The 14th Day (22 page)

In fact she doesn't understand, they're communicating in a language whose alphabet lacks certain letters. Whether it's by choice or it's out of his control, Vaniok isn't offering her whole words. She's sure he had something to tell her this morning. But now it may be too late. “Vaniok,” she says, “I know you. I know what kind of person you are. You and I have both done things we're not proud of, I'm sure, but I know you're decent and generous.”

His eyes glisten with gratitude, then they flash. “How do you find our serious friend from the capital?” he asks.

Men, she thinks, always measuring themselves against each other. “Nobody is serious all the time,” she says.

Vaniok seems about to answer but he says nothing. He drinks from his cup, puts it down and picks it up again.

“You ought to get to know him better,” she says. She feels a flicker of pride, remembering Jory's shy smile when she made him pronounce the name of one of the local flowers. “Isn't it odd,” she says, “that both of us would have been strangers to him back home.” Jory has told her about the customs of the capital, the peculiar slang of the taxi drivers, the street fairs on midsummer night, the special way pancakes are made on the day of the first snowfall. As a girl in the Deep Lakes she looked forward for months to her few trips to the capital, which had fed her dreams of living there some day. Would she have done so, she wonders. How would those things have turned out?

Vaniok's voice is hoarse. “And you're not a stranger.”

Again it's a question. “Yes, I'm a friend. As I am to you.”

“The same kind of friend?”

“No,” she says mildly, thinking that he doesn't know when to stop. “You two aren't the same kind of person.”

Vaniok looks at her, his expression indecipherable. It's not clear what he's asking of her, not clear what she could tell him. She can't explain to her cousin, or to herself, for that matter, her relationship with their other countryman. Of course she's Jory's friend—and more: she knows the hard feel of his arms, she's traced with her finger the thin, wavering ridge of scar above his wrist, she's run her hand across the intricate topography of his stomach, she knows his yeasty smell. But his voice will suddenly tighten when he speaks of the homeland and then it becomes clear that all he and she do here is like the blank space between the chapters in a book. The men in the gray uniforms will be gone one day, he insists, he's going to return, they're going to return, the names of these alien flowers can be forgotten.

“But Jory,” she'd asked, “what if things continue as they are back there?” As far as anyone can tell, those men are likely to stay for a long while.

“Then we have to continue hoping and planning to return,” he answers without hesitation.

“You could spend a life that way.”

“Any other way of spending it would be trivial.”

At those times she hasn't said anything, she hides her anger. This life isn't trivial, she wants to say. Here they are, separated by immense distances of earth and ocean from the homeland. The rain that hisses on the roof of Jory's apartment releases elusive springtime smells into the little bedroom. This isn't a trivial moment. It's wrong to dismiss everything that lies between this passing moment and that hoped-for return.

“So,” Vaniok says now, “the two of you must be exploring the area, I suppose. Out to the country, the little towns around here.”

“Yes,” she answers. “But there are things closer by. I'm determined that we're going to rent a rowboat on the lake here.”

“Ah,” he says, “the lake. Yes, be sure to bring some fishing tackle. You'll have to show me what you catch.”

“You don't think I know about fishing?” she laughs. “I could surprise you.”

But Vaniok doesn't laugh. His eyes are full of grief. She realizes she shouldn't have told him about the boating expedition she's talked about with Jory. Men think what they call love is so simple and exclusive. At this moment she loves her cousin dearly in all his ardor and pain. She wishes she could make him understand how a succession of dreary days can bring tears to her eyes at the sight of the most unlikely scenes. Just yesterday in the courtyard of the place where she lives, she felt her eyes filling as she watched a little boy with a scraped knee. The child was crying as much out of habit as pain. Looking at him, she thought:
it isn't because of the wound that you're crying but because you can sense that it's already healing, carrying you away from this moment that will never return
. No, she realized later, I'm the one who feels that moment passing.

