The 14th Day (18 page)

The ache he feels is familiar. Was it any different when he was a boy standing in front of the orphanage? He told Ila about the time when, for some minor act of misbehavior—to this day he can't remember what it was, he was probably playing too loudly—his father stormed into his room, ordered him to put on his coat, then marched him to the car. He made Jory's mother come along too. It was winter so darkness came early as his father drove them to the orphanage on the north bank of the river. It was a long red brick building with a wall of the same brick around it, a black metal gate with pointed stakes. There was an illuminated statue of St. Anthony near the gate. His father stopped the car in front of that statue and said he was going to have to put his son in the orphanage because he was such a bad boy. He even got out of the car, came around and opened the door for Jory, led him out. All the while his mother never said a word; Jory has always wondered what she was thinking. She would be dead within five years but she couldn't have been aware of her illness that long before. For whatever reason, though, on that occasion she was silent. The boy pleaded and cried and finally his father relented, or rather, made as if he was relenting, and they went home.

Here in the warm spring night Jory can remember the high red brick wall, grimly dark in the winter evening. He remembers breathing the sharp, chilly air. He stood close to the shiny car in which his mother sat silent, his fingers touching the metal, afraid to let go. Years later when he went to school in that part of the city he would go blocks out of his way to avoid seeing that red brick wall of the orphanage.

My father drove me there, my mother sat in the car saying nothing. What was it I did to deserve that? This is a place for boys like you, my father said. My hands touched the cold metal of the car, tears came and I was praying. I won't do it again, I promised. Please, I said, please. I called to my mother, hoping she'd understand. But she just sat there, looking away. Was she already planning to leave us?

He crushes his cigarette and immediately lights another with hands that are shaking. But now he feels confined, the air inside has become too thin to breathe. He has to get out of here.

Once he's out the door he feels better. It's a mild night and there's movement to the air. After coming down the front steps, Jory turns without thinking toward the center of town. He hasn't gone a half-dozen steps before he realizes he's moving in that direction because of what he's hearing. He stops for a moment to listen. It's unusually noisy out: distant shouts and cries come from the area where the campus and the town meet. He starts walking again, more quickly this time. Could this be some kind of student uprising?

Drawn by the prospect of turbulence, he hurries up one of the side streets that leads to the business area adjacent to the university. Here and there he glimpses others moving in the same direction, some of them running, and his own pace quickens. Something is happening; he wants something to happen. His walk becomes a jog and it doesn't take him long to arrive at the town's principal street, where an excited clot of spectators on the corner is shouting encouragement to a couple dozen people clustered around a police car, its blue light turning steadily. Jory watches as other groups surge, join the larger mass, then split off, moving toward the campus. An amplified voice from the police car makes some kind of request but the students react with a jeer. The car's siren sounds sharply, driving the crowd away for an instant. Farther down the street another siren wails, an animal calling to its mate. A half dozen young men rush past, knocking over a plastic trash barrel to the cheers of the crowd, and its contents spill into the street. “Yes,” a distant voice shouts. “Yes, yes,” others take up the cry. Silently, Jory echoes the shout. It's only after the men are gone that he realizes their faces were painted. Caught up in the excitement, he follows after them, determined to find out what's going on.

Small bands flow past him in darting swirls, toward the police car, then away; the blue light keeps turning but the car isn't moving. In seconds Jory is across the street, pushing his way past larger groups of shouting bystanders gathered in front of the shops that cater to the students. Here people are packed thickly: several hundred of them are massed in the town's center, where the commercial street faces the campus. Shouts and chants concuss around him but he keeps moving toward where the noise is loudest. A couple of young men have climbed atop a low concrete ledge on a bank building for a better view of things and Jory does the same. From his vantage point he can see over the heads and waving arms to the other side of the street. There, facing the students, are a half dozen visored policemen, clubs in their hands. The sight of them turns Jory's excitement to uneasiness. His hand runs along the brick wall of the bank behind him. If the police were to rush in this direction there would be no place to flee, he'd be driven into the wall. Shouts and jeers sound around him but they seem to come from far away as Jory stares at the masked figures who might have stepped out of a nightmare. Why has he come here?

