The Necessary Beggar

by Susan Palwick

  There was Mim-Bim, shining like a little lantern. Pretty thing! It wouldn’t live much longer, but Zamatryna could at least try to save it from the boots of the pale people.

  As she watched, the beetle began walking in an odd pattern: up a few inches, a diagonal down, up a few inches, a diagonal back to where it had started. Zamatryna stared. She had never seen a beetle do that before. But Mim-Bim repeated the pattern, over and over. X. The beetle was tracing an X.

  X for silence. “I won’t tell the pale people about you,” Zamatryna whispered, nearly soundlessly lest anyone hear. “I won’t let them crush you.”

  Still Mim-Bim continued the dance. X. Up, down and across, up, down and across. X. Did that mean that Zamatryna couldn’t tell anyone about the beetle, that she had to keep it completely secret? X. But why? And how had the insect learned human gestures? X. Had going through the door into exile changed it that much? But Zamatryna herself didn’t feel so very different.

  X. She fell asleep watching the beetle, watching and wondering. When she woke up, after no dreams she could remember, her head was above the covers and her body ached from the strange bed. She blinked, remembered where she was, remembered everything that had happened, and ducked under the covers again. Here was Mim-Bim, tracing the same pattern. Zamatryna picked the beetle up and put it back in her pocket. Since it knew gestures now, she hoped it would have the sense to stay hidden.

  The pale man from the night before no longer sat at the door; someone else was there, a man equally pale but with brown hair and darker eyes, who smiled at them. Someone brought them breakfast, a bitter hot drink and more of the orange juice, and dry granules to soak in milk. Someone else brought their clothing and the carpets back. “Oh, thank goodness,” Harani said, and hurried over to the neat piles. Aliniana followed with more energy than she’d yet shown here.

  “This soap smells terrible,” Aliniana grumbled, holding one of Jamfret’s tunics to her nose. “And the color’s faded! Did they ruin everything?”

  “Never mind. At least we can get out of these ridiculous garments and back into our own.”

  “Some of it,” Aliniana said grimly. “This is too small for Jamfret now! They shrunk it! And where’s our food, and the seeds? Did they bring that pile back too?”

  The food and seeds were gone, and only some of the clothing they had so carefully chosen to bring with them was still wearable. Some of it was faded, some shrunk. Some had developed holes where none had been before. The prayer carpets had kept their colors, for they were costly things, but Poliniana’s beautiful slippers were oddly bent, missing some of their jewels and beads. Zamatryna’s wooden doll had been robbed of its eyes and hair; her mother handed it back to her with a sigh. “I’m sorry, sweet one. I’ll fix it for you when I can.”

  “It’s all right,” Zamatryna said. She felt very grown up suddenly, and she knew what to do. She carried the wooden doll to her Uncle Darroti, who sat hugging himself on his bed, his face working, and placed it on his lap. “She lost her hair and eyes, Uncle. Will you make new ones for her?”

  He didn’t look at her. He stared into the air above her head and said tonelessly, “I don’t know how.”

  “Yes you do, Uncle. Of course you do! You made them the first time.”

  “That was at home. I don’t know how anymore.”

  She touched his hand. It was very cold. “You’ll learn,” she said. She began to climb into his lap, because once he had liked it when she did that, but he didn’t respond, didn’t unfold his arms, still didn’t look at her. It was like climbing a tree, except that tree branches bent when you climbed them, and Uncle Darroti didn’t bend.

  “Zamatryna,” her father said quietly. “Don’t. He doesn’t want it.”

  She got down again, feeling scolded. “I wanted to help. I thought—”

  “I know. Come here.” She went to Erolorit, and he bent and picked her up and held her for a long time, as he had not done since she was much smaller. “I know you were trying to help,” he said into her hair. “You are a sweet, kind child, and your uncle loves you, but he cannot show it right now. He cannot show it to anyone. You must not be angry at him or upset with yourself. He is sick, and we will all try to make him better, but I think it will take a long time. Do not be upset. Can you go play with your cousins?”

  But she didn’t get the chance, because new pale people came and gestured for the family to follow with their things. This time they were taken deep into the ugly city and brought to another of the cloth buildings, much smaller than the one where they had been before. It had ten cots crammed into it, so close together that they had to crawl over each other if someone wanted to get up in the middle of the night. Their building was surrounded by others, each of which also held too many people, none of whom spoke any language they could understand. Little white houses stood between the buildings; they were the places of relief, made of hard shiny white stuff. They stank, but at least the ground was mostly clean.

  A short distance away was a much larger building filled with tables, where three times a day they ate their food: plain, dull stuff, plentiful enough but tasteless, good only for keeping life in the body. Grandfather Timbor blessed it before each meal, his voice nearly inaudible over the uproar of voices around them. Zamatryna had never seen so many people in such a little space, and she never grew used to the smell. Babies could be bathed every two days, but anyone who could walk was only permitted to take a very short shower once a week, because water was too precious here to waste. The stink of bodies was everywhere.

