Human Solutions

by Avi Silberstein

  Several years later, I received in the mail a copy of Señor Reyes’ latest book. He had named a character in it “Javier Gonzalez”—not a particularly lovable character, but it was still a nice gesture. His inscription on the front page read: “To Javier, who gave me a week in my homeland when I needed it most. With lots of love, Mr. Such-and-such.”

  FORTY-THREE

  I spent the rest of the afternoon in the Library’s Staff Only room. I worked on a cassette tape labeled “ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?” and then turned to editing and transcribing the testimonies given by the tortured political prisoners.

  Dinner was an uneventful affair, and I went to bed as soon as I could. I awoke a few hours later, at what must have been close to midnight. The moon was only half full but bright, and I tread quickly down the silent roads of the Colony. When I arrived at the goat barn, I fed the goats a pile of apples to calm their bleating. I called out Tibor’s name as loud as I dared until he returned a groggy whisper.

  “Is there a guard around?” I asked.

  “They patrol every hour or so at night.”

  I looked around. “Where do they approach from?”

  “The main road,” Tibor said. “With a flashlight, always. You keep your eyes out, you can’t miss them.”

  “I brought you a chicken sandwich,” I said. “It’s coming over the fence now.” I lobbed the paper bag over to where Tibor was sitting. It landed on a pile of hay.

  “When are we leaving?” Tibor said. “I’m ready to kill that guard who’s here in the daytime.”

  “Sunday,” I said. “I’m working on the plan, but I need your help. Look in the bag.”

  Tibor opened the bag. He pulled out a chicken sandwich, wrapped in two layers of thick wax paper. There was another object in the bag, wrapped in a sock.

  “It’s a tape recorder,” I said. “I need a recording of you talking. I’ll explain later. You can talk about whatever you want—just know that Uncle Peter is going to be listening to it.”

  “I’ve got lots of things to say to—”

  “Start saying them, then,” I interrupted. “I don’t know how much time we have until the guards come around.”

  I found a place where I could sit with my back against a willow tree and keep an eye out on the road. Ten minutes or so must have gone by, and all I could hear was the low murmur of Tibor’s voice coming from the barn. I must have nodded off, because the next thing I knew, there was the sound of laughter and the bouncing beams of a pair of flashlights rapidly approaching. I hissed a word of warning to Tibor. He switched off the tape recorder and buried it under a pile of hay.

  I climbed up the willow as high as I could, my heart beating wildly and my breath coming in short gasps. It was not the ideal tree for hiding—I soon discovered—for lack of foliage, but it had to make do. I tried to take slow, deep breaths and to be as still as possible.

  The guards shone their flashlights around the barn.

  “What did it sound like?” said one of them, who I recognized to be Leonardo.

  “Somebody talking—I couldn’t hear what they were saying,” said the other. “Here, let’s look around.”

  At this, Tibor snored loudly and rolled around. He was trying to distract them. I had nowhere to go—I was treed.

  The guards split up and circled the barn, playing their flashlights everywhere. They expanded outwards, tracing concentric circles. I tried to make myself as small as possible. There was an approaching noise and then stillness. I opened my eyes. It was Leonardo. I gave him an apologetic look and brought a finger up to my lips. He paused and then kept walking.

  I closed my eyes and held my breath as they continued to search. I heard footsteps and then a satisfied grunt. I opened my eyes—there was a beam of light on my feet. It moved up my legs and up to my face. It was the guard who had shown me to my room and scattered my clothes. He grinned.

  “Well, well, well,” he said.

  FORTY-FOUR

  The guard marched me over to the same room I was taken to when I first arrived at the colony. He pushed me into the room and warned me that there would be someone posted outside. I paced around for a few minutes, at first berating myself for having fallen asleep, and then working to come up with a strategy for facing Uncle Peter. I knew that being defensive would make things worse—I would have to go on the offensive from the very beginning. When I was overcome by the need to sleep, I stretched out flat on my back on the concrete floor. I took my handkerchief out of my pocket and put it beneath my head.

  When I awoke, the room was bathed in early morning sunlight. I groaned and rolled over onto my side. That’s when I noticed that Uncle Peter was standing at the window, looking out. It was a pose that looked affected—and probably was. He didn’t say anything for several long moments, and I rolled myself into a sitting position.

  “What the hell is going on?” he said, finally.

  “I can—”

  “You were visiting the Jew at midnight,” he said, coldly. This was not the preaching Uncle Peter or the jovial, punishing Uncle Peter—this was the laconic, ex-Nazi Uncle Peter.

  “You’re lucky we’re here,” Uncle Peter continued, “and not in the interrogation room.”

  I shuddered at the thought. I rubbed my arms briskly and tried to look alert—I had to take charge of this situation.

  “I’m an actor,” I said, “which means that I lie to people for a living.”

  Uncle Peter turned around.

  “What it also means,” I continued, “is that I can spot a liar a mile away. And the Jew is lying to us when he says that nobody helped him kill Dr. Koehler.”

  “We’re not here to talk about the Jew!”

