The Book of Jonas (11 page)

He slumped to the ground in despair, feeling exposed sitting among the rocks, open to both the sky and the valley far below. He hoped his dark clothes did not stand out against the lighter granite. The ringing in his ear was pronounced, new, and he tried to get rid of it by screwing up his eyes. When that didn’t work, he opened them and searched the slope below for any signs of movement, any hint that he might have been discovered. His arm throbbed with an immobilizing pain. Distant, booming thuds echoed from the rocks and seemed to suck away the air. He longed for the cave, to simply be there, to be anywhere that would get him out from under the open sky and off the slope. His head rang as though hit with a mallet. He needed the cave, which he imagined had been custom-built for him, for his shelter, perhaps by his father or his grandfather. His imagination made it a living thing, a rescuer, an active participant in his struggle.

Perhaps he passed out. He lost track of time. Eventually, because he had no choice, he stood. His arm did not seem to be bleeding as much, but he did not dare to look underneath the cloth he kept wrapped around it. He walked around a subtle
bend in the hill that did not look like anything at all when viewed from below, but which stretched farther back into a seam in the hillside, its depth becoming apparent only as he entered it. He climbed up what turned out to be a shallow gorge in the rock, mostly hidden from view when seen from below. He surveyed the landscape again. Up the hill, on the other side of this crevice, he saw a flat, shelflike protrusion balanced on the steep slope, and some outcroppings of vegetation, scrub brush and dwarf pine, and farther down the rock were tiny groves of elm and birch, tucked into a hidden part of the mountain.

The sun was descending in the western sky when he stepped around a corner, up over the shallow ledge, and onto a rocky flat, which had a clear view of a large section of the valley. A ledge, but no cave, only the mountainside covered by a heavy layer of dead coarse brush and sage. But as he looked closer, prodded around in the tangle of branches and thorns, he was unable to find the rock wall which the brush appeared to cover. Instead he found that the stone curved inward, and that the vegetation was not well attached, as he first thought, but that it came off in his hand when he grabbed it, revealing a dark recess behind.

Little by little, the branches fell away, revealing a shallow opening about the same depth as the ledge, the ledge itself serving as a kind of threshold. His imagination had turned the cave into a kind of temple, but reality was rougher. He was not disappointed, desperate as he was for any kind of shelter before the approaching night, but at the same time, the shallow depression in the rock wall did not live up to the image he
had created in his mind. Judging by the dark burn marks on the ceiling and the packed earth that made up the floor, he concluded that it had been used as a shelter in the past, perhaps during an earlier war.

The sun was sinking quickly, and the temperature began to drop with it. Younis set about as best he could making the cave marginally more habitable, clearing out what brush and stone he could with his good left arm. He was no stranger to sleeping outside, although he usually had a fire during all but the warmest parts of summer. But he carried nothing with him to make a fire, no matches, no flint, and the prospect of spending the night exposed and alone without warmth terrified him.

He pushed away some stones from the cave floor, enough to create a flat area on which to lie, and dragged a fir bough to cover it as a kind of rough pallet. Then he took the dry brush he had pulled from the cave mouth and stacked it up around the rim of the ledge, to prevent the opening from being seen from below. This done, the sun dipping below the horizon, he crawled inside the cave, exhausted, and blacked out.

He woke shivering in the dark, the cave mouth edged by the crescent moon’s silvery light. His teeth rattled together and his fingers and toes had gone numb. With tremendous effort, he stood up and walked to the entrance of the cave, moving
his limbs in an effort to regain some feeling. As he left the cave and walked onto the rocky ledge, he was bathed by the moon, the same wan light that anointed the great valley laid out before him. A thousand visible stars beamed tiny versions of the same pale cast, making everything appear to glow from within. Gradually his limbs, though still cold, regained most of their feeling, and his forearm throbbed. He could clearly see his breath, which seemed to be painted with the same silver sheen. Despite his cold and hunger, he found comfort in the sight of it, precious as the unknowable future, as though the concentrated energy of everything he saw were being focused upon him, standing high up on the mountain, looking out over all the world.

