by Amy Gustine
You Should Pity Us Instead
© 2016 by Amy Gustine
FIRST EDITION
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gustine, Amy, 1970-
[Short stories. Selections]
You should pity us instead: stories / Amy Gustine. -- First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-941411-20-9 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS3607.U788A6 2016
813’.6--dc23
2015017017
Cover design and interior by Kristen Radtke.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
To Erma, Charlie, Leona, and Henry for playing conductor and chauffer, for picking out the grapes and being the Solid Gold dancers, for telling me to put my fingers on ASDFJKL;
CONTENTS
All the Sons of Cain
Unattended
Goldene Medene
You Should Pity Us Instead
An Uncontaminated Soul
Prisoners Do
Coyote
AKA Juan
The River Warta
When We’re Innocent
Half-Life
ALL THE SONS OF CAIN
After they find out where she lives, they start coming every week, sometimes every day. Wednesday morning they come especially early, waking her. R’s mother stays in bed, yearning for coffee and the bathroom, but fearful of nearing the window. She knows what she’ll see below: her son’s scrawny face imprinted on cheap poster board, hoisted on stave and dowel by protesters who misspell his name. Sometimes they use him to protest another prisoner trade, sometimes to support it; sometimes to urge settlements, other times to condemn those already built; to push for a two-state solution or to warn against it. Once they were protesting a tax, another time something to do with toilets. R’s mother doesn’t want to know what they’re using her son for today. Reconciliation and revenge. Hostages and prisoners. Murderers and soldiers. It all sounds the same from up here.
She turns to the wall and pulls the blanket over her shoulder. Retired from her job as a nurse, she has nothing to do but think of R. What she thinks is that he’s already dead. If not today, then tomorrow, or next year. And if we’re sure to die, then aren’t we already gone? Only time intervenes, and what is time? If you were a rock, there would be no time. Rocks do not die. It occurs to her symbols don’t die either. As a symbol—inert, permanent—her son still matters.
Sitting up, she looks toward the street-side window. She ought to love the protesters. Whatever they’re protesting for, they’re keeping her son in people’s minds. But she can’t love them. She doesn’t give a damn about them.
R’s mother lies back down. What is the math of a mother’s love? Infinity, she thinks. She would let everyone in the world burn for him. Including, and especially, Gilad Shalit.
They took R after Shalit, Israel’s common son, came home in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. Terrorists, some say. Freedom fighters to others. Regardless, Hamas wanted more. It was six months ago that they grabbed R under cover of tear gas near the Gaza border. The pain of his capture has not attenuated. Instead, it is like a cancer swimming through her veins to plant pieces in every pocket of self: her eyes, her ears, her taste, her dreams.
R’s mother is sliding against the wall, staying clear of the window on her way to the bathroom, when something smacks the outside of the building. Enraged, she rushes toward the window, about to yell “bomb” just to make them stop jousting with his face. That face, that name, belong to her. To hell with them. But before she can speak, a few words break free of the crowd. Muslim. Tape. Proof.
She slams the window and turns on the TV, channeling past women singing and a show about desert climates to a local news program. Hamas has released a videotape of R in which he claims to be converting to Islam. His mother barely registers these words. She is staring at the newspaper her son holds, a British paper dated just last week.
The possibility that an Israeli soldier is becoming a Muslim takes hold of the country. The protests become larger, the pundits more strident. One morning R’s mother is watching a local channel broadcasting a protest outside her own window. A banner, painted in slurred red letters, reads: “A Jew is worth a thousand Muslims. A traitor is worth a thousand deaths.”
She finds a pair of scissors and cuts the TV’s power cord.
For a month she doesn’t go out, doesn’t answer the phone, doesn’t read the newspaper or turn on the radio. A boy in the building goes to the market for her, a boy who can be counted on never to ask how she’s feeling or what she thinks about the tape. Like a prisoner herself—a prisoner of uncertainty, of history, of other people’s prejudice—she spends her time reading old novels, their familiar stories a great comfort. No more surprises.
Then one Friday afternoon she is forced to venture into the street because her cousin’s daughter has had a baby and there is a party. No protesters are about, but she dons a disguise anyway—old glasses, a hat, her nurse’s uniform—to walk the ten blocks to her cousin’s house. When she arrives, an aunt on the baby’s father’s side, a woman she has never met before, shakes her head sympathetically and says she heard what they are saying about R. “Don’t worry,” the woman assures her. “We all know it isn’t true. It is impossible for a Jew to become a Muslim. Muslims are dogs.” She lights a cigarette and puffs. “Putting a collar on a human doesn’t make him a mutt.”
The other women in the room blanch, casting silent apologies to R’s mother, who returns their pained expression with a neutral stare, as if she doesn’t know what the problem is.
