He’s still in this mood when he runs into Jory not long into the work day. “My God,” he says, seeing the small bandage above his eye, “were you in a fight?” Insanely, his first thought is that Carl had something to do with it.
Jory looks embarrassed. “I happened to be in town last night when the disturbance broke out. I was too close.”
It’s hard for Vaniok to imagine his countryman in the middle of the student riot. “What was that like?” he asks.
Jory waves away the question. His eyes search the warehouse as if he’s looking for an enemy hidden among the stacked boxes. Vaniok, who approached him with good will, has the familiar sense that his countryman is drawing back, as if he’s afraid Vaniok will ask him too many questions. Possibly he’s uneasy about his relationship with Ila.
Vaniok keeps looking at the bandage. He can’t help feeling that Carl had something to do with Jory’s injury. “It must have been something,” he says, trying to be friendly.
For an instant Jory seems on the verge of responding and Vaniok remembers times when the man has surprised him with a sudden cheerfulness. But what flickers in his eyes is brief.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I have to be getting to work.”
After he leaves Vaniok feels a vague irritation. Just minutes before, it seemed as though aches he’s carried with him for so long were quieted once and for all. Now he’s been reminded that nothing lasts forever, not even the mysterious solace that came to him in that dark room full of mops and pails when Ranush’s spirit visited him. He thinks of the story from the gospels that used to fascinate him as a child: Christ goes to the mountain with the three apostles and there his face shines like the sun, his garments are as white as snow, and Moses and Elijah appear beside him. Dazzled, the impulsive Peter suggests that they put up tents and stay there but Christ, who has other plans for himself and the apostles, tells Peter they have to return to the lowland.
Why does it always have to be Jory who does this to him?
But this isn’t the gospel story, he reminds himself, and there’s no Jesus in this town. He isn’t going to let himself fall into gloom. Jory is preoccupied by something, but that’s not unusual for him: he’s a man who lives in a hole he’s dug for himself. Even the success Vaniok knows he enjoys with Ila hasn’t changed that. Vaniok can see this, like a sudden glimpse of the earth’s curvature: that whatever has already happened between Jory and Ila, it won’t be permanent, that there’s something in the man that will prevent him from holding on to whatever happiness he can manage to find. Vaniok is surprised by how certain he is about this, he even feels sympathy for his countryman. He, on the other hand, feels a lightness, the weightlessness of a curled piece of ash lifting from a fire and floating on the heat of the flames. Lord, let us set up our tents, he thinks.
He has to talk to somebody and the only one he knows who could even begin to understand how he feels is Ila. What if she’s closer to Jory at the moment, she’s still his cousin. He phones the inn where she works and asks for her, aware of the boldness of this move. “Is this an emergency?” the person on the other end of the line asks. “Just call her to the phone,” he demands. When she answers Vaniok asks her if she’ll meet him after work.
“Why, Vaniok? Is anything wrong?”
Hearing his cousin’s voice, he realizes how impossible it’s going to be to explain his motives. What can he tell her, after all? About Ranush, about what he’s recognized about the men at work, his intuition about Jory? Can he put any of it into words that would convey a fraction of his feelings? And yet he has to talk to her, what he’s felt this morning can’t just be a passing mood. “No,” he says into the phone. “Nothing is wrong at all. In fact everything is fine, yes, everything is fine.” His own voice sounds a little mad but he wishes he could talk to her this minute. Even as she agrees to meet him Vaniok feels the weight of the hours that stand between this moment and the time when he’ll see her.
Walking to the coffee shop to meet her cousin, Ila wonders about Vaniok’s call. He sounded so strange, so intense. That he phoned her at the inn is a surprise. He didn’t sound depressed; in fact, if anything, he seemed the opposite. Of course he can be given to sudden elations and enthusiasms but he can plummet just as suddenly. What can be behind this new mood? Certainly he knows about her and Jory but maybe he saw them together—that could have upset him. Possibly in some way it’s thrown him off his balance.
