Human Solutions

by Avi Silberstein

  Ernesto and I worked in silence for the better part of an hour, until the lunch bell rang. The dining hall was louder than I had ever seen it—the colonists seemed energized and in unusually high spirits. I asked Ernesto what was going on. He shrugged. “Nine times out of ten, this means Uncle Peter is away.”

  Sure enough, there was no sign of Uncle Peter, and no blackboard. Lunch was potato salad with a hearty bean and vegetable stew. I ate hungrily and went back for seconds. When I returned, Ernesto got up and picked up his tray. “Take the afternoon off,” he said. “There’s not much that needs to be done at the library. Go read a book, or do some work in the fields.”

  It was a warm and clear afternoon. I made my way over to the long, orderly rows of crops and approached the first colonist I saw. He was a man of about my age and was intently weeding something. He was using mostly his hands, but, ­occasionally, he would scrape at the soil with a small trowel.

  “What’s that you’re weeding?” I asked.

  “Carrots.”

  “Wouldn’t you like a hand with that?”

  The man shook his head tightly.

  “What if I start all the way at the other end of the bed?”

  “I guess,” he said.

  “Great. And what should I be doing, exactly?”

  “Pull out everything but these,” he said, gesturing at the small, feathery carrot plants that were only a couple of inches tall. “Be gentle with them.”

  I told the man that I needed a trowel and a wide-brimmed hat like his. He gestured for me to follow him. I liked how he said that: “Be gentle with them.” I wanted to start telling people to be gentle with things. It seemed like a good indicator of kindness—to be able to say that and truly mean it.

  He unlocked the tool shed, and we found what we needed inside. With a bucket and trowel in hand, I went to the opposite end of the carrot bed and squatted down in the dirt. The weeds came out easily—the soil was soft and moist—and I found a good working rhythm. A couple of hours must have passed before the man and I finally converged.

  I was on my way back to the library when the dinner bell rang. Once again, there was no blackboard and no Uncle Peter, and the colonists seemed much more relaxed and sociable. I got up as everyone was eating to announce that the first day of rehearsals would be that night. Everyone who had signed up—as well as anyone who wanted to join—should come to the dining hall at seven o’clock.

  By the time I had finished eating, it was almost seven. I enlisted some help in moving a few of the dining tables, clearing a space which would serve as the stage. Soon everyone had left except for the would-be actors: a group of twenty or so boys and girls (including Claudio, I was glad to see), who seemed to be excited.

  “We’re all actors,” I began. “Every last one of us. We are acting when we pretend to be happy about something that is actually making us sad, or when we pretend to be listening to someone when, in fact, we are not.”

  I paused to let this sink in. The children looked at me attentively, with only a few exceptions.

  “We’ll be putting on a play, but before we think too much about that, we’re going to do some acting exercises.” I grouped the children into threes or fours and told them that I would be giving each group a children’s book.

  “These are books that most of you have not read,” I said. “They are not Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs. Each group will have some time to prepare a short performance of your book, and we will then take turns doing these in front of everyone else. The other groups will try to guess what the book is about, based on your performance. Here’s the catch: you can’t use words or props. Only actions and facial expressions.”

  The children buzzed about excitedly in their groups—I was reminded of the students at my acting studio, all of them eager to try being someone new for a change, if only for a few moments.

  The first group got up to perform—I did not remember what book I had given them, but it seemed to involve a lot of stomping and chasing each other around. The other children yelled out guesses, and, in the end, the group members (who looked genuinely surprised that nobody had guessed correctly) informed us that it was a book about a cat that gets adopted by a family who has a big and unfriendly dog.

  By the time the last group performed, we were all worn out, and I sent the children off with a few tired, congratulatory words. There were things I needed to work on for the escape, but I was exhausted and could hardly muster up the energy to take my clothes off before dropping onto my bed and falling asleep.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The next day, Uncle Peter was back. The blackboard period was especially long at lunch, perhaps to make up for all the sins that had happened while he was gone. He was in top form, going from a calm whisper to an incensed roar in mere seconds, pacing back and forth in front of the blackboard. He succeeded in squashing down any elevations in mood that had occurred in his absence. When I went by his office for our interview later, he was in high spirits.