As a distraction, someone asks the new mother how her labor was. Long, she says, and lots of back pain. This sparks a round of birth stories. The new mother’s trials are trumped first by a mother allergic to pain medication who delivered a ten-pound girl, then by one who gave birth in the hospital’s waiting room. Finally, a tiny woman tells of delivering twins on a moving bus. She wins, yet the stories continue—strange places, strange pains, rude medical staff. R’s mother remains silent. Her birth story can’t be told.
On the way home, she passes a café she used to like and glances in the window, thinking of their pastries. There, on a TV monitor hanging from the wall, is her son, his features digitally removed from the structure of his face and superimposed on a missile embossed with the star and crescent. Grabbing the door from a young couple stepping out, she goes inside. One of the pundits, a chubby man with a bad comb-over, is saying it doesn’t matter whether R has converted to Islam or not. “He was born a Jew, so he is a Jew. We must get him out.”
R’s mother thinks of the blood-lettered banner, the old woman at the party. What would they say if they knew the truth? It’s only a matter of time before a journalist goes digging—before the truth creates lies, and lies become facts.
At home she packs quickly, a change of clothes, a few toiletries. Then she gathers pictures of R. Recent ones, in which he’s recognizable—one on his fifteenth birthday with his favorite red shirt, one at the beach, one from high school graduation—but also older ones, to show him at his most vulnerable. On his seventh birthday with both front teeth mi
ssing. On the day he took his first step, his hands flung in the air, his expression shocked and joyful. Finally she takes the first picture of all in which he isn’t even visible. Only she can be seen, standing outside an airplane bound for home, holding something wrapped in a yellow blanket.
She leaves behind the picture of R in his IDF uniform, his long-toothed smile hidden in an ambivalent twist of the lip, his eyes lost in the shadow of an Israeli flag unfurled at the edge of the frame.
As her plane descends into Cairo’s International Airport, R’s mother looks down on the glittering high-rises lining the Nile’s shore, then inland, to the raw-concrete worker’s homes, squatting in twilight. To the east is the City of the Dead, crumbling, necropolitan mustards, and to the west the dark, ancient deserts of Giza’s tombs, so singular and grand they strike her not as burial plots, but as alien settlements. Everywhere there are minarets, looking from above like missiles. As they near the earth, a few small crosses appear, then smokestacks, antennas, and satellite dishes, then finally bags and bags of garbage held in check by brick walls.
Her plane lands, opening to air that smells like home, hot and dusty. She wears black to blend in with the married women. The customs official examines her blue passport closely, but it doesn’t arouse suspicions. Her last name is common in Israel, one of the favorites for immigrants looking to shed their European identities.
R’s mother spends the night in a hotel, and the next morning the young man at the front desk locates a driver to take her east. Two hundred and fifty miles on two-lane roads, her peripheral vision tainted by a head scarf. At one point the driver takes a dirt road that can’t go anywhere good and R’s mother thinks he’s figured out who she is and plans to make short work of a troublesome Jewish mother, but it turns out to only be a clever shortcut. The driver returns to pavement and in another few miles looks over his shoulder. “You are Jew, no?” he asks in English.
She hesitates. “Yes.”
He taps the dashboard. “I am Christian. The government, they kill my pigs, so I get this. They cannot kill a car, no?”
Many of the Christians in Egypt were pig farmers until the government slaughtered all the pigs to pacify Muslims worried about swine flu. R’s mother understands the garbage now. The pigs used to eat it. She smiles sympathetically. “They can kill anything, but for now you have a very nice car.”
Another few miles before the pig farmer asks why she is going to Rafah. “Not a good place for Jew.”
R’s mother considers whether to tell the truth. The Muslim government killed his Christian pigs. What are the chances she’ll find a more trustworthy Egyptian?
When she admits where she really wants to go, he looks shocked, then nods and holds up her money. “You pay me twice this, I get you to somebody. Understand? I know nothing.”
She affirms, “Nothing.”
In Rafah the pig farmer deposits R’s mother at one of the few open businesses, a market with red metal tables. The rest of the street is lined with chalky buildings leaning against one another. Most appear empty. The proprietor brings her a Sprite, staring at her a moment before going inside and shutting the door in a way that tells her she’s not wanted. At the red table she sits bolt upright, half-expecting to be shot from a passing car. They pass only rarely. When they do, R’s mother tightens the muscles around her spine. If she dies, she’d like to do it looking forward.
The pig farmer returns at dark and says he’s found her a place to stay. “Tomorrow, the tunnels.”
She offers an open hand of bills, and he selects five. “This is good.”
They drive through streets edged in dirt mounds and concrete shards to a building with a green flag. A woman shows R’s mother to a room with a white iron bed. That night she dreams of carrying R under a sky glittering with stars. When the earth opens up in a great zigzag crack, she drops him.
The next morning the woman brings her bread with a paste of mustard-flavored chicken and tells her a man is coming. R’s mother nods. A man is always coming.
The pig farmer returns. “Why do you go to Gaza?”
“My son is in there.”
The man asks who her son is.
She tells him.
There is a long pause. He repeats the name.
