The Volunteer

by Salvatore Scibona

  Louisa said, “No, tell him it’s the peace that means we’re free from war.”

  PARADISE

  2011

  Janis dreamt he led a flock of sheep across a bridge to Riga. The sheep came along without fear while their bells tolled. Up ahead, the city teemed with riflemen, packs of starving wolves. His creatures followed him everywhere. One by one they were shot and devoured, and their souls shot up like blue rockets in the night sky.

  Souls are blue.

  When he awoke, stillness beset his room. The whorls in the paneling were only wood grain, not tortured ghosts trying to talk to him. A bird attacked the tent of caterpillars in the eave outside his window. A passing train howled. Why should all his dreams take place in Riga? Ever since he’d come to Heaven, this was so.

  He felt he had at least to consider the loopy explanation that he had never really left Riga: perhaps what he took for Riga dreams were in fact waking life, and what he took for reality here was just a dream. Because some tubes had got crossed. Like the bathroom after his mother’s Russian had finished fixing it: there was cold water in the shower and hot in the toilet bowl. This circus had persisted for weeks before Papa had come on a visit and made it right again.

  Janis threw off his covers, went down the hall to breakfast with the other children who lived there in the home and the interns who took care of them, and for a few days gave the theory his closest look; but its flaws were hard to surmount. For one thing, he flew in the dreams and breathed water and ate whole cows in one swallow, which seemed too incredible. The parks, attics, and various other locations where people spoke in Latvian changed too quickly for him to understand how he had got from place to place: a telltale sign of a dream. Whereas the room where he awoke from the Riga dreams stayed the same from one morning to the next. A large room, with a cabinet and drawers of his own where he could keep interesting objects he had found outside. A small bed stood atop an identical other bed, and a window looked out on a sandlot and a bridge where trains of awesome length ran day and night, uncountable boxcars, moving mountains of coal to fuel what?

  The sun maybe.

  He concluded the Riga dreams were only dreams, and this here was the real place, the sandlot made of real sand. He might have concluded also that the months he’d spent here were real months, but it made no sense to speak of months amid eternity. As soon as one month elapsed another arose to take its place. And so on forever. Time here was just a manner of speaking.

  He was led every morning to church. At eleven, there was freedom to nap on a carpet alongside the others or, if a growing pain kept him awake, to lie perfectly still listening to their sleep snorts, smelling their breath and clothes, freely and surreptitiously entering their dreams with his thoughts. It puzzled him that even in Heaven he should suffer growing pains before he got to sleep. He could not in fact be growing. If children continued to grow here, then adults must continue to approach old age and die, which would defeat the purpose of Heaven.

  In his previous life, or rather in his life, he had often questioned how it could be that some of us would be saved and go to Paradise forever, while others, who were wicked or who did not believe, would be condemned to Hell—because surely some saved children had parents who were condemned, and how could you take part in Paradise if you knew your parents were suffering torment for all time? The only conclusion he had been able to reach was that God cracked people apart like ice cubes in a tray and selected one by one which to save and put them in a bowl where he left them to melt together. What became of the resulting water made of the saved? Probably he drank it. In any case there would no longer be a you, strictly speaking, to remember your parents. This seemed a dishonest trick on God’s part, even though it seemed at first unlike God to lie or trick.

  He would soon learn God did little more than trick us. First of all God had dressed that man at the airport as a pilot and arranged for him to speak to Janis in Latvian—even though they were in Germany! Why?

  Also, in the school here, he learned about God showing Eve the fruit and telling her not to eat it. A trick, but why?

  Also, the teacher read to them about God telling Abraham to take his only son onto a mountaintop and cut his throat. Janis and the other students followed along with the story in their identical books while seated in a semicircle on individual rugs. Beside him, the girl Doina wrapped her long dark hair around her eyes. Their classmates were dumbstruck with fear, looking at the page illustrated with the happy boy being tricked into carrying the wood for the fire on which his body was to be burned.

  Janis did not fear.

