“No, go ahead,” her mother said. There was a long silence. “There are bats in the roof,” she said finally. “I can hear them rustling around up there and squeaking.”
Livy looked up at the rafters obediently. Her mother was a great changer of subjects.
“I don’t know if I’m supposed to think they’re a nuisance,” her mother went on. “They eat the mosquitoes. But I think most people run them out.”
“I like them,” Livy said.
“Me too,” her mother said. “Even if they do shit all over the place.” She squeezed Livy’s knee, and then gave it a pat.
Another day with no text message from the cousin; another day unable to get close to the meeting place. The raw cabbage and tomatoes had gotten Revaz’s bowels moving and he had had to dig a hole with a stick behind the blackberry bush. It was hard to dig with the stick, and he was sweating and slapping mosquitoes at the same time. It made him feel old and frail. After a while he dropped the stick and dug with his hands, the earth packing in under his fingernails.
If they arrested him and sent him back, he would die in prison. It would likely be tuberculosis that got him—it was everywhere in the prisons and the drugs did nothing—or a heart attack. He had high blood pressure and nobody got to see a doctor in prison unless they were already half-dead. He had visited many prisons and he knew.
He had written six stories about the prisons, and had even gotten an allowance to bring along a bloody-minded photographer who talked the men into pulling up their sleeves and showing their sores. The smell was asphyxiating everywhere: he’d seen twenty-two men in a single holding cell designed for six, and half the toilets had no water. The series had sold to a tabloid and he’d kept the gas on in his apartment for three months with the earnings, before the inevitable call came from some municipal undersecretary and the assignment was shut down.
He’d had a few brilliant ideas in his life and every one of them had started with money and ended with a beating. Inmates got no phone calls, were allowed no letters. Sometimes they went without personal visits for months or years—their request paperwork was lost, or they failed to keep up their end of the elaborate network of obligations that was the economy of prison life. A visiting journalist could carry messages to the men for money. Another journalist brought this fact to his attention, a colleague with a summer house in the mountains, and he was persuaded. He was still in debt from when his parents were dying. They had tried private care, not that it had helped. And he had other debts as well.
There was quite a bit of money at first. His colleague put him in touch with a man named Beridze, who met him in a café, wearing a shearling jacket and cheap shoes, and explained that he would act as a broker between Revaz and the many people who needed to communicate with prisoners, many of whom were Beridze’s friends. He smiled when he said “friends,” in case Revaz might fail to understand what he meant: he was kanonieri qurdebi, the mob. The kanonieri qurdebi, existing half in and half outside of prison as it did, had urgent communication needs. He and Revaz agreed on a rate of payment, and letters began arriving at Revaz’s apartment, an outer envelope addressed to him and a smaller envelope inside, sometimes immaculate and sometimes folded and smudged, with the prison number and the recipient’s name on it. Revaz could visit the prisons easily, even though his series had been discontinued. He still had his press pass, and the guards were indifferent to all matters outside of life and death and their own hustles. For a year he made regular visits.
His address was circulating, he realized uneasily in the winter of that year. More and more messages arrived. There were no return addresses, and the only direct contact he had was with Beridze, who dropped by his apartment once a month with a bottle of sherry to make sure he was still “comfortable.” The money was wired into a second bank account that he set up.
If he’d been telling his sister Anna this, he would have said: Those poor men. You can’t imagine their isolation. As the word got out he was sometimes approached directly by mothers and girlfriends who had heard he could get into the prisons, and for them he reduced the rate for his services. He saw real gratitude in their eyes. There was that, at least.
Of course, Anna was not an idiot. She would have said: And the rest? Nothing but love letters, are they? Love letters from the kanonieri qurdebi to their many, many friends.
The beating came in the spring. He was walking home from work and the gutters were trickling with melted snow. They came up behind him and pulled his jacket over his head, so he saw no faces. It was over very quickly. His nose was broken and two ribs were cracked.
He had laughed later, in his apartment, trying to think who might have done it. Because there were so many people he’d carried messages to by then, and in parsing out the matter he had to think not only of them and their friends and their many business connections—most of whom he could only guess at, because why would he ask?—but he also had to think of their rivals, and their business connections and friends and wives and mistresses, and this vast spreading growth of sympathy and antipathy was the actual fabric of society. He’d gotten into a bad place in it, and that was all he knew.
And one of the messages, maybe, had been about the ferry. At any rate, the police said it had been. He couldn’t say; he never read them.
When it got dark he climbed out of the tree and walked in the woods. His stomach no longer hurt from hunger, but food was constantly on his mind. Potatoes: boiled mostly, with sour cream. Heavy, filling beer. The marrow from the neck bones in the soup pot, scraped out and eaten with salt.
Revaz knew he couldn’t wait forever for a hustler who wasn’t coming, living on stolen cabbages. But he was not brave enough for this game, really. If he wasn’t careful he would simply sit in the tree until he starved or had a heart attack. It was a great mental effort to contemplate the brave and probably futile things he could do—the mad dash he could make over the hill, cars he could steal. Even if he got past the police, how would he find his way?