She nods.
He taps his temple. “You are not thinking.”
“I know.”
They sit awhile in silence until the man sighs. “Promise me you will not say his name. Tell them you have family, but make up a name. Do not tell them the real name.”
She nods again, and he hands her a bag with a thobe, slacks, and a white hijab.
“They will want to check you, understand? For safety.” He pats down his own chest and sides to demonstrate.
He returns after dark with a flour sack. “For your eyes.” She slips the sack over her head and submits to loosely bound wrists. They drive in what feels like circles for an hour before he helps her out of the car and unties her hands. They are in a home with pink floor tiles, a young man at the kitchen table. R’s mother hands over more money. The pig farmer and the man debate something in heated undertones until the pig farmer sighs and comes over. While he runs his fingers over her sides, her thighs, and then briefly, barely touching, over her breasts and buttocks, he keeps repeating, “I am sorry, I am sorry.”
The pig farmer and the other man leave. A boy remains, stationed inside the kitchen doorway. He watches her with a look of amusement alternating with blankness, as if he’s having brief seizures. Over the next hour two new men look in on her, each asking why she is here. She tells them her son is in Gaza and pulls out the older photographs. The men have all looked through her purse, but only for weapons. They showed no interest in the pictures.
At one point a woman comes in holding a newborn and looks to the boy. He gives no indication of approval or disapproval, so she sits down to nurse.
“Was it a difficult birth?” R’s mother asks in her passable Arabic.
“Easy,” she says. “It is my fourth.”
“Any more?”
“If Allah desires.” The woman’s tone says Allah is a pesky boss. “My first was hard.” She dips her head to indicate the boy. “Fifteen hours and he gets stuck.”
The woman describes her other children’s births and then the tales of nieces and nephews, neighbors and friends. Sick babies, big babies, small babies, babies who can’t wait, and babies who must be coaxed free. Babies who die.
“If Allah wants so many babies,” the woman asks, “why make them die?”
More men come, blindfold R’s mother and put her in a car. In a new kitchen two of them get down on the floor, heads inside a cabinet whose pressboard doors have swollen from water damage and cracked along the edge. They work silently, then pull the cabinet free to reveal a hole in the floor lined by wooden braces that act as both wall and ladder. One of the men helps her get a footing. As she descends, surprised by the muscle required to lower oneself into the earth, the air grows cooler and begins to taste of sulfur and iron. Breathing becomes difficult and her fingers begin to spasm from gripping the wooden braces.
At the bottom a man hands her a blanket. “Cold.”
The tunnel is twice the width of her shoulders, its height an inch above her own. Light bulbs dangle from exposed wires, and cigarette butts dot the dirt floor. Every six feet a wooden brace supports the roof. She fears losing her resolve, but the nonchalance of the men emboldens her, and she dares to ask why the tunnel smells of fish.
“You don’t let them take to the water,” her Egyptian guide explains, rubbing index to thumb in the universal symbol of cash, “so we bring them fish.”
At the tunnel’s end her guide fits a harness around her and uses a phone on the wall to give the order to lift. Three men pulley R’s mother from the earth. Her first glimpse of Gaza is a girl’s bedroom with blue birds flying in lonely, far-flung formation across a pink wall. In the corner four children sit on a dingy yellow bedspread playing a game with stones and brok
en crayons. One of the men unbuckles the harness and motions for her to follow him. They walk through a room which several families have divided with blankets and out the door to a dark street. The man is gone, the door shut, while R’s mother is still thinking about who painted those lonely birds.
•
The first night she sleeps behind a dumpster, and the next morning her bones feel as if they’ve been hammered. Gaza looks like she’d expected: half-buildings, debris-littered streets, dusty clothes, graffiti. The few women outside are accompanied by a man. Her resolve wavers until she spots a pair of older women alone, but when she arrays the pictures, whispering, “I am his mother,” they look frightened, shaking their heads, and quickly move on.
The next night she sleeps on the beach hidden behind a pile of cinder blocks, and in the morning her bones feel only gently pinged, like the keys of a piano too strenuously played. The men think they took all her money, but R’s mother hid bills between the inner and outer sole of her shoe, so she buys a banana and eats it, watching a group of children yelling at a boy cowering against a wall. Every few seconds laughter bursts forth and the faces light up, including the boy against the wall. He switches places with one of the shouters and shows her how it’s done, getting his face low, leaving her only a view of his dark, angry eyes. The other children clap at his performance. R’s mother catches the words “soldier” and “tough.” Instead of cops and robbers, the children here play IDF and Palestinian.
She shows them R’s picture. “Do you know him?”
One little girl says he looks like her father. “But he’s not.”
A boy asks what his name is, then shrugs apologies and wanders off.
After that, R’s mother talks only to children. Their skin feels dusty when she takes an arm, asks them to look. “He is here,” she explains, “being kept somewhere. If you were kept, wouldn’t you want your mother to be able to visit?”