  That stink never faded. They spent fifteen long, strange months in the ugly city. If indeed it was a city of Mendicants, as Erolorit had claimed, it never felt sacred. The pale people in green were kind enough, but would not let them leave. They spent most of their time at school, studying English.

  The children learned it most easily, and Zamatryna was the quickest of all. Nearly fluent after a year—a feat the Americans considered remarkable—she became the interpreter for the family. What a relief it was to be able to communicate with something other than gestures!

  They learned that they were in the desert to the north of Reno, Nevada, in a camp built to accommodate refugees from other places, places torn by warfare or decimated by plague. Their neighbors in the camp had fled persecution, famine, and chaos to seek asylum in the United States, the wealthiest country in this world. These were the lucky ones, who had been able to leave their countries at all. Most of them had friends and family they had left behind, whom they would try to bring here once they became established in America. Once they would have been able to come here more easily, but the United States had been attacked on its own soil, ten years before Timbor’s family arrived, and no longer trusted people who were not already Americans. Even getting to the camp was difficult: many people were turned away at airports, sent back to their own countries. And sometimes people in the camp were sent back, when their pleas for asylum were rej ected.

  The Army, the people in green, guarded the camp to make sure no one escaped to live illegally in the United States. That was why the camp was in the middle of a desert, for even if someone escaped, there were miles of harsh landscape between the gates and the nearest town, or even the nearest reliable source of water. But people from outside came into the camp: teachers, doctors, social workers, linguists and lawyers, ministers and church volunteers, all the people who wanted to help the refugees stay in the United States, even though they weren’t Americans yet. Zamatryna liked the teachers, who told her how smart she was. She didn’t like the doctors, who stuck needles into her, or the linguists, who kept trying to find out what language her family spoke. Some of the church people were very kind, but others told her that her family’s blessings were no good, that everyone had to use the same blessings their church did. It was very strange, because the different churches had different blessings, too. But at least all of these people, the ones she liked and the one she didn’t, wanted to help the refugees stay in the United State
s.

  Her teachers told her that there were other people who didn’t want the refugees to stay in the United States. Some of these people were very angry. They couldn’t come into the camp. They couldn’t get near the camp. The Army kept them away. The teachers and doctors and social workers had to come into the camp in Army trucks, or else in cars or vans surrounded by Army trucks and guarded by Army guns, because if they tried to come alone, they would be hurt by these others. A social worker and two nurses had been killed before the Army set up that system.

  The people trying to help the refugees were called the Do-Goodniks, or Nicks for short. The people who hated them, who hated both the refugees and the Nicks, were called the Nuts, although there were different degrees of Nuts; not all of them were violent. Some only waved signs and wrote letters. But some Nicks also only waved signs and wrote letters, rather than coming into the camp to help the refugees.

  The Nuts didn’t call themselves Nuts: only the Nicks called them that. The Nuts called themselves Patriots, and called the Nicks Traitors.

  Nut could also mean an edible seed. Nick could also mean a notch, or a small cut. English was a very confusing language. Patriot and Traitor, at any rate, seemed to have only one meaning each.

  Zamatryna wasn’t happy in the camp. She liked learning English, even though it was so confusing, and did well in her lessons, but there were too many people here and too many problems, both inside their tent and outside it. Having everyone in the family crowded into one room was extremely wearing. They all grew snappish, their love for one another strained, and Zamatryna had a private problem, one she was afraid to share with anyone.

  Mim-Bim refused to die, as any ordinary beetle would have done at the end of the summer. The insect lived through the fall and the winter, surviving on bits of lettuce and rice and canned fruit that Zamatryna sneaked into her pocket in the dining tent. Mim-Bim lived in her pocket, always, allowed out only at night, when it traced Xs under the bedcovers. It traced Xs in her pocket, too; she could feel it. Silence, silence. So she had to keep Mim-Bim a secret, even though she longed to ask some adult what all of this meant. Clearly Mim-Bim was something other than an ordinary beetle, but whom could Zamatryna consult about this oracle, when the insect so obsessively demanded secrecy? The creature who had been a beloved pet became a dreaded burden, and yet one Zamatryna was afraid to discard. If she stepped on Mim-Bim, or refused to feed the beetle, she would be no better than the Americans. Each morning when she woke up, she yearned to find that she had accidentally crushed the animal in her sleep, for then surely she would be forgiven. But each morning it was still alive, still tracing its constant figure.

  And then there were the problems outside their tent: an illness that swept through the camp, leaving Zamatryna’s family untouched but killing five babies; perpetual fights between people from rival tribes or faiths or nations; a man who raped two women, whose husbands then conspired to murder him, whereupon both couples were shipped back to their countries as criminals. Under American law, they had had no right to take the vengeance they did.

  The entire camp was abuzz, after that happened. “Barbarians,” Aliniana said, weeping. “We have arrived in a world of barbarians!” Zamatryna didn’t know if she meant that the man was a barbarian for raping the women, or that the husbands were barbarians for murdering him, or that the Americans were barbarians for sending the couples back to their countries. One couple was from Nicaragua, the other from Lebanon. Grandfather Timbor said quietly that this itself was a form of murder, because the couples would probably die of famine or war when they went back home.

