The Book of Jonas (10 page)

S
omething had happened. Something awful.

He remembers the cool night air flowing in through the open window, the thin woolen blanket keeping the warmth close to his body. He was young enough that he still shared a room with his sister, Miriam. But she was not there. Something had happened.

He remembers armed men running down the street in front of the house, and his mother wailing. He had been sent to bed early, told to stay there. And from his pallet on the floor he listened to low voices, his father and brother, occasional shouts in the street, the arrivals and departures of visitors.

He must have fallen asleep, and it was quiet when he woke. The cool night air flowed in through the open window, carrying with it the strangely bright light from a crescent moon. Under the woolen blanket, Younis turned on his side, trying to get comfortable.

He remembers thinking that the next year, or perhaps the year after, when his brother had moved out to start his own
family, he would sleep in his own room, now his brother’s room, toward the front of the house. But for now he shared a room, a children’s room, with his sister, who was not there. Their soft rugs lay against opposite walls, and he felt the cool autumn air streaming in through the window, even as the blanket held close his warmth.

His body warm, his face pleasantly cool, he smelled the faint, lingering scent of woodsmoke high on the air, and then he became aware of an increasingly urgent pressure on his bladder. At first he tried to deny it, and for a moment he contemplated rolling over, pulling the blanket around him, and trying to go back to sleep. Somewhere in the distance a rooster cleared its throat. He wanted to stay in bed, go back to sleep, because he knew that if he got out of bed and into the cold, sleep would have even more difficulty overtaking him when he returned. But then he found the urge was too great to ignore. He braced himself, then pulled back the blanket and allowed the cool air to envelop him, raising gooseflesh on his arms.

He stood up and tugged on his shalwar and kamiz. In the moonlight, he spotted his long, woolen wrap lying in a bundle against the wall, and thought about pulling it over his shoulders for warmth, then reconsidered. He would be gone only minutes, after all, because he was paying only a brief visit to the low earthen hut in the backyard. He strapped on his sandals and walked groggily out through the kitchen, opening the heavy wooden back door as silently as he could manage.

Dew covered the yard’s cool grass, and wet his feet as he
crossed, taking practiced steps toward the small outbuilding at the far end of the wall. It was a clear night, with a thin sliver of moon low in the sky, and off to the east the horizon showed the first faint signs of the coming dawn. He wished absently that he weren’t so tired, so that he might linger, appreciate it all awhile longer. He entered the outhouse, of habit holding his breath against the acrid smell, pulled the kamiz down slightly, and released his bladder. The rooster crowed again in the distance, and Younis was nearly finished when he heard the noise.

It cut sharply through the clear night, louder and louder. He will never be able to describe it adequately. It sounded like a lot of things: like paper ripping, amplified a hundred times, and overlaying that was the sound of a flag cracking rapidly in a strong wind, and some kind of engine noise, like a scooter with a broken tailpipe, and underneath it all was a low, long whistle, sounding for all the world like the whistle his father made when he called the sheep in from the far pasture. The entire cacophony grew louder and louder, but at the same time, in his memory, extended on until forever.

And then, at the far end of forever was an explosion. But to simply call it an explosion would be like calling the sun a light: literally true but grossly insufficient. It was the crossing of a barrier, a rending of reality. It was light brighter than he had ever seen, and then he was blind; it was louder than imagination, and then he was deaf. He was slammed against the back wall of the outhouse, and then there was nothing.

He woke to shouts and more explosions, kept distant by a ringing sound in his right ear. He was still in the outhouse, the walls of which jumped with shadows cast by nearby firelight, distorted flickers on the wall. He got to his knees and peered out, trying to stretch his arm to support himself, but was stopped short by a stab of pain from his wrist to his shoulder. It felt as though his arm were slowly being torn in two. He clutched at his arm to find that it was wet, and this confused him. He curled the arm to his stomach and pushed himself up to kneel on the earthen floor. He stood weakly and looked down to see large wet patches covering the front of his clothes. His sleeve was ripped almost from the wrist to the elbow, and he moved his arm tentatively, stopping when pain ran up to his shoulder and into his chest. He stumbled out of the outbuilding.