Had the people in the white house noticed the stump where he had pulled the cabbage loose? He had a sudden bolt of insight into fairy stories about imps who come in the night and steal little things, mangle chickens and break crockery. That was what he was now, a shadowy creature who picked at the edges of daytime lives.
Livy could not concentrate on the magazines, and as the night grew later and she felt no urge to sleep, her anxiety began to rise again. She straightened the books in the shelf above her bed; she’d read them all many times. Her parents had gone to bed. They would find out about the robbery eventually. There must have been cameras in the pharmacy. She kept picturing the two of them side by side in the kitchen with their hands pressed across their eyes; shock and bottomless disappointment. Her nearest cousin, a weedy boy in Creek County, had been brought home twice by the police, in the style of teenage boys: once for possession of drug paraphernalia—a glass pipe—and once for something she couldn’t remember, some teenage crime extrapolated from insolence, from hanging around. She pondered the fact that what she had done was much worse than anything the cousin had ever done, despite his outsized reputation in the family. She stood in the middle of her room, shoulders hunched, flinching in the dead air.
It was hot but she didn’t want to open the skylight because mosquitoes would come in. She paced. Sweat bloomed under her hair. She tried to write in her journal but got no further than Still stuck here. She thought about writing down what had happened at the pharmacy but dismissed the idea immediately on the grounds that the journal could be used as evidence against her in a criminal trial. She doubled back on this thought and examined it closely for signs of hysteria or exaggeration, and found to her dismay that it was sound. The room was stifling. She shuffled down the stairs.
She took a cigarette from her mother’s pack, which was in the pocket of a raincoat hung by the door. She had smoked only two or three cigarettes before in her life, but this seemed like a good time for one. She found the matches in the cabinet over t
he stove and pushed the front door open as quietly as she could.
The night was brighter than she had expected. An oval moon hung over the hill across the creek. The yard spread out before her like a basin: the garden at the bottom with the garage and the massive privet bush beside it, the hills sloping up and away. She had sometimes slept in a tent in the yard when she was younger, giddy with the exposure of it, the animal secrets in the grass. She would wake up to find slugs in the shoes she’d left by the tent flap.
She walked out into the middle of the basin, wondering if going into the yard counted as leaving the house. She lit the cigarette, which made her cough. She felt a crinkle in her chest like a paper bag. Her mother smoked a strong brand. She walked deeper into the dark yard, inhaling lightly, cut grass sticking to her wet feet. There was a broad avenue of grass with trees on both sides leading to the driveway the Markos shared with the neighbors; she intended to go that way and walk the loop of the driveway down to the creek on the other side. But as she got closer to the woods she was afraid.
She stopped and regarded the trees. The feeling was clear and persistent, the voice of a matter-of-fact child saying Don’t go near the woods at night, and Livy realized, standing by the garage on the tame, newly cut grass with the dark trees right ahead of her, that it was the voice of Little Red Riding Hood. She’d had a recording of the story when she was little and this was the actor’s voice speaking from the center of her chest, giving her a piece of eternally solid advice. She took a small drag from the cigarette and stayed where she was. She was safe by the garage wall with the moon shining weakly down. There was a flash of white in the woods and the sound of dry branches breaking and undergrowth giving way—a deer leaping, escaping.
A man walked out of the woods. Livy’s breathing hitched in her throat. She put her free hand on the planks of the garage wall behind her.
It was clear that he saw her. He took a few steps out of the underbrush at the edge of the woods, moving the vines of blackberries and multiflora roses delicately out of his way, and then stopped on the grass and brushed off the front of his pants. He put one hand in the air: a wave. Livy was suddenly inverted, her insides blank with shock, her consciousness straining outward. He had been there the whole time she walked in the yard, lit her cigarette, lingered by the garage; he had heard her coughing, had been watching while she scratched the mosquito bites on her legs. Her right hand scrabbled over the boards behind her and closed over the handle of a potato fork on a nail. It was a blunt-tined pitchfork with a short, worn handle, a garden tool that looked more dangerous than it was. She leveled it at him.
He did not move. They stared at each other. Livy shuffled sideways to the corner of the garage, holding the potato fork out in front of her. The house was behind her, a straight shot. She paused at the corner of the garage, breathing hard, and the man lowered his hand.
She ran. The potato fork swam along beside her with the pumping of her arm. She reached the porch and tried the door; it was locked. She had come out of the kitchen door, on the other side of the house, and her parents must have locked this one before they went to bed. Her stomach twisted. She hit the door twice with the flat of her hand and looked back. He was still standing at the edge of the trees, looking after her, but now his hands were hanging at his sides. He was making no move to follow her.
She shook the hair out of her eyes, wiped the sweat off her forehead. His shoulders were slumped, his body thick around the middle. He wasn’t following her, but he wasn’t retreating, either.
She recognized him. He was the man in the photo.
“Shit,” she said, pronouncing it so forcefully that saliva dribbled over her lip. He was wearing a white shirt; she could see the gleam of eyeglasses. She looked down at her shaking hands, remembered the cigarette, and threw it away.
