The 14th Day (17 page)

He laughs lazily. Even in the dark he can imagine her pout, can see her eyes fill with mischief. He turns over onto his back, shaking off sleep. “I did drop off,” he says. “I was dreaming of something.”

“Maybe you don't want me to know what you're dreaming,” she teases.

“No.” He remembers something. It's just a fragment, like a detail torn from a very large and complex painting. “It wasn't a dream, really, just a moment, an image.” He sees it clearly now. “I was back in the capital, in front of the opera house. It was raining and the street was packed with cabs that glistened like black beetles. There was a traffic jam and the drivers were sounding their horns.”

She leans toward him. “I like those glistening beetles. Was I there with you, maybe? What happened in your dream?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing happened. I was alone. I was just watching.” He gropes toward the memory, trying to conjure the scene: cabs glisten, umbrellas bob but Jory can't feel the rain, the horns are silent. Already the moment he inhabited in his dream is just a picture, flat and depthless like something encountered in a book. He stares at that picture, aware of an ache, and gradually he comes to recognize what he's thinking: it's possible that he'll never go back there, that this picture is all he'll have. The realization is a presence in the dark room, a heavy stranger seated in the chair by the window; and by degrees it becomes clear to Jory that another word for the ache he feels is fear.

Long seconds pass during which neither he nor Ila says anything. Then she reaches toward him and runs a finger slowly along the scar on his forearm and he knows that she's guessed what he's thinking. “I used to wonder in the early days,” she says as if to herself, “why did this have to happen to our country, what did we do to deserve it? It made me so angry.”

When she withdraws her hand Jory lifts himself and gets a cigarette from the table beside the bed. He lights it and passes it to Ila, happy to be performing this small service for her. After a few moments she gives the cigarette back and he draws the burning tobacco into his lungs, watches the darkness soften in the slowly tumbling smoke of his exhalation. Why did it have to happen to the homeland? “My father said that what was wrong with us as a people,” he tells her, “was that we never had enough respect for order.” He can see his father sitting at the kitchen table, his shoulders bent under the weight of the terrible choice he made. A lifetime of caution was being thrown away in a disastrous gamble. “What we need most of all now is stability,” he declared to his brothers, who were there for his birthday. There was a rising desperation in his voice. “All through our history we've torn ourselves apart and let others pick up the pieces. We need order.” Jory remembers the way the man's blue eyes—exactly the color of his own—filled when his three brothers pushed back their chairs and walked out of the room without saying another word.

His father's search for order came too late: the men in gray couldn't undo the flaw in the plane's engine that took away his parents and ended his childhood so abruptly. Here in this dark room in another country, Jory has a glimpse of the tragedy of his father's life. He was a limited man but the world hadn't been kind to him; he'd been asked to bear more suffering than he should have had to. “Christ,” Jory mutters.

“What is it?”

He shakes his head. “My father believed the colonels were the answer to the homeland's problems.” He looks into the dark: how clear his father's situation seems to him. “He was naive, he realized he was wrong before he died.”

There's a long silence. “My family was divided too,” she says. “There was a lot of that.”

Jory nods. The people they're talking about seem very far away yet they're as much a part of the two of them as their fingerprints, and just as ineradicable. “What about your half-brother?” he asks. “Was he caught up in all this?”

“No,” she says quickly. “I wouldn't really call him political at all.” Jory waits for more but after a few seconds he realizes that she's not going to say anything else. By now he's learned that her half-brother is someone she isn't going to talk about. Of course, after what happened to him, Jory can understand.

He gestures in the dark. “I could say the same thing about myself. I never cared for politics.”

“But didn't you say there was a time when you were political—at the university?” she challenges.

“Did I?” He's surprised he told her that much. He waves it away. “No, I wasn't ever really political.” He recognizes that in spite of the satisfaction he feels in sharing his past with her there are things he has to keep to himself.
Is it,
he wonders,
that I don't want to look like a complete fool?
“It's a long and boring story,” he repeats, though really it was short. Helani. He has no trouble believing she existed; what's more difficult to believe is that there was such a person as he seems to have been when he knew her.

