The Boat

by NAM LE

  Mayako? I think Mrs. Sasaki will punish me but it is not her. It is Mrs. Tamura, another teacher from my old elementary school in the city. She comes sometimes and sings and tells folktales. She was strict at the school but she is nice here at the Temple. Mrs. Tamura comes out to the front of the Temple and says, What's wrong? Someone else brings me a bowl. It is Mr. Sasaki.

  I am late and cannot weigh the bowls to choose the heavier one. Forgive me, I say, I want to go home. But you are safe here. Forgive me, my sister says it is safe in the city. Your mother and father want you to be here. It is the order of the prefecture and the government. Forgive me, I want to serve thé Emperor and be a shattered jewel. The two faces, in the shadow, could belong to anyone. Mayako, says the woman, there will be another Visiting Day soon. Eat, says the man. I press my hands together. Kanai anzen: may our family be preserved.

  Mrs. Tamura does not sing that night. I lie on my back. Tomiko is on my left and Yukiyo is on my right. Everywhere there is the sound of sniffing. Mother is on my left and she smells of pine oil and chrysanthemum and close to her body she smells like dust and sweat. I am on her right. Mrs. Tamura says softly to me in the dark, You cannot go home now, Mayako. The truck can come only once every few weeks and it just left today. I feel her lips against my ear. They are just over that hill, she says. Think of that. Just wait for Visiting Day. She smells like spiced potatoes. Do without until victory! There is a warning. The radio speaks. The wind is loud under the Temple doors. Is that the sound of a B-29? It is only a single plane. It is honorable to follow the jeweled path for the Emperor. The radio is sick again. Takai says the American beasts sometimes drop leaves of tin from the sky to make the radio sick. All around us is soft rain. Big Sister and I wear our air-raid hoods, Father wears his white joe. The ferry makes a deep sound like a plane far beneath us. Everything around us is washed until the water is the same color as the sky. We are visiting the Shrine on MiyajimaIsland to press our hands together for good luck with the evacuation. Sumi, says Father. You must go with Mayako. I will stay, says Big Sister. You are in the sixth grade, he says. You are eligible to go. Forgive me, I will not evacuate. It is the order of the prefecture, says Father, and there is not enough food in the city. To bear what you think you cannot bear is really to bear, says Big Sister. Father bends down to speak closer to her. His face is all wet. Sumi, you will be safe there. Through the rain I see the big torii archway to the Shrine on MiyajimaIsland. It floats like a red spirit above the water. Forgive me, I will not run from danger, says Big Sister. Water drips down from the rim of her air-raid hood. You taught me the story of the son of Ieyasu – honor won in youth grows with age. You fought the enemy in Manchuria. I am not a child. I know the way of Bushido and I will fight like you. Who will look after your sister? Mayako goes with the school, says Big Sister. She will be safe. I do not want to go, I say. If the bombs come, says Big Sister, I will stay and die like a shattered jewel. Her face is bright. How is it so bright when it is raining? The air smells like UjinaPort. Sumi, listen to me. Go with Mayako. You will both be safe in the hills. Big Sister says, Anyone who thinks the Fatherland will lose is hikokumin. Traitor. Father is silent for a long time. Then he looks at me instead of her. I will be a hero-spirit like you, says Big Sister. One hundred million deaths with honor! Honorable death before surrender! Defend every last inch of the Fatherland! There is no dust on her face but it looks like stone. Father does not look at her. He looks at me. One hundred million deaths with honor! I repeat after her. Then I say again, I do not want to go. You will go, says Father. You will go, says Big Sister. She looks like a warrior. It is only for a little while until we win the war, little turnip. And I will come to visit you. Promise? I promise, little turnip. The rain comes down without noise. Over the wind the all-clear sounds. Someone in the Temple is softly crying. Then far away another B-29. I see leaves of tin falling like cherry blossoms. I smell pine oil and chrysanthemum. Child of my heart.

  If I cannot go home, I will write a letter. I tell Mr. Sasaki before our morning stretches. Should emergency arise, we chant together, offer yourselves courageously to the State. There is lice inspection instead of cleaning. A letter, that is a good idea, says Mr. Sasaki. He nods. So shall you not only be our good and faithful subjects, but render illustrious the best traditions of your forefathers. The morning is hot and clear. There is a warning and the roar of a single B-29. The noise drags across the blue sky. The boys go to train in Morse code and the girls make straw sandals with Mrs. Sasaki. The all-clear sounds. I will do without until victory, but with my family. I go outside to write the letter in my head. Dear Father and Mother. Thank you for the pears and the rice with red beans and the sesame seeds mixed with salt. Thank you for my yukata and wooden sandals. It is hot here. We are taught to make straw sandals here. Yesterday we ate potatoes. Banzai to the Emperor! The Imperial Rescript on Education says, Should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State. Please let me come home and work on mobilization. I will be safe there. I take out the photograph. And thank you for the photograph. Over the light wind there is the roar of another B-29. Just a single plane. The Americans use their planes to take photographs, says Big Sister. It is hot outside. I hear the sound of the higurashi cicada – kana kana kana. There are kites and crows in the blue sky. I imagine I hear the song of the tsuku-tsukuboshi, which says: chokko chokko uisu. Chokko chokko uisu. All around me are the eight million kami. I look in my hand. On my left is Mother and on my right is Father. Behind me is Big Sister. The paper is mostly gray. Then everything turns white and the left side of my face is warm. Don't blink, says the man with the rabbit teeth. Don't worry, says Father. He laughs at me. Don't blink. Look here.

