Revolution

by Deb Olin Unferth

  “They were all Jews,” the man said. “Place used to be flocked with them.”

  “Paul was no Jew,” said George, a little defensive for his religion.

  “But he fell off a horse, you know,” I said. “Hit the head.”

  “And he talked too much,” the man said. “Nobody liked him. They were just being polite.”

  SIXTY BUCKS

  We’d been robbed all along, of course, but now it seemed as if robberies and avoiding robberies became the primary activities of our days. We were robbed over and over. We kept our money well distributed among our belongings and on our person so the thieves made off with only a few dollars at a time, but it added up. My parents refused to wire us money and George wouldn’t ask his mother. We were eating bread for most of our meals. But still George gave money to anyone who asked, at least a few cents. And he would not be mad if someone robbed us—this was a rule. “They need the money more than us,” he’d say. “Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the kingdom. Observe the lilies of the field.”

  I pretended to be pregnant sometimes for free food. My stomach had become permanently bloated. When you looked at me it wasn’t noticeable right away, then you saw it, a small swell, and if I had my money belt around my waist on top of the swollen stomach, I really did look pregnant. People would bring food to our room. In one place we stayed, the dueño brought me cookies that gave me hives when I ate them but the hives went away in a few hours if I didn’t touch them so I kept eating the cookies. He brought them every morning, and I’d swell up and deflate by evening.

  * * *

  Beyond Panama City there was no road, only jungle and swamp you could wade through all the way to South America if you wanted, only you’d probably die before you arrived. I had to talk George out of going. We had no choice but to turn around and go back to Nicaragua only a few weeks after we’d left.

  That’s when we were robbed by men who never came anywhere near us or our belongings. We were at the border. George was sick. The idea was to hurry into Nicaragua, where the doctors cost five bucks. He couldn’t move much, so I had to kind of prop him up while we waited for the bus to leave. I was terrified, as usual. It was my conviction that, as the elder and as the instigator of this whole trip, he should be taking care of me, and if he was lying there shaking with fever, how could he?

  He wanted me to buy some black-market córdobas here at the border where they were cheaper. He usually changed the money. I ran off and bought sixty dollars’ worth of córdobas from a man standing on the side of the road. The man gave me stacks and stacks of bills—so many I couldn’t carry them all. I tried, but they kept falling on the ground and I had to make two trips. I limped back to George with the second batch and dropped them at his feet.

  “What is that?” he said, raising his head a little. “What are we going to do with all that? How much did you change, like fifty bucks? Don’t tell me you changed fifty bucks. You should have changed ten.”

  I tried to get the money into our day bags, but it wouldn’t fit. I had to get our backpacks down off the top of the bus and shove it in those, but it wasn’t going in there either.

  “We’ll have to throw it away,” said George. “Good job.”

  A lady with a plastic tub of tamales came over. “Hey,” she said. “Those guys say they’re going to kill you.”

  “How’s that?” said George, squinting at a few men across the street. They were standing in the dust, hands in their pants pockets, looking down the road.

  “For the money.”

  “It’s not worth that much,” I said.

  I could see George thinking, sizing the guys up. Oh come on, I thought, really?

  “How about if we give them half,” said George at last.

  She shrugged.

  So we loaded half of the stacks into the plastic tub and watched her cross over to the men. A stack of bills dropped in the dust.

  EARLY WRITINGS

  The journals are to blame, in part, for the waning of George and me or, more accurately, what I wrote in them. I’m to blame.

