After the First Death (14 page)

Hey, wait a minute, she thought, what’s going on here? Why this great surge of hope when actually I’m down in the pits? Why not? Things couldn’t possibly be worse, and once you accept that, you can begin to hope. You can begin to take chances, be reckless because, what the hell, you have nothing to lose, right? Right. She closed her eyes, exulting in the sudden flow of thoughts. Let’s count the blessings, she thought, the things on Our Side. The key. Miro who was obviously the weak link
among the hijackers. Little Raymond, even, who was bright and intelligent. And this new knowledge of hers, this new hope. She caught her breath, pondering a new thought: the possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth—love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn’t flowers grow out of dirt?

She let her breath out and felt her lips trembling. Christ, such a revelation. She wasn’t certain now whether she was praying or thinking or what. She had never been a hotshot in the philosophy department, had never in fact been required to
think
, to go beyond what was written in textbooks, and thus the wonder of her thoughts and the new knowledge they had brought her filled her with a kind of ecstacy she had never known before. Not ecstacy of the emotions but of the mind, the intellect.

Overwhelmed, she looked around for someone to share it all with. There was no one, of course. She bent down and planted a kiss on Raymond’s tender cheek. Softly so that she wouldn’t wake him if he slept.

And then Miro was back.

“Why
are you doing this?” she asked, trying to keep any harshness out of her voice, needing to seem friendly and interested. By
this
she meant the bus, the children, the hijacking, this entire nightmare.

Miro knew her meaning. “It’s what we must do,” he answered in his carefully measured English, as if he were walking a verbal tightrope. “Our work, our duty.”

“You mean your work is to kidnap children, hurt people, terrorize them?” The hell with trying to appear docile, let the chips fall.

“It’s the war. It’s all a part of the war.”

“I haven’t heard of any war.”

He looked so young, so defenseless, the brown eyes innocent, the mouth sensitive. So unlike the person in the mask.

After Antibbe left the bus with one last lingering look at her, Kate had retired to the back seat and sat there, pondering the time ahead and what she must do. One of the things was winning Miro over. Or at least getting him to talk, to let down his defenses. She had seen that look in his eye and had to take advantage of what that look meant. He had to look upon her as a human being. More than that: as a desirable young woman, and not a victim. She knew the perfect terrible truth of the situation: she had to make it hard for him to kill her. Thus, when he looked her way on his return as he checked the children, she forced a smile to her lips. A weak substitute of a smile maybe, but it had done the trick. After a few moments, Miro came and sat beside her on the back seat. He removed his mask and placed it on the seat beside him.

And now they were talking about some kind of war, something she hadn’t expected when she’d started this conversation. But, she thought: At least, we’re talking, we’re communicating.

“The war is going on all the time,” Miro continued. It was a topic he loved, a topic they had discussed much in the school. “Our duty is to let the people know the war exists, that the world is involved in it, that no one is free from war until our homeland is free.” He wished Artkin was here to listen to him, to see how well he had learned his lessons.

“Where’s your homeland?” Kate asked.

“My homeland is far from here. Across the ocean.”

Kate detected a wistfulness in his voice. “What’s its name?”

Miro hesitated. He had not said the word of his homeland for so long—like his own name—that he wondered how it would sound on his tongue. And he hesitated also because he did not know how much he should tell this girl. He wanted to win her confidence, but he must not betray himself or the others. If he did not say his name aloud to Artkin, how could he tell this girl the name of his homeland? “You do not know the place,” Miro said. “But it is a place of beauty.”

“Tell me about it,” Kate said.

“I have never been there. I have never seen my homeland.”

“You’ve never seen it?” Kate asked, incredulous. “How do you know your homeland is so beautiful then and worth all—all this?”

