The 14th Day (3 page)

“Here we are,” Jory says brightly when he returns with a bottle and two small glasses, still beaded with water. In the bottle is the famous amber-colored liquor so beloved in the homeland. “This is good for coughs and sniffles,” Jory says. “Insomnia, indigestion—and if you're in good health this will preserve it.” His speech is accompanied by sudden, emphatic gestures, unlike his reserve of this morning—it's clear he's at home here. But Vaniok is still trying to get control of his own reactions to this room. Maybe he actually has caught a cold: his hands are trembling and to keep Jory from noticing it, he nods heartily. Bringing his hands together, then apart, he takes a step forward, then retreats, his own movements as animated as his host's.

He accepts the tiny glass gratefully and holds it between his thumb and forefinger, lifting it so that the light turns its contents into liquid fire. “Ah,” he sighs in anticipation. The fumes of the powerful liquor send forth a flood of sensations—sounds, sights from somewhere else. He doesn't try to sort them out; he allows them to wash over him. Still he waits for Jory to make a toast before drinking the liquor down in a swallow. He shivers with pleasure, his body instantly calmer now, even though his uneasiness hasn't left him. Jory has rolled up his sleeves and for the first time Vaniok notices a long scar on the top of his right forearm. He's determined not to remark on it; he knows there are many scars after the Thirteen Days and people don't always want to talk about them. “I hope you'll like it here,” he says. Though he's said it before, the occasion seems to make it appropriate.

Jory indicates that he'll pour another drink and Vaniok nods in agreement. Jory pours carefully and hands the glass to Vaniok. “Thanks,” Jory says, “but I hope it's a very short stay.”

“Yes,” Vaniok is suddenly elated. “Yes. May your stay be very short and very delightful.”

Jory drinks and brings down the glass. “May my stay be delightfully short.”

Vaniok is feeling better now, the liquor has begun to take its effect and talk comes more easily. “My father owned a boat livery in the Deep Lakes,” he says, as if Jory has asked about his family. “My older brothers were happy to follow in his footsteps. I wasn't so sure.” For a moment he can see the family gathered for his father's last birthday in the twilight on the screened porch, the blaze of candles on the cake in the next room. “I think I would have probably joined them in the long run.” Once again he remembers the pleasure of rowing slowly and steadily across one of the lakes, the lily pads bobbing in the wake of the boat. “At least,” he sighs, “I get some outdoor work on this job.” The weight of the memory has already caused his spirits to sink.

Jory has fallen silent and as Vaniok lifts himself out of the past, he wonders at how easily he got back there—he hadn't been thinking, he'd just started talking and now he's managed to make himself sad. Has he done the same to Jory?

When Jory looks at him his eyes are unreadable. “Yes, what to do with ourselves,” he says deliberately. “The men in gray certainly complicated that problem for us, didn't they?”

At the mention of the colonels who seized power, they solemnly declared, in order to save the nation, an impersonal gloom settles over everything in the room. Vaniok listens to the distant sounds coming from the street, sounds of people who don't have to think about these kinds of things. How lucky they are. Jory, meanwhile, is caught up in his own thoughts. After a moment he pulls himself up. “But I told you about my jar of soil,” he says, “and I haven't shown it to you. Here, come to the desk.” Vaniok, who'd actually forgotten about it, follows Jory across the room. He slowly opens one of the drawers and extracts a glass jar like the kind used to hold preserves back home. Vaniok can see the dark earth inside; the earlier excitement returns. Jory brings the jar to Vaniok and slowly undoes the lid. When he pulls it away, the sharp smell of the homeland's soil rushes from its container and Vaniok's eyes sting.