  Tehran Calling

  THE SECOND ANNOUNCEMENT WOKE HER. Sarah turned to the window: nothing – night – then, swimming up through the blackness, an image of her face. The cabin lights coming on. She couldn't remember falling asleep. All around her were dark-eyed women dabbing off their makeup, donning head scarves and manteaus in silence, as though beguiled by some lingering residue of Sarah's sleep. Sarah put on her own scarf, felt the knot of cloth against her throat.

  The city came up at them like a dream of light. White streams and red, neon lava, flowing side by side along arterial roads; electric dots and clusters of yellow, pink, and orange. She thought of Parvin down there, working her way between those points. With a mechanical groan from the undercarriage the wheels opened out. The plane banked, decelerated, then seconds later they were touching down, roaring to a stop in the middle of a vast, enchanted field. Runways glowed blue in the ground mist. Taxi-ways green. Lights around them blinking and blearing in the jet fuel haze. Sarah checked her watch: 4 a.m. local time.

  Inside the airport, Parvin was nowhere to be seen. Sarah hurried through the terminal, pursued, it felt, by photographs lining the walls: faces of men in gray beards, black turbans, their expressions strained between benevolence and censure. Despite the hour, the airport was implausibly, surreally busy.

  Low-wattage light pressed on her nerves as she walked, coercing her body into its familiar anxiety: rushing to work through underground tunnels, the digital alarm still ringing in her ears, toothpaste still bitter on her tongue – suspending herself in the slipstream of other bodies. Staving off sleep. She wore a long black overgarment and black cotton scarf. All the women wore long overgarments and head scarves. This shook her a little – she'd expected more visual disparity. She'd expected to be surprised by it. Around a corner an electronic sign pulsed: IN FUTURE ISLAM WILL DESTROY SATANIC SOVEREIGNTY OF THE WEST. It was too early, and she too tired, to burrow beneath the threat. Keep moving, she told herself.

  Large glass windows separated customs from the arrival bay. Retrieving her bags, Sarah noticed a young man watching her through the glass. She stopped, waited for some bodies to interpose, then shuffled out behind them. He was still there. Slight figured and clean-shaven, nondescriptly dressed. He hadn't taken his eyes off her. A slow warmth rose up from her a
bdomen. She'd read too many accounts, before coming, about the plainclothes police in this country. She lowered her eyes, withdrawing into her scarf, and then, without warning, he was beside her.

  "Sarah," he said.

  She froze.

  He said, "I am Parvin's friend."

  Her posture, she was aware, was one of almost parodie decorum – a sister of the faith, scrupulously observing the veil – but there was no part of her spared to find it funny. She 'd barely landed. Now she was shocked awake, her mind instantaneously compacted in fear, fixed on the image of a small dark room ... a metal chair in the middle of it.

  "Parvin. You know?"

  She didn't speak. What if it were a trick? – to elicit information? An admission of association?

  "Come with me," he said. For the first time his English seemed weighted by a heavier accent.

  She looked up but he hadn't moved. He reached into his shirt pocket. "Here," he said, and took a step back.

  It was a Polaroid. Parvin, her jaw dangling open in the middle of some mischief, one hand brushing back her purple-streaked hair, the other squeezing Sarah's shoulder. Both their faces upwardly flushed by the candlelit cake before them. Sarah recognized it from her thirtieth birthday. Five years ago. Parvin had taken her to a sushi restaurant near the Chinatown lions and, after the complimentary snapshot, had persuaded the waitstaff to sing "Happy Birthday" in Japanese. They'd filed away, smiling tightly, harassedly. How hopeless that whole occasion had made her feel, Sarah remembered – turning thirty – yet even so, looking back now, she was stifled with nostalgia.

  "Good," said the young man. He leaned in closer. "Now. Please. Come with me."

  ***

  HIS NAME WAS MAHMOUD and he was a family friend of Parvin's. She shouldn't be afraid. Also, he was the leader of the Party. Parvin worked with him now. Why hadn't she picked Sarah up? She had been busy with last-minute responsibilities. He spoke rapidly, in a tone suggesting he didn't want to explain any more than he already had. He assumed Parvin had told her about the rally in two days' time.

  Sarah sat with him in the backseat, wondering what responsibilities could possibly have kept her friend at this hour. It was hard to tell whether dawn had broken. A faint glow massed behind the smog but it could have been the electric ambience of night – caught and refracted in low-lying haze. In the driver's seat a heavily stubbled youth named Reza steered their car, an ancient Ford, like a bullet into the city.