“I have heard the old men talking in the camps and they have said how beautiful it is. They say that if you take off your shoes, you can feel the richness of the land on the skin of your feet. The orange trees are fruitful and the flight of the turtle dove and the lark is balm to the eyes and spirit.” He was quoting the old men now, and his voice was like music. “The river there is gentle and the sun is a blessing on the earth and turns the flesh golden. The sky is the blue of shells washed by fresh rains.”

Kate thought: This strange, pathetic boy.

And then remembered that he carried a gun and one child had already died.

“Katie, Katie,” one of the children cried.

The cry brought back the reality of the bus, the heat,
the oppressiveness, the plastic pail nearby that reeked of urine.

Kate listened, but the child did not cry out again.

“The old men in the camps,” Kate said. “What camps?”

Miro was pleased with her question. She was becoming interested: he was doing his job well. But how could he tell her about the refugee camps, that endless string of filthy crowded places he and Aniel had drifted through in the early years of their lives, unknown and unwanted in a terrible kind of anonymity? They had existed on the generosity of strangers, and when they did not encounter generosity, they stole. Aniel was the expert at theft. Sometimes Miro acted as a decoy in the makeshift marketplaces, while Aniel’s swift hands grabbed and clutched whatever was at hand. Nothing was ever useless. You made use of whatever came your way. Even the time Aniel had wrenched a battery from an old abandoned truck. They had bartered it for food. The food was spoiled and sickened them. But then the battery was also useless. How could he tell the girl all this?

“My people are outcasts, our homeland occupied by others. But we were allowed to live in camps,” Miro said, wanting to hold her interest without telling her about the hunger and the stealing and the begging. He did not want to diminish himself in her eyes.

“You said
we
,” Kate said. “Who was
we?
Your family, your parents?”

“Only my brother Aniel and me. He was two years older.”

“How about your parents?”

He translated the American word
parents
into the word for mother and father in the old language and
tried at the same time to summon feeling, emotion,
something
, but could not.

“I never knew my father,” Miro said. “I never knew my mother.” For some reason, he always felt guilty about this: not knowing his parents, having no remembrance of them. Why did he feel guilty? He pondered this in the small hours of the night when sleep did not come. Do not waste your time with the past, Artkin had told him once. The past is gone; the present is enough. And the future will bring us back our homeland. He had said to Artkin: “My father and my mother are in the past, and if I don’t remember them, who will?” And Artkin had turned away without an answer. So Artkin did not know everything, after all.

Now, Miro said to the girl, “I have no memory of them.”

There was a strange expression on her face. What was it? Sadness? No. He would have treated a sad look from her with contempt. He did not want her sadness. The look told of something else but he could not name it. A strangeness in her eyes as if in a moment she would either burst forth with laughter or dissolve in tears. He was confused. No one had ever looked at him with such—such intimacy before. And to cover his confusion, he found himself telling her:

“In those days, there were always attacks on the border. And there were times when we did not know who was enemy or friend. Mines were planted in the gardens. Cattle was slaughtered in border raids. Planes dropped bombs or raked the earth with machine-gun fire. Homes were burned. Aniel said that our father and mother were blown up by a mine planted in our garden. Someone told him this. But Aniel also said: ‘Let us not talk about it. They are alive in us. As long as we are
alive, one of us, then they will never be dead.’ And now Aniel is dead.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. And he looked at her again. For signs of—he did not know what. She was only a girl, an American at that, and she meant nothing to him outside of the fact that she was his victim, his first death. She should have been dead hours ago. She would be dead hours from now. By his hand. His gun. Who was she to say
I’m sorry?
Only those most intimate should say words like that. Even Artkin had not said them, but had turned away in respect.

Kate sensed that she was losing him, that she had said something to turn him off. He had been so open one moment and then his faced had closed her out, his eyes dropping away. Maybe it hurt him to talk about his parents and his dead brother. Maybe her instincts were correct, after all, and she was on the right track: he was vulnerable, sensitive. She couldn’t lose him now. Instinctively, she turned to the oldest weapon she knew, remembering how it had never failed her.

