The 14th Day Page 5
There’s no answer and after a moment she knocks again, more forcefully this time. She listens: under the shrill quarrel of birds she hears sounds of movement in the house and she pulls herself straight, waiting; at last the door opens a crack and she’s aware of someone looking at her. “Come on in.” The words are faint, they seem to come from some inner room, the speaker is still hidden in the shadows. Something stirs in Ila, she remembers how distant and weary her Aunt Estrid’s voice was in the final days of her sickness and she thinks: my God, Miss Lorraine is dying.
When the door is fully opened, the woman she sees has none of the haunted look of her aunt in her last sickness: the bloodless face, the eyes that seemed to want to take in the entire world before they closed for good; but neither does she look much like what Ila expects from a seer: Miss Lorraine, who could be any age between forty and sixty, is a thin woman of uncertain race with dirty gray hair. She stands before Ila with a cigarette in her hand. She’s wearing a rumpled gray skirt and and a green blouse, both too large for her, and on her feet are a pair of worn sneakers. Squinting into the sunlight, she stands in the doorway a moment, puts her cigarette to her mouth briefly and exhales. “She don’t look like much,” the woman at work told Ila, “but she’ll surprise you.” Still, Ila can’t help feeling let down.
“Come on in here.” From a dim corridor Ila glimpses the darkened living room with blinds drawn, an open bag of potato chips on the sofa shimmering in the glow of the soundless TV set. She follows Miss Lorraine into a small, windowless anteroom with a couple of steel chairs and a card table, a short thick candle burning there. In spite of the drab surroundings the smell of wax reminds Ila of church, which makes her feel better. She can detect other scents as well, a vague suggestion of herbs, something sharper underneath. Pasted to the wall are religious pictures and photos of people from newspapers: there are one or two political leaders Ila can recognize, some men who look like athletes, but most of the faces are unknown to her. With a heavy sigh Miss Lorraine takes a seat and waves a dismissive hand. “Sit down, sit down.”
Ila does so, leaning forward a little, as she does when she drives, trying to see around curves. She wants to recover the sense of expectation she felt when she was standing outside this house, the sense that she was on the verge of discoveries; she doesn’t want to lose the feeling that important things are going to happen to her. She’s swallowed her initial disappointment with the way Miss Lorraine’s place looks; instead she watches the candle flame, clearing her mind of distractions. Appearances, she reminds herself, are not important. The woman across the table from her coughs into her hand—curt, muffled, like a dog’s bark—then crushes her cigarette in a metal ashtray. Her eyes narrow. Wordlessly, she extends her hand to Ila, who gives her her own. “Mmm,” Miss Lorraine hums to herself, cradling Ila’s open hand in hers, which is as dry as a lizard’s. The woman’s thumb searches the soft flesh of Ila’s palm and Ila tenses as she feels the gentle, exploratory pressure, the sudden halt, the retracing of a line. At last, after a few seconds Miss Lorraine abruptly releases Ila’s hand. “Oh, yes,” she says. “You come a long way. You come a long way to here.”
No, Ila wants to protest, no, I didn’t. She hasn’t come a long way today, though Miss Lorraine can certainly guess from her accent that she wasn’t born in this place—but that’s too easy and obvious. Don’t let this turn out to be a total waste of time, she prays, don’t turn me into a fool. She tries to keep her reaction out of her face, reminding herself that how far she traveled to get here isn’t important, it isn’t what she came here to find out. But then Miss Lorraine says something even more upsetting: “You miss your father.” Ila’s fists tighten: she distinctly does not miss her father! She mourns him abstractly but he was a small-minded man, a shadow across her aspirations. It would be truer to say she missed him while he was still alive because even as a child she could see the way he turned inward, after the ghost of his first wife came back to haunt him and he transformed his earlier marriage into a time of hope and joy, the measure of his present failure. That was when he started drinking heavily. He and Ila’s mother fought all the time, things were spinning out of control, long before the Thirteen Days. Here in a stranger’s house in another part of the world, Ila’s insides tighten exactly as they used to when she was growing up.
