gus, all of it.
The girl from Salmon had left a purple sock by the foot of the bed. To be sure she was gone he went outside and found the tracks of her pickup tailing down the pasture and out the gate. He noticed his coffee cup was empty and went inside and filled up again, pouring in a double shot of Jack.
He hadn’t done yesterday’s dishes but wouldn’t do them now. The mice had left little turds in the sink but so what – they had to eat too. Imagine what it was like before the white man came. Mice had the run of the place.
A fly was buzzing against the window. “Don’t be silly,” he told it, “you can’t get out that way.” He put a beer glass over the fly and slid a sheet of paper under the glass, opened the screen door with his elbow and held the glass up. The fly lingered a moment on the rim then flew away.
The fly had had no way of understanding glass, something there yet not there, invisible but impenetrable. But aren’t I the same, beating myself against a barrier I can’t see?
The fly should have searched for a crack in the logs, an open door. Instead it had persisted at what didn’t work, because it expected it to work.
And why didn’t he turn from what he couldn’t see and kept colliding with, what he expected to work but didn’t, what caused pain and imprisoned him? Would he continue doing this till he died?
He crossed the pasture and shoved his head into the creek, drank his fill and let it sluice his eyes and wash through his hair. At the corral the appaloosa mare nickered and came bobbing over, stuck her head across the jack fence and whuffed at him. He went into the barn and came back with a battered aluminum bucket half-filled with oats and let her bury her nose in it. “And you, my pretty,” he said, “you can’t see your barriers either – that with one shoulder you could push over this fence and be free –”
She didn’t answer and the roan gelding named Big Red came over shuddering the sleep off his ribs and licking his hairy chops. Jack refilled the bucket and tipped it toward him but the mare bared her teeth and Big Red swung his head aside. “Be a bitch,” he told her, “see what you get.” He shoved her head away and let the gelding snuffle down into the bucket, Jack pushing the mare’s head back each time she neared.
Once in Afghanistan they’d come into a deserted village where in an empty manger a starving little girl was chained by her ankle to a post, pleading up at him with frightened hostile eyes. “Don’t worry,” Wahid had said, “she was left for the hyenas – there isn’t enough food for girls.”
When Jack climbed into the goat manger and shot the chain off her ankle she didn’t flinch. He fed her barley and chunks of dried lamb, everything he had, carried her all night on his shoulders, his sheepskin coat wrapped round her shivering frame, her bony fingers wrapped in his hair, to the next village and gave them five hundred afghanis to feed and shelter her. “They’ll keep your money,” Wahid sneered, “not her.” And two months later when they’d passed through the village the girl was not there. “Oh, we sent her to Taloqan,” the villagers said, “to Doctors Without Borders.”
“There’s no Doctors Without Borders there,” he’d answered.
“People in Taloqan, they took her...”
You have to stop this. He walked back to the cabin and took the half-full Jack Daniels bottle onto the porch, picked up the 30.30 Winchester lever-action and blew the bottle off the rail. He sat in the rocking chair on the porch and shot out the windows and mirror of the old Chevy pickup rusting in the grass by the barn, the horses watching him nervously from the far side of the corral. On the road a quarter mile away there were glass insulators on the telephone poles and he shot at them missing till his bullets were gone.
He went into the cabin, tipped the gun against the wall, put on running shoes, shorts and a t-shirt and started to run up the pasture but that made him sick so he walked up the steep rocky canyon of the trout creek till the firs thinned into pines and some of the sickness of the whiskey sweated out of him.
The sun was high. Far below were the pasture and two horses and tiny cabin and the truck tracks curving through the pasture to the dirt road that led twenty-three miles to Salmon.
Long ago Colonel Ackerman had said every dead man would come back to keep him company. How could he get free of them?
Keep running. Go somewhere new?
He was the one who’d killed them. He was the one who volunteered for Afghanistan. How could he escape what he couldn’t see in himself?
Pipeline
IT HAD RAINED three straight weeks in Paris. Sophie hated the gray skies, the nasty wind from the battlefields of the Somme aching her bones with all their dead. The Seine snaked its bitter chill through the city, its icy mist chased by the wind down the wide boulevards and narrow alleys.
