The 14th Day Read online

  “Ila,” his voice catches, “that’s just one more reason I like being around you.” Boldly, madly, he takes her hand for an instant and lets it go, thinking again of how much easier it will be for her to make her way among these people. All at once he feels, as he did when he met Jory a few days ago, the strangeness and terror of being on this spot on the planet, so far from where he expected to live his life, so far, if he thinks about it, from where he expected he’d be buried; and he wishes he could kiss his cousin for being here with him, for warming him with her liveliness. He needs something because just now he remembers so many things: thick braided rugs on polished floors, the long heavy coats everybody wore in the winter back there, the delicate glasses they used when they drank the fiery amber-colored liquor of their region. There was a china plate at his grandmother’s with the picture of a cheerful wood-spirit sitting on a limb in an old tree, large colorful moths flitting around him in the pale blue sky. As a child he’d been endlessly fascinated by that image. Did the plate survive the Thirteen Days, he wonders. At the moment, the thought that it might not have seems tragic.

  But Vaniok resists this incursion from the lost country. He spreads his arms toward the sunny street where the students laugh together in small groups. “This is poetry,” he declares. “This is all the poetry we need.”

  Ila smiles her enchanting smile but this time its warmth doesn’t reach him. His cousin is a complicated person whose thoughts can’t always be read. Vaniok wonders if for all their closeness Ila will ever know him. A sudden breeze chills the poetry of this sunny street and he thinks again of Jory.

  “There are so few of of us,” he says, “and we’re so far from home. It’s a pity we don’t get along better.”

  Ila laughs. “It wasn’t heaven back there: we fought, we quarreled. How else could the Thirteen Days have happened?”

  He touches her wrist with the tip of his finger. “You’re so wise for a youngster,” he teases, she being only four years his junior.

  She turns down her mouth. “No,” she said, “it’s just that I remember, like Jory. But I don’t limit my memories.”

  “I told you about his jar of soil, didn’t I? His uncle gave it to him as he was leaving. The uncle was killed.” Ila nods. As they both know, many uncles were killed. But the memory of his visit has brought back what he felt there and Vaniok is agitated again. “He carries it around like some kind of relic,” he says, his voice rising. Then he plunges into gloomy silence.

  “Vaniok,” Ila says quietly, “we all deal with this in our own way. You shouldn’t let it bother you.”

  “Did I say it was bothering me?”

  Her green eyes seem to see everything. “You don’t have to say it,” she says. “Ever since he came here I can see it on your face.”

  He looks at her, trying to express everything he’s feeling. All I want is peace, he wants to tell her. What he says is, “I don’t want to bury myself in memories.”

  She smiles sadly. “But, Vaniok, Jory doesn’t have anything to do with that. That’s up to you.”

  “I wish he’d never have come here,” Vaniok says suddenly. “You know, I like this place. We can’t go back, after all. As you said, we have to move on.” He waves his hand, taking in the scene that gave him so much pleasure only minutes ago. “And now he’s come and …” Vaniok is flushed, the blood has rushed to his head.

  Ila takes his hand and for a few seconds neither of them says anything. Even so, he feels the blood subsiding. “All of us feel that way sometime,” she says at last. “What you feel doesn’t have anything to do with Jory, really.”

  Vaniok shakes his head. “I can’t believe I said that.” He’s tongue-tied, his words aren’t coming out right. He doesn’t even want to be talking about Jory. He looks into his cousin’s eyes: their green depths seem to offer infinite understanding, even forgiveness, but he’s looking for more; he wants to tell her things he hasn’t said to anyone else. “Let me tell you about Ranush,” he’d say, “not just about the time I didn’t meet him on that street corner but all of it.” How much satisfaction it would give him to pour out the whole story, leaving out nothing. He wouldn’t try to excuse his behavior. “It was a bad moment,” he’d say, “I was weak.” All of them had their bad moments, he knows, all of them deserve to be forgiven their bad moments. But Vaniok isn’t looking for forgiveness; he’d be satisfied if he could just tell somebody like Ila what happened, to say it aloud. Yes, someday she’ll hear it all. In his mind it’s already become a solemn promise.

