The Cloud of Unknowing (5 page)

“Ask not for whom the bell tolls, boychik,” Lou said.

The windows of the house, tilted skyward, reflected steel-grey clouds gathering in the western sky.

In the morning they biked along the Lackawanna River, through Wilkes-Barre, then northwest on Highway 309. A few miles on, they hit the steepest climb of the trip so far. They switchbacked until traffic got too heavy, then inched up the breakdown lane. Jonathan's mind emptied of everything but forward motion. He strained against the pedals and stared at the small patch of road crawling beneath him, and when he looked up, he could no longer see his father. The grade steepened even more. Defeated, he got off his bike and walked, leaning his forearms on the handlebars. After a while he decided that pushing the bike was as much work as riding it, so he got back on, almost tipping over as he struggled to gain momentum on the hill. He found Lou resting under a tree in the next village with the map spread out in front of him. He leaned his bike against his father's and sat down heavily.

“Guess what they call this range we're in,” Lou said.

Jonathan shrugged.

“The Endless Mountains.”

When they set off again under thickening clouds, Jonathan was determined to get out front, or at least keep pace, but once again Lou pulled ahead. Every time Jonathan spotted him, the distance between them grew until his father disappeared
entirely. The road went up and down along a ridge, neither losing nor gaining much altitude. Jonathan stared straight ahead, not looking at the countryside as it passed. He was glad to be alone now, relieved of the obligation to be good company. “
Eat my dust, Dad
,” he screamed through clenched teeth as he pushed up a hill, checking over his shoulder to be sure he was still alone.

Late in the afternoon, he spotted Lou's bike outside a trolley car diner and found him inside, sitting at the counter. A fry cook leaned on the counter in front of him, smoking. Seeing Jonathan, the cook stubbed out his cigarette and straightened up.

“Hey!” Lou said, swiveling around. “I was just talking about you. No one believes I have a twelve-year-old son who can ride his bike up a mountain.”

“Mine don't do nothing but watch TV,” the cook said. “Good for you, kid.” He slapped the counter twice and turned back to the grill.

While they ate their sandwiches, Jonathan calculated their mileage on a napkin. He made a column of the distances between the little red arrows on the map, then added them up and checked his addition, going over their route to make sure he hadn't left anything out.

“Whattaya got?” Lou asked, mopping his plate with a bread crust.

“Fifty-seven miles so far.”

“Let me see the map.” He put on his reading glasses. “How are you holding up?”

“Good.”

“Why don't we bypass Williamsport, then? Let's see if we can make it here.” He pointed at a town where the road they were following intersected Route 15.

When the rain came, it wasn't a soaking one. It softened the line of trees and released perfume from the yellowing ferns alongside the road. Jonathan passed a sign that said, “State Game Lands Number 134.” He realized he hadn't seen a house for miles. At Route 15 he found Lou waiting outside a boarded-up gas station.

“It looks like the town's gone,” Lou said.

“You said there would be a motel.”

“I guess I was wrong.”

The mountain air atomized their breath. “I'm cold,” Jonathan said.”

“I don't know what to tell you,” Lou said. “We can turn around and go to Williamsport if that's what you want.”

“No, I don't want to backtrack.”

“Good. Neither do I.”

They pushed on, riding together now. They put on their headlamps when it got dark. Trees, fields, collapsing sheds, clusters of trailers scrolled past in the thin bands of light until they came to a darkened house. The residents had turned in for the night or moved away; they couldn't tell which, and they decided not to knock on the door. Exhausted, they spread out their sleeping bags on the wide front porch and ate a dinner of sardines and crackers. Lou rolled up his half-towel for neck support—a habit he'd picked up in Japan when he was in the army—and Jonathan wadded his pants and shirt into a pillow.

