The 14th Day (8 page)

But usually Fotor was less dramatic. More likely he'd be urging Jory to action. The man was constantly on the make, bartering for clothes, a car, language lessons, he watched TV attentively, quickly learning the local expressions. “We have to move on,” he'd say. “The clock doesn't stop. You too, Jory, you should prepare for a career here, or somewhere. It can be done. We don't have to work at these kinds of jobs all the time. These are jobs for animals.” Jory could only shake his head. Of course, he knew all that. Still, there was another side to the question. Once we start to make those kinds of accommodations to our circumstances, he tried to tell Fotor, we start to surrender. Didn't he know that to the people who passed them in the street they were shadows that could disappear the moment a cloud covered the sun? You couldn't accept that; only if you refused to see yourself as a shadow was it possible to go on. All of them from the homeland—he, Fotor, the rest of them—were part of a continuing story, a story that had to be remembered, kept alive.

Fotor would smile his bison's smile. “Of course,” he'd say, “of course,” his eyes directed elsewhere, as if he were calculating sums, which may very well have been what he was doing. In the end Fotor, with all his contacts, had managed to find the perfect place for himself, a warm green island where he was going to be in charge of a concession. “The government is very corrupt there,” he said gleefully as he made plans for his departure. “There are unlimited opportunities. From one store I'll soon have two, then many. All you have to do is write me when I'm there and I'll see to it that they let you in.”

Here in the truck, Jory can imagine Fotor's island, the little store with a roof of thatch where he sells souvenirs and cold drinks, the back office where he works out more important deals of one sort or another in places hundreds of miles away. Outside, the fierce heat is broken occasionally by pounding rains. There's blue water, miles of untracked yellow sand, a rudimentary sun, as simple as a child's drawing. The place Jory conjures up is starkly empty and yet for a few seconds, listening to the truck's steady drone, he lets himself contemplate the prospect of living on that island.

He can imagine himself there with Fotor, the two of them facing each other across a rattan table, cool drinks beside them. Would Jory finally ask him the question he hadn't been able to bring himself to ask in the last place they were together: “What happened to that man I knocked down? Did I kill him?” Palm fronds would hiss, Fotor would stare back unblinking. “I mean,” Jory would pursue quietly, trying to make it seem like some unimportant matter he wanted to clear up, “I'd just like to know.” Meaning
Am I completely in your power or do you even know yourself whether I killed that man?
“Really,” Jory would press, his voice rising just a little, “I'm curious, that's all.” At last Fotor might pick up his glass and take a sip of his drink. After he put it down he'd shrug. “Come on,” he'd say reassuringly, “what difference does it make? You don't owe me anything.” On that elemental island where the two of them were dust motes on a smooth expanse of glass, would Fotor continue to insist that underneath everything they weren't all that different? “No,” Jory's lips make a silent answer to his countryman's assertion. As the tremor of the truck's downshifting passes through his body, he's returned to the present. He has things to do here; he has no time to think about Fotor's island.

In a few minutes this truck and another one are at the Life Sciences building, a newly-completed white cube perched atop a hill of bare red clay. There Jory and his fellow workers unload the greenery while some of them begin digging holes and others fill wheelbarrows with loam or carry bags of peat and fertilizer to the site. When the holes have been dug they carefully put the plants into the ground, first pulling away the burlap sacks, then cutting the twine that binds the shrubbery. They fill in the earth around the plants, add peat moss and pellets of fertilizer, then rake the area and water the bushes and small trees, placing a layer of cedar chips around some of them. Muscles strain, backs are wet, breath comes quickly, but in time a ring of dark green rises from the red clay, encircling the white cube.

Jory pats the cool loam with his ungloved hand. So he's a gardener now. The uncle for whom he was named would have found that amusing. The large, red-faced bachelor lawyer with the thick mustache lived in one of the densely settled suburbs of the capital, but he wore tweeds and affected a curved pipe and a walking stick like a country squire. Whenever Jory came to visit they'd have to go first to his uncle's garden, where they'd walk solemnly among the growing things, stopping at certain points to admire. “There's nothing like the fragrance of a tea rose,” the older man would exclaim, bending toward the plant, his eyes shut as if he were intending to bestow the softest of kisses on the damp petals. After the stroll among the flowers they'd repair to the dark-paneled study for serious talks about life. A bottle of whiskey would be set beside one of the decoys that was likely to be on the desk and the two of them would sit in silence while the older man sucked on his pipe, finally sending up a haze of blue smoke that veiled the hunting prints on the wall. “Now,” he'd declare enthusiastically, leaning forward with the anticipation of an archaeologist about to open a long-buried cask. “Now we'll talk. Yes?”