He’s already waiting for her at the coffee place on the corner and she can see at once that the almost desperate cheer she heard in his voice on the phone is edged with something more brooding. He greets her spiritedly, then falls silent, his fingers moving along the edge of his saucer.
“Was there any damage at the inn?” he asks her. “From the riot, I mean.”
“Oh, no,” she says. “The people who stay at the inn aren’t the type that go around breaking windows.”
He smiles. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. Of course,” he laughs but the laughter never reaches his eyes, which are those of someone who’s awakened in a hospital bed wondering whether he has all his limbs. He’s fallen silent and she looks at him encouragingly.
“I went drinking with the men after work on Friday,” he says. This can’t be what he called her about, Ila is certain. “I don’t want you to think I’m a drunkard, though,” he adds.
“Vaniok, why would I?” she tells him. Is this a reference to his behavior at the seaside picnic, she wonders.
But his expression darkens, something furtive enters his eyes before he glances into his coffee cup. “Ila,” he says, “did you ever do things you weren’t proud of, things you were ashamed of? Maybe things you didn’t understand when you did them?”
“Of course,” she answers immediately. “Isn’t that what it means to be human?”
“True, true,” he nods, taking in the statement as if he’d just learned some fact, a thing to be memorized. “You have to go on,” he says. “What’s past is past.”
It sounds like a question and so she answers: “Yes.”
He shakes his head. “You understand things so well.”
In fact she doesn’t understand, they’re communicating in a language whose alphabet lacks certain letters. Whether it’s by choice or it’s out of his control, Vaniok isn’t offering her whole words. She’s sure he had something to tell her this morning. But now it may be too late. “Vaniok,” she says, “I know you. I know what kind of person you are. You and I have both done things we’re not proud of, I’m sure, but I know you’re decent and generous.”
His eyes glisten with gratitude, then they flash. “How do you find our serious friend from the capital?” he asks.
Men, she thinks, always measuring themselves against each other. “Nobody is serious all the time,” she says.
Vaniok seems about to answer but he says nothing. He drinks from his cup, puts it down and picks it up again.
“You ought to get to know him better,” she says. She feels a flicker of pride, remembering Jory’s shy smile when she made him pronounce the name of one of the local flowers. “Isn’t it odd,” she says, “that both of us would have been strangers to him back home.” Jory has told her about the customs of the capital, the peculiar slang of the taxi drivers, the street fairs on midsummer night, the special way pancakes are made on the day of the first snowfall. As a girl in the Deep Lakes she looked forward for months to her few trips to the capital, which had fed her dreams of living there some day. Would she have done so, she wonders. How would those things have turned out?
Vaniok’s voice is hoarse. “And you’re not a stranger.”
Again it’s a question. “Yes, I’m a friend. As I am to you.”
“The same kind of friend?”
“No,” she says mildly, thinking that he doesn’t know when to stop. “You two aren’t the same kind of person.”
Vaniok looks at her, his expression indecipherable. It’s not clear what he’s asking of her, not clear what she could tell him. She ca
n’t explain to her cousin, or to herself, for that matter, her relationship with their other countryman. Of course she’s Jory’s friend—and more: she knows the hard feel of his arms, she’s traced with her finger the thin, wavering ridge of scar above his wrist, she’s run her hand across the intricate topography of his stomach, she knows his yeasty smell. But his voice will suddenly tighten when he speaks of the homeland and then it becomes clear that all he and she do here is like the blank space between the chapters in a book. The men in the gray uniforms will be gone one day, he insists, he’s going to return, they’re going to return, the names of these alien flowers can be forgotten.
“But Jory,” she’d asked, “what if things continue as they are back there?” As far as anyone can tell, those men are likely to stay for a long while.
“Then we have to continue hoping and planning to return,” he answers without hesitation.
“You could spend a life that way.”
“Any other way of spending it would be trivial.”