As he watches, the line of police thickens, more of them stepping out of the darkness on the other side of the street, and the mood of the crowd around him changes: the defiant cries quiet to an anxious murmur, the students' manic swirling stops abruptly, like a dance that's halted when the sound system fails, and a nervous shuffling of feet moves through the crowd, accompanied by a low wind of voices as the entire mass shifts backward toward him. Jory can smell their fear, and his own.

Suddenly there's the sound of breaking glass. An alarm rings and for an instant everything is frozen; then a riotous cheer goes up; the students, emboldened, lunge and surge toward the men in helmets. Jory watches it all as if from somewhere else. Still, he's there, in the middle of things. A cool breeze sweeps in from somewhere in the night. Under the alarm's shrill clamor he hears a faint tapping from a rain of objects being thrown at the helmeted police. After a moment he sees that the missiles are coins, glittering when they catch the light, rapping the plastic helmets with a tinny patter; but the police quickly retreat to the stone wall that separates the campus from the town. A lusty shout goes up. The students seem to have won a round. Maybe this is a demonstration against the war, Jory thinks. But the war has been over for weeks now.

The men in visors remain clustered near the wall across the street, their raised plastic shields glistening like the hard shells of insects as the last of the coins ping against their curved surfaces. There are more shields now but still the police make no effort to advance on the swirling mob; they remain on their side of the street, biding their time as their numbers grow. Then, while everyone is waiting for the next move, something soars above the packed street like a white comet and a sigh rises from the crowd. For a moment no one has an idea of what it is; at last they can see that it's a roll of toilet tissue whose arc is interrupted by a tree. A length of white paper unravels, hanging down from a limb like a banner. Once more, a cheer goes up and more toilet tissue flies.

The crowd is ecstatic now but Jory has only one desire: to get out of here—he can see this isn't going to end well. He clambers down from his perch and is immediately hemmed in by excited students. Pushing past people pumping their fists, he works his way toward the middle of the block where there's a narrow alley between a pair of buildings. It's jammed but the street before him is filled with students waving beer bottles and shouting, taunting the police—there's no possibility of moving in that direction. He's still pushing on and a nervous buzz passes like a gust of wind through the crowd, carrying with it a barely suppressed hysteria. For a moment everything goes still, there's a collective holding of the breath, and then the sound changes from boisterous shouting to a chaos of screams; and a full scale stampede erupts: as though the street behind him has been tilted, the students begin to pour like water toward Jory. They're in full flight now, an avalanche rushing his way with blind, reckless force.

Desperate not to be driven against the shops, he lunges toward the narrow opening, flinging his weight at the crowd ahead of him. Shoulders and heads bob in the dark alley, from behind he feels the force of countless others hurling themselves toward the same spot. Somehow he manages to get to the opening, driven from behind by the loud, discordant mass moving in the same direction. He's part of the flow now, caught up in the general panic. Arms flail, feet kick. A woman screams somewhere ahead of him. He has to use his elbows to keep himself from getting trampled by the onrushing tide. People jam up against him, they bump and sweep him along the tight passageway. He fights back, trying to keep from being spun completely around and dragged backward through the narrow space.

The crush of bodies is continuous. Screams come from ahead and behind now, the voices in the alley sounding different from those in the street. The alarm that's never stopped ringing is part of a distant dream but all the while he's swept forward. He pushes on, fends off arms and elbows, his eyes fixed on the slice of night at the other end of the passageway. Something strikes his forehead sharply and he sees a flash, an instant of time is chopped into segments but he manages to keep moving. People kick and shove him until at last the onrushing current sweeps him out of the alley where the air is suddenly cooler. He staggers away from the main flow, grateful, like a man who's stepped out of the crashing surf into a startlingly thinner medium.

The alley opens into a parking lot. Heavy-footed, Jory maneuvers himself behind a car and sinks into a crouch. He watches the students pour out of the narrow channel between buildings, fanning out among the cars, shouting and screaming. Bent into a stoop, he becomes aware of a throbbing in his head and, tentatively, he puts his fingers to his brow: they come back wet. He takes out a handkerchief and gently places it against the cut. A few feet away the students continue rushing out of the alleyway. Jory watches dazedly. Then he sees the first of the visored police.