  George and I both kept journals. We wrote in them, filled them up, and bought new ones. We wound up with a pile of notebooks that we carried from country to country in our backpacks. I don’t know how his journals would look to me now, but mine are unbearable, the most god-awful crap anyone has ever written. It causes me physical pain to see them. There are just a lot of prayers in there, declarations about the poor, how I have to help them or someone has to. It goes on and on. I can find a few shadows of the person I was or at least would one day be, but mostly it’s a record of my drastic attempts to make sense of Christianity: What does it mean to be three and one at the same time? How can Jesus be fully God and fully man? Is God inside time, experiencing it, or outside of it, creating it? And what is the point in hiding Himself? Why not let Himself be known like a proper king? I was reading the Bible, book by book, which was only confusing me further, with its alien logic, its inoperable moral code, its God with His tantrums. Build an ark, roll the stone. Get out of the way, I’m going to destroy that town. God with His dramatic christenings: You are the chosen one. You are the last born, the tempted one, the one floated away, the thief who will suffer beside me.

  I don’t recognize the person who wrote those journals. She sounds like she’s quoting someone or practicing what she wants to say, lifting phrases from another’s tongue—George’s, presumably. I get exasperated with her, furious. I want to reach through the murk and shake her, but then another voice steps into my mind and defends her. “She’s trying to figure it out,” this other me inside me says. “Be patient with her.”

  We—I and I—stand to one side and regard the girl we were.

  * * *

  George’s journals were less hysterical. A mere record of events, which town we went to, whom we met there, what we did after that. “We stopped at the church of Santo Domingo, had a talk with a priest who argued Gutiérrez is right, violence deserves violence.” He might add a comment or question: “What would Jesus say?” I know this because I read his journals. I read them all the time, every chance I got. I reread old passages, searching for things I might have missed. I was struck down with guilt over this. I had to wade through my shame in galoshes, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  * * *

  I know now that he read my journals too. It never occurred to me at the time, although again and again he found items in them to object to. The journal had fallen on the floor and had somehow opened to this page, he said, and he had seen these four words. He was shuffling around for the repellent and he inadvertently stuck his hand in my notebook and flipped it open and read this sentence.

  In the later months my parroting starts to disappear, and there are flashes of irritation with George and then more and more.

  “I’m sick of trying to change him.”

  “I’m becoming convinced that he can be a creep.”

  “George is weird. I don’t know if I want to marry him.”

  “George isn’t talking to me, as usual. Well, it’s not as though he doesn’t talk to me, it’s just that talking to me is suddenly such an effort.”

  “Should I really marry him?”

  “I don’t want to be his student anymore.”

  God was an element too—some days it was me and God against him. Other days it was him and his stupid God over there. I wrote it all down. He read it and grew distant and cold, and I wrote that down too, as more proof, more criticism, and he read that too. He began to develop a caught-bird look, an intensely lonely air, which would stay with him, would become his trademark look for the rest of the time I knew him.

  * * *

  Later, back in the States, the look grew worse. A new kind of reticence fell upon him, less friendly, less playful, as the criticisms arrived not just from me but from a world he’d come back to that he’d outgrown.

  Only it wasn’t a caught-bird look. That’s not right. It was more the look of a caged thing set free. The l
ook of the freed thing the moment it realizes there’s a downside.

  WATER

  We made it back to Nicaragua. Months had gone by since our first visit there. It was that many months closer to the end of the revolution and we didn’t know it, but I could feel every day of it, heavy, sitting on the city, though the Sandinistas still had two more years to go. I told George I didn’t want to be engaged anymore.

  It was a surprise to me that I said it. I didn’t know I was going to until the words were coming out of my mouth, “I don’t want to be engaged,” and as soon as they were out, I realized that this was the only idea I’d had on the whole trip so far, my sole contribution.

  We were sitting in our room on the bed. Evening was coming on. I could hear the Internacionalistas in the atrium, fussing toward the door, getting ready to head over to Comedor Sarah.

  “All right,” he said. He didn’t say anything else. I had expected a protest and now I was confused and maybe disappointed. I never knew what to expect from him.

  Then I thought we were leaving for dinner. I left the room, but George didn’t follow. He shut the door. He locked it.

  “Okay,” I said. “All right.”