At those times she hasn’t said anything, she hides her anger. This life isn’t trivial, she wants to say. Here they are, separated by immense distances of earth and ocean from the homeland. The rain that hisses on the roof of Jory’s apartment releases elusive springtime smells into the little bedroom. This isn’t a trivial moment. It’s wrong to dismiss everything that lies between this passing moment and that hoped-for return.
“So,” Vaniok says now, “the two of you must be exploring the area, I suppose. Out to the country, the little towns around here.”
“Yes,” she answers. “But there are things closer by. I’m determined that we’re going to rent a rowboat on the lake here.”
“Ah,” he says, “the lake. Yes, be sure to bring some fishing tackle. You’ll have to show me what you catch.”
“You don’t think I know about fishing?” she laughs. “I could surprise you.”
But Vaniok doesn’t laugh. His eyes are full of grief. She realizes she shouldn’t have told him about the boating expedition she’s talked about with Jory. Men think what they call love is so simple and exclusive. At this moment she loves her cousin dearly in all his ardor and pain. She wishes she could make him understand how a succession of dreary days can bring tears to her eyes at the sight of the most unlikely scenes. Just yesterday in the courtyard of the place where she lives, she felt her eyes filling as she watched a little boy with a scraped knee. The child was crying as much out of habit as pain. Looking at him, she thought: it isn’t because of the wound that you’re crying but because you can sense that it’s already healing, carrying you away from this moment that will never return. No, she realized later, I’m the one who feels that moment passing.
She wishes she could explain to Vaniok that seeing Jory, even making what’s called love with Jory, doesn’t mean that either of them gives themselves fully to the other. Vaniok, she wants to say, you are always going to be in my heart long after Jory is gone. Thinking this, she leans forward and kisses him solemnly on the lips. Vaniok is so puzzled by her gesture he forgets to be embarrassed that this is happening in public, in the little coffee shop where students are hunched over their books and passersby can look in from the street. He sits back and shakes his head, his mouth twisted into an ambiguous expression. In his eyes, though, is the desperate look of a man who’s wanted to say something but has finally been unable to do so. Ila says nothing more, realizing with sadness what she’s just thought: that Jory will be gone one day, possibly soon; and that she already knows this.
“Hey, let’s get moving,” Carl shouts from above. “Come on, Jory, they didn’t send us here to look at the scenery.” Jory remains motionless beside the wheelbarrow, his feet planted, his torso slightly turned toward the sound of Carl’s voice. A second goes by, two seconds, more. I could stop, he thinks, just freeze, stand here till it occurs to Carl that I’m not going to take this load of dirt up the hill. What would he do then? Would he finally come down and push it himself? Jory smiles at the fantasy but at last, in his own time, he leans down and fills his lungs with air, he grips the handles and jerks the weight into balance, feeling the entire load in his arms; then he starts pushing his burden along the path that runs level for a blessed twenty feet before climbing upward toward the basketball arena. Carl is still far away but Jory keeps his face impassive, his back stiff with resolution: he’s not going to let that man see him weaken. “Bastard,” he says to himself. Still, when he was assigned to Carl’s crew this morning, he actually welcomed it because he knew he’d be getting plenty of work and that’s exactly what he wants. Keeping a wheelbarrow under control with only one dependable hand requires concentration; it doesn’t leave him much time to think about other things that are bothering him, like what’s happening between him and Ila. He glances up from his load, he runs his tongue across his lips, tasting dirt in his sweat. The day is sunny and warm; the campus is quiet.
But his contemplation of the landscape is brief. Carl’s voice breaks in once more. “Let’s go, Jory,” he yells from the top of the slope where the load of dirt has to be carried, “let’s make it look like you’re at least pretending to work.” Jory inhales, throwing his full weight into his forward motion, his bent back straining, his calves tense. He’s grateful for the white fury that helps him push the heavy wheelbarrow up the slope. Though he’s virtually working with one hand, he manages to maintain enough speed to get the load of dirt around the curve. Passing Carl, he keeps his eyes straight ahead. “Moron,” he says under his breath when he’s far enough from the man, relieved to be past the dangerous curve where a couple of times already he’s almost lost control. Now, on level terrain, he can ease up on his right hand, his wrist throbbing deliciously as he transfers more of the weight to his left arm. One more obstacle overcome. For now. This is one of the good parts, though if he relaxes he’s likely to think again about other things, like how stupid it was to drive his fist into a bench last night, as if that would resolve his situation with Ila. Or make work any easier.