  “It’s good to be back,” he said, gesturing for me to have a seat. “Yes, yes, yes!”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “I don’t know how you did it—living all those years in that garbage dump of a city,” he said.

  “You were in Santiago?” I asked. I turned on the tape recorder. Uncle Peter frowned.

  “I was doing business there.”

  “Oh?”

  “But you and I will talk more about that later,” he added, with finality.

  “Last time, we left off with you roaming around the German countryside, attracting followers everywhere you went.”

  “Ah, yes,” Uncle Peter said, leaning back in his chair. It was the summertime, and I had a light rucksack with a blanket and a canteen and some food in it. Everywhere I went, I was welcomed with open arms, and everything I asked for I was given. Rides to the next village, a hay-filled barn to spread my blanket, a warm meal at a family’s supper table–all these things were given to me by the grace of God, and I began to realize that I had a mission in this world.

  “After a while, these followers were begging me to settle down and start a church, a place where they could hear me speak every week and where we could all build a spiritual community under God. I could not start a colony in Germany—land was too expensive, you see—and I heard from a friend that the far-away country of Chile was essentially giving away land. I went to the Chilean consulate and bought a 4,400-acre tract of land, sight unseen. I traveled there with a small group of my followers, and we began to rebuild the decaying ranch that was on the land. Two years after that, the rest of my followers emigrated here—another two hundred of them—officially forming the Colony. That was twenty-six years ago.”

  “The Colony is built on 4,400 acres of land?” I asked.

  “No, no,” Uncle Peter said, waving his hand dismissively. “That was the original piece of land. Since then, we’ve annexed many neighboring acreages—we are now at ten times that: 45,000 acres.”

  “I noticed there was an old church near the blueberry fields,” I said.

  Uncle Peter’s face contorted for a brief moment and then he coughed violently into his handkerchief.

  “The church was sold to us by an order of nuns that was looking to move farther south–to where there are more Mapuche Indians for them to convert—I mean ‘help.’ ”

  I decided not to press it, and Uncle Peter launched into a tiresome explanation of how the other lots were acquired. I struggled to pay attention and eventually managed to ask him a series of irrelevant questions that knocked him off track. He noticed the time and declared the interview to be over. I thanked him for his time and stood up.

  “One more thing,” Uncle Peter said. “You know how to use a typewriter, correct?”

  I nodded.

  “Good—you are one of the only ones here who does. Therefore, I will require your assistance with a very delicate and important task. A guard will come to get you after dinner. Do exactly as he says.”
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br />   THIRTY-TWO

  I found the carrot-weeding man elbows-deep in a bush. “Green beans,” he explained, jostling his half-filled basket. He told me to grab a basket from the shed. If I wanted to, I could work opposite him, he conceded. I squatted down across the bed from the man and began picking green beans.

  “You can pull them harder than that,” he said, without looking up. He showed me how to yank the beans off and assured me it would not hurt the plant.

  “Thank you,” I said. “My name is Javier.”

  “I know.”

  I waited for him to volunteer his own name.

  “You’re Juan, right?” I said. I didn’t look up as I said this. That seemed to be the rules of the game when talking in the fields: it’s allowed, but no making eye contact or pausing, or you’ll get slowed down.

  “Victor,” he said.

  We picked in silence for a while—the beans were the exact same shade of green as the rest of the plant, which made finding them a challenge.

  “I work in the kitchen,” I said. “Making breakfast in the mornings.”

  Victor was a couple of paces ahead of me.

  “What’s your favorite breakfast that we make here?” I said.

  The bush in front of Victor shook under his rough, exploring hands. I looked away.

