A hand on the door—a soft knock, a wait, then three knocks louder.
Nobody Bess knows would knock this way; they’d call her name, “Miss Bessie, you there?” And they mostly bring her little somethingsto-eat, a pear or a handful of hickory nuts. No words now though but one more knock. Bess drags up slowly and, on her way, turns June’s picture face-down on the table. No shame involved—just giving him shelter, wherever he is, though she hasn’t seen his eyes in the picture for three years (her cataracts are ripe).
When the door’s full open, it’s a dark-haired white boy turning to leave. He halts on the top step. “I wake you, Aunt Bess?”
All her life she’s never confessed to being asleep when somebody calls her. She bares her excellent teeth and says “Just lying, collecting my thoughts for church.” She hasn’t been to church in twelve years, can’t get that near June’s stone in the yard.
The boy—a man, thirty-one years old—says “Bess, it’s Buckeye Price’s son, Reynolds.”
She weighs that claim against his face. “You got a heap more of your mammy in you—Lizbeth’s eyes and Mr. Jack’s hair. How they getting on?”
“Well, you remember my father’s dead; and Mother’s losing her sight but she’s cheerful.”
“I ain’t seen a thing since before you were born.” Bess waves a hand in front of her eyes and shakes her head, “Can’t even see my own black skin.”
“You sure knew me.”
“I known you long as anybody left but your own mother. I was holding her wrist when you was born. Held her mammy’s too the minute she died.”
He’s heard that before and, while she rises and moves to the door, he takes the memory as a sign her mind is clear enough. If he can keep her on track awhile, she may yet tell him all he needs (he’s told himself that Bess is his hope of understanding what he can’t pardon and passing that much on to others). One of her two chairs sits on the porch at the sunny end. He goes over, takes it and moves toward the shade.
“Where you going with my antiques?” She still hasn’t laughed.
“I’m sitting you in the cool so you’ll talk.”
“You ain’t still writing that book about me?” But she makes a careful way to the chair and lowers herself.
He sits on the top step, less than a yard of space between them. “I haven’t started your book yet, no. I need your help.” He waits and thinks he’s lost her already—her eyes have lowered a curious veil across the pupils, a pearly haze—but he tries anyhow. “Start from the first, when you worked for Miss Liz.”
Her eyes shut now. “That won’t the first.”
“But start there please; they were my grandparents.”
There comes a long space when nothing on her moves; then her left hand rises flat on the air, a firm refusal. Her eyes are opening again and seeing; then they aim straight at him with a new peeled clarity as if his nearness has tripped something in her and reeled back youth. The hand stays up as she finally speaks. “The start was when my lips come open in Mama’s belly and axed for light.”
He says “I’ve got womb memories too—”
“You want this story or you want to talk? I’m near bout ninety.”
He knows she’s a hundred sometime this month (he found the month and year in a ledger from the Coleman farm), but he keeps it from her. He says “I want that story; tell on.”
And honest to God, Bess tries to tell it. Her dry lips work and her mind sends words—she only recalls these scattered hours—but what comes out is dark shine and power from her banked old heart and the quick of her bones, dark but hot as a furnace blast with a high blue roar. It burns the boy first. Bess sees him blown back and starting to scorch; then it whips round and folds her into the light till both of them sit in a grate of embers, purified by the tale itself, the visible trace of one long life too hard to tell.
AN EARLY CHRISTMAS
BY SUNDOWN I knew I’d ruined the day, maybe even the rest of my trip. And I’d only got here three hours ago—Israel, the West Bank, the Old City of Jerusalem, December 24th 1980 and me almost at the Jaffa Gate on my way back toward a faceless hotel five hundred yards across the valley that anciently served as the model for Hell. I’d flown here on a personal whim, no work to do, no major plan. Fact was, I’d spent the previous Easter in Rome alone. And two days ago when I saw I’d be alone for Christmas, I thought I might try Rome again. My grown sons would be unavailable, my live-in lady friend had found younger company a few months back, and I was exhausted from the push to finish twenty pictures for an exhibition (I’m a landscape painter basically). So I had the telephone in my hand to book tomorrow’s flight to Rome when I suddenly thought “No, Bethlehem.”