  “Someday I’m going to tell you a story,” he says.

  “Oh? I like stories.” She looks at him with abstract expectation but her eyes give no invitation to go on with what he wants to say.

  “You’ll have to wait for it.” Vaniok tries for a wicked smile. In a way, he tells himself, he’s already started his story.

  Ila gets into her car and turns the key: the engine starts up with the hoarse bark of a stupid but lovable large dog. In fact, she thinks of her twelve-year-old car as Bortok, the oafish giant of the stories she heard when she was growing up. Her cousin has made it clear he doesn’t think the large green sedan is dependable, and in the weeks she’s owned the car Ila has already heard noises that make her wonder, but she paid very little for it and if she gets into trouble she’s sure the young mechanic with the twisted leg will be able to fix it for her. Most of all, she can’t imagine surrendering the freedom she feels behind the wheel.

  The car is only a beginning, she knows, which is why it makes her so happy to be driving. She isn’t content to be a housekeeper all her life. Wouldn’t that just be another sort of hiding, staying buried under the hay? You have to come out sometime. She’s determined to learn the language of this country well and get another job. She’s even started thinking about going to school. Not that she has any direction or goal that she can see right now; but it’s important to keep moving. How appropriate it is that just when her restlessness has surged up, Jory should appear, as if to signal a new chapter in her life.

  She pulls out of the lot behind the inn run by the university, where she works. She told Vaniok she and some of the others at work were going to a movie tonight. It was a harmless lie: she doesn’t have anything planned and she’s fond of her cousin but she doesn’t want to tie herself down, especially now. There’s been a change in their relationship since Jory came here. Vaniok is more ardent somehow, yet confused; he’s not sure what he wants from her. It’s clear Jory’s presence has disturbed him and he seems to be looking to her to save him from whatever it is that the other man has brought with him. You have to save yourself, she wants to tell him, has told him already, if he’s at all capable of listening.

  But she’s thinking about Jory now, this tall, thin man with sandy hair and wide shoulders that he carries in an oddly tentative way, as if they supported delicate china, heirlooms from the homeland. Seen out of the corner of the eye, he looks frail, as if a breeze could blow him over; but there’s something deep in his eyes that’s visible even when he’s talking about casual things, something that fascinates her. She remembers an illustration in a book of saints’ lives from the days when she dreamed about being a martyr: the saint was being prepared for his fate, whether it was beheading or being burnt on coals, she can’t remember. A pair of burly tormentors stood beside the man, who was stripped to the waist, but he seemed unaware of their presence. His eyes were fixed on some point beyond the picture. There was terror in those eyes, yet it was clear he was determined to hold fast, he was not going to renounce his fate. As a girl Ila was certain she could understand exactly how he felt. The saint’s eyes aroused her compassion but they ignited her admiration as well. She’d completely forgotten that lost corner of her childhood until now and her excitement at recovering it stirs her restlessness. She’s grateful to Jory for the memory.

  Ila has exchanged a few words with him though they haven’t talked about martyrs. She’s told him about the bus service, about the grocery stores that have
certain foods. Always he’s thanked her with the distant smile of a man who doesn’t expect to be using these services very long. But what if he and she were in the university’s arboretum, walking beneath one of the trees heavy with purple blossoms, what if she were to pluck one of those flowers and put it in his hand? “Smell this,” she’d say, “feel its soft weight in your hand.” Would he thank her politely and smile, seeing something else? Imagining the scene, she sees herself taking him by the wrist, as if to detect in his pulse the reaction he wouldn’t let himself show. Yes, she smiles, he would feel something.

  There’s a thin warmth to the early evening, a promise of the coming heat that will last through the nights, driving the insects to a shrill, restless clamor. The idea excites her; she’s impatient with the dawdling, homebound traffic. At last, after a few red lights, the little town is behind her. She’s in the countryside, where a fringe of spring green covers the trees and the smell of upturned earth is in the air. “Now, Bortok,” she says, “you can stretch your legs.” When she presses down on the accelerator the car jolts forward with a growl; she turns up the radio and the music competes with the rush of wind. Already she’s left it all behind, the town, her cousin, the newcomer, the people she works with, the need to be careful.