  I sat on a table in the atrium and waited for him to come out. The Internacionalistas were leaving in groups, ponytailed and radiant. I swung my legs, waited. I was hungry, but I wasn’t going to go to Sarah’s without him. I never went anywhere without him. If we didn’t hurry it up, soon they’d run out of food. Maybe an hour went by, and he didn’t come out. I hopped off the table, knocked lightly on the door. “George? Do you want to go eat?” No answer. I could go to Sarah’s and see if I could bring dinner back. I’d never seen any take-out containers. The very idea was odd, but you never know.

  Then I was out on the street. The Nicaraguan night was having one of its moments, low, white-streaked around the edges. George usually led the way to Comedor Sarah. Which way was it? We were in a new hostel too. All the hostels were only a few blocks apart, a kilometer or so from Comedor Sarah, but I walked and walked and couldn’t find it. Soon I seemed to be getting farther, not closer. I tried turning back, but that wasn’t right either. I was too far for a shortly strung yo-yo like me. In fact I was lost. I began to panic. I roamed down one street and then another. All the streets looked the same until they started to look different, then very different, and the next thing I knew I was on a long stretch of flat road, fields all around. For all I knew I was walking straight out of Managua. For all I knew I was walking home. The road shone like a river and the sky glowed a hot, dim red. The smell of dung, the unfilled fields. Billboards darkly advertised the revolution. I thought I heard someone call my name. Twice I thought it and both times I turned back to no one.

  There was a man walking in front of me. I saw him emerge from the black. He must have heard me at the same moment because he turned, saw me, gestured for me to come over to him, fingers pointing down, meaning: Come here. I stopped (did I know nothing?). He walked over to me. His face was blank. He held out his hand to mine as if to shake it. He mumbled and I couldn’t understand him. I leaned in to hear. At the end of his hand, he had bills folded between his fingers. I took a step backward and his other arm swung around and clamped my shoulder like a claw. I screamed and wrenched myself away. He grabbed the back of my dress and I heard it tear. I ran. I drummed down the road. It was luminous, rising up out of the night fields. I turned into a field and kept running, branches scratching my face and arms, until I thumped down on the ground, palms in the dirt. I breathed. Then I jumped up and was off again. I came out of the fields to the streets. I rushed up and down until I came on our hostel at last. I walked through the atrium, still empty of Internacionalistas, back to our room, back to George. I leaned against the door. I slid down it, waited. I turned on my side and lay on the cement. Waited.

  * * *

  What I remember most about waiting there on the cement is the water standing all around, shining circles that reflected the light.

  We lived in zones in Managua and in order to save water during the shortage, the government turned it off two days a week, and which days you had no water depended on what zone you were in. The Internacionalistas always became very animated about not having water. The night before, the dueña of the hostel would fill container after container with water—tubs and jugs and bottles and buckets—and set them out for the Internacionalistas. Water stood all over and still we were very pleased about having no water. Sometimes the city didn’t shut the water off until seven or eight in the morning, so if you woke early you could still have a shower, but on the day the water was off in your zone you were ready not to take a shower. You were ready not to brush your teeth. You drank beer or Rojita all day because it was better to save what water you had. By afternoon the standing water was squirming with bugs, and small clouds of mosquitoes hung over the buckets. The water attracted mosquitoes. In Panama, tens of thousands of people died of yellow fever, malaria, and dengue from standing water during the French effort to build the canal. We all knew that and talked about it, shaking our heads, and yet it never occurred to us to cover our water.

  The day I broke the engagement and was nearly attacked or at least mistaken for a prostitute was a day we were supposed to have no water. But the government hadn’t turned it off. They’d gotten the day mixed up or they were trying to be nice or it was another sign that things were getting a little chaotic behind the curtain. We’d prepared for a day without water, but it was all around us and coming out of the faucets. Its seamless presence felt abundant, extreme even. We hadn’t realized how much we’d missed it when it wasn’t there.