“You been on a trip to the ocean recently,” Miss Lorraine says and now Ila is embarrassed for the woman, even more embarrassed for herself, it’s all she can do to keep from shaking her head. I’m such a fool, she thinks, to have believed this stranger would know anything. She feels an overwhelming sadness, a vast grief floods her, beyond anything warranted by the present situation—she’s surprised by the depth of her feeling. But even as all this is happening, a wave of physical exhaustion sweeps over her, a depletion of her energies so total that she knows she couldn’t push away the chair she’s sitting in and walk to the door if she had to. Ila is startled, frightened. What’s happened to her? Her blood has become thick, heavy, her heartbeat a muffled, insistent cry. It’s difficult to keep her head erect. She looks at Miss Lorraine wonderingly. Did she cause all this?
Flushed, lightheaded, Ila looks at the woman with an eager desperation, for the first time she pays attention to the brown eyes across the table: the large pupils are still, even as they reflect the dancing light of the candle. “I’m sorry,” Ila says aloud, in a child’s whisper; but the woman shows no interest in her, her gaze seems directed toward some place far beyond this room. The silence deepens, time slows, the candle flame seems to freeze; then the light moves differently in Miss Lorraine’s eyes and Ila feels something pass over her like a gust of wind, her exhaustion lifts as suddenly as it came upon her and in its place is a calm acceptance of everything, a willingness to believe, the expectation that she’s about to learn something. All the while Miss Lorraine hums softly to herself as if she’s forgotten that Ila is there. Ila nods to her, responding to questions that haven’t been asked; she realizes that without having willed it she’s smiling. She knows now that this woman understands everything that she’s thinking, that she’s aware of her earlier doubts but that she doesn’t blame her for them. Ila continues to smile at Miss Lorraine, knowing that everything has shifted beneath her.
Of course, she sees, the woman was right about the trip to the ocean: Ila went there in the dream she had not long ago: she was at the seashore somewhere near here, looking down from high dunes at the dazzling beach where waves rolled in, an endless white thunder. The coast curved gently; sun sparkled on the moving water. She’d never been to this place before and yet everything seemed familiar. Though nobody else was in sight she knew that someone was with her, which made her happy because soon that person would be beside her. She awakened full of expectation.
That sense of expectation has returned. At the same time Ila remembers driving into the countryside after work not long ago and stopping by the side of the empty road. Then too she was looking from a high place, this time at the land that fell away in green hilly waves to a pond shining in the distance, a red barn, as far away as the stars. It was then that she spoke the words from the language of her childhood. At the time. she’d felt that pronouncing those syllables was like flinging a few small coins into the alien landscape. She felt her own puniness then, she remembers listening for something—she didn’t know what—and hearing only the soft rustle of the trees in the breeze, a dry, desolating hiss. Her bright coins had fallen soundlessly to the earth and were lost in the grass. And yet, remarkably, at the same time she experienced a surge of elation. Even standing there acknowledging her smallness, she was alive. Even then, that was enough for her.
But she realizes now that those coins worked their magic after all; she had cast a spell, only it had taken time. It was after she spoke those words, she believes, that the whole world changed, changed because she’d wanted it to change. Or maybe what’s changed is her awareness. Now she can feel the motion in things, she feels herself being pulled toward something.
What was it that started that motion? Was it Jory’s coming here?
Across the table, Miss Lorraine knows all this. Ila looks at her intently, aware that everything she’s thinking is communicated to this woman, she can feel the weight of her thoughts being lifted as she hands them to Miss Lorraine. Ila is calmly expectant, knowing that Miss Lorraine will be directing the next moves. She leans further forward, she’s aware that underneath the smell of herbs in the room there’s a sharp, astringent tang of camphor. She looks at the candle flame that twists violently without any obvious source of agitation.