“Put your hand into the jar,” Jory urges softly and Vaniok does so. The yielding earth is surprisingly cool, Vaniok's fingers disappear in the blackness. For long seconds neither of the men speaks. Oddly, no sounds from the outside penetrate the walls of the room. At last Vaniok withdraws his hand, carefully brushing the last grains of soil back into the jar. The silence lengthens, Vaniok waits while Jory closes the cover and turns to put away his container of earth. But even as he does so Jory stops, frozen for a moment, as if he's forgotten what he set out to do. Bent over the jar, his back to Vaniok, he asks, “Will we ever go back there?” The words are barely audible, it's not clear whom he's talking to and Vaniok is surprised by the despair he hears in this voice that until now has been so insistent on their return. In the angle of Jory's back Vaniok senses the man's vulnerability and he's suddenly embarrassed, as if he's glimpsed some secret Jory hasn't wanted him to see—it's as though in this instant he's looking at the real Jory. The hair on Vaniok's arms bristles.

In a moment, though, the other man has put away the jar, closed the drawer of the desk, and he's facing Vaniok again, apparently his old self once more. “Another drink, maybe?” he asks.

Vaniok shakes his head. “I really have to be going now,” he says. “But thanks for inviting me. Thanks for the drinks. I know you'll like it here.”

Jory walks him to the door. He's not as cheerful as he was earlier but his cordiality seems genuine. “Thank you for coming,” he says. When he closes the door Vaniok makes his way quickly down the stairs and is glad when he's finally outside.

“Jory is very quiet, very reserved,” Ila says. “A man of mystery.” Vaniok and she are having coffee at an outdoor restaurant and he watches the students passing by. They wear shorts and light shirts in the unseasonably mild weather, and walk with loose limbs, smiles on their faces as if they expect to meet only people who like them. Vaniok tries to imagine he's one of these students, bright futures dancing in his head, visions of parties on the beach where people who will be your friends for life gather around the fire and sing.

“He's like the farmer in the sea shell,” Ila says. The two of them are speaking in the old language.

Vaniok is brought back to the present. He remembers: Ila has been talking about Jory, who's been here little more than a week. “Farmer?” Vaniok asks. “What farmer?”

“In the story, silly. The farmer in the sea shell.”

“Ah, that one.” His grandmother used to tell him the folktale about the young man who'd gone looking for the ocean in a sea shell and had lost himself in its cavernous whorls.

“I can imagine many women might think they're the maiden whose whisper calls him out.”

Vaniok laughs. “He goes around like a man with indigestion.”

She laughs too but only to be polite, he can see. It's clear she's fascinated by this new arrival, and that bothers Vaniok. She probably thinks his remark was crude.

“You and I aren't that way,” he says now, trying to be more careful in his choice of words. “Jory is so …” He brings his hands together, pushing them against each other with all the force he can muster.

“Exactly,” she says. “That's what makes him so interesting.” The trill of her silvery laughter runs up the back of Vaniok's neck. He and Ila are distant cousins who only discovered this fact here in the host country. In the months since she's been in the university town they've become good friends, which was easy at first when Vaniok thought of her as a relative and felt protective toward her. But Ila is a strong, independent person who doesn't need anybody's protection and gradually Vaniok has come to think of her less as someone who's distantly connected by blood and more as simply a woman he's happy to be with. Nobody would call her beautiful but there's something about her that makes men look at her and keep looking, something more than her expressive face, her clear, fair skin or her compact figure. Vaniok has been with her enough to know that at any moment something can come into her eyes, a sudden darkening, like a cloud-shadow, that makes her seem older and wiser than her years. There's something else he glimpses at times like this: that she's determined to reach for what she wants and take it, whatever the obstacles. Catching sight of this look, Vaniok wishes he could feel that way. Now, the sunlight behind her traces a halo of blonde hair around her head and coats her white arm with a fringe of golden down. Vaniok wants very much to touch it.

“But weren't we all like that at one time,” he insists, leaning forward, “didn't we all think we were going back there tomorrow?”

“No,” she says, her almost oriental eyes narrowing. “Once I left there I knew I was never going back.”

He's pleased that she seems to be siding with him. “Give our friend time,” he says. “He'll change.”

Ila says nothing. Vaniok wonders what she's thinking.

“You're happy here?” he asks. On the plate before him is a torn, hard-crusted roll. “You don't mind it that people are still asking us to repeat what we say?”