With a change in Amsterdam, the flight was on time. My luggage was waiting in that low barn of a baggage room where a few years back a squad of arriving Japanese terrorists calmly opened their own slim bags, produced machine guns and mowed down dozens of passengers. I rented a car, then drove through a dry plain littered with burnt-out tanks and Jeeps from the ‘67 war, then up a spine of rocky hills till I reached Jerusalem in late afternoon—a ridge of light that was already strange and welcome as a rescue. I easily found my room, the size of a cigar box; then asked where I might get a ticket for mass in Bethlehem tonight.
The desk clerk lowered her lioness head in frank despair. “Nowhere, sir. You’re weeks too late.”
At that point a four-foot high bellhop—pretty surely an Arab—beckoned me over toward his stand, looked round conspiratorially and whispered that I should try an address ten minutes away by the Jaffa Gate inside the old walls, a Catholic agency for tourists and pilgrims.
I’d walked straight out in the still-warm sun down a valley path through dirt, weeds, more rusted car parts and up again through the western gate that stands by the ruins of Herod’s palace—later Pilate’s headquarters where Jesus was mauled. By the time I found the agency in its maze of trinket shops, the wide room was empty and dimming fast. Surely all tickets were long since gone.
But a bell had jangled when I walked in; and as I was almost turning to leave, a monk appeared through a green door. His brown habit was plainly Franciscan, but his English was almost comically French; and his livid dome and predatory profile sliced the air like a Grand Inquisitor’s, hellbent to save me at whatever cost to life and limb.
I told him how I’d come without warning so had been unable to write for tickets by the November deadline. Was there a chance of a single, even standing room, in Bethlehem tonight? (Western Christmas begins in a Roman Catholic church adjoining the Greek basilica with its famous cave beneath the altar, the actual birthplace, a makeshift stable.)
Before he’d even heard me out, the monk’s head slowly shook a firm no. But when I said I was sorry because I’d come as an artist for Time magazine—an instant lie—he gutted my eyes with his own ice blues, then asked for my passport. He took some time with the entry stamp, establishing yes I had just landed. And where was I staying? Who accompanied me? Did I have a car? Did I understand that Bethlehem was shut to cars till midnight tonight? The only way was on foot or bus, and I’d be body-searched by Israeli guards. When I switched to the truth—I was on my own with a rented car—he gave the thinnest frigid smile and laid his blackest ace between us. “Is monsieur a Catholic person?”
I have no quarrel with the Catholic church except for the fact that my sons’ mother used her nominal Catholicism to keep the boys from me five bitter years while she refused to hear of divorce or any shared custody on grounds that the Church prevented her yielding when I well knew she had less faith than I in a storm, which was shakily little in those years. So the truthful answer was “No I’m not,” but then I thought of the creed I’d repeated a thousand times in my childhood—I believe in the holy Catholic church. I met the monk’s fuming eyes and said “Yes, Brother, Catholic.”
He gave my passport one more look, comparing the photograph with my face as if I might have lethal designs on the manger itself. Then he vanished
through what seemed a slit in space, that mute and slick. Through the glass in the outside door, I could see that the street was bright again even this late, a honey-colored gleam on the limestone.
A string of Arab schoolboys—all in blue smocks like midget painters—were scuffling homeward. One of them saw me through the glass and stretched his face in a monster grin, crossed eyes, fang teeth. Another boy cut a literal flip. He stood on his two feet, frowned at me deeply, spun through the air ass-over-tip and landed upright, laughing wildly.
I thought of the actual Bethlehem shepherds—local boys at leisure to greet the newest Babe with pet lambs, songs, their best rude pranks—and I took a step forward, smiled and waved. The monster boy was a twin to my younger son years back, and I started to open the door and speak.
But the monk was instantly on me—“Ah non!” He thrust a scattering hand at the boys; and then I saw that he held one ticket, printed large on heavy paper. When the boys were gone, he held it toward me. “Merry Christmas, Monsieur Boatner.” Again his lips had frozen, smiling.