What they invariably talked about was the younger man's future plans. As both of them knew, Jory's father made no secret of his disappointment that his only child had chosen to work in a library. “It isn't a profession,” his father told him more than once, pushing his glasses up on his nose, “it's just a way of not having to make up your mind about something more definite.” Though Jory would never admit it openly, there was more than a little truth to this guess about his motives. But if he didn't know what he wanted to do with his life, he was certain what he didn't want to do: he had no intention of following his father's path into government service. He wasn't going to crawl up the same kind of bureaucratic ladder like a trained chimp, stopping for applause each time he reached another of the rungs labeled with a Roman numeral. Uncle Jory had no great love for library work either. He had his own, not very secret agenda for his nephew: that he would eventually go into the law. “There's no better place to explore than in a library,” he'd insist, confident of how that exploration would turn out. How little either of the brothers understood about him.

Both men were reacting to the catastrophe that had shaped their lives, the plane crash in which their parents were killed when Jory's own father, the oldest child, was nineteen. The young man took over the leadership of the family of four boys as if he'd been preparing all his life for this responsibility. A tall, grave youth, he was determined to preside over an orderly world that couldn't be disrupted by accidents like the one that had so precipitously turned him into an adult. It was no surprise that he would gain a reputation for steadiness in his job with the government. His brother, younger by a year, took a different lesson from his parents' tragedy. The estate the older man had left turned out, after many legal battles, to be much smaller than anyone had imagined. Though accusations were made that their father's business accounts were hopelessly scrambled, which was the charitable view, or deceptively inflated, which was the more common, the younger brother was convinced that the family had been cheated out of a large share of its money by sharp lawyers acting for an unscrupulous partner. Now he had a mission: to become a lawyer himself in order to ensure that others wouldn't be taken advantage of in the same way. Yet as a lawyer, Uncle Jory's successes came from finding tax advantages for wealthy clients rather than from righting the wrongs of the oppressed. Occasionally, during one of his serious talks about life when he'd had too much to drink, he spoke dolefully of himself as a failure and it was clear then that he hoped his nephew would follow the path from which he'd strayed.

His uncle, his father—they had lives. Whether successes or failures, they were lives. While he has what? Once more he thinks of Fotor, who had a way of getting under the surface. What would he say about Jory's present situation?
You're terrified, Jory. Don't try to deny it. What happened to you up north, why did you snap toward the end? Was it that you lost the heart to keep going on?
The voice would be soft, even gentle, with no accusatory edge, just a man who was curious, asking questions.
Didn't you even feel a sense of relief for a moment,
he'd go on,
at the thought of going to prison, ending this pointless existence of waiting?
He'd pause for a while, as if expecting an answer, then he'd go on.
And what is it like here, now that you've left that place, your name itself changed? Hasn't it become harder to keep up your personal religion of hope and memory? Doesn't your being a fugitive allow you still another distraction? Aren't you sometimes tempted by the idea that you'll simply disappear?

No, Jory answers, no. You have it all wrong.

“Hey, Jory, we've got to get this job done today.” It's Carl, of course, who's caught him the one moment he's stopped to catch his breath.

“O.K.,” he answers with a jerk of the head. Ox, Jory says to himself, keep your eye on your own work. As if he doesn't get at least as much done by the end of the day as the other man does. He breathes deeply, calming himself. Better to block Carl out of his mind and keep within the tunnel of his work.

He pushes a wheelbarrow of freshly-turned earth up a slight incline. He remembers the pleasantly harsh smell of his uncle's tobacco, which vividly brings back those long afternoons in his study: the decoys, the whiskey, the hunting prints—he even remembers fondly the roses he was asked to admire. Carefully, he maneuvers the wheelbarrow to the place where the bushes have been planted; he lifts it and the thick, moist earth slides out, some clumps adhering to the blue metal even after he's shaken the wheelbarrow several times. How would he have resolved the questions about his career if he'd have been allowed to stay in the homeland? Though they would no longer be the same kind of questions since the people with the greatest interest in the answers are dead now. Once again these thoughts have brought him to a feeling of emptiness. The family's story—the brothers' rivalry, their parents' sudden death, countless things that came before—it could all end with him, here in this alien place. Kneeling before the mound of earth, he pats it with his hands gently, like a man searching for something he's lost.