  “You’re right,” I said, which is what I always say when trying to win someone over. “We’re not. But do you know what I did last night? I brought him a chicken sandwich. And earlier that day? An apple. I’m trying to earn his confidence by bringing him food and talking to him, and, once he trusts me, then I can just peel back the layers of lies, and we’ll get to the truth.”

  “This is not some sort of amateur operation, where everyone does what they want!” he said.

  “I should have asked you,” I said. “It was wrong to do this without telling you—but I thought you wanted to figure out who helped him kill Dr. Koehler, and I wanted to help.”

  “You think it’s easy, what I do? You think some big shot from Santiago can walk into this place and start extracting information from anyone?”

  I shook my head. “I wouldn’t presume—I’ve been learning a lot from you in my short time here, is all. You’ve shown me things.”

  “I’ve seen lots of people,” Uncle Peter said. “A few have what it takes, but most don’t. You don’t have what it takes.”

  “If you just gave me a chance—”

  “I don’t want to have you brought to my attention again.”

  I lowered my gaze. “Please accept my apologies.”

  “You are very quickly wearing out your welcome here.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  I made my way over to the library after breakfast. Ernesto was sweeping the floor. We were standing by the window when Greta walked by—her posture perfect, her stride determined.

  “What is it with her?” I said.

  Ernesto tipped the contents of his dustbin into a garbage can. “She and Angela were as close as any two people can be. She didn’t used to be like this—she was an entirely different person before Angela passed away.”

  “She was here from the very beginning?”

  “From even before that. She was a young woman living on a farm when Peter came by—before he was Uncle Peter. He had just begun his travels in the German countryside, and Greta’s farm was one of the first places he stayed. He stayed in their barn for two weeks, borrowing one of their horses every day to ride into town and try to convert the people there. Greta fell in love with him and followed him everywhere he went, from barn to barn, town to town, onto a train that traversed Europe and
a boat that wound its way across the Atlantic Ocean.”

  “It was not reciprocal,” I said.

  Ernesto chuckled. “How could it be?”

  We went outside to gather up the chickens and started down the road. We veered off onto a trail that skirted along the edge of the forest. We circled around and ended up near the goat barn.

  “Let’s go see Tibor,” I suggested.

  Ernesto shook his head. “We can’t get any closer,” he said. “For some reason, these chickens love the smell of a goat barn, and they’ll fly right over the electrified fence. I’ve never seen anything like it. It takes quite a bit of effort to get them out.”

  Something clicked into place. “How do you get them out?”

  “Well,” Ernesto said, “it happened only the one time. We had to turn off the electrified fence and get right in there.”

  One of my chickens stopped to peck at a plant. I let her work on it for a few moments. Then I jiggled the worm in front of her, and she immediately forgot about the plant and continued walking.

  “How are you feeling about going home?” Ernesto said, breaking the silence.

  His question took me by surprise. I had not given much thought to going home. All I had been focusing on was the escape itself and the logistics involved with the Manipulation. It took me some time before I was able to formulate an answer.

  “There are things I love about the Colony,” I said. “Most of them are things I never knew I would love. There’s the physical labour, for one—working in the fields, preparing breakfast. There’s a physical sense in which it makes me feel good, a bodily sense, but there’s also the mental benefits of it. The feeling that I’m doing something that is concrete and useful, not abstract and often worthless, like teaching a man to feign embarrassment or to project his voice.”

  Ernesto nodded. We were at a fork in the road, and he pointed for us to go right—he didn’t want to interrupt me.

  “I like being told what to eat and when to eat it—what to prepare for breakfast and how to do it.”

  “You don’t mind decisions being made for you,” Ernesto said.

  “It’s more than that—I want these decisions made for me. There are too many micro-decisions that we make each day, and I’d just as rather not make most of them. I used to think that the more choices we have in our lives, the better—but now I think it might be the other way around.”

  A crowd of boys came marching down the trail, their instructor excitedly pointing out the names of plants. The children ignored him for the most part, but two of the boys were absorbing every word, walking wide-eyed and asking questions. When they were past us, Ernesto and I didn’t speak again for several minutes.

  “This place could be great,” I said, “if it weren’t run by a madman.”

  Ernesto nodded, not taking his eyes off his chickens.

  “He’s a brilliant manipulator,” I said. “He’s constantly uniting the colonists against a common enemy—the nuns at times, Tibor the Jew, their own traitorous colonists who have sinned too often, the cesspool that is Santiago, and essentially anywhere outside the Colony. Now he’s not all wrong on that last one—Santiago can be a bit of a cesspool, and the rest of the country is run at the whim of another madman.”

  Uncle Peter’s rule over the Colony and General Pinochet’s rule over Chile were not so different. They were each running Manipulations of their own, at a far greater scale than I had ever thought possible.

