Messi@

by Andrei Codrescu

  Mr. Elahu called the convent to ask Andrea to do the show again that evening, even though another girl’s tryout had been scheduled. Andrea said no. Mr. Elahu begged and pleaded, but the more he did, the more stubborn Andrea became.

  “Maybe in two days?” The producer persisted.

  “Maybe,” Andrea said.

  But in two days she also said no. The producer called every day, but the nuns told him that Andrea was not available.

  Andrea sat on her bed with her press notices spread around her, reading the fragment from Coulianou’s writing over and over again. What did it mean? Could language actually change the physical world? Words can make people happy or sad. Singing words can make them dance. Angry words can make them fight. But can they, as Coulianou seemed to suggest, undo the very fabric of the physical world merely by being spoken out loud? Yehuda ben Yehuda also believed something similar.

  The second time Yehuda ben Yehuda saw her was at the end of that trying week. He waited for her in the morning outside the convent, with a handful of flowers he had personally picked in the Garden of Gethsemane. They went to the Afghan café where they had first kissed, and Andrea reminded him of the promise he had made her the first time they met.

  “The time has come,” she said, “for you to help me leave Jerusalem.”

  Ben didn’t understand. “But surely … after the success of the show, no one would dream of deporting you.”

  “It is precisely now that they will. Do you know when the war came?” Andrea did not say which war. “The fighting started on the day I was elected class president in my high school. Next day the schools closed. This is the time to go, precisely,” she repeated stubbornly.

  Ben insisted, too. “Won’t you fight extradition, though? All Israel knows who you are. They will demonstrate.”

  “You don’t understand, Ben. You’re American. It is not good to be known by everyone. My father was well known. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Are you going to help me, or not?”

  Her voice was firm. Ben did not ask her why she had gone on the show in the first place if she did not want to be known. It occurred to him that perhaps she had expected to fail. She had been surprised by her success. Maybe she truly hadn’t liked the fame, the fawning, the reviews, the flowers, the telegrams. He could see that she was frightened.

  The day after she and Ben decided to leave Jerusalem, Andrea stayed in her room, skipping meals, and causing concern to the sisters. She lay on the bed with her arms crossed behind her head, looking at Christ hanging naked on the wall, the chipped nails of his long toes just above her feet. Andrea sat up and took off her clothes. She pulled a shopping bag from under the bed and spread the contents on the threadbare rug. There she sprawled, admiring her treasures. Father Tuiredh’s gold watch, a heavy lump of gold, ticktocked like the heart of a boy being kissed. To think that she’d almost lost it in Adam’s skull! She picked it up by its chain and swung it mesmerically back and forth at Christ. Hypnotized, the Savior closed his eyes.

  At that very moment, Father Tuiredh was communicating grave news to Mother Superior. He had spent the better part of two days trudging through government offices in search of records pertaining to Andrea Isbik, or Andrea Isabel, or any orphan of her sex and age. Immigration had never heard of her. There was no trace of her having come to Israel. Her names were not on the passenger lists of any airline for the date of her arrival at the hospice. Fadier Tuiredh had even attempted to locate Father Eustratdus, the Sarajevan priest who sent Andrea to Jerusalem, but a phone call to the Vatican yielded nothing of his existence. It looked as if the girl had simply materialized, the night of her arrival at their gate, out of the thin, snowy air of Jerusalem.

  The priest sorrowfully told the mother superior these things, and then the two sat in thoughtful silence. Andrea, the girl they loved, was an illegal immigrant. That wasn’t so unusual in itself. What was unusual was that the girl had slipped undetected through the state’s bureaucratic machinery to become one of the most visible public persons in Israel. There was also the question of the missing four years.

  “Truly,” Father Tuiredh sighed, quoting an ancient poet, “we are hidden in the light.”

  Mother Superior, recovering from the shock of these revelations, defended Andrea’s crime. “Why should she respect borders? The soldiers who raped her did not respect her borders. What sort of boundaries could such a child have? Her country’s borders shredded like so much paper when the war came. Her childhood had no shape and no limits. Perhaps she has acquired a gift for telling people what they want to hear. I can barely imagine this convent without her.” The old lady looked on the verge of tears.