A freight train blasted by in the middle of the night, so close it shook the porch, and for a moment Jonathan didn't know where he was. Then he saw his panniers and his sneakers, stuffed with newspaper to soak up the day's rain. The sky was clear now. The moon, high over the trees across the road, flooded the porch with light. He could count every link on the chain of his bicycle, leaning against the rail in front of him.

“Lou, are you awake?”

“Hmm.”

“Lou?”

“Hmm?”

“Did your dad ever go with you?”

“Go where?”

“You know, like the time you went to Oklahoma?”

“No,” Lou said, “Zadie had to mind the store.” He adjusted his towel. “We've got a big climb tomorrow, Jonathan.” Soon he was snoring softly, inhaling and exhaling the fruits and berries of the air.

While Jonathan waited for sleep to return, he thought of Lou at fourteen—just a few years older than he was now—running alongside a slow-moving train, grabbing on to the side. Lou had stopped snoring. When Jonathan looked over he was lying perfectly still, washed in a cold light. Jonathan went back to his reverie.

A dark, flat place sped past the open door of the boxcar. It was all he could summon when he thought of Oklahoma. The train slowed, then stopped in a sleeping town. This time, though, instead of his father, Jonathan saw himself turning his pockets inside out for the man at the jail.

Moscow, 1968

Helena's three-family building sat on the back half of a divided lot on the Cambridge–Somerville line, tucked in behind another house. A trellis, sagging from the weight of a Concord grape vine, covered the flagstone walk. Crushed fruit littered the concrete steps leading to the porch, where all the names on the mailboxes gave an impression of serious overcrowding. Below Helena's name on the third floor mailbox was that of her son, Jonathan. He lived in Jamaica Plain but registered his car in Cambridge. A long list of Tanzanian names covered the second floor mailbox: Membe, Batenga, Bukurura, Amani, etc. There were actually only three single men living in the apartment, but not always the same three. As they moved in and out, the list was appended with new names, written on masking tape in various hands. On the mailbox for the first floor, along with “Gulnaev”—Helena's Section 8 tenants, a family from Chechnya—were several other Chechen surnames; probably relatives using their address for some official business.

It had been a nice little junkyard district when Helena bought the building fifteen years earlier, in the early '90s—only a few houses on her end of the block. Since then, condominium complexes and parking garages had sprung up everywhere. Her building was hemmed in on three sides, but her south windows faced the open sky above her neighbor's back yard. One moonlit night, Helena and Jonathan had sneaked past the neighbor's house with two passive solar panels and installed them on south wall of her building to supplement the forced-air heating system. The results had been disappointing, though, and now
she was blowing insulation into the ceiling of her kitchen with a machine she'd rented by the hour. She worked slowly. At seventy-one, she'd become unsteady on a stepladder. Insulation escaped from the keyholes she'd cut in the drywall before she had a chance to cover them up, and clouds of itchy fluff blew around the room, sticking to her sweaty arms and neck and to her tights. The hose kept clogging. Each time, she had to climb down, turn off the machine, and pull the impacted wad out of the nozzle. She was beginning to worry that she wouldn't make it back to the rental place before they closed.

She heard a knock on the back door and descended the ladder carefully. Zabet, one of the Chechens from the first floor, stood in the dark stairwell holding a Pyrex dish. Zabet's hair, cut stylishly short and dyed a reddish brown when Helena had last seen it, was covered now with a black hijab. It made a striking combination with her thin, gracefully arched eyebrows, which were tattooed on—as were her eye- and lip-liner. Helena smoothed the fluffs of insulation from her own hair and asked Zabet in. The Gulnaevs were political refugees. They had been living in Helena's first-floor apartment for seven and a half years. Zabet and her husband, Axmet, had two children: a son, Adlan, now twenty, and his sister Alla, who was seventeen and no longer living at home. All of them were dark and lithe, with long, straight noses and intelligent, almond-shaped eyes. Their beauty somehow made their problems seem more tragic.