He disentangled himself from the edge of the woods. The white shirt shifted and sagged against the dark undergrowth, and then he was out in the moonlight, walking carefully across the grass with both hands held out in front of him, palms forward. The moon shone down on his small round head. He stopped by the arborvitae a few yards from the porch and raised his hands higher. “Please?” he said.
Livy could see the shape of the top of his head, his shoulders, his supplicating hands, but his face was dark; only the frames of his glasses stood out. To his eyes she was probably only a shadow at the edge of the porch. She was glad for that. She held the potato fork out farther, to make sure he saw it.
“Please?” he said. He walked down the slope toward her. His expression was anxious. He looked about fifty, in a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and dark pants. There was a gleaming metal watchband on one upraised wrist. His hair stood up in tufts.
Livy’s mouth was closed tightly and she was breathing very hard through her nose. He stopped a few feet away, below her on the grass.
“Please,” he said.
His accent rounded the word. He pressed his hands to his breast pocket, then the pockets of his pants, and held them out again, palms up: I have nothing. Livy opened her mouth; her breathing was frighteningly loud. Her chest was heaving as if she’d been crying and she made a great effort to control it.
“What,” she said.
“Help,” he said.
He reached into his breast pocket, withdrew an object, and came closer, holding it out. She pointed the potato fork down at him. His obvious fatigue made him seem immovable, as if he had used all his strength to cross the yard and was therefore capable only of standing there forever. It was this that made her put out her hand and take the small flat object from him. He drew back instantly into himself, his shoulders going slack. She looked down at what she held in her hand: a plastic ID card, illegible in the dark, with a little square photo, and a bunch of folded money.
“What is this?” she said. “No, no. I don’t want this. Take it back.” She pushed it into his hand.
He accepted it, slowly, and put it back in his pocket. She could see that his chest was heaving now too, as if he’d been holding his breath. He pivoted on one foot and pointed across the yard to the garage. “House,” he said.
“House?”
He pointed at his own chest, and then at the garage again. “House,” he said. “I go.” His hand flattened across his chest. The arm swung out and back. “Thank you,” he said.
He turned and hurried away. She watched as he crossed the flat part of the yard, vanished briefly in the deep shadow of the privet bush, and then reappeared by the garage door. There was a moment of stillness, indistinct in the dark, possibly a minute struggle with the old latch, and then the door opened and he went inside.
Livy’s mind rang like a bell. She picked up the cigarette where she had dropped it at her feet, put it out, and threw it under the porch stairs. Then she carried the potato fork to the far end of the porch and propped it against the wall.
She noticed that her hands were shaking. Her legs, when she stepped down into the grass, buckled under her. The grass was long and wet; it was a corner of the yard that had not been mowed in weeks, and she stayed on her knees in it for a minute, her fingers laced into the roots. Finally she got to her feet and walked around to the kitchen door. It was still unlocked. She went in and locked it behind her.
In the kitchen she drank a glass of water very fast and thought, I have to go get the police right now.
She stood at the sink with the empty glass. She could go downstairs and wake up her parents. They would get the police.
But she felt weak, almost faint. She went up to her bed and lay down. Her shoes were still on and after a while she sat up and pulled them off, which was more difficult than it normally was, as if her hands were numb. She sat with her hair falling in her face, trying to think. A little moonlight came in the window.
She lay down. She remembered a nightmare, which in her restive exhausted state felt like a cogent argument, a train of thought: herself on a sea choked with jostling ice, clinging to a floe that heaved and sank hideously.<
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She would get up and get her parents and the police.
But he looked so scared. He looked like her chemistry teachers: the glasses, the gray hair, the buttoned shirt. Many middle-aged men who worked indoors looked like this. She could think of a whole parade of them, wearing watches and windbreakers, teachers and restaurant managers and friends’ fathers who worked in the city.
What would happen to him if the police found him? He looked like a man afraid for his life. She had heard things on TV about people like that disappearing. Foreign people who were taken to black sites. She had seen a documentary about it.
She wondered if he had killed someone. Many someones, maybe, to warrant all this. Her mind stalled there.
She fell asleep, somehow, curled up on her side.
3
He didn’t sleep that night. It was pitch black inside the garage, and he sat down on a stack of lumber that he felt in the darkness and leaned against the wall and let his mind fade in and out for many hours. When light began to come through the windows he saw that there was a loft above him. He found a ladder and climbed up. The loft was full of old furniture.
He would have expected to feel anxious now, but he did not. He felt the calm of an infant—soft-brained, placid. He sat on the floor, leaning against a white-painted dresser. He’d turned everything over. He’d made his little bid. She might bring the police, but she might not. He was too tired and too hungry to care anymore.
He hoped that she might bring him something to eat. In a half-dreaming state, he developed a certainty that she would bring him an egg sandwich. It would have mayonnaise and soft cheese. He fell asleep as the sun was coming over the top of the hill, the valley floor still dark and cool. When he woke again and switched on his phone, there was a text message waiting for him in his own language:
Relief Map Page 11