  He put his hand softly on Doina’s leg by way of saying, Don’t cry, Doina, it’s a trick. Above them on a wooden chair, the crinkle-faced teacher with massive old breasts turned the page. The children did likewise, gasping and squirming. Janis did not squirm. The picture now showed the little boy in diaperlike underpants and tied in ropes while his ancient bearded father held a knife over him, ready to stab, smiling with confidence at the clouds. Yet further down the slope of the mountain, a ram had got its horns stuck in a thicket, and in a corner of the sky the angel of the Lord was darting this way with enormous feathered wings. The teacher read. The boy was spared. The ram was killed instead. The teacher explained what the story meant, to no one’s satisfaction but her own. Janis closed his book and turned it upside down, considering the trick.

  Then he leaned to one side and slipped the book under his bottom and sat on it. The book needed to be punished. It had been unfair to the ram.

  Also, the teacher read a rule from the Bible where it said you shouldn’t keep on mindlessly repeating the same things when you pray, and yet that very afternoon she instructed all of them in his class to repeat the same three prayers on beads to prepare for their First Communions. He gave the teacher a sideways look that meant, I am just a mouse, but that is a mousetrap. She spoke German—he considered it German—but he understood her a little better all the time, and the other children as well. To understand German was nothing to be proud of. He had not worked at it; it merely happened. Although he did feel less alone this way. That he was coming miraculously to understand German without formal instruction was simply one of God’s obscure tricks.

  He wearied of the tricks. The teacher read to them, “When you pray, pray in your private room and close the door, and pray in secret,” and anyway she then led them in prayer right there in the classroom! Heaven was like an obstacle course.

  He wondered if all the children had entered Heaven through an airport, as in his case, or whether he had come that way because the plane in which he was flying had exploded. He did not believe the plane had exploded because he had broken his father’s crayon. What kind of sense would that make? However, it may have exploded when he broke the crayon.

  Janis had expected to meet surprises in Heaven. However, when he got there, he was no less surprised for having expected surprises: in fact he did remember his parents, although he forgot more and more about his father. There was a plane ride, the crayon he had ruined, a toilet. But the events connecting them escaped him day by day.

  He missed his mother badly. He awoke from dreams—his leg bones afire with pain—in which the two of them walked together through the aisles of a gleaming grocery store at the end of their street. But his memories of her were breaking apart. Before he had arrived here, the memories were a single sequence. Now they were episodes. He began to see God did not plan to take all thoughts of her from his mind in one swipe, but to erase them piece by piece. It was probably kinder this way. All the same, if God was all-powerful, surely he could find a way to make Paradise less excruciating. Unless God was not all-powerful. But then he would not be God.

  For a week or so during the winter holiday from school, Janis and the other children climbed a hill in the woods and sledded down, and when the sled really found its speed, so they couldn’t control its motion side to side but clutched the handles while i
t shot toward the frozen gully below, Janis wondered, what if he hit that boulder, right there, and was killed, in Heaven? Would he go to Heaven’s Heaven? And would he remember nothing?

  * * *

  • • •

  “BOY,” THE PRIEST SAID.

  “Yes, Father,” the boy said.

  They were passing a plastic soccer ball in the sandlot behind the fence at the St. Thérèse Home. The priest was wearing his hiking clothes because he did not play sports anymore. He was too old for games, but here he was.

  The daylight waned.

  “Give it your laces, now,” the priest said, demonstrating with cocked ankle, and passed. “Look,” he said, “all this has got to end.”

  The boy cocked his own ankle sharply, as though his foot were clubbed, swung, caught the ball without a hint of toe, and brought it spinning as high as the eyes of the priest; whose limbic system did not inform the conscious parts of him before it responded—a complex of buried muscle memory, the unforgotten talent of a slowing body that still remembered all the brain had lost: the ball was watched in, was trapped with his chest, was dropped to the nimbly flicking thigh that sent the ball up, up. His gleaming skull waited like a globe in space. The ball fell through the purple sky. The spinning hexagons came close. His neck went back and stiffened. The ball came to his forehead like revelation ricocheting against his brains, and he headed it back to the boy.