  In truth, the nuns at Saint Hildegard’s were only slightly less adrift than Andrea. They came from places torn by war and dismembered by selfishness; the convent offered them shelter within a chaotic and shapeless world. They were all refugees.

  Neither the sullen Celt nor the wise old nun wanted to give in to the unspoken thought that had seized their faith-thirsty souls, namely that Andrea had just appeared. The consequences of such a fact were too immense. They turned simultaneously toward the door, beyond which was a vestibule in which there was a door, behind which a young girl might, just might, be the One That Suddenly Appeared!

  Behind the door of her tiny room, Andrea pulled a painted silk shawl toward her by one scarlet fringe. This shawl was Professor Li’s prized possession; she had found it carefully folded and wrapped in rice paper at the bottom of his trunk. Andrea put her cheek to its smooth surface—it smelled of rose petals. On the fabric three girls with scarlet leaves in their dark hair sat together in a flowering bower by a raging brook. Smoothed out to its full length, the shawl told a story about a fox, a philosopher on a cloud, three maidens, and a ship. Andrea wrapped the story around her shoulders, and the fringes hung down on her hips.

  Andrea let the shawl fall from her shoulders and picked up Lama Cohen’s jingly prayer wheel. She put her left breast through the circle at the center and thought that she should have the creatures painted on the wheel tattooed there. And around the other breast she could tattoo the creatures from Professor Li’s shawl. Thus, orange, red, magenta, and black demons with flaming headdresses would circle her left nipple, while girls with scarlet leaves, a fox, a mountain, a philosopher on a cloud, and a ship would surround the right one. Perhaps the philosopher could be made to appear as if he were squatting on his golden buttocks on the very tip of the deep pink swirl of her aureola. She welcomed the little plump buttocks of the golden philosopher and strained up to receive him, her nipples hardening. She stretched out her arms, imagining her body an airport for winged delights.

  The polished wooden man she’d taken from Mr. Rabindranath’s room watched her from the floor. He was made from cherrywood, with a prominent, polished erection. Written on him from head to toe were verses in Sanskrit. The verse on his enlarged lingam was written with silver ink. Andrea studied him for a moment: his lips were thick and his big round eyes were shaded by very long, painted eyelashes. She brought the figure to her lips and kissed him. She turned him around and spanked with one finger his exquisitely carved wooden butt. The wooden man just laughed at her, which made her mad. She brought his head down between her legs and made him look straight at the thin jagged line there. She eased him past the soft down surrounding this fault, then made him kiss it.

  Two doors down, Mr. Rabindranath began spontaneously to float. He gyrated helplessly for a while, then bumped into a wall, unable to find the door. He had been hoping to avoid another episode of meditational immodesty, but without his compass, the wooden ithyphallos, this was nearly impossible. He had done his best to convince the sisters that levitation happened only during a trance and that he had no recollection of the event afterward. In truth, he knew only too well what he had done and what he looked like when his form took to the halls. He attributed these accidents to a disturbance in the world of the gods. Several times during meditation he had been allowed to enter a ci
rcle of devas who had been, quite literally, tearing one another apart over eschatological questions. During one of these encounters, a red-and-blue deity with a crown of pink flames devoured a modest mauve deity who held the opinion that people ought to be given another chance. Then a gold pig-faced demon bashed one of similar hue but with the face of a monkey and the sentiments of an autodidact. These struggles were unusual in cosmic history; to the casual meditator they looked a lot like weather forming and dissipating in the sky. Mr. Rabindranath was not an average meditator. He had assumed the shapes of past masters and animals and had amused himself by the performance of what humans call miracles, though he denied strenuously that such activities were meant to be amusing. He referred always to a “higher purpose,” which—because mystery was at its essence—could not be revealed. There was a higher purpose, though. Notwithstanding such highbrow considerations, the ithyphallos had served him well in the storms that were breaking in the invisible realm. Without it, recklessness was added to his familiar awkwardness.