The crescent moon still hung over the horizon, and the eastern sky was not much brighter than it was the last time he looked at it, but everything else was different. His house was gone, in its place a pile of broken stone and burning timbers, the air filled with the charred, pungent smell of smoldering plastic. Flames roared through empty windows in the shattered wall. He considered running back in, took a step forward, then another, but with each step the heat grew exponentially, burning
his skin and drying his eyes, until he was barely able even to look at it. He realized he was yelling.

More explosions burst forth from other parts of the village, each preceded by the same nameless sound, and it seemed as though nothing existed in the world except explosions. Younis found himself wondering whether every one of them meant the same thing.

He briefly thought he might be asleep still, in his bed and dreaming it all. The explosions stopped, replaced now by shouts and wails. A diffuse firelight rose and fell all around him, rose and fell, illuminating towering columns of thick black smoke hulking above all the world, fading into the darkness, returning again, massive and dangerous, like monsters disappearing and reappearing from the corners of his bedroom.

Younis moved through it all in a state of hyperawareness, not thinking in the rational sense, but rapidly processing pieces of information, noticing, slowing everything down. He noticed how a small part of the house’s back wall, the part farthest away from the outhouse, looked normal, completely unaffected by the carnage around it. He smelled the acrid smell of burning plastic and hair and the sulfur smell of explosives. He noticed that the water well in the courtyard appeared to be untouched, the circular retaining wall pristine, but that something sat on it in flames, as though someone had balanced a burning leg of mutton on the well’s lip. Tiny craters pocked the outhouse’s mud-brick outer walls, and the courtyard wall buckled in upon itself.

He still held his arm curled up at his stomach, and he
looked down to see that blood dripped off the tips of his fingers and into the dewy grass. He wrapped his forearm in a loose piece of his shalwar, keeping his elbow bent, the fabric wound tightly.

He felt himself go weak, and fought to maintain consciousness. For a moment, he thought he might be able to fly, lift himself off the ground and swoop away toward the hills, where he knew his family awaited him, willing his speedy journey.

The first gunshots came from the south side of the village, sharp, small reports, one or two at a time, like the sound of kindling under an ax. Then a machine gun opened up and the pops came as rapidly as the chain links through the pulley over the well when the bucket was dropped in, the whole chaos of reports moving gradually closer.

Younis ran toward the front gate, which led out onto the street, noticing when he got there that the entire wall beside the gate was now one long pile of bricks that he could have easily stepped over. Despite this, he popped open the latch and let the heavy door swing wide, closing it firmly after he exited.

The street itself was deserted, but he heard the mass of gunfire and shouts moving toward him like a living thing, faster and faster, louder by the second. He turned to go in the opposite direction, and took a single step when suddenly the world opened up all around, the gate and remnants of the wall behind him bursting into chips and splinters and showering him with dust.

The shouts came from everywhere at once, up the street and down, the air around him filling with cracks and whistles. He wanted to lie down, become the earth. He wanted to wake himself up, surround himself with iron and stone, drift away like dust before a windstorm. Instead, he spotted the narrow alleyway between two houses opposite the pile of rubble that used to be his home. He ran across the street and down the alley, the walls barely wide enough for his shoulders to pass through, and into another alley, and then another, all of them familiar and yet completely foreign. And then he was on the road beside the river, the broad expanse of water dark against the growing dawn.

Gunfire echoed again somewhere behind him, but he stopped despite it, suddenly stunned by the river. He probably looked at it for no more than a second or two, but the moment stretches on in his memory, expanding and becoming an event all its own. He was taken in by the beauty of it, by its cold rapids still roiling away, unconcerned by the horror unfolding behind him. For a moment he took in the sound of it, the gentle gurgle closer to shore, a top note underpinned by the deeper, more powerful roar out toward the rushing center. It will never stop, he thought, flowing on and building as it headed south, emptying, finally, into the vast sea, taking with it the water at which he now gazed, as much that night’s witness as himself, and yet fallow by comparison, unplanted with its brutality.