“You speak English beautifully,” she said, flattering him, of course, but knowing there was truth in the flattery. “You must have a special talent for languages.”

Miro blushed with pleasure. But like so many things, there was pain in the pleasure. The girl’s statement also made him think again of Aniel. Poor Aniel. Dead before his time. Good with weapons as Miro had been good with languages. Aniel had been good with his hands as well. His hands, too, were weapons. He struck swiftly and with accuracy. He knew the parts of the body that were most vulnerable to attack. His hands could kill as quickly as a knife or bullet. But Aniel had been a slow student in other respects. Especially language. Miro had excelled at languages. You should have been a scholar,
his instructor had once said. In a time of peace, he might have have been.

The girl persisted: “Did you go to a special language school?”

“I went to a special school,” he said, wondering if she noticed the irony of his words. And then he found himself telling her about this special school that was not really a school at all, not with desks and chairs arranged neatly like the pictures he had seen of American classrooms. The building was sunk into the earth with no windows. The blackboards were sheets of wrinkled paper pinned to the walls. The education received in the school was intense and concentrated. You are here to learn what you must know to survive and what you must know to gain back our homeland, the instructor had said. He was an old man with many scars on his face. He taught the use of weapons and explosives. Combat: with the knife, the gun, the hands. The diagrams of the human body outlined on the blackboard were indelibly stamped on Miro’s mind. Even now, Miro could touch certain spots on a body that would cause a victim to grovel with pain. Yet Miro had enjoyed the other lessons more: reading and the languages. The languages were important because everyone was trained for a destination, to carry out revolutionary acts throughout the world. The countries of Europe. Africa. America. Miro and Aniel were assigned the English language; their destination, America. The instruction actually concentrated only on the rudiments of language, enough to read street signs and order food in restaurants and stores so as not to call attention to themselves, to know what newspaper head-lines meant or newscasts on radio and television. And the usual vocabulary of intimidation to be used in robberies, confrontations:
pigs, war, up with your hands,
we will kill, die.
… Miro discovered that he had a talent for language, and a teacher who had lived in Brooklyn many years before (Miro felt a kind of regret when later they had blown up the post office there) had encouraged him and brought him books and gave him special instructions. But he had to study in secret. This had amused Aniel. The school itself was a secret place; while the authorities allowed the refugees to live citizenless in the camps, they forbade them to conduct schools, making education clandestine, carried out under guard. “Here you are,” Aniel had said, “studying secretly in a secret place. A secret within a secret.” And yet Miro knew that Aniel was proud of his brother’s talent, just as Miro was proud of Aniel’s skill with weapons.

“Katie, Katie,” the child cried again—or perhaps it was another child—and Miro started in surprise. He had been carried away by his words and his memories, and had in fact forgotten the presence of the girl to whom he was addressing those words. Had he revealed too much of himself?

The child persisted in her cries.

“I should go to her,” the girl said, apologetically.

Miro was pleased with her reluctance to leave. Perhaps she had been interested in what he had been saying. Perhaps he was winning her over, at last.

The crying child was Karen, the dark-haired girl who wore tiny onyx earrings, no larger than periods at the end of sentences. She was half asleep, whimpering, having a bad dream maybe. Kate drew her on her lap and pressed the child close. The child spoke unintelligibly, gibberish, the language of dreams and nightmares.

“There, there,” Kate murmured, herself dreamy, held in the thrall of Miro’s words. The boy stumbling through refugee camps, no parents, his brother dead, taught violence in an underground school. She thought
of her own life, placid and pointless by comparison, safe and secure. On the edge of pity for the boy, she realized that their two lives had brought them here to the bus where she was a victim, not the boy. His life had prepared him for this moment. Hers hadn’t. He was prepared to hurt and to kill. She was prepared for nothing. Certainly, not to be brave. But being brave shouldn’t be something that you are trained for, should it? Bravery should be an interior quality, summoned from within. Where is mine? Kate asked herself dismally. Where is mine?