  Gyrating hopelessly before the mirror, Mr. Rabindranath stopped dead his spinning when he realized who it was that might at this very moment be touching a pink fingertip to the phallus of his ithyphallos. For the first time since he had begun to float, Mr. Rabindranath became erect. His angry penis pointed to the door, and the door opened to let him out. “Oh, gods of mine and of all other religions,” he sobbed, closing his eyes, “please do not let what is going to happen happen!”

  But it did. The angry swarthy Indian, led by his throbbing protrusion, crashed into the small chapel where Mother Superior and Father Tuiredh sat watching the door as if they were expecting him.

  “Where to, Doctor?” Father Tuiredh asked, quite amused.

  “Returning to India, I suppose,” Mr. Rabindranath said painfully before he spun once more on his axis and ended up near the ceiling.

  Andrea lay down the moist wooden man and picked up a round metal box with something rattling inside. There seemed to be no way to open it, no matter how hard she tried. It had been welded shut. The box belonged to Father Hernio, the wealthiest of the convent’s guests. There were five trunks in his room, each one full of books, vestments, drawing pads, compasses, writing instruments, pillboxes, creams, lotions, brushes, combs, and mirrors. This little box had been most modest, but it had attracted her nonetheless.

  Father Hernio had already noticed the disappearance of the unobtrusive little box and had turned his room upside down in search of it. His day never began before he’d held this box in his hands and said a prayer over it. It contained the fine ashes of both his mother and father, killed by Marxist guerrillas near Mindanao more than twenty years before. He had carried them with him to every country of exile, and he believed that they watched over him and insured his success. He felt that without them, he was doomed to lose his faith.

  When shaking it, bashing it against the floor, and tossing it in the air didn’t crack it open, Andrea kissed the metal box and licked it. It tasted like the strips of the Mechano set she’d bent and twisted when she was ten. She knew the taste also of the metal screws in her sled, which had hurt her tongue. She had also licked many coins. In fact, her first urge when faced with a small metal object was to lick it. She once heard a story about a man who ate an entire car over a period of six months. He’d eaten everything—the wheels, the motor, the tailpipe—bit by bit, in mouth-sized portions. Andrea loved that story—it gave her a funny, itchy sensation, like spiders walking on her tummy. She would have loved to eat Father Hernio’s box, but the thing was indestructible. She’d just have to return it, she supposed.

  The next item was puzzling and clumsy. Andrea might never have taken it if she hadn’t nearly been discovered by Father Zahan. It was a tall whip with leather tails of graduated length. When she stood it up it was a foot taller than she was. When she laid it down on the floor, the thongs fanned out like braids of hair, some of which were the thinness of piano wire, while others were as thick as her wrist. The handle was made of some sort of hollow reed. Still, it was heavy. She would have put the strange whip back on the windowsill where it had been resting if she hadn’t heard the father’s voice in the hallway, joking with one of the nuns:

  “No man is an island, Sister; every man has a peninsula that links him to others. Mankind to womenfolk …”

  The sister’s uncertain laugh betrayed her misunderstanding of the pun. In her haste to lay the whip down, Andrea bent it and it snapped neatly, folding in two. When she pressed on it again, it folded another time. Now it was manageable, no bigger than a blackboard pointer. She stuck it down the right leg of her jeans. The leather thongs spilled over her belt and she pulled her shirt over them. Luckily, the father tarried long enough for her to slip onto the small balcony their rooms shared.

  Andrea unsnapped the whip to its full size again and let the tails caress her. Then she straightened out her arm and brought it back more forcefully. She had miscalculated: the leather thongs stung her thighs and wrapped themselves around her. She let out an involuntary cry and clamped her hand over her mouth, fearful that she might be overheard. Her legs felt as if rows of stinging red ants were marching in circles around them.