  "You have come at a busy time," said Mahmoud.

  "Where are we going?" She wound down her window. A warp of gasoline and exhaust filled the car and she quickly closed it again. Behind the brief scream of wind she thought she'd heard the sound of drums. "Where are we meeting Parvin?"

  The two men conferred in Farsi.

  "You have come during Ashura," said Mahmoud. "Our holiest week."

  She nodded impatiently. Reza glanced up into the rearview mirror.

  "Your hotel is near one of the largest processions," Mahmoud went on. "If you would like to see – if you are not too tired – "

  "Hotel? I thought that was just for the visa." Parvin had arranged the letter of invitation from the hotel, had assured her it was just a formality. "I'm staying with Parvin," she said.

  The car swerved left. Sarah slid over and smacked into Mahmoud, who flinched, then, as she disengaged herself, smiled stiffly down at his knees. Inexplicably, his reaction riled her. Reza twisted half around from the front seat, made a comment in his skipping Farsi. A short silence ensued, then Mahmoud translated, "He says there are one thousand accidents a day in this city." Reza caught her eye in the rearview mirror and gave her a civic nod. After another silence, Mahmoud said, "We thought it would be better. At the hotel."

  "Why?" She frowned, shook her head. "I don't understand."

  The lines on his face were so shallow, like lines on tracing paper, and this, with the way his lower lip turned outward, gave him the slightly churlish air of a child. He said, "At least until the rally is over." There was irritation in his voice. "Parvin will explain – she comes to meet us in the afternoon." Then his face closed off completely to her.

  Sarah slumped back in the deep seat. As they drove, the sky around them lightened, lifting the concrete landscape – block after block of squat, square buildings – into blue relief. Sarah swallowed repeatedly, trying to clear her throat of its sooty taste. She had no choice – she'd wait for Parvin. Her body felt suddenly spent beneath her clothes. Her head still fumy from the flight, the sleeping pills she'd taken. And now she'd offended this smooth-cheeked boy – this reluctant guide of hers – Mahmoud. She pressed her face against the glass. The city was stilled, caught in the subdued minutes before sunrise. A woman tripped out of a cinder-block doorway, holding her scarf down against the wind. In the distance, the constant shudder of drums. All at once Sarah was overpowered by the strangeness of where she was. Loneliness dropped on her with the speed of a black column.

  ***

  THREE MONTHS AGO, she'd been a senior associate at Pearson, Peelle and Sloss – one of the top-tier law firms in Portland. She'd had a private office with a river view, a private understanding with management with regard to her next promotion, a reservoir of professional goodwill accrued, it sometimes seemed, by virtue of having not yet majorly screwed up. She'd paid off half of a two-bedroom apartment in the Pearl District, exercised almost daily to keep her body in good shape. And – back then – pathetically, she knew – she'd had Paul. She would return from her morning exercise to find him still ensnared in their bedsheets, or shaving behind a blade of light from the bathroom, frazzle-haired and stumbly, seeing her and hauling her body – buzzing and taut and alive – toward his own. He was the aberration of her life: the relief from her lifelong suspicion that she was, at heart, a hollow person, who clung to hollow things.

  She unknotted her head scarf. She'd pleaded jet lag as soon as they arrived at the hotel and Mahmoud, who seemed already uncomfortable accompanying her into the lobby, had quickly taken his leave. Upstairs, someone had forgotten to draw the curtains and the room was blanched with golden light. The eastern windows were level with the top of a large plane tree – so close Sarah could reach out and touch its leaves. It cast a fretwork of shadows on the floor.

  She removed her long black overgarment and threw it on a chair. Her shirt underneath was drenched. She peeled it off, then her jeans, and abruptly caught a glimpse of her reflection in a bathroom mirror: slender and olive-skinned, a body in accidentally matching bra and underwear. A small wad of undeclared U.S. dollars was gauze-covered and bandaged to the back of her knee. She looked mysterious, glowing – there was a different sun here, somehow; more impersonal. Incandescent. Well, this was what she wanted, wasn't it? She was in the desert now.

  They'd met at work. At first he'd been just another good-looking suit in Banking, three floors up, with good teeth, arms that filled out his sleeves when he leaned, the way men always leaned, double-elbowed, on bar counters. He had the salt-and-pepper hair that, on some men, draws more attention to their youth than their age. He was divorced – no kids. He was her professional senior. She'd dealt with him on some statutory debt recovery claims. One day, at Friday drinks, he brought up the last file they'd worked. Their client had been demanding payment from a company in Chapter 11 but had been low on the list of creditors. The firm had all but counseled forfeit when Sarah developed a submission for priority and, against all expectations, won a good settlement. It had been a tough case. Paul admired her work and said so. Despite her proficiency, work had for so long devolved into sets of empty, unaltering rituals for Sarah that she was capable of registering his comment only as some kind of code. Already, she found herself deferring to him for meaning.