  Maybe Aliniana meant all three kinds of barbarity. She had nothing good to say about their new world. But Zamatryna was afraid to ask, because Uncle Darroti, who had never become normal again, didn’t eat for three days after the couples were deported. He spoke only once, in a whisper, to Erolorit, who reported the conversation to the rest of the family.

  “He is afraid that if the Americans learn that he is a murderer, we will be cast out of this place.”

  Macsofo snorted. “What are they going to do? Send us back home? How?”

  “No one will find out,” Timbor said mildly. “We will not tell them.”

  Harani shook her head. “The question isn’t whether we’ll get to stay here. It’s whether we’ll ever get to leave the camp.”

  For Zamatryna’s family, who had arrived without papers, were a great mystery to the Americans, who kept asking them questions. The Americans thought that Timbor’s family had gotten off one of the refugee trucks from the East (for in the press of the crowd, apparently, no one had seen them simply appear). Their names were not on the master list kept by the soldier on duty, the list Zamatryna had mistaken for a poem, on which every name had already been checked off. They spoke no known language, and there was no record of them anywhere in the computer, which tracked the transportation of refugees from across the country here, to Nevada. And yet they must have been processed at one of the airports, the Americans said, must have had papers at some point, or they never would have gotten this far.

  That was why Zamatryna’s family had spent their first night in a quarantine tent, why their blood had been drawn to check for diseases. The Americans knew that this must have already happened, if the family was here—for no one could get onto the trucks without a health check—but they did it again, to be safe. And the fact that Zamatryna’s family so obviously had never seen needles before puzzled and worried them, although when all the tests came back negative the next morning, the family was still allowed into the main camp.

  Because Zamatryna was the oldest child, and more fluent in English than her parents, the Americans asked her a great number of questions, which she relayed to her grandfather. Timbor answered the questions as succinctly and truthfully as he could. The Americans didn’t find these conversations very satisfying.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Home.”

  “Yes, but what is the name of your home?”

  “In our language it means the Glorious City.”

  “What language is that?”

  “It is our language.”

  “Would you say the name of the city in your language, please?”

  “Lémabantunk.”

  “We have never heard of Lémabantunk. Where is it?”

  “It is home.”

  “Sir, what country is Lémabantunk in?”

  “Gandiffri.”

  “We have never heard of any country called Gandiffri.”

  “Well no, not in your language, of course not.”

  “But no one speaks your language! No one here has ever heard your language.”

  “Of course people speak our language. We speak it.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “We walked.”

  “You walked? To the United States? That is impossible. That would mean you were from South or Central America, and you speak no language known in those places. You could have walked from Canada, but there are no refugees from Canada. And you were in the trucks from New York. You could not have walked from South or Central America to New York. If you were from South or Central America, you would have been in a convoy from Los Angeles or Texas.”

  “We walked from our city to this desert.”

  “Sir, that is impossible.”

  “I am sorry that you think it is impossible. We are here, whether it is impossible or not.”

  “Why do you have no papers?”

  “We had to leave so much behind.”

  “But you must have had papers with you, to get into the country! The borders are guarded very carefully, and the trucks are guarded even more carefully.”

  “I am sorry. If you give us papers now, we will guard them very carefully.”

  “But we can’t give you papers unless we know where you are from. Do you understand?”

  “I have told you where we are from.”

  “Can you show us on a map? If we bring you a globe, can you show us
your country?”

  “I cannot read your maps. We do not have globes, in our country.”

  “What direction did you walk in, when you walked to the United States? Did you walk north? If you walked, you must have walked north. Otherwise you would have had to walk across an ocean, which is impossible.”

  “We walked forward.”

  “Sir, please understand that we are not trying to be difficult. We want to help your family. But if we cannot get fuller information from you, you will be deported. You will have to go back home.”

  “We cannot go back home.”

  “Why not? Why did you leave home? Why did you come here? Was there a war, or a famine, or a plague? Were people persecuting you?”

  Here, at last, Timbor lost some of his composure. Zamatryna knew that he wanted at all costs to keep from the Americans the fact that Darroti had committed a crime, since criminals were not allowed to stay here. In her pocket, she could feel Mim-Bim tracing its constant X, and she wondered if silence about the cause of their exile was what the beetle was commanding so urgently. “We came here to begin again! It is painful to us to think about why we had to leave. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes, sir. Sir, we are very sorry, but we still need to ask you these questions. There are laws here.”

  “Go away, please. We are grateful for the shelter and the food you have given us, and for teaching us your language, but I think you have asked enough questions for today.”

  They went away. They came back. They brought with them a woman, an immigration lawyer, who explained patiently that to remain in the United States without papers, the family would need to fulfill certain conditions. If they were not already sponsored by relatives, or by an employer, or by a church, they could request asylum in the United States. But that was a complicated legal process, which would involve proving that they had left their own country out of justified fear of persecution based on race, religion, political views, social affiliation, or nationality.