  The thing she’d taken was not a whip but a bull-roarer, given to Zahan at his initiation. He was forbidden to part with it. When Yuin young men reached the age of thirteen, they were taught to speak with the bull-roarer, a leather-stringed instrument that could make an extraordinary range of sounds, in imitation of the sharp winds that sang in Australia’s lonely landscape. These were the voices of the Yuin gods, which every initiated member of the tribe understood, though the language was spoken properly only by the holy men. Father Zahan was a holy man, believed by his tribesmen to be five thousand years old—as old as the tribe. Without his bull-roarer, however, the father was no more than what he appeared to be: a Catholic priest. This was an identity he had found necessary to adopt because of the politics in his region. His people did not consider this a contradiction.

  When the stinging subsided, Andrea felt very warm. Stretched out on the rug, she listened to the rain. Sometimes she could understand what it said. It was delivering a message to the Yuin priest. The rain said: I have watched you trying to use your bull-roarer in the difficult environs of Jerusalem, which is a loud city without a single private place!

  The message was not intended for her. The entity speaking was Darumulun, a Yuin god. She tried to warn him: “Father Zahan isn’t here, Mr. Rain. You may be confused because everybody here in Jerusalem is always communicating with God, which kinda jams the airwaves!”

  Andrea closed her eyes trying to imagine what Father Zahan’s god looked like. She saw a massive shape, a pyramidal being swathed in rolls of quivering fat. In his enormous fist he held a taut bull-roarer. In his belly button, which was as big as a cave, there were blue sparks. This is where the rain and the voice came from. Intrigued by her ability to see all the way inside this supernatural being, Andrea looked around. Some naked young boys were tending Darumulun by throwing pails of scented water on his hot skin. She realized that the boys were in the first year of their initiation: they were forbidden to talk. Also, they ate only from the forest floor and they slept only from midnight until dawn. The god Darumulun was a huge telegraph that the Yuin people used to communicate with one another and their ancestors. No matter how far away a Yuin might find himself, he could always reach Darumulun with a bull-roarer.

  Father Zahan, meanwhile, was having a fit of nerves. The absence of the bull-roarer had given him a tremor in the hands and legs that would not subside. He could think of no one cruel enough to deprive him of his whip. He searched his room as if hidden within its modest dimensions were holes leading to other worlds. Finally, he curled up on his bed and attempted to guide his shaky thoughts to Darumulun. It was for naught. He trembled like a sapling. It was then, at his most tenuous, that he saw Andrea etched with India ink in his mind. She regarded him with the curiosity of one who knew the future. Gratitude, or someth
ing akin to it, filled him. It was time to return home.

  “Instruct me,” he whispered.

  Andrea lay the stinging whip with its voices down on her bed. The bull-roarer vibrated there as if a low-voltage current coursed through its strands. She would have liked to lie on top of it but was afraid that the slight trembling would turn into a thrashing. The thought of what it would be like to be quashed by a massive shape such as Darumulun stopped her. In camp, she’d had to submit to an immense sweaty soldier who’d completely hidden her in his folds of fat. Even the other soldiers, waiting their turn, had protested. The giant finished before he suffocated her, but she’d wished herself dead.

  Andrea felt a sudden need for affection. Cautiously, she opened her door a crack and peered down the corridor. No one there. The feeling that she was about to do something naughty never failed to thrill her. But what to do? She had already been inside the guest rooms and taken things. The thrill was keenest at the moment when she actually slipped something under her blouse or stuck it down the leg of her jeans. The possibility of getting caught caused a delicious vibration in her fingertips. The down on her upper thighs and lower back ruffled lightly. She had even let herself into Mother Superior’s room, but it was so austere it repelled her. Apart from the black crucifix on the white wall above the narrow bed, there was only a locked steamer trunk. She had fiddled with the heavy, old-fashioned lock, but its secrets held. Just before she abandoned the attempt she’d had the strange thought that if one of her tears fell into the keyhole, the lock would open suddenly.

  Andrea looked to the worn stone steps that twisted up to the second story, where the novices’ cells were located. No sound came from up there, which meant that the sisters were about their chores at the school or in the garden. She tiptoed up. Just as she expected, the first door she tried was unlocked, but the cell was not empty. Kneeling before the sliver of light that came through a narrow window was Sister Rodica, wearing only a nightshirt. She was weeping. She did not hear Andrea come in.