She wishes she could explain to Vaniok that seeing Jory, even making what's called love with Jory, doesn't mean that either of them gives themselves fully to the other. Vaniok, she wants to say, you are always going to be in my heart long after Jory is gone. Thinking this, she leans forward and kisses him solemnly on the lips. Vaniok is so puzzled by her gesture he forgets to be embarrassed that this is happening in public, in the little coffee shop where students are hunched over their books and passersby can look in from the street. He sits back and shakes his head, his mouth twisted into an ambiguous expression. In his eyes, though, is the desperate look of a man who's wanted to say something but has finally been unable to do so. Ila says nothing more, realizing with sadness what she's just thought: that Jory will be gone one day, possibly soon; and that she already knows this.

“Hey, let's get moving,” Carl shouts from above. “Come on, Jory, they didn't send us here to look at the scenery.” Jory remains motionless beside the wheelbarrow, his feet planted, his torso slightly turned toward the sound of Carl's voice. A second goes by, two seconds, more. I could stop, he thinks, just freeze, stand here till it occurs to Carl that I'm not going to take this load of dirt up the hill. What would he do then? Would he finally come down and push it himself? Jory smiles at the fantasy but at last, in his own time, he leans down and fills his lungs with air, he grips the handles and jerks the weight into balance, feeling the entire load in his arms; then he starts pushing his burden along the path that runs level for a blessed twenty feet before climbing upward toward the basketball arena. Carl is still far away but Jory keeps his face impassive, his back stiff with resolution: he's not going to let that man see him weaken. “Bastard,” he says to himself. Still, when he was assigned to Carl's crew this morning, he actually welcomed it because he knew he'd be getting plenty of work and that's exactly what he wants. Keeping a wheelbarrow under control with only one dependable hand requires concentration; it doesn't leave him much time to think about other things that are bothering him, like what's happening between him and Ila. He glances up from his load, he runs his tongue across his lips, tasting dirt in his sweat. The day is sunny and warm; the campus is quiet.

But his contemplation of the landscape is brief. Carl's voice breaks in once more. “Let's go, Jory,” he yells from the top of the slope where the load of dirt has to be carried, “let's make it look like you're at least pretending to work.” Jory inhales, throwing his full weight into his forward motion, his bent back straining, his calves tense. He's grateful for the white fury that helps him push the heavy wheelbarrow up the slope. Though he's virtually working with one hand, he manages to maintain enough speed to get the load of dirt around the curve. Passing Carl, he keeps his eyes straight ahead. “Moron,” he says under his breath when he's far enough from the man, relieved to be past the dangerous curve where a couple of times already he's almost lost control. Now, on level terrain, he can ease up on his right hand, his wrist throbbing deliciously as he transfers more of the weight to his left arm. One more obstacle overcome. For now. This is one of the good parts, though if he relaxes he's likely to think again about other things, like how stupid it was to drive his fist into a bench last night, as if that would resolve his situation with Ila. Or make work any easier.

“Christ, Carl's got a hornet's nest up his ass today,” one of the other workers mutters when Jory dumps his load of dirt. The man is talking as much to himself as to anyone else but Jory grunts affirmatively. Nobody's been very happy around here since the first stories about possible cutbacks. Word has gone around lately that nothing is going to be done for several months and the men have eased up a little but they're still holding something back, even among themselves, and they've never been particularly friendly with Jory.

He stops and wipes the sweat from his brow, feels the sweat cooling on his back. After last night's rain it's steamy, more like midsummer than spring. The seasons move so swiftly here—God knows what the weather is like in the country to the north. He checks himself—he's starting to think again, about the past, about other things. That was what got him started last night: one moment he was walking down the main street, not particularly happy since he couldn't see Ila, who had other plans, but at least part of the scene, one among the walkers who passed the lighted windows of the shops; and then he was thinking again about his relationship with Ila; and soon familiar questions assaulted him:
What am I doing here? What's going to happen to me? Where am I going to be buried?
What did it matter where you were buried, Ila always told him, and he could never explain to her that he wasn't really talking about being buried, though actually he was—it was hard to put this into words. But thinking of Ila only brought up the question of their future and, alone in the garden, he felt a rising terror. Slamming his hand into a bench a few minutes later didn't make any sense but it brought a momentary distraction. And a reminder this morning.