  “Your name,” the priest demanded. But that wasn’t the right question, was it?

  And with great solemn gray-green eyes, the boy watched the ball at his feet: as if to say, I don’t matter, this matters; and cocked his ankle, and aimed, and swung back again, all eyes, eyes not to the ground or himself or the priest, but to the ball: as if to say, You don’t matter, this matters; and aimed again, and shot it.

  * * *

  • • •

  DOWNHILL FROM THE CHILDREN’S HOME, in the leafy commercial district, on the promenade flanking the channel that directed the Este River through the village, and next door to a boutique trafficking in sexually suggestive clothes for young people, there stood under steep gables a four-story townhouse in the half-timbered medievalist style that had bewitched the citizens of the nineteenth century and promised them the long-lost quietude of life inside a nursery rhyme. But the timbers crisscrossing its facade supported nothing at all: they were only laths. The place was kept erect by hidden beams or hidden walls or some other subterfuge. The upper three floors of this gentile sham had gone unoccupied for a decade; but on the ground floor there still lived a lone, tall, bald, vigorous, worldly, aging, orthodox, volatile, overscheduled, and very angry priest.

  He slammed the house’s flimsy door behind him and hustled up the street. A fat briefcase on wheels gurgled down the pavement at his side like a lagging robot. He pressed a button in his hip pocket. The car at the curb flashed, awoke, hummed. He folded his bones inside it. He drove through the vale of sophistry and self-delusion that is our current world.

  His smartphone pushed a playlist of smooth jazz through the fourteen-speaker audio system as the car rocketed up the superhighway. He checked the color-coded calendar on the phone to remind him at which parish he was to nearly drown in which bottomless pond of administrative chores today.

  And there was no color for the Kinderheim St. Thérèse, you see? He was far too busy to do much more than wash the dishes with the children after he ate supper with them on Tuesdays and let them remind him how to burn mix CDs on the computer in the dining room. His body, mind, and heart seldom convened, and spuriously even then, as now on the road, or over whiskey during a wedding reception, when his slackening body led him to meditations on the grave, at which (while the revelers danced, who made new life out of their very tissues) he aimed his mind with—with wrath. He was not ready to die yet.

  Have mercy upon us all, oh Lord. And forgive—

  For Christ’s sake, forget about the orphans! If he wasn’t managing their finances then they were somebody else’s job.

  However, the boy some scoundrel had ditched at the airport eight months ago would still speak only—for Lord knew what reason—with the priest. And the schoolteachers had called on him often enough that he and the boy had fallen into a shabby rapport as among prison bunkmates, each resigned that the other was his only meaningful company but bristling at the injustice of it.

  The boy had had no name, then suddenly he had one. The priest had given it to him by accident. When the boy had started to talk with him, it was in a screwy sort of English that confounded everybody’s notion he could only be a Slav of some stripe. The vowels were wrong. He sounded, faintly, like Bill Clinton—no, less class and more cowboy—rather like a country-western singer from Texas named Willie Nelson, or so the priest had observed aloud, only once, to an intern. This notion got around among the staff, and so began another joke the boy had accepted and that enraged the priest. Once the boy began answering to “Willy,” the priest began to lose hope they would ever find out who he was.

  * * *

  • • •

  “BOY,” THE PRIEST SAID.

  “Yes, Father,” Willy said, walking alongside, scanning the pavement for bugs.

  “Look at these dunderheads behind their sunglasses. The current fashion—do they think they’re hornets?”

  “Sir?” the boy said.

  “Does that look cool to you, those sunglasses?”

  “Yessir.”

  “They take up half that woman’s face. The having of large eyes makes us alluring, supposedly.”

  “What’s alluring?”

  “Tending to draw others to oneself,” he said in German.

  The boy made a comprehending nod.