Jonas allows this image to linger. He has always liked this detail, this thought: the moonlight, himself looking out on the valley. He is not lying about it, either. At least, no more so than anyone who tells a story. He was there. If anything, it was more dramatic than he describes. But he can’t help thinking that maybe he is overdoing it. Perhaps he describes the moonlight once too often. As he watches Rose’s face, Jonas becomes concerned that he has gone too far.

The difficulty, he realizes, is inherent in the use of both words and memory. Their imprecision combines to make it nearly impossible for him to tell a true story. Even as he speaks,
he is conscious of the fact that it wasn’t exactly as he describes. Had he really stopped beside the river that night, looked out into it and thought those things, or had he done that on a previous evening, and then, once again, superimposed one memory on top of another? Does he describe the river accurately, his frantic journey along it, or does he use a sort of verbal shorthand to convey to Rose the general picture, and allow her imagination to fill in the details? Is there any other way to tell her what happened?

Because what Jonas wants, after all, is not simply to describe for Rose a mountain or a cave or his desperation. What he wants is for Rose to feel something, fear or pain or anger or heartache, even if only as a semblance of the emotion he detects within himself, even as he sits in her living room and tells this version of the story. He wants her to know, needs her to know, needs to place it all into context, needs to explain himself, wants her to understand.

So he continues to talk, continues to describe for her how it was, or how he remembers it, or at least how he has convinced himself he remembers it. How scared he was, how angry, how desperate, how alone. And if it comes across as stilted or overwrought, if in his effort to commune with her, conjure for her his reality, he uses commonly held devices, if he describes once too often the strange crescent moon that lit up the world, or his shivering, or the accursed cave in which he was forced to spend the days of his youth, it is in the service of a greater purpose, and he can easily be forgiven.

At some point, Younis was woken by convulsions. He lay on his side at the mouth of the cave, legs drawn up and wrapped by his arms. He shivered a little more and closed his eyes, tensing his muscles in an effort to keep away the cold. He shivered again, and moved to stand up, recover some warmth through the motion of doing so. But as he put his hands to the cold earth and began to push himself up, he found that he could not do it, that he lacked the strength to lift his body. He tried again, and again, but found that he could not make himself rise. He tried to open his eyes, but found that he could not, or perhaps, he thought, with a panic suppressed by fatigue, his eyes were open but he could not see anything, or perhaps the world had simply disappeared.

The shivering stopped suddenly, replaced by a distant warmth, and Younis smiled weakly to himself. He drifted in a void, a blackness so complete that a moonless night was like broad daytime in comparison. Images confronted him and then disappeared before he could focus on them, made compelling by his inability to resolve them. He chased after them, trying desperately to focus on something, anything, and a gentle, spinning sensation took hold, rocking him back and forth, lulling him, but simultaneously making it impossible to focus on any one thing, impossible to think, impossible to move. Helpless and exposed, vague visions approaching him from all
directions, he gave up trying to focus on them, let them go, and allowed himself to drift.

And then he was back in his village, where everything was as it was supposed to be, his mother walking out to the pasture at the end of the dusty road, carrying naan wrapped in cloth and hot tea, which he took, steaming, in the bright cool air. The sheep surrounded him, and he protected them with devotion, for their wool, for the warmth and the food they provided. He sipped from the earthen bowl his mother handed him, the tea sweetened and faintly spiced, and he looked up into green eyes that so readily mirrored his own. As he looked, her face changed, growing gradually lighter and lighter, as though the sun overhead were drawing itself closer to the earth. He looked around to see that everything grew brighter, less resolute: the pasture, the stone wall, the earth itself fading away, losing contrast in the light. Soon he could see only her most obvious features, her eyes and nose and mouth, her dark hair, and everything else, her skin and wrinkled brow, her arms and hands, grew brighter with each passing moment, until all he could see was light, and nothing else existed. She disappeared into it, disappeared along with everything else, everything he knew, the pasture and the sheep and the hills and the village and even the river itself, the source of all of it, everything he knew, all of it blending into a golden light that was suddenly his entire existence.