“I see a man,” Miss Lorraine says, “I see a tall man.” Ila nods: of course it’s Jory. “The man limps,” the woman adds and Ila is suddenly more attentive. “Only a little,” Miss Lorraine goes on, “but you can notice when he gets up. His first step isn’t steady.” Ila’s breath is pulled out of her. “Stipa,” she says aloud, surprising herself. “He’s holding flowers in his hand,” Miss Lorraine tells her and Ila sees her half-brother, his head bent over the bunch of lilacs he’s brought her. She sees the complex blue of his eyes, the icy sadness just below the cheerful surface, she sees the way he smiled with half of his mouth. “This man is a lover from the past,” Miss Lorraine declares and Ila nods. She listens gravely, thinking, yes, he’s a lover, and in the space of a breath she remembers the two of them as children hunched together among the clothes in the closet under the stairs while the shouts of her father and mother came to them from a distance, in the darkness that smelled of wet wool with a trace of camphor. She was very young then and when she told him the darkness frightened her he instructed her to close her eyes so that it would be her own darkness she inhabited. Years later, under the farmer’s hay while the soldiers searched the barn, she occupied her own darkness once more and tried to touch that earlier one, desperately preferring any darkness to her imagination of what they’d done to Stipa’s face.
“Stipa,” Ila says again. She misses him overwhelmingly. “Is his soul resting, is he happy?” she asks. Stipa, who went into the world before her and invariably came back to report on it. She sees him in a white shirt with an open collar on the night of a Constitution Day party, a young man in his early twenties with the air of somebody much older, somebody, it’s clear now, who uncannily guessed that he had to crowd all his life into a brief span. Ila, three years younger, had always felt closer to him than to any of her friends. She herself had a reputation for daring—fast driving, staying out all night, smoking cigars in restaurants—the kinds of things that would get back to her father and vex him; but Ila was always aware of a kinship with Stipa, for all his external conservatism, and she suspected that in his thoughts he might be more adventurous than she. At any rate, she was certain he understood her as no one else did.
That warm night, rich with the scent of lilacs, Stipa seemed so merrily sad. He’d been drinking, she’d had a few furtive sips herself. “Let’s leave these boring people to themselves,” he said, taking her hand and walking with her through the night filled with fish flies, galaxies of them clustered around the lights on the walk. He’d brought some marijuana to the party and they smoked in the boathouse, looking at the darting silhouettes of fish in the luminous rectangle of water where their father had once kept a speedboat: dark shapes emerged, disappeared, random motions formed momentary patterns. “Maybe we could go for a swim,” Stipa suggested after a long silence. She looked at his white shirt turned blue in the dark. She was already unbuttoning her blouse before he’d even asked her, it seemed. She laughed at the way time had bent. “What is it?” he asked. “Why are you laughing?” “I don’t know. Tell me a joke.”
They entered the water in the enclosed space of the boat house, then swam out into the chilly lake. Fragments of music from the party were suddenly close to them, then only faint murmurs drifting over the dark, bobbing surface of the lake. Every star in the heavens was visible above them. There was a sense of daring in the night air and when they came back to the boathouse, they wrapped themselves in musty tarpaulin boat covers that they used like blankets and they smoked some more, listening to the water lap against the wood, watching its faint, swimming light move across the walls. “You’re a very attractive woman,” Stipa told her. The sweet scent of marijuana was everywhere, blending with the fishy smell of the water, the tarpaulin, the faint tang of creosote. The cover had slipped off Stipa’s shoulder and his skin glowed palely in the reflected light of the water. “I wonder,” he said, “may I touch your breast in a brotherly way?” She laughed. “In a brotherly way? Of course.” He pulled down the tarpaulin and she felt his fingers gently, delicately move over her still-wet skin and even before he asked, with a voice not entirely under control, “Can I kiss you there in a brotherly way?” she was ready to answer yes, of course, please; but just at that moment the two of them heard voices calling “Stipa, Stipa, where are you? The party’s just getting started.” Without any words between them she and Stipa dressed quickly—she remembers them handing each other articles of clothing, a wonderfully intimate act—and soon they were back among the partygoers; but many times when she hasn’t been able to sleep, Ila has wondered how that uncompleted story would have ended had it had time to move to its conclusion. It was one more thing taken away in the Thirteen Days.
Ila looks at the woman across from her, who smiles distantly, as if she’s listening to something Stipa is telling her from the other side. She nods. “He’s at peace. He knows you remember him.”