  In the early days of her exile all she owned was her freedom and she spent it like currency that would have no value beyond the next border crossing. There was a park in the first place she stayed in after leaving the homeland, where she stood on a green bridge with wrought iron railings watching a cloud of pigeons lift into the gray skies. “Where are they all going so suddenly?” a man on the same bridge asked, as if to himself. Then, speaking unmistakably to her, he continued. “Have they heard of a better place, do you think?” He smiled when their eyes met. There was sadness in his smile, a touch of desperation, but it was a welcoming smile and she answered, “Let’s hope they find brighter skies.” The man had a raincoat over his shoulder, his hair was thin, like herself he was a stranger to the country. She accepted his invitation to a tea shop where a gas fire hissed as if it were whispering secrets. The two of them exchanged stories without telling anything about themselves, they named places that only the speakers had seen, and before long the gray, drizzly streets outside the tea shop became the outer edge of the world. Later they were in the man’s room, preparing to go to bed, and he stopped for a moment as if he were about to reconsider the whole thing. More likely, he was thinking of somebody else, someplace else. He laughed quietly. “Don’t you think this is a little dangerous?” he asked, turning out the light. Ila, not many days from her own country and its troubles, said nothing.

  She’s more careful about her actions these days; she intends to do only the things that she herself has decided to do. She thinks of the Ila who went with the man to his room as a younger sister who didn’t entirely understand what she was doing, somebody who might have thought she was making choices but who was simply following an impulse in much the same way the pigeons in the park had taken flight.

  And yet, is she making choices now? Here on this country road she has a sense of being moved. Something has entered her blood in the last few days, an excitement that makes her come awake at night, sharply alert, expectant. She can’t help feeling she’s driving toward some destination. Patagonia, she tells herself, and smiles.

  Gashes of red earth rush past, interrupting the flow of green; grassy hills give way to thin stands of unhaunted woods, so different from the forests of the homeland. The tires’ sound changes when she crosses a bridge over a wide, shallow river. On the other bank a white steeple points toward the clear, unclouded heavens. The church comes into view as the car climbs the slope from the bridge, its simple lines a fervent declaration. Nearby is a small, fenced cemetery. Passing this congregation of the dead, Ila instinctively crosses herself, though she hasn’t believed in God for a long time, at least not in a God who watches over people and protects them. Even under the hay in that farmer’s barn, her eyes smarting from the prickling, nostril-clotting blades of dried grass, she wasn’t praying, she was only trying not to sneeze as she listened to unseen men bark orders and call to each other across the echoing spaces. She didn’t expect any power to help her because none had helped her parents and her half-brother the night the soldiers knocked down the door, Ila by the merest of chances being away from home. She had to live in the same clothes for weeks, eating what she could find, begging, trusting her intuition about approaching strangers in a country that was now murderously divided. She gave herself no particular credit for shrewdness or stamina, knowing that many others as cunning and as strong had the bad luck to say the wrong thing at a particular moment.

  Really, if she believed in that kind of a God she’d wonder why he let her survive, crawling on her hands and knees through the rough stubble of a farmer’s field, hiding among smelly, slippery fish in a boat that heaved and dipped on the stormy lake, coming up time and again with the right lies; only for the privilege of being separated from everything she knew and ending up here in a remote part of this other country, working as a housekeeper. She can never forget that the God she prayed to every night as a little girl, her eyes closed, her face pressed against the fresh linen, was the same God who’d let her half-brother Stipa be beaten to death by drunken soldiers until his face was something the neighbors wouldn’t let her see, so that she always sees it in her dreams. That God erased the homeland, giving her no reason to go back to a place that would be little more than a graveyard for her. Still, she can’t help feeling that the dead, even those buried here, deserve some acknowledgment. After crossing herself she adds, “May their souls rest in peace.”