  “Look at her—what are you hiding from?” he hissed, quiet enough that the woman passing them wouldn’t hear as she crossed the street. “Boy?”

  “Yes, Father?”

  “Your name,” he said.

  The boy stomped, lightly, just enough to stun a millipede on the pavement. He stuffed the last of his potato chips in his mouth and slipped the insect into the foil chip bag and folded it. “It’s allowed to kill bugs here? Or should I wait to find them dead already?”

  “Go ahead and kill them,” the priest said. “No one cares.”

  All around them in the park, the vegetable life of suburban Hamburg was motionless and yet alive, surging under greed-stoked growth; light and water turning into leaf matter and husks. An economy of life continuing so slowly no one had ever quite witnessed it, yet all believed. Life proceeding invisibly everywhere.

  “Tie your shoes, boy,” the priest said.

  “It hurts my feet when I tie the strings.”

  “We are speaking of a cramp around the toes?”

  “Yeah, and the middle too. And the heel.”

  “Well, that’s you growing up.”

  The boy looked down. He looked up with shock, then fear.

  Possibly the priest’s English had failed him. “I only mean you’re getting bigger,” he said.

  But the boy was not consoled. He stuck up his neck, stiff and bold, like an angry priest, a habit he was adopting that his companion understood to mean he felt some dread returning and was determined to smack it down.

  “What size are those shoes, thirty?” the priest said. “I’ll have them get you new ones.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “I HATE A LITTLE BOY,” he told his analyst, who made no sound. “Will you condemn me, please, and get it over with?” the priest demanded.

  “Why should—”

  “‘Why should I condemn you, what have you done wrong?’ you’re about to say. Doesn’t it embarrass you how predictable the whole theater of your profession is?”

  The analyst, invisible behind the priest’s head, audibly sipped some sort of neopagan tea that smelled like used underwear and probably stimulated
the gall bladder or otherwise bamboozled the naturists and sentimental scientists who, having gone to medical school, choose to specialize in the psyche, wherever in the body that may be.

  “Spit it out, why don’t you?” said the priest.

  “Spit what out, Werner?”

  “Say it, why should I hate a little boy, five years old?”

  “I was going to ask why should Willy—”

  “Don’t call him that. That’s just the stupid name they use. And don’t say I call him that sometimes. I do it ironically. Get him away from me! This is my hour, not his.”

  “Why should the boy—”

  “Thank you.”

  “—merit your time if you dislike him?” the analyst asked. “Your time is expensive.”

  “No,” he said, drawn out and vicious. “My time is free. Water from the ever-flowing stream. And everybody comes and takes as much as they like. My time is worthless. Your time is expensive.”

  “Your time is worthless?”

  “I’m not a priest anymore. I’m a business manager. He’s inventory. Get him away from me. Sell him.”

  “To that Dutch woman you mentioned.”

  “Yes—no! Not to her,” he sighed. “Even if she took him awhile, she’d only bring him back. She knows nothing about him. Nobody does. He doesn’t himself. He may have forgotten whatever his mother tongue was by now anyway. I wish I could cut him out of my throat like a tonsil.”

  “Ah,” the analyst pronounced expansively. “He’s got down that far, has he?”

  The priest groped a moment through the thicket of inferences that sprung before him. Then he sat up and turned so he could respond to the last question by laughing forcibly at the analyst’s face. “Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. Seek and you will find,” he said. “Now you’ll say, ‘I wasn’t implying anything about sex.’ But you were. You have an unconscious as well as I have. I’m sure you don’t believe in anything so airy as a calling. But I had one. I thought I knew what it meant to be a weirdo when they sent me up here. I mean a Catholic in Hamburg, to say nothing of a clergyman. That was nothing. People here respected me once upon a time. We took the children to a street carnival the other day; and do you know I didn’t even wear my collar? When I think of what the saints endured, and I can’t take the snide unspoken innuendo of strangers. People used to assume I was at least living in service to others. Now they assume—they assume—” he shouted, a sort of bark, and fell back on the couch.