I took the ticket and reached for my wallet, not a tip but a seasonal gift for the poor (I assumed Franciscans still cared for the poor).
His eyes took offense and he said “Impossible” in English not French, then gave me the same dismissive wave he’d flung at the boys.
I must have felt a combination of shame at my lie of brotherhood with him and hot revulsion from his condescending hand. I thrust the ticket at him. “On second thought, Ah non, merci.”
He was totally calm and accepted the ticket; this happened daily. He gave an Oriental deep bow with a wide arm-flourish—“As you say, Mr. Boatner”—and was gone again, uncannily fast.
Ten seconds later I was outside in a new damp chill, a purplish haze that had suddenly risen. The peddlers’ stands were all shut down; the only moving thing was a beggar in a scarlet fez and a weird leather stump in place of one leg—the left leg showed from sole to knee with a palm-sized ulcer deep in the shin.
Thank God at least he was hopping briskly away and didn’t spot me. I’d go to my hotel, drink malt whiskey and try to sleep through the glorious Birth till noon tomorrow.
Which was how I thought I’d ruined the trip.
I was very wrong, though if I’d plowed on bar-ward and bed-ward, I might well be a standing man now, a vertical painter, not a huddled gimp with unpredictable fingers that somedays blot out hours of work with a lunge. What bent my course was, again, a child—almost surely the one at the window who’d looked so much like my younger son. He was pale, black-haired, maybe eight years old, practicing soccer with a tattered ball and a limestone curb that faced the Arab Police Department and marked the line of Christ’s real path from Pilate to the cross (the official Via Dolorosa is a medieval tour guide’s invention).
As my normal gait bore down on the boy—five yards off—he spun, faced me grimly and suddenly fired his ball at my feet.
I hadn’t returned a soccer pass in thirty years, but some vestigial trained synapse flared in my mind; and back the ball went, dead at his eyes.
He caught it, laughing, with both arms; charged ahead and up three steps, then turned to say “We give you tea.”
He waited with his ball in the high door-frame beside a cafe till I took his next challenge and followed him up a winding stair into deepening dark. Young as he was, at the first landing, I had an apprehensive moment—my mind formed the sight of a blade and silently said the one word knife. But as we entered the dim apartment, I was quickly wrapped in the dense, amazing rough-haired mantle of Eastern hospitality.
The boy was named Jabril and was older than I’d first thought (“eleven and a half very soon”). He lived with his parents and older sister above the Citadel Cafe on the pocket square inside the gate; and in the time between sunset and Christmas dawn, they and their kinsmen served me tea and an unforeseeable strange lot more. His smiling mother was fortyish and stocky in a Western dress from 1950. The pretty teenage sister wore jeans and a starched tux shirt. The father was not yet home from work, but the women mustered round me with grins. They either spoke no English or wouldn’t take the risk, but they made me endless tiny glasses of thick sweet tea with water boiled on a charcoal brazier in the midst of the room. There were also bowls of pistachio nuts, flat sesame cakes and small rice candies. Soon I was wolfing them down too fast; and again my exhausted brain repeated a word to itself—poison, poison—though my teeth chewed on.
I’d been seated right off on a sofa with Jabril beside me once he changed into cleaner clothes. His English was better than I could have guessed, and he reeled out normal boyish questions. Where did I live? Did I know Ronald Reagan? Why did he not help the Palestinian people? Was my wife sick? If not, where was she? How could I live alone? Was I not very sad? When would I go home? Was that near Chicago where his uncle lived? Could he visit me soon? But the facts he truly cared about were where he lingered—“How much older than me are your sons? Are they very respectful?”
I said “They’re more than twice your age’both grown men now—and one has a daughter. “
“You will have many more grandchildren soon?”
I tried to explain how in America that wasn’t my business—the children were up to my son and his wife.
It plainly failed to impress Jabril—he put up a finger to stop me short for a deeper probe. “Are they kind to you?—your grownup sons?”
I said they were, the times I saw them.
“But they have left you.” His eyes were round and solemn as bronze coins, judging my sons.