Aware of Ila's silence, he adds, “Maybe I should have said it's contemporary politics that I don't like. I actually enjoy reading about politics in earlier times. Ever since I was a boy I loved history.” He'd spend long, gray afternoons following the mythical accounts of his people's earliest conflicts, pondering the meanings hidden in the proclamations of rulers whose very existence was in question, running the antique words through his hands as if they were the richly embroidered vestments of kings. In those old stories Jory would look for the threads that bound the present to the past, trying to rescue some meaning from the howling gales of time. History isn't only something we read about, Helani would tell him later. It's what we do.

“Maybe,” he says, “I'm a citizen of a country that exists only in history books.”

“You're a strange man, Jory.” Ila looks at him. In the dark he can see her still shape. “I like that strangeness.”

He smiles. “And you,” he asks her. “For all that you say, don't you have your own dreams of going back there?”

She shakes her head. “I don't want to go back. That place is gone.” He hears the determination in her voice. He thinks of a child who's in pain but will not allow herself to cry. Both of them look toward the open window, where the curtain dances in a gust of warm night air. The breeze carries the fragrance of nameless blossoming flowers, and suddenly the scent is powerful. Jory runs his hand along the side of Ila's arm, feeling the tense muscle under the smooth skin. “You're still hurting,” he says. “You'll heal.”

She draws herself up, shakes her hair free. “You and I have different ideas of healing,” she answers. “For me, healing is forgetting.” She turns her head. “Mmm, I love the smell of that flower.” Jory remembers white and pink blossoms in the university gardens. In the twilight they looked like moths. But even as he smells the sweet fragrance of the blossoms outside his window he's seeing the scene before the opera house in the homeland, black cabs glistening in the rain. A picture, only a picture.

“It will happen, you know,” he says. “The people who are running the country now won't be there forever.”

“Jory.” His name on her lips is flat, toneless. She might be a foreigner pronouncing the syllables exploratively, not sure she has them right. His own name sounds strange to him. Then she adds, “You can't keep looking backward.”

“But I'm talking about the future,” he answers immediately.

“No, you aren't, my friend.” She runs a finger across his shoulder. Seconds pass in silence. “My sweet friend,” she says after a while. Her voice is softer, making the darkness more comfortable, and yet there's a note of sadness in it. She kisses the place her finger has left. “Did you know it took all my willpower to keep from touching your shoulders when I first met you? You have the most erotic shoulders of any man I know.”

The silence that follows is steep, as if the pedal on a piano has been lifted, abruptly cutting short a note, and Jory feels an anticipatory tremor: their time together will be over soon and he knows that when she leaves there will be a vast absence, that for all that Ila's told him about her life, his hunger will be even greater after she's gone.

When she speaks again there's a different note to her voice, a touch wistful, meditative. “Did you ever think what it would be like to live in the desert?” she asks.

He looks into the dark spaces of his room. “I suppose it would be bleak and empty.”

“But maybe it isn't so empty,” she answers. “They say the air there is sharp and dry. You can see things that are far away as clearly as if you were looking at them through a telescope. Imagine that! And there's a wind all the time, a dry wind, like a constant breath.”

“Then sand would get into every corner, I'd think.”

Ila responds quickly, as if she's ready for that kind of reaction. “I imagine that the sand keeps things clean, it scours them.”

Jory smiles. “You're making it sound very attractive. Is this the Desert of Eden?”

“Don't laugh,” she punches gently at his arm. “I've heard that nothing is more beautiful than when the desert floor is covered with blossoms that come out all at once after a rain.”

“When would that be?” he asks. “Once a year?”

Ila is silent a while. Then she says, “Well, it appeals to me. I like the idea of a place where the air is so dry that static electricity crackles between people when they touch. And where your fingers get so smooth from the dryness that it's as if you had no fingerprints.”

“No fingerprints—it sounds like a great place for criminals.” All at once he's seized by something very much like dread.

He feels Ila's grip. “Let's see your hand,” she says, and runs her fingers against his in the dark. “No, my friend, you'll never lose your fingerprints.”