“Jory,” Carl yells. “We need that wheelbarrow over here.”

He rises and starts toward the wheelbarrow but stops in mid-stride, thinking
I will not come instantly when you call
. He stands beside the wheelbarrow, his hands hanging free, and the bright warm day swims around him. So different from that other, colder place, and still he remembers a similar moment, his breath frosting, his hand bleeding, a man lying in the snow beneath him. Time stopped for an instant then and Jory accepted everything that might happen to him, prepared for whatever followed. Even though that moment passed after a few beats of his heart and the world began to totter and sway once more, Jory remembers the tranquility of that gap in time. Now, as the memory fades, he takes a deliberate step toward the wheelbarrow.
When I'm ready
.

When the workday is over, Jory's back and shoulders ache but thinking about Fotor, about his uncle, has brought its own heaviness. He feels older than his years: one more day has been added to his count. It's like the stories the nuns used to tell about eternity, the bird flying out of a flat land across spaces so vast that it took a century to reach a gigantic mountain, from which the bird would take one speck of dirt and fly back with it for another century, depositing that tiny crumb of earth on the plain it had set out from. After waiting for a full hundred years it would then take flight once more toward that distant mountain, repeating the actions of the previous trip. “And when that bird had finally transported that entire huge mountain and recreated it on the plain—think, children, how immensely long that must be …” Sister Gendura's eyes would have grown so large, many in the class could believe she was actually witnessing what she was describing. “And when the whole mountain was leveled and set upon the plain, even then, eternity would not have started to begin.” Yes, he thinks, another day, another speck of dirt from the mountain.

At last he's made his way to the neighborhood where he lives. The simple frame houses, built in the previous century for workers of a mill long since closed, are occupied mostly by students and other transients now. Set among thick, old trees and a motley abundance of untended vegetation, the buildings with their sagging porches and fallen shutters have a temporary air. In a few places the front yards are worn to dirt where the students play their games. A battered sofa is sprawled on one of the skimpy lawns, as if the inhabitants of the house had to flee in a hurry and hadn't had the time to take everything. The evening air is mild and a soft yellow light infuses the dense greenness of the street, the lazy light at the end of a workday. On a shaded porch nearby, a couple of young men in baseball caps sit drinking beer while one of them hesitantly plucks the strings of a guitar. All at once the easy laughter of a young woman floats over the bushes, sounding surprisingly close, and Jory turns to listen. A rich, leafy smell engulfs him, stirring his memory, and for the moment all the weight of his past slides off of him. He's sure he's about to make some kind of connection; but after the laughter there's only silence, the smell drifts away.

Who am I thinking about?
His heart beats faster.

Inside the green and gray house where he lives, the warm, enclosed air is stifling, carrying the smells of the anonymous lives that surround him. He already anticipates the feel of the ten stairs under his feet. How quickly things become automatic! He could find his rooms in total darkness. Yet he's brought in from the outdoors the lingering excitement of an unanswered question: who was it that that woman's laugh reminded him of, the low, throaty music, detached and passionate at the same time? Something moves across his consciousness, a shape, a face; and at last here in the musty hallway what eluded him in the street comes clear: Vara. He stands there a moment savoring this realization, then he climbs the steps quickly. When he enters his room he goes immediately to his desk. It takes only a few seconds' riffling through a pile of mementos before he finds the postcard he received about a year ago. Even its angled edge protruding from the mess of papers recovers for him the feeling he experienced then. He takes the postcard into his hands and studies the pictured scene, an opera house on the bank of a river in a city on another continent far to the east of here. Then he turns it over and reads Vara's message, her handwriting as brisk and swift as her step, the letters slanting emphatically: “Jory, Remember the time when we walked along the river and you said we should never forget we're young. I try, though sometimes it's hard. The river here is equally dirty but not so romantic.” And then, the simple “V.”