For the first time clearly, I saw they were gone—really gone except for jokey visits—but I managed a smile.
Jabril’s eyes refused to quit. “Why have they let you come here alone in the cold and rain?”
Bullseye and I saw he knew it. But I made up an answer about a commission to paint some pictures in the desert light southeast of here—the Dead Sea valley, an hour’s drive. I tried to parry the rest of his serves with questions about his own friends, his school and with compliments on his resourceful English.
The mother and daughter stirred around us but never sat; and when I’d drunk all the tea I could hold and started drawing Jabril’s head in a school tablet that had lain with his books, they silently disappeared from the room.
The boy sat still with enormous dignity as if he’d waited all his life for the man to appear who’d fix his likeness in history.
But given the night and day behind me (and the Franciscan creep), when I finished the line of Jabril’s neck, I suddenly wondered if this were somehow irreligious—didn’t Islam, like Orthodox Judaism, forbid a likeness of living things? I held out the drawing. “Is this all right?”
He faced me, barely seeing the tablet, and shook his head—a firm no.
I took that as a final answer, though what I’d drawn was a speaking likeness; and I started tearing the sheet from the tablet.
But again he shook his courtly head and stopped my wrist. He took the tablet, set it between us; then faced me again, graver still with eyes that had no need to blink.
Till now I’d seen only one Arab country—Morocco fifteen years ago—but I’d read and watched enough Middle East news to feel a twinge of actual fear. Here, unknowing, I’d made some irreversible gaffe—maybe worse than a gaffe. What would come down from the boy, the women, his invisible father, the nearest mullah or God knew who? My mind said knife a few more times, and I stood in place. “Please thank your mother and sister for tea. Good luck in school.”
Jabril stood too. “You eat something now.”
I realized that, in all my life, no other child had ever concerned himself with my diet. “Thank you. I’ll go to my hotel and rest, then eat a good dinner. “
“You eat with us.” He stood as if a ready meal would rush in on us.
“Oh yes, thank you; the nuts were fine. The candy really filled me up.
He said “No. More.” Then he reached for my right hand and said “We go.”
The usual murk of jet lag, verbal imprecisions, vague anxiety and “What-the-hell” abandon overwhelmed me. I’d follow Jabril wherever he led.
It was back through the front door, down the stairs out into the night, then quickly back through the cafe entrance. At first the space seemed totally dark, but the boy led on, and then I saw what seemed a small alcove off the back. We turned in there and—ah—a long marble-topped table, Jabril’s mother with her hair combed long, the sister now in a blood-red dress, an older woman with a prosperous mustache and two more men (one younger than me, one silver-haired). They’d plainly waited in this dim silence for our arrival. Once the younger man sat me at the head of the table, they all beamed on me and said “You are welcome” in various ways.
Then the older man called out for “Samir,” and a stupefyingly bountiful meal slid into place.
Slowly the facts—were they facts?—emerged. This was Jabril’s immediate family, not Muslim at all but Christian and Catholic. The younger man was the boy’s father, a driver for the British consul. The older man was the father’s father; the single woman was somebody’s aunt who’d moved to San Francisco years back and was home for the week. The cafe seemed to belong to the family; and this was clearly their Christmas feast at which somehow I’d been expected and over which I half presided with growing peace and an appetite like none I’d felt since my days as an artist in the splendid highlands of Vietnam, drawing the beautiful terror for Time. Somehow the tablet with Jabril’s portrait was rounding the table before the summoned Samir appeared with Scotch for me, the only drinker.
Samir was the waiter, the only one in sight this evening (the cafe was closed to all but us). He was a small man, maybe thirty, with one short leg on which he limped and a face so focused on his work that he threatened more than once in my sight to burst into flame—not anger but purpose. It was Sam alone who brought and re-brought platters of chicken with mountainous saffron-yellow rice, a flayed and all but grinning lamb with roast eggplant, endless mysterious bowls of relishes laced with yogurt and olive oil, endless bottles of mineral water and orangeade, more Scotch for me.
Collected Stories of Reynolds Price Page 60