  I spent a long time in the fields that afternoon—the sun had taken a short leave of absence, and it was a bit chilly. I was happy to be outside, and, after my conversation with Ernesto that morning, I couldn’t help thinking about the fact that I had only a couple of days left here. I wasn’t sure what life would be like if I managed to escape from the Colony—only that it would somehow be different at a very basic level. I thought back to my daydream from a few days ago—the one with Elena and working in our garden while Claudio plays his clarinet for us—and it occurred to me that the only way to have that vision realized would be to stop limiting my relationships with those who cared for me. I was only limiting my own life by keeping the ties that bound me to others long and slack.

  After dinner, the colonists trickled out of the dining hall while the children who would be in the play stayed behind. Their excitement was palpable, but there was an underlying sense of anxiety about the performance. For most of these children, this would be their first time ever performing on stage, and the fact remained that we had not yet rehearsed the play in its entirety.

  “Let me start out by saying,” I said, “that this play is not about memorizing lines and knowing exactly what part of the stage to come in from. What we’re after is to have some fun and to entertain our fellow colonists.”

  This alone seemed to relieve some of the tension that had fallen over the room.

  “I need you to remember that this play is a story that we’re telling, and each chapter of the story will be loosely told. Now let’s see how well you can remember—what’s the first act?”

  “Uncle Peter is born!” someone called out.

  “Good, excellent. And what needs to happen during that act?”

  One of the girls raised her hand—she was taller than any of the boys and had long black hair pulled into twin braids. It was Maca—who had helped me with my storytelling. “His mama can’t get to the hospital in time so she makes the baby in a farm.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “And who plays the farmer?”

  One of the boys raised his hand.

  “The mother?”

  A girl raised her hand.

  “The doctor?”

  Another girl.

  “The barn animals?”

  The rest of the kids raised their hands.

  “Perfect,” I said. “Second act?”

  “Uncle Peter grows up!”

  “And what happens in that act?”

  In this way, we worked through the play, filling in any roles that were not filled and making sure that the children had a basic understanding of what the action was for each act.

  “And now,” I said, “time for the most important question.”

  All of the children quieted down.

  “Who wants to be the director?”

  The children looked at each other and then at me. Nobody said anything. I studiously avoided looking at Maca. Finally, she raised her hand. “You’re the director!” she said, exasperated.

  “Oh no,” I said. “I’m the producer, playwright, and choreographer—I don’t think I could take on the director role as well.”

  “Fine,” Maca said, sighing. She could not have been more than 11 years old. “I’ll do it.”

  FORTY-SIX

  I woke up on Saturday morning with a sense of immediacy and a feeling of unbridled energy. It might have been the same burst of energy that a runner stores until the very end of a race. I took a quick shower and put on my freshly laundered clothes. On Friday evenings, the residents of my dormitory would leave their clothes just outside our doors, and, on Saturday mornings, they were replaced with a clean set. The shirt I pulled on was a little stiff—it needed to be worked in—but I was otherwise feeling loose and relaxed and ready for my last full day in the Colony.

  I arrived at the kitchen early, and Anita was cracking several trays of eggs into a gigantic bowl. She asked me to take over for her, and I was happy to do so.

  “What are we making today?” I asked.

  “We’ve got breakfast beans this morning,” she said, not caring to elaborate more on what that might be, “and what you’re working on there is going to be kuchen.”

  Anita showed me a book on German cooking—it had a blackened cover and stained pages.

  “I’m putting you in charge of the apple kuchen,” Anita said. She opened the book and showed me the recipe (which she, in pencil, had translated from the German, and adapted to fit the large scale of the Colony).

  I put the heavy cookbook down on the table and summoned
the reserves of energy that I had awoken with that morning.

  Anita said, “The ovens are preheating already.”

  I must have had a look on my face, because she grabbed the scruff of my neck and pulled on it gently.

  “You’re ready for this,” she said.

  I snagged a passing colonist and asked her to measure out the many cups of flour and to then add the baking powder and salt to that mixture. A man came up and asked me if he could help, and I asked him to start chopping apples.

  I found a stack of oversized baking pans and oiled them. Then I stopped and looked around the kitchen. It was not so different than directing a play, this business of making food on a large scale. As long as everyone played their role, they would be making a lot of people happy.

  Anita came by to check on things and to congratulate me on a job well done.

  “So long as you don’t burn it,” she said, smiling.

  I planted myself in front of the oven for the entire cooking time, anxious to not overcook the kuchen.

  “Apple kuchen,” Ernesto said–later, when we were leaving the dining hall, “was Angela’s favorite breakfast.”

  The kuchen had been a hit—people had come by for seconds and thirds, and, next thing I knew, it was all gone.

  “It’s the other reason I can’t leave the Colony,” Ernesto said. “Angela is here. She’s in that sign, in the woods where we would go for walks, and in the river we swam in—she’s everywhere. If I leave, all those memories will trickle away. And there’s her grave, too, of course, and mine.”

  I went to visit Tibor. It was risky but necessary. I found him sitting morosely on the floor, tearing at bits of straw and abjectly petting one of the goats who was curled up next to him.

  I waited at a distance until a group of onlookers left, and then I asked him how he was doing.

  “I’m too old for all this,” he groaned, stretching his neck.