  “Sausages and eggs,” he said quietly. “My father would make them.”

  There was something in the corners of his mouth, a slight downturn—subtle enough that I was not sure I had seen it. But then I looked at the rise and fall of his breathing and noticed that it had slowed down a bit. I thought there might be something there with his father, but I didn’t want to explore just yet.

  “You weren’t born here?” I said.

  “In Valdivia,” he said. “Have you been?”

  I shook my head. I knew only that it was an old, wood-shingled city in the south. Victor told me about the city, that it was built at the juncture of two rivers—the Rio Valdivia and the Rio Calle Calle.

  I thought about the rivers and about a father who woke up early enough to make breakfast for his son. “Did you fish much, growing up?” I said.

  “My father was a fisherman,” he said. Again, the corners of his mouth—there it was.

  “And my mother,” he continued, “a server at one of the restaurants that lined the fisherman’s wharf. They met one night at a dance, and out I came ten months later. We were all happy, but, then, when I was twelve, my mother discovered the German Club. There were lots of Germans—Valdivia was colonized by them in the 1800s as part of Chile’s efforts to populate the south.

  “At this German Club, my mother gets involved with some young skinheads. You know what that is? And then, one morning, real early, just after my father has gone out to his fishing boat, she wakes me up and pulls me by the hand to the bus station. We’re going on an adventure, she tells me, but I want my father to come, too. We catch the first northbound bus of the day, and we’re banging at the gates to the Colony that same afternoon.”

  “I never saw my father again,” Victor said, “and he never saw his wife, either.”

  Neither of us said anything for a few moments. I knew that Victor was someplace else—a remote and vulnerable place.

  “Listen,” I said, “I need a hat—the sun is getting to me.”

  Victor looked over at the shed.

  “You don’t have to come along,” I said. “I’d just need to borrow the keys.”

  Victor hesitated.

  “It’s all the same to me,” I said, shrugging.

  He handed me the keys, and I went over to the shed. I knew I didn’t have much time; there was only so long it could take to pull a hat from the basket by the door. I found a rope coiled tightly in the corner and tossed it out the back window of the shed. I did the same with a hammer that was dangling from the edge of a bucket. I’d come back to get them later. When I emerged from the shed, Victor was looking my way. I waved and lifted the hat. It was too easy, sometimes.

  We picked beans until the dinner bell rang. I walked back to the library slowly, giving Ernesto some time to leave for the dining hall. The library was empty when I finally arrived. I went into the Library Staff Only room and retrieved my tape recorder and a blank cassette. I pressed the Record button down and hurried over to the dining hall. There were only a few stragglers in line—everyone else was sitting and eating—and, by the time I had my tray of food, there were only a few empty seats. These seats were, as usual, all clustered near the front of the room, where Uncle Peter and his tall blackboard stood. I took a seat right up next to Uncle Peter, my tape recorder whirring quietly in the pocket of my pants, its microphone carefully positioned near the opening.

  Uncle Peter worked his way through a few of the names on the list.

  “Who’s next here?” Uncle Peter said, craning his neck to look at the blackboard. “Marta S.”

  A woman slowly got to her feet.

  “It seems to me,” Uncle Peter said, “that this is the third time you’ve been on the blackboard this month.”

  Marta was shaking her head slowly, back and forth. Uncle Peter looked over at one of the guards and made a gesture with his hand. The guard whipped out a small notebook and began to flip through it, counting silently with a dip of his head. He looked up at Uncle Peter and nodded.

  Uncle Peter turned to the rest of us, triumphantly. “It seems like we have a bit of a troublemaker here, wouldn’t you say? A pest, even. Are you a pest, Marta S?”

  I could see Marta’s eyes growing wider, her face growing redder.

  “Answer the question!” he demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Marta said. “I don’t think I am.”

  “She doesn’t think she is,” Uncle Peter said, turning away from her. “Why don’t you tell us why your name is on the blackboard, then, and we will decide for ourselves whether you are a pest or not.”