La Pitié-Salpétrière Hospital took up a vast chunk of Paris behind the Austerlitz train station in the Thirteenth Arrondissement, a neighborhood of minimum wage laborers, low-income office workers, Arab and Asian immigrants, and students too poor to live nearer the Sorbonne. It was a dismal quarter far from the monuments and tourist stops, its stripped bicycles chained to the leafless sycamores, the dog shit on the sidewalks, the mean cafés where unshaven men clustered at dented zinc bars, the pollution-stained empty churches, the little groceries selling wine in cardboard liters and kabobs and day-old pastries, the reeking tabacs where ill-dressed people came out of the cold to buy cigarettes to kill themselves and lottery tickets for a hopeless shot at a better life.
Ever since AIDS appeared all the doctors wore latex gloves when working on the maimed souls the ambulances deposited so steadily at La Pitié-Salpétrière’s Emergency ward, yet she always felt blood beneath her fingernails. After every patient and at the end of her shift leaning over the sink in the prep room to scrub under her nails with a brush and anti-bacterial cleanser. But the sensation never left.
It bothered her now as she waited at Boulevard St. Michel for the light to turn green. She dug her fingernails under each other but couldn’t banish it.
The light turned green. She stuck her head out the car window to see round the bus ahead, ducked back in as a scooter snarled past. The bus belched a black cloud, inched forward and stopped. The light turned red.
She beat her palms on the wheel, snapped on the radio and shut it off. But now with all the subway bombings everyone was driving and it took two hours to cross Paris. She should have gone on foot, but walking four miles from the hospital to pick up Leo at school then back to the apartment still took longer than driving.
The light turned green but now cars blocked the crossing. The bus edged forward. She gunned her Renault round its back bumper, between jaywalkers and through the intersection and down the ramp onto Quai Voltaire along the Seine.
If these Muslim bombings continued Paris would be unlivable. No neurosis, no paranoid schizophrenia, could excuse what these bombers did to totally innocent people.
The traffic picked up, her tires trundling faster over the cobbles. The Eiffel Tower loomed ahead and she smiled up at it. Late sun cascaded through sycamores on Avenue de la Bourdonnais. Leo was waiting in his blue school smock and cap among the other children. “I made a flower today,” he said, holding up a crayon drawing. “I made a castle, too, but Mademoiselle LaCaille said to finish it tomorrow.”
“I left the hospital early,” Sophie said. “But the traffic... look what time it is!”
“Why are they doing this?” Mademoiselle LaCaille said. “What did we do to them?” She knelt for Leo to kiss her on both cheeks. “Okay my little soldier, see you tomorrow.”
Sophie drove up La Bourdonnais and left onto St. Dominique. There were no parking places. She drove round the block twice, gave up and parked on the sidewalk. “We’ll have to move the car,” she said, “before it gets towed.”
They walked around the corner to the open-air market, Leo skipping and swinging her hand. “What shall we have for dinner, my little cabbage?” she said.
“Hot dogs.”
“We had those last night.” There was a line at the butcher’s so she inspected fruits and vegetables. “Do you want strawberries or peaches?”
“Peaches.”
There was no line at the next butcher’s. “We’ll have sausages, no?” She followed him slowly up the stairs to their third floor apartment and kicked the door shut behind them. There were eighteen messages on the phone. Screw them, she told herself.
“You have to put up my picture,” Leo said.
She taped it to the refrigerator, turned on the French fryer and dumped the new lettuce into the sink. “Did you fix any people today?” he said.
She tried to remember. A kaleidoscope of emergencies, frantic calls, suffering patients and impatient nurses. “A few.”
He raised his arms for her to pull off his smock. “I’m going to watch TV.”
“In a few minutes you can help with the salad.” From the living room came the blare of the television, followed by a click-click as Leo rotated the dial looking for cartoons. She opened a bottle of Mâcon red, went out on the terrace, wiped the day’s pollution off the table and sat down to watch the sun sink into the orange clouds.
The wine was light and fruity, reminiscent of the sunsoaked Burgundy hills. But she couldn’t relax. It was the eighteen messages. If one of them was a patient in trouble... “There’s no cartoons,” Leo said. “Somebody blew up the Métro – is that real?”