The light bathed him and he woke, lying on his side beside a crackling fire, covered by a thin blanket, his limbs prickling and stiff as the feeling gradually returned to them, the flame’s glow wrestling with the darkness and cold. The smell of cooking food violently ignited his suppressed hunger. Squinting into the flickering light, he could make out only a shadow across the fire, a presence overwhelming the refuge in which he had been so isolated. He closed his eyes, mildly surprised to find that he was not yet dead, then opened them again, tried to focus on the figure opposite him.

“Salaam aleikum,”
said the figure.

Younis heard the words, clear and accented, oddly pronounced, but was too weak and shocked to respond, and then he lost consciousness again.

“Are you okay? Can you hear my greeting?” said the figure. “I said, ‘Peace be with you.’”

Younis rubbed his head, then tried turning to get a good look at the place where the voice came from, but could not move. Gradually he brought the figure into vague focus, adjusting his vision to the harsh firelight. The man was dressed in an odd mix of local and foreign clothes, camouflage fatigues devoid of patches or insignia, a kamiz, and a pakol cap. He gazed levelly at Younis, patiently awaiting his response.

“And also with you,” Younis finally replied, weakly. “And you in return? Are you well?” His voice was barely louder than a whisper.

“I am well, sir, thank you,” said the man.

“You are English?” said Younis, in English.

“I speak English,” said the man.

“Why are you here?”

“I guess I am lost.”

Younis, his mind addled, tried to force his head clear and strained not just to understand the stranger’s English, but to place it. He could not, as it was so dissimilar from the English he had heard his father, or anyone else, speak.

He could feel the strength flowing back into his limbs, spurred by the warmth of the fire, and abruptly he tried to stand.

“If it is not too forward, sir,” began Younis, “may I ask where are you…” But he stumbled weakly, and fell back down to the earth.

“Have something to eat,” said the man, and stepped around the fire, stopping to pick up a shallow pan that had been warming there, and offered it to Younis. “I’m afraid it’s not much.”

Younis shoveled the food from the pan to his mouth with
his hand. It tasted like beef and some sort of mashed vegetable, but had a plastic taste he could not place. He had to keep himself from throwing it back up out of his empty stomach. The man offered some water from an opaque bottle that faintly carried the same plastic odor.

“Are you from the village down there,” asked the man, pointing his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the valley, toward the bottom of the mountain.

Younis thought first to answer truthfully, and then thought better of it.

“No,” he said. “I come from Yokshal, on the other side of the mountain,” naming a village he had heard his father speak about occasionally, the home of some distant cousins, or perhaps an uncle.

“Huh,” said the man, evidently either unfamiliar or unconcerned with the other village. “We must have come from opposite directions. I came up from the river.”

As his eyes became more accustomed to the light, Younis could make out the man’s features a little more clearly, filling in the vague outline. He was several days unshaven, with light blue eyes rarely seen in that part of the world. His left forearm was wrapped in a dirty bandage, a mirror image of the wound on Younis’s right arm, and a thin cut, just beginning to heal, accented his left cheek and temple. He was well armed, a long rifle propped against a rock beside him, and the hilt of a combat knife protruded from a strap around his thigh.

“How long have you been here?” asked the man.

“I could ask you the same question,” said Younis, his voice
weak and rasping.

“Here?” said the man, motioning to the ground around him. “About two hours. This part of the world? Nearly a year.”

“I don’t know how long I have been here,” said Younis, slowly gathering his strength. “I fell, injuring my arm, as you can see, and came here to this shelter because I could not walk home. But I have always lived here.”

The man looked at Younis coldly, as though measuring his words, then smiled a little half smile and said, nodding at Younis’s arm, “I can take a look at that, if you want. I have some supplies with me.”