  Marta S. looked around the room accusingly, looking for a clue as to who had put her name on the board. I could see then that the sinner’s blackboard was a brilliant way to breed distrust among the colonists. This lack of group cohesion meant that Uncle Peter did not have to fear an uprising or revolution among his ranks. I looked up at him. His posture was perfect, and his eyes were fixed on Marta S.

  “I’m waiting!” Uncle Peter said. “And I hate waiting.”

  “Maybe my name is on there because I was rude to a kitchen worker who asked me to clean off—”

  “THAT IS NOT A SIN!” Uncle Peter roared. His voice dropped to barely a whisper. “And you know that very well, you pest.”

  “Uncle Peter,” Marta S. said “I’m begging you—”

  “Stop it with your STUPID BLABBERING! Are you going to make me repeat myself? You are nothing but a CLOD OF DIRT!”

  I looked up—Uncle Peter’s glass eye seemed to be vibrating in its socket. Here was a man who spent much of his time telling people to shut up. I intended to use that to my advantage.

  Uncle Peter gestured at the guards, and they advanced on Marta S. with a potato sack in hand. I lowered my head until it was directly over my bowl of soup. There were fat globules floating there and chunks of meat that were tenderly bumping up against potatoes and carrots. I tried to lose myself in the act of eating soup. The meat had once been a cow—I could see it then, grazing contentedly in the field—and the potatoes had once been buried beneath the ground, lifted out triumphantly by rough hands and scrubbed in the kitchen sink not far from where I sat. I continued on in this way, thinking about the carrots, onions, garlic, and parsley, until I got to the barley. I had never seen barley growing anywhere and had no idea what it would look like. Something like wheat, perhaps.

  “I’ll tell you what I did,” Marta S. said quietly.

  Uncle Peter held up his hand—the guards stopped advancing.

  “I was working in the fields yesterday, and it was so very hot that I almost fainted. I needed to cool off, and I was not far from the river, so I went down there. I didn’t want to wet my
clothes, so I took them off and jumped into the river and then right back out. Nobody saw me—I didn’t think anybody saw me.” She looked around accusingly.

  “You took your clothes off,” Uncle Peter said, “in a place other than your bedroom or the bathroom?”

  This did not sound like much of a sin to me.

  “I was almost fainting from the heat, Uncle Peter!”

  “WHAT IF a group of boys had walked by? WHAT IF a group of men?”

  “I was very quick, Uncle Peter. I would have heard them—”

  “SILENCE! I’m thinking.”

  We waited for Uncle Peter to pass his judgment. Marta S. looked fearfully at the guards who were still surrounding her.

  “Step back,” Uncle Peter called to his guards, waving them away. “We won’t be needing the potato sack.”

  “Oh, thank you, Uncle Peter!” Marta S. said.

  Uncle Peter looked around at the rest of us. “Does it feel like this room is hot to you, right now?”

  Nobody knew what the right answer was. Marta S. looked at him uncertainly.

  “You look warm,” Uncle Peter said, turning back to Marta S. “Maybe you’d like to take a swim?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Take your clothes off.”

  Marta S. looked around. “Uncle Peter …”

  “NOW!”

  Marta S. undid her hair bonnet and let it drop. She fixed her gaze on the floor—her face and neck bright red. She undid the buttons on the front of her dress and lifted it off. She was strong and stocky—the way you’d expect a woman who spends most days in the fields to look. Her underwear was beige and utilitarian, and had been mended many times over.

  “The rest of it, too,” Uncle Peter said. He had turned off the microphone. The effect was somehow menacing.

  Marta S. was crying now, tears streaking down her round cheeks. She unhooked her bra and shrugged it off her shoulders. Then she stepped out of her underwear. Her face and chest were flushed a blotchy red. There were tremors running through her flesh, and I wanted nothing more than to wrap a blanket around this woman and take her as far away from this place as possible.