She smiles. “I intend to be happy wherever I am.” She's told him of her escape, when she had to lie under the hay in a farmer's barn, breathless as a corpse, while men with bayonets prodded and poked nearby; and he can imagine her first making that promise to herself as she lay beneath the hay, the sharp bristles prickling her face, the smell filling her nose and making her want to sneeze while the soldiers with bayonets moved by, near enough to touch.

A well-dressed passerby smiles at Ila. “The men here don't seem to mind it when you misuse their precious language,” Vaniok says with a frown.

She tosses her head. “Words aren't the only way of speaking.”

He feels a gust of sadness; she doesn't have much trouble becoming friendly with the people here, she doesn't have to cultivate a knowledge of basketball. Vaniok falls silent. Countless frustrations throng the moment like hurrying, anonymous crowds. Then he remembers Jory and quotes the lines the newcomer declaimed when they first met: “Blue snow on black limbs … smell of mushrooms hidden in the earth.”

She looks at him blankly. “I was never fond of poetry.”

“Ila,” his voice catches, “that's just one more reason I like being around you.” Boldly, madly, he takes her hand for an instant and lets it go, thinking again of how much easier it will be for her to make her way among these people. All at once he feels, as he did when he met Jory a few days ago, the strangeness and terror of being on this spot on the planet, so far from where he expected to live his life, so far, if he thinks about it, from where he expected he'd be buried; and he wishes he could kiss his cousin for being here with him, for warming him with her liveliness. He needs something because just now he remembers so many things: thick braided rugs on polished floors, the long heavy coats everybody wore in the winter back there, the delicate glasses they used when they drank the fiery amber-colored liquor of their region. There was a china plate at his grandmother's with the picture of a cheerful wood-spirit sitting on a limb in an old tree, large colorful moths flitting around him in the pale blue sky. As a child he'd been endlessly fascinated by that image. Did the plate survive the Thirteen Days, he wonders. At the moment, the thought that it might not have seems tragic.

But Vaniok resists this incursion from the lost country. He spreads his arms toward the sunny street where the students laugh together in small groups. “This is poetry,” he declares. “This is all the poetry we need.”

Ila smiles her enchanting smile but this time its warmth doesn't reach him. His cousin is a complicated person whose thoughts can't always be read. Vaniok wonders if for all their closeness Ila will ever know him. A sudden breeze chills the poetry of this sunny street and he thinks again of Jory.

“There are so few of of us,” he says, “and we're so far from home. It's a pity we don't get along better.”

Ila laughs. “It wasn't heaven back there: we fought, we quarreled. How else could the Thirteen Days have happened?”

He touches her wrist with the tip of his finger. “You're so wise for a youngster,” he teases, she being only four years his junior.

She turns down her mouth. “No,” she said, “it's just that I remember, like Jory. But I don't limit my memories.”

“I told you about his jar of soil, didn't I? His uncle gave it to him as he was leaving. The uncle was killed.” Ila nods. As they both know, many uncles were killed. But the memory of his visit has brought back what he felt there and Vaniok is agitated again. “He carries it around like some kind of relic,” he says, his voice rising. Then he plunges into gloomy silence.

“Vaniok,” Ila says quietly, “we all deal with this in our own way. You shouldn't let it bother you.”

“Did I say it was bothering me?”

Her green eyes seem to see everything. “You don't have to say it,” she says. “Ever since he came here I can see it on your face.”

He looks at her, trying to express everything he's feeling. All I want is peace, he wants to tell her. What he says is, “I don't want to bury myself in memories.”

She smiles sadly. “But, Vaniok, Jory doesn't have anything to do with that. That's up to you.”

“I wish he'd never have come here,” Vaniok says suddenly. “You know, I like this place. We can't go back, after all. As you said, we have to move on.” He waves his hand, taking in the scene that gave him so much pleasure only minutes ago. “And now he's come and …” Vaniok is flushed, the blood has rushed to his head.

Ila takes his hand and for a few seconds neither of them says anything. Even so, he feels the blood subsiding. “All of us feel that way sometime,” she says at last. “What you feel doesn't have anything to do with Jory, really.”