She knelt down to face him. “Maybe it is, chou-chou.”
“How could they do that?”
“Maybe their parents didn’t love them, maybe...”
“You love me, don’t you, Maman?”
She buried her nose in his neck. “What do you think?”
“And Papa loved me too, before he died?”
She kissed him. “More than anything else in the world.”
As he walked away she thought of Sisyphus, of this little boy with a great weight on his shoulders. I can’t do that to him. She went back on the terrace but the sun had set.
“Merde!” she yelled. “The car!”
When she reached the corner a woman with a baby carriage was standing where the car had been. “Did you see them tow a car,” Sophie gasped, “a green Renault?”
“They screwed it up good, too,” a man said, “getting it off the sidewalk.”
“They think they can do anything,” the woman said.
“But if everyone parked on the sidewalk,” the man said, “where would people walk?”
Seven hundred francs for the towing, three-fifty for the ticket. She climbed the stairs slowly. This was life, and when you got tired of fighting you died. You put your life into your children so they could grow up and put their lives into theirs. She spent her days sewing up people and her nights getting ready for the next day. Was there more?
Leo sat on his bedroom floor lost in a castle book. She rinsed the lettuce and spun it, sliced the potatoes, put the sausages in a pan, washed a tomato, mixed olive oil, garlic, and tarragon vinegar, dropped the potatoes into the fryer, refilled her glass and called the police. After ten minutes on hold she hung up and called Leo for dinner.
“You didn’t let me help make the salad,” he said.
The food made everything better, and having her little boy to talk to, with his brown cowlick, solemn face and deep eyes, the way already at three he measured everything, just like a man. I mustn’t depend on him, she thought. He’s got to grow up just like any kid, free of guilt and adult worries. “It was okay,” he said, “the car?”
“Bastards towed it.”
“Oh.” He thought for a moment. “Now what will we do?”
She caressed his cowlick. “In the morning we’ll walk to school. We’ll stop at a café for pastries and hot chocolate. Then I’ll get the car.”
“What about the hospital?”
“I’ll just have to come in late.” But tomorrow she was lead trauma surgeon from eight a.m. – and if someone came in badly hurt... She’d have to get the car later... There had to be more to life than this.
JACK WATCHED THE WAVE RISE as it neared shore. The crest turned green and feathered at the top when the wind caught its edge. As it surged he lifted up and leaned with the surfboard into the curl. It was the perfect instant and h
e stood sliding down the slope of the wave and rode the pipeline till it finally cascaded down on him in a thunder of foam and no longer free and weightless he sank back into the sea.
Before sunset the swell began to ease. Seated on the board that rose and fell with the waves, his legs dangling in the cool deep, he watched the sun sink toward the horizon. It pleased him that these waves had traveled from China all the way across the Pacific, that this was the first point where they’d touch land, and from this unknown corner of Tuamotu they’d continue unabated to Antarctica.
As the sun touched the horizon it was blocked by a huge wave darker than the sea. He leapt to his feet on the board to make sure – the board sinking – and yes, another great black back surged above the waves and slid beneath them. Whales.
They passed twenty yards away, blocking the sun. One whale’s spray wet his face and lingered like smoke in the sunset.
He rode a last wave toward shore, lit a fire of palm fronds and driftwood in a ring of lava rocks, opened a warm beer and cooked the rockfish he’d caught that afternoon. Behind the beach mynahs and doves were calling in the palms and monkey pod trees.
He could see the curve of the earth in the wide span of the sea. The stars grew thick and sharp, the breeze softened. He felt a moment’s loneliness to be so far from his own kind.
If he were on another planet, in another universe, would that be far enough? He glanced up at the myriad stars, tried to imagine all the humans living their complicated lives all over the earth. Somewhere was there someone he could know, could love? And who’d love him too?
The whales stayed with him like a mystical, ancient and unifying force, greater than he, than human life, the heartbeat of the universe.
They were together. They’re not alone.
IV
Paris
Perfect Strangers
September 1986
“IT’S ABOUT TIME you called us back,” Timothy said.
“You know we’ve been trying to reach you.”