He considered jumping into it, letting the rushing water carry him along, whether to safety or not, where he would
be silent and invisible in the churning current. He recalled swimming in it during the heat of summer, at the deep pool upstream, the icicles that shot through him when he jumped in from the rocky bank, numbing his legs and arms, bringing his life to the top of his skin, and he realized that in that water, those rapids, he would never survive the journey. And then he wondered whether he wanted to survive, and thought that maybe jumping in would be the best thing after all.

This happened much faster than it takes to describe, only seconds, and later Younis will express his amazement at this, at how quickly everything changes, whether because of a decision you make or the decisions made by others, or just because of chance, and in a moment the entire path of your life, everything you knew and everything you will ever know, is altered. But in those few seconds all he recognized was the need to make a decision and, somewhere deep inside, the importance of his choice.

The gunfire grew louder until it was nearly upon him, and he discovered he was running, only distantly aware of having decided to run, more conscious of the cool morning air blowing his hair, the rush of wind that he was puzzled to find he could hear only in his left ear, and he ran without knowing it, north out of the village, along the river, his legs churning without thought, like the river itself, and he ran down the path toward the hills, toward the mountains, running under the beautiful clear moon, toward the pass, and he ran, unconnected to the world, understanding nothing save the need to run, and he ran, and he was distantly surprised to find, almost offhandedly, that he did not cry, not even a tear.

Jonas pauses occasionally, to take a breath, or a sip from his glass of juice, or to gather his thoughts, and when he does, a little gap opens up in the space of the living room. Within these gaps live perceptions rendered undetectable by the telling of the story: the steady ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner, the creak of Rose’s wooden chair as she shifts her weight, the echoed shout of a child playing out in the neighborhood, the lengthening shadows in the front yard.

Rose has heard stories like this before. Not this story, of course. This story is different. Each story is different. But all of them share a need to be told, to be heard, and Rose knows how to hear them. She knows that these gaps are important, that they mean something. She knows that often the gaps are nearly as important as the story itself.

And so, despite her growing apprehension, she does not try to fill them. She does not express astonishment, or make meaningless, encouraging sounds. She does not ask questions, does not request clarification. She listens. She gives him her attention, the space to find his words, allows his story to breathe, offers him this measure of grace.

The cave his father had described came to mean more in Younis’s mind than it actually was. He searched for hours, trying to match his father’s instructions to the unfamiliar terrain before him, increasingly tired, weakened by the loss of blood, exhausted, and, finally, desperate. He longed for the cave, longed for all it represented. Its capacity for solace, its ability to shelter grew larger and more mythical with each step he took. He wandered across the empty hills.

Near the rock his father had shown him, balanced unnaturally in the shallow water close to the bank, the path ran away from the river and wove past a low, rocky outcrop before ascending steeply. Into the hills, it leveled out as often as the terrain allowed, but mostly it climbed steeply. The route was clear close to the river, a visible footpath that he easily followed up into the low pastures. But farther into the hills, it traversed stone and gravel, so that he had to search every twenty or thirty steps to be sure he was still walking in the right direction.

Periodically, the route appeared to end abruptly, run straight into a rock wall or stand of brush. He scrambled up the stone face or around the brush, searching above it until he found the barest trace on which to continue, until the trail disappeared again, this time into a deep gully, or a stretch of impenetrable
thorns, and he repeated the process, each time hoping that the path on which he resumed his trek was the correct one.

His route trended steeply upward, switching back and forth as it encountered obstacles and sheer faces, sometimes leading right back toward the beginning, twisting around like a noodle dropped on a pile of rocks. And then the trail ended again, in the middle of a vast boulder field, and Younis couldn’t find it, no matter how hard he looked.