Ila is flooded with joy. And yet, at the same time, she wants more, she isn’t content just to explore the past. She came here because she’s certain something is happening, something is going to happen here, in this town in the host country. “Is there someone else?” she asks the woman. “Is there another man? Now?”
“Yes,” Miss Lorraine says quietly and Ila is thrilled but even as she hears the words she sees something dark move across the woman’s face. What she sees there is so troubling that she has to look away, toward the pictures on the wall, seeking comfort in the assembled mass of confident faces and gestures. But there’s nothing there to calm her and she turns back to Miss Lorraine with some hesitation. When their eyes meet, Ila catches the residue of something that’s already fading, something complicated and terrifying that almost makes her wish she hadn’t come here. She feels a sadness that she can’t attach to anything. She can recognize, though, that what she saw was some kind of signal, that for a moment Miss Lorraine allowed her an unguarded look at something she had no right to see, though she doesn’t understand yet what it is that’s been communicated. It isn’t even about her, she knows somehow, or about Jory, it’s about Miss Lorraine herself. But why did she let Ila see it?
“Yes,” the woman says after a while, her expression making it clear she knows what Ila is thinking. “There’s a stranger. Someone who’s come here recently.” Ila nods, her heart pounds: it’s Jory, of course. But she’s still thinking about what she saw in the woman’s eyes. Miss Lorraine says nothing more, though; the next move is Ila’s.
“This man,” Ila begins. She wants to ask what will happen between them but, just as it happened earlier, a wave of physical exhaustion passes over her and Ila loses all track of time. When she recovers her attention she realizes at last what it was that Miss Lorraine has let her see: that she is in fact dying, just as Ila has guessed on first hearing her voice, that like Aunt Estrid, she has only a short time left. Ila looks at the woman’s small gray hands on the table. How does she know this, what makes her guess about the woman’s losses, the quarrel with her sister that was never made up, the children who haven’t come to visit in years, the death that will come on the very sofa that Ila glimpsed, in the flickering glow of the TV set, a bag of potato chips lying open beside her, the utter loneliness of Miss Lorraine’s final days? Suddenly Ila is crying.
“Now, now,” Miss Lorraine looks at her, her eyes calm. Ila recovers, she blows her nose, composes herself. “You go on now,” Miss Lorraine says. “What were you going to ask?”
All at once Ila understands the terms of the bargain she’s made with the woman: Miss Lorraine has let her see this about herself in exchange for her silence about something else: she doesn’t want to tell Ila what she sees about Jory’s future. At first the idea disturbs her—what does the woman see? Ila can feel the trembling in her hands but she breathes deeply, she watches the candle’s flame, and in time she’s calmer. She doesn’t need to know the future, she’s willing to act in darkness. Still, she’s curious about Jory and decides to venture a different question. “Will this man ever return to where he came from?” she asks. The woman looks at Ila scrutinizingly. Her face is blank. She shakes her head abstractly. “Things are not clear there,” she says. “I can’t say for certain.” Ila can only guess what Miss Lorraine saw about her and Jory but she knows it’s time to leave. I don’t care, she tells herself, I don’t want to know about the future. I want to be surprised. Acknowledging this, she feels a sudden strength.
But this feeling is checked by her awareness that she’s never going to see this woman again. “Miss Lorraine, I’m so …” Her eyes are wet.
The woman’s hand goes up. “You got your life to live.”
Back in the car she has to wait a moment to calm herself before starting for home. Zita, who told her about Miss Lorraine, will want to know what she said about the future and Ila will tell her she saw many large houses. This will thrill Zita, who’s been talking about nothing else lately but her older sister who, like the two of them, is a stranger in this country. The sister, it seems, took a night course in real estate and within a very few years has managed to become quite successful. “We can do that too,” Zita has said, showing Ila the picture of her sister’s new house hundreds of miles to the west. “We don’t have to work forever at these jobs.” It wasn’t so much the house that got Ila’s attention, it was the barren mountains on the horizon, the desert landscape beyond, which had a strange appeal. What would it be like to live there, she wondered, where, as Zita said, your fingers were always smooth and dry?