“Christ, Carl’s got a hornet’s nest up his ass today,” one of the other workers mutters when Jory dumps his load of dirt. The man is talking as much to himself as to anyone else but Jory grunts affirmatively. Nobody’s been very happy around here since the first stories about possible cutbacks. Word has gone around lately that nothing is going to be done for several months and the men have eased up a little but they’re still holding something back, even among themselves, and they’ve never been particularly friendly with Jory.
He stops and wipes the sweat from his brow, feels the sweat cooling on his back. After last night’s rain it’s steamy, more like midsummer than spring. The seasons move so swiftly here—God knows what the weather is like in the country to the north. He checks himself—he’s starting to think again, about the past, about other things. That was what got him started last night: one moment he was walking down the main street, not particularly happy since he couldn’t see Ila, who had other plans, but at least part of the scene, one among the walkers who passed the lighted windows of the shops; and then he was thinking again about his relationship with Ila; and soon familiar questions assaulted him: What am I doing here? What’s going to happen to me? Where am I going to be buried? What did it matter where you were buried, Ila always told him, and he could never explain to her that he wasn’t really talking about being buried, though actually he was—it was hard to put this into words. But thinking of Ila only brought up the question of their future and, alone in the garden, he felt a rising terror. Slamming his hand into a bench a few minutes later didn’t make any sense but it brought a momentary distraction. And a reminder this morning.
“Come on, Jory. They’re not paying us to meditate.” Jory hadn’t realized Carl was so close. “Or maybe you think it looks better if we leave the job half done.”
Jory puts his head down and grasps the handles of the wheelbarrow, pivots its satisfyingly light weight on the wheel and starts down the hill. The world has been reduced to a child’s
dimensions now: downhill, light, easy, pleasant; uphill, heavy, difficult, dangerous. Everything else is blocked out but the sloping path he has to take from the pile of dirt beside the truck to the work site, the ground beneath him still soft after last night’s rains. He thinks about nothing else as he follows the bouncing wheelbarrow down the incline. Arms outspread, gloved hands loosely gripping the handles, the wheelbarrow’s empty metal basin flecked with dirt from the previous trips, he lets himself be pulled by its hollow weight. This is the part of the job to savor: his back muscles relax, his legs follow the downward slope, breath comes easily, smells of earth and grass rise around him—he’s left his mind behind.
Back at the bottom of the hill Jory maneuvers the wheelbarrow toward a tall black man named Ben who stands nearby, leaning on his shovel. Ben maintains this position until the last second when Jory has stopped before the still formidable mound of dirt beside the truck; then the man steps forward and begins methodically cutting into the pile and hurling shovels full of the black soil into the waiting barrow. This is Jory’s respite, the time to collect his strength, just as the other man’s will come when the wheelbarrow is full. During this quiet interval punctuated by the soft, repeated thuds of dirt striking dirt, Jory longs for a cigarette: with each cloud of smoke he’d expel more of the accumulated weariness of these trips, the toll on his muscles. What a pleasure it would be to watch that smoke dissipate in the sunlight. He lets his right hand dangle at his side, the wrist tingling, the gloved fingers loosely curved, asked to do nothing for a time. Even a slightly lighter load would be a relief but Carl has already criticized Ben for not filling the wheelbarrow and it’s certain that the man won’t stop until a tall, plump hill of dark earth rises above the barrow’s rim. Cigaretteless, Jory listens resignedly to the plop of falling dirt.
The 14th Day Page 17