When they first arrived, Zabet often came to Helena for help. Helena welcomed the opportunity to use her college Russian. She read employment ads for Zabet and helped her apply for food stamps. These were the sorts of things she'd dealt with herself thirty-five years earlier when she was newly divorced, with a son and a daughter of her own. She found charter schools
for the children. Also a Balkan choir, a homework club, and a dance school that offered sliding scale tuition.

At first Helena had a hard time making sense of their story—because her Russian was rusty, and because they'd moved around so much. Axmet and Zabet had met as college students in Novosibirsk and fallen in love, to the disappointment of both families, who'd had other plans for them. They'd lived in Grozny and in Zabet's home country of Dagestan before settling in Kyrgyzstan, where Axmet had relatives. Then, around the time of the second Chechen war, Axmet had lost his job. Zabet described arrests and beatings—sometimes attributing them to ethnic hatred, sometimes to bad luck or random chance, sometimes to professional or family jealousies. Even when Helena didn't understand the words—
visilat
,
obvinyat
—she could guess their meanings from Zabet's dramatic expressions.

During the their few years in Cambridge, things seemed to go all right for the Gulnaevs. Helena helped Zabet pay for a cosmetics course, and she got a job in a salon in Brookline, where the clients were mostly Russian Jews. Axmet found work at a muffler shop. Somehow, though, setbacks always outpaced advances, and they weren't quite able to cover their expenses. Axmet had health problems. Adlan graduated from high school and enrolled in classes at Bunker Hill Community College, but he dropped out within a few months. Zabet told Helena it was because his classes were too easy—that he was planning to apply to some real colleges.

As their problems mounted, the family seemed to retrench. Zabet and Alla began covering their hair. Adlan grew a beard and began attending a local mosque. Only Axmet was unaltered; he still shaved and wore work pants, running shoes, and fitted t-shirts that showed off his boxer's physique. Then, unexpectedly, they took Alla out of school. The concern was that she was “having boyfriends.”

“She's becoming a wild girl, Galina,” Zabet explained. “You don't know how wild.”

While Helena was still thinking of a way to get Alla back in school, she learned of her engagement to a Chechen boy whose uncle was a wealthy businessman in Kazakhstan.

“Does she want this?” Helena asked.

“Yes,” Zabet said. “She wants
away
.”

Alla and her new husband would live in Almaty. She could finish school there, Zabet said. She was interested in the law, or maybe social work. Helena couldn't honestly say her prospects there were worse in Almaty than in Cambridge. Somehow, though, she ended up back in Chechnya living with her in-laws. In Grozny, of all places, where the Gulnaevs' journey had begun. Within a year she had a baby.

Zabet handed Helena the Pyrex dish and stepped into the kitchen. “I brought you cabbage with meats and rice. I think you like this before.”

“
Golubtsy
,” insisted Helena. “
Bolshoi spasiba
.”

“Yes, of course,
golubtsy
.” She collapsed in a chair. “Oh, Galina!” This was what she called Helena. “Is problem with Alla. She is in Grozny hospital.”

Helena sat down across the table and winced. “Alla is sick?”

“She have a fever, very high fever, and pain in stomach.”

“What do the doctors say?”

“Well, you know Movladi's mother make her work too hard.”

Helena had heard this already. It was much as Zabet would reveal of any misgivings. “But do they know why she has a fever? Is it some kind of infection?”

“Yes, infection.”

“What kind of infection? What's wrong with her?”

Zabet tugged nervously on the sleeve of her sweater. “I wish she could go to Kizlyar. To the better hospital, for antibiotics.” Zabet's family was in Kizlyar, just over the Dagestan border.

Helena shook her head, not understanding. “They aren't treating her? No antibiotics?”

“Of course, but I call this morning and she still have a high fever. I don't think they are giving her real drugs. You have to pay to make sure they give her real drugs, not counterfeit. I know the doctor in Kizlyar to get them.”

“Maybe she should come back here if she's sick.”