Grazed by her touch, he's remembering that night in another country, the man lying beneath him on the snowy street.
Did I kill him? All I was doing was trying to push him away from me
. His insides go tense.
And all during the Thirteen Days when people were doing those things I did nothing
. It was his uncles' signing of a petition that insured his banishment from the homeland.

A soft, gloomy silence has settled over them, broken at last by Ila, who seems to have sensed his mood. “Tell me again about those cabs in front of the opera house,” she says. “What street was that?”

Jory rouses himself. “Prince Elik Street,” he answers. She's told him of her youthful dream of moving to the capital and living in a bohemian apartment on one of the canals. Again and again she's asked him to describe the area. “We'll see it together,” he's told her, trying to believe in his fiction. It's bothered him that she's never responded to his statement, apparently content with his descriptions of the place.

“Tell me,” she says now, “if I were living in my little apartment on the canal, could I walk to the opera house? Not,” she adds quickly, “that I'd be likely to want to go to the opera.”

“That depends on how energetic you are,” he says.

“Oh, I'm energetic. You know that. How would I go, what streets would I take?”

“Let's see.” He tries to visualize it. “If you were living, say, on East Canal Street, you'd walk west to General Zabor Boulevard. Then …” In his mind he' moves across the spaces of the capital, the narrow streets, wide boulevards, the green parks. Beside him, Ila responds like an acolyte in church as he names the streets that would take her to the opera house.

When they arrive there at last she claps her hands in glee. Then, in a brisk daytime voice, she declares, “After all that traveling, I have to be getting home.”

“So early?” he challenges her.

“Really, look at the time.” No, he wants to tell her, inexplicably filled with sorrow, you have to stay; but she's already left the bed, she's gathered up her clothes. “And after all,” she says, “we'll see each other in a few hours.” His wordless protest dies in his throat. Of course she's right: they'll see each other tomorrow. And yet he dreads the emptiness that will come on him the moment she leaves. After she's gone he'll be haunted by questions. Ila, he wants to ask her, what's going to happen between us? The thought of the future frightens me. But he says none of this and before long he's walking her to her car, leaning in to kiss her. Then he's watching her leave, following the taillights with his eyes until he's looking at the empty street.

He returns to an apartment that's shrunken in the light. Coffee-stained cups, glasses coated with wine, cluttered ashtrays, tangled sheets—disorder is everywhere. At first he's grateful: he has something to do, distracting mechanical activity. But he makes only a half-hearted attempt to tidy the place before giving up. Am I trying to remove all traces of her, he wonders. Absently he runs water over a wine glass and puts it into the dish tray, leaving the other one untouched. He turns out the lights and drops into a chair, where he lights a cigarette and looks toward the open window, but nothing is the same as it was when Ila was here. He feels the trace of her touch on his shoulder, remembers her hand in his hair. How will this end? The question floats up again but he pushes it away. The smoke makes its lazy pattern: if there's a sign in that shape Jory can't read it. He doesn't want to think about the end; instead he holds on to his memories.

“Tell me again about Fotor,” Ila commanded earlier this evening, putting on the gruff voice she seemed to feel his name required, “the man with the face like a wily bison. I think I'd like your Fotor.” And for a moment Jory was actually jealous of his fellow exile. “Tell me about that other place,” she insisted, and he recounted the story of his days in the country to the north, describing the old building where he lived with its many odd-shaped rooms and its red-topped tower, the view of the river he had from his front window, the long ships, the driving sleet, the snow-clotted streets, the ice-bear. He re-created it all for her, happy to be handing her this portion of his history. “That was awful,” she said of the episode that caused him to leave, “but you had no choice, it wasn't your fault, it could have happened to anyone.” Yet now as he relives that moment he feels the sadness he felt there, though the feeling is edged with a sharper emotion. Why couldn't Ila have stayed with him tonight, or at least stayed longer? Could he have said something differently, is there some formula he's missed? She asked whether she was in his dream of the street in front of the opera house. He wishes now he'd told her that she had been. Imagining her delight with this answer, he feels a deep sense of regret tinged with foreboding. Do things only become real for me, he hears himself thinking, when I lose them?