  CENSORSHIP

  George and I were in Managua the day La Prensa reopened. We were there to read the first paper off the presses.

  The Sandinistas had shut the paper down years before, saying at La Prensa they took money from the CIA and didn’t like the revolution. Opponents called it censorship—more proof of Sandinista Communist treachery. Look at the Russians, look at the Cubans. Now the Sandinistas. But the Sandinistas were letting La Prensa reopen. What did it mean? The Internacionalistas took it as a sign of triumph (¡Viva Sandino!), but maybe it was another sign of ruin.

  I remember being on the street when the paper came off the presses—the crowds of people, the newspaper boy turning in circles, his thin papers going from his fingers, passing through the crowd. It was late in our trip. I’m not sure about the timing. We were still planning to get married at that point, but we were uncomfortable and I was about to say I didn’t want to. Or maybe we weren’t going to get married anymore and that’s why we were uncomfortable, not sure what we were to each other now. I’m certain it was our second time in Nicaragua. We were pinging around, an arsenal of interviews in our bags. I know we were together and that we were unhappy. But on that day the talk was all about La Prensa. It was afternoon, the day La Prensa reopened. The newspaper got a late start or their boy did. I don’t recall what was in the paper, what the articles were about, but I know I was surprised. I had thought it was a heroic moment, a historic one. I had thought La Prensa might want to be at least a little nice to the Sandinistas for letting them print their paper again, but no, at La Prensa they were mad. Somebody had taken away their land, their money, their men, made them drive taxis. They had a lot to say about it.

  Or were we someplace else that day, the day La Prensa reopened? In Panama? And what I remember is the first time George and I bought the paper, on our way back through, though it had reopened weeks before?

  Am I inventing the crowds? No, that part must be right. I can see the people gathering, the Nicaraguan men and women, but I can’t see the rest of the day around it.

  It could have been the day I vomited on the street. Or it could have been the day I cut the soldiers’ hair. Or the day I was robbed on the bus. Or the day we went to the Russian ballet. Or the day we interviewed the bishop. We could have been walking out the church doors. I believe we were leaving some formidable spot—or does the memory
of formidability come from the advent of La Prensa?

  And now, today, I read that La Prensa hadn’t been shut down for years. In this book it says that the press had opened and shut and opened and shut like a drawer during those years of the revolution. I ask a Nicaraguan journalist I meet and she confirms it. “Did it open and close?” I say.

  “Many times,” she says solemnly.

  So why that day all the hoopla? Was every time it reopened a special time? And I’m misremembering its uniqueness, not the celebration? Which part of this am I wrong about? I couldn’t say. I am sure of this much: I was there in some way. I bought La Prensa. “Let me see it,” said George, but I kept it. I held it in my hands and read the insides. Later we used it for toilet paper.

  PEANUT BUTTER

  George and I got separate rooms. The engagement was off, after all, but we told each other we needed separate beds in order to get some sleep. The beds were singles and we were sick and hot. The rooms cost two dollars apiece. We split up our stuff and George went into one room on one side of the atrium and I went into another on the other and that was it for a while. I lay alone in the concrete room. Days passed. One morning I got up and went to his room. It was empty, cleaned out, and I figured we’d broken up and he’d taken off, left me there. I went back to my room and got onto the bed.

  I lay there sweating for days. I didn’t eat. A huge spider lived in the room—flat and fast, the size of a small plate. Now and then it came out, sat on the wall, and then scooted away. I watched for it and threw shoes its way but didn’t get it and I lived in low-steam fear. The Internacionalistas talked all day and night outside my room. They sat at plastic white tables that they moved around to try to stay in the shade. They’d start out in the morning at one end of the atrium, and as the day went on and the sun moved across the sky, they moved the tables and chairs across the cement to the other end. The next morning they’d carry the tables back and start over. I watched this all day. I had to leave the door to my room open a little because the roof was a strip of corrugated tin and the room worked like a convection oven.