The sight of these eyeless, helmeted figures moving in his direction with their clubs raised is enough for him. He slips carefully away from behind the car until he's in the street, where he turns away from the turmoil and jogs to the fringes of the town's residential section a couple of blocks from the scene of the rioting. When he finds a bench he drops onto it. Panting, he listens to the distant sounds of conflict, the quiet street rocking gently around him. He dabs at his head with a handkerchief and is relieved to find that the cut isn't bad.

He breathes deeply, luxuriating in these gasps that clean out his lungs. His head hangs heavily against his heaving chest, he aches in a dozen places, and he closes his eyes. In the peaceful darkness he falls into a kind of trance, transported to a time when he and Vara were in a cafe. It was drizzling outside as it often was in that country of his exile and the murmur of voices around them was deep and masculine. They were drinking coffee with cinnamon—the scent is so strongly present that he might be holding a cup in his hands now. The mood between him and Vara was muted—was she talking about leaving for the east again? Jory was playing with his teaspoon, pushing it idly against the saucer, the sleeve of Vara's green coat was frayed. And yet, when he tries to summon up Vara's face he can't: all he can conjure is something vague, the outline of a face, someone who clearly isn't Vara. The possibility that he's lost his memory of her alarms him.

In an instant he shivers back to the present. He's been sitting for a while, listening to the distant noises, and now he becomes aware that there's someone else nearby. He tenses, his hands close on the bench. He can see that a few feet away a tall young man is leaning against a building, outside the light of the streetlight, in the shadow of a young pear tree. The man is saying something Jory can't make out but he seems to be watching him and Jory regards him warily. After a few moments he realizes that what looks like concentration is actually stupor: the man is drunk, he's either muttering to himself or trying to say something to Jory. He gets up and walks over to the man. “What's happening?” he asks. “Do you know what's going on tonight?”

“The god-damned refs,” the man slurs, lifting his head and looking blankly at Jory. “They took the game away from us. The refs stole the game. We should be number one.” Jory stands there a while before he fully comprehends what the man has told him. He remembers now that tonight is the night of the championship basketball game.

“Are you telling me that all this is about a game?” he shouts. It's only after he's been shaking the man that he realizes he's grabbed hold of him.

“Hey, man, hey, man,” the other protests tearfully, “what are you doing?” When Jory lets him go he slumps to the pavement.

Jory is furious, his hands are trembling. He leaves quickly. Behind him the man continues his incoherent muttering. Jory turns down one of the dark residential streets. Here, where the large houses are set back on spacious lawns, the sounds of the night's wildness are like the faint hiss of the sea and he stops, aware that he has no immediate destination. He doesn't want to go back to the apartment and he has no desire to return to the scene of the basketball riot. He has no place here, none, he doesn't belong here. He stands beside a tree whose thick leaves are black in the night. In the nearest house a single light burns in a room upstairs. He looks at that light wondering how it is that he's come here, wondering too when he'll be free of this place. Never has he felt so sharply his separation from the homeland.

Ila, he thinks, if you'd only have stayed with me an hour longer none of this would have happened. Yet even as the thought is taking shape he realizes that this isn't what's bothering him, that he's evading something far more disturbing than tonight's events. He puts his hand against the tree and pulls it across the rough bark, mimicking Ila's gesture when she ran her fingers against his. He lifts his hand from the tree, he looks at it and lets it drop. In that palm and curved fingers he seems to read a truth he's spent much of his time evading: that for all the excitement between himself and Ila, all the pleasure and satisfaction they take in each other's company, neither of them loves the other. Ila and he feed each other's hunger but when they're apart they're separate. Yes, he thinks, that's the way it is, and for a moment he feels relief. He lifts his hand again, he looks at it. He's able to breathe, to experience the world around him, conscious of nothing else. He touches the tree again and runs his hand along its rough bark, his finger tracing its wavering pattern. Then it all comes hurtling back, the emptiness he feels when Ila is gone.