“Come on, Jory. They're not paying us to meditate.” Jory hadn't realized Carl was so close. “Or maybe you think it looks better if we leave the job half done.”

Jory puts his head down and grasps the handles of the wheelbarrow, pivots its satisfyingly light weight on the wheel and starts down the hill. The world has been reduced to a child's dimensions now: downhill, light, easy, pleasant; uphill, heavy, difficult, dangerous. Everything else is blocked out but the sloping path he has to take from the pile of dirt beside the truck to the work site, the ground beneath him still soft after last night's rains. He thinks about nothing else as he follows the bouncing wheelbarrow down the incline. Arms outspread, gloved hands loosely gripping the handles, the wheelbarrow's empty metal basin flecked with dirt from the previous trips, he lets himself be pulled by its hollow weight. This is the part of the job to savor: his back muscles relax, his legs follow the downward slope, breath comes easily, smells of earth and grass rise around him—he's left his mind behind.

Back at the bottom of the hill Jory maneuvers the wheelbarrow toward a tall black man named Ben who stands nearby, leaning on his shovel. Ben maintains this position until the last second when Jory has stopped before the still formidable mound of dirt beside the truck; then the man steps forward and begins methodically cutting into the pile and hurling shovels full of the black soil into the waiting barrow. This is Jory's respite, the time to collect his strength, just as the other man's will come when the wheelbarrow is full. During this quiet interval punctuated by the soft, repeated thuds of dirt striking dirt, Jory longs for a cigarette: with each cloud of smoke he'd expel more of the accumulated weariness of these trips, the toll on his muscles. What a pleasure it would be to watch that smoke dissipate in the sunlight. He lets his right hand dangle at his side, the wrist tingling, the gloved fingers loosely curved, asked to do nothing for a time. Even a slightly lighter load would be a relief but Carl has already criticized Ben for not filling the wheelbarrow and it's certain that the man won't stop until a tall, plump hill of dark earth rises above the barrow's rim. Cigaretteless, Jory listens resignedly to the plop of falling dirt.

At last, with the sudden silence the rhythm shifts and Jory's ordeal begins: he glances at the other man a moment, though neither communicates anything in the exchange, then he takes one last look at the stationary mass in the wheelbarrow, a smaller version of the pile Ben is reducing; he lifts the handles, with an adjustment of his shoulders he gets control of the weight, he begins to move the load along the first, easy, level stretch of path, the wheel rolling comfortably, only his extended arms feeling the mass's need to be kept in balance—he'd actually be enjoying himself, he realizes, if he weren't thinking about what lies ahead. Then the weight exerts its pull as the path begins to slope, first gently, then steeply, and he has to react: the muscles in his back and shoulders tense, his calves tighten, he throws more of his weight into pushing the dirt up the hill, part way, most of the way, his breath becoming shorter. Before he's ready for it, he's at the most dangerous part, the turn, alert to the yielding soil beneath him. The left handle dips as the path banks, making him aware of the weakness in the wrist that holds the other handle; still, if he can manage enough momentum he can get around this corner as he has a half-dozen times already today and he pushes, straining to maintain the balance of the burden in front of him.

And he makes it once more, or thinks he has until all at once the load he's been pushing starts to jump away from him. Even as it's happening he seems to see the scene from some place far away: the wheelbarrow tumbling down the slope, its handles thrust upward for an instant like a bull's horns, then diving away, the carriage turning over in a soft bouncing motion as a comet-tail of dirt spills behind it; himself, pulled in by the momentum, losing his footing as he scrambles for balance, then following the lost load down the hill, his body striking the ground in a twisting roll until at last everything stops moving and he's at the bottom beside the overturned wheelbarrow, a coat of grainy dirt on his lips. Lying there on his back he blinks, tastes the salty dirt on his mouth, he carefully moves his arms, his legs: for all of his falling, he seems all right. In gratitude, he relaxes. Above him a line of trees is set against the cloudless sky and he experiences an interval of peace—the blue above takes him to some lost moment from his university days, he has a vision of one of the library's ancient gray stone towers, its pointed green copper roof, the scene framed by a sky like this one.