  On an impulse, she turns down a dirt road she’s never traveled before. Red dust rises around her, tickling her nostrils. She drives a mile, two miles, farther from the part of this country that she knows. There are woods, occasional meadows; few people live on the steadily rising road. She feels a tingle of excitement: she could easily get lost here, maybe never find her way back to the town. There are places where the thick growth obscures the view and she can persuade herself she’s the only person in the universe. The car whines, climbing to a point where the land levels at last, the trees fall away and a large area of the green countryside lies below her. She turns off the engine and steps into the evening quiet. The view stretches out before her: rolling fields, dark clots of trees, the flash of a pond in the distance, a farmhouse and a barn. Smells rise up from the car, from the earth and what grows on it. “Land, sky” she says aloud, using the words she first learned thousands of miles from here, “water, trees. Grass, hills,” she continues, a witch casting a spell; but the scene remains unchanged, impervious to her words, and Ila experiences a shudder of fear and estrangement. Still, she goes on, pouring her voice into the evening air, speaking the language of the homeland. “Breeze, warmth, evening, shadow …” Her heart beats wildly, her nostrils fill with the rich smells around her, she can’t help feeling the almost unbearable joy of being alive. “Jory,” she says. “Welcome, stranger.”

  Jory carefully folds the blue work order before slipping it into his pocket. He’s putting on his gloves when Carl walks up to him. “There’s someone to see you,” he says. As usual, he sounds as if he resents having to breathe the same air as Jory.

  “Someone to see me?” He can’t imagine who it can be. In the few weeks he’s been in this country he’s only gotten to know a handful of people. “Someone from the university?”

  “Never saw him before in my life,” Carl says. “He’s at the loading dock.”

  Jory removes his gloves slowly: their rough feel is comforting. “Thanks,” he says and the other man, who’s already turned to leave, grunts a response. Jory watches him walk away but he stays where he is: he’s in no hurry to go to the loading dock. If the visitor is nobody from here, who could it be? For a few moments he ponders the riddle; then, all at once, he’s certain this is an ominous visit. Could someone have found out about his papers? Still standing in
the place where he heard this upsetting piece of news, he imagines himself walking casually in the direction of the rest room and then leaving by the South Street door. How long would it be before whoever is looking for him realized he wasn’t there anymore? But, really, where could he go? He doesn’t know his way around this area. All right, he tells himself, calm down, it isn’t going to help to jump to hasty conclusions. Say it is an immigration agent: he can tell him some story, make some evasive answers. He’s done that before, after all, in other places. Yes, he tells himself and the phrase “evasive answers” is like a talisman. In fact, though, he has no idea what those answers might be.

  Slowly and by a roundabout route, he makes his way to the landing dock, which frames a bright green patch of the neighborhood that borders the university. He glances around, looking for someone in a suit, maybe with a notebook in his hand. To his relief, there’s nobody there who fits that description. Feeling a little better, he steps further into the area of the loading dock.

  “Are you Jory?” He turns when he hears his name spoken in their language, though something about the pronunciation is both strange and familiar. Stepping toward him is a short, nondescript man in ordinary work clothes. The man is smiling and Jory nods obligingly. This could just be somebody sent over to work with him, he thinks.

  “Yes,” he says, “that’s me.” But the man startles him by using his real last name. Jory’s stomach goes light, he looks into the tranquil square of green outside the building realizing that he’s been trapped; instinctively he scans the area to see if there are any others. The man is an agent, after all, and Jory is going to have to invent answers that will at least buy him enough time to think of the next move. “Who are you?” he manages to ask.

  The stranger gives a name that slips by Jory even as he’s hearing it. Yes, yes, he thinks, I don’t care about your name. Get to the point. When he does, though, Jory is even more startled than he would be if the man had flashed a badge. “Fotor asked me to drop by and see how you were,” the man says. It’s then that Jory recognizes the accent: this stranger comes from the country where Jory lived before coming here, the place where he met Fotor.