“No,” Macsofo said. They all looked at him. “We have lost enough. Now you want us to lose our names, too?”
Timbor held Poliniana on his lap; she was playing with some brilliant red and yellow leaves she’d found outside. “Macsofo, be reasonable. We need these papers to survive here. Why does it matter what people call us?”
“It matters because it is who we are!”
“Who we are is not contained in a few syllables,” Timbor said mildly.
Zamatryna remembered walking through the door into exile, repeating her name to herself. My name is Zamatryna-Harani Erolorit. Harani is my mommy, and Erolorit is my daddy. My name is Zamatryna-Harani Erolorit. She had been afraid then that she would forget her name, or lose it. Now she was going to lose it after all. She pressed herself unhappily against her mother’s side. “I want to keep my name, too,” she said.
Lisa sighed. “This guy might be willing to change the names and country of origin for more money. Make you all from Afghanistan, say. But he’ll charge a fortune. He’s already charging a fortune. There are nine of you. That’s a lot of people. This is going to wipe me out, guys. It will take all of Mama’s money, and when Stan finds out—”
“When we have the green cards, we can work?” Macsofo said.
“Sure. But you need skills to work, and getting skills takes a while.”
“We will work. We will pay you back. We will repay our debt. But I cannot give up my name, Lisa. Perhaps you think it foolish.”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t think it’s silly. I’m not sure I could give up my name, either, and that’s the truth.”
“I think it is silly,” Timbor snapped. “You have done enough for us, Lisa. We cannot expect you to spend all your money on this. Macsofo—”
“We will pay it back. I will pay it back by myself, if I have to! I will spend the rest of my life paying it back! Father, I came here out of loyalty to my family. And then Darroti did what, if it had happened at home, would have kept us from having to come here at all. We came here for nothing, following a coward and a weakling—”
“No,” Erolorit said. “Macsofo, you must not say that. We loved Darroti, although he had done wrong. We do not know why he did what he did, and we must not judge. You must not speak evil—”
“I speak the truth!” Macsofo said in Gandiffran. “We know that he killed a Mendicant; how can we not judge that? He exiled all of us for nothing! We cannot go back. We have lost too much, too much, and I cannot also give up my name!”
Aliniana was crying. Poliniana, on Timbor’s lap, ripped the beautiful leaves into small shreds. Zamatryna sat at the table, her limbs like lead. She wanted to be happy. When would everyone be happy again?
Harani coughed and said in English, “There is another problem, no? Lisa, the families you listed had four adults and five children. We have five adults and four children.”
“That’s minor,” Lisa said. “If this guy changes names, he can change ages, too. Okay, look, in for a penny, in for a pound. We’ll do the names too. That’s probably best, in the long run. But you’re all going to need the same last name, okay, because that’s how it works here. It will just be too complicated otherwise.”
“Our last name is the father’s name,” Timbor said. “So my last name is Banto, who was my father, and Erolorit and Macsofo’s last name is Timbor, for I am their father, and their own children—”
“Nope,” Lisa said. “That’s a real pretty way of doing things, but it’s too complicated. It won’t work here. Now listen, I have to run get some groceries. You talk about it and figure out what you want the last name to be. You can keep your own first names, that’s less important—people have all kinds of crazy first names—or make them more American, too. All of you could have American names pretty easily.” She laughed and pointed at each of them. “Tim, Max, Alice, Erroll, hmmmm, Harani—well, that one can stay the way it is—Rick, James, Polly, Trina.”
“Trina?” Zamatryna wrinkled her nose. “That’s ugly. It sounds like latrine.”
“Latrine.” Lisa turned around, shaking her head. “You know the word ‘latrine’? Where’d you learn that word?”
“From your dictionary, Lisa. It means toilet.” Zamatryna’s cousins shrieked and giggled, and she said, “I don’t want a name that sounds like a Porto-San.”
“Honey, you are a wonder. Well, then, call yourself something else. Call yourself Zama; that’s fine. Or you can keep calling yourself Zamatryna, but it’s too long, and people will get tangled up in it. Okay, we need bread and milk and eggs, toilet paper, cereal, light bulbs. Anything else?”
They made the grocery list, and Lisa left, and the family was left sitting around the kitchen table. “Well,” Macsofo said bitterly, “what shall our new last name be?” Aliniana was still sniffling.
“We could all call ourselves Timbor, because he is the head of our family,” Erolorit said.
Timbor waved a hand in dismissal. “No, I cannot be Timbor Timbor. We must think of something else. If we are going to use all of Lisa’s money, at least we need to think of something that works for all of us.”
“We should call ourselves Darroti, because he is the reason we are here,” Macsofo said tonelessly, and Timbor’s face went pale.
“No, Macsofo. I could not bear that. It would be cruel, both to him and to us.”
“Our fate is cruel. I think it fitting.”
Harani shook her head. “You must learn to forgive, Macsofo. If our fate is cruel, it cannot now be undone, and your bitterness is poisoning you. Timbor, could we call ourselves Lémabantunk, to remind ourselves of home?”
“The Americans will not be able to say that,” Timbor said. “But the idea is fine, Harani. We can call ourselves Gandiffri. That is most fitting, for we are all of Gandiffri that exists here.”
Macsofo stared moodily out the window at the falling leaves. “And every time we say it, we will remember how much we miss our country.”
“As if we could forget that, whatever we called ourselves,” Aliniana said through her tears. “I like Gandiffri. In English it means Land of Gifts, and I suppose we must try to see this place as a land of gifts too.”
The grown-ups stared, for Aliniana rarely voiced any opinions, let alone in opposition to her husband. Harani put her hand on Aliniana’s shoulder, and Zamatryna squinted up at her aunt. “I like Gandiffri too. It’s pretty.”
“Well then,” Timbor said, and smiled. “Well then, we have our name. We shall see what Lisa thinks of it.”
Lisa thought well of it, to the family’s relief. “Gandiffri,” she said, pulling a carton of eggs out of a grocery bag. “That’s good. It sounds foreign, but not too foreign. It’ll work just fine. Okay, Harani, here’s that waffle mix you wanted, and Zamatryna and Poliniana, you girls, I got you some more little hairbands. These have pretty plastic stars on them, see? They’ll match your new sandals, the pink ones from Payless.”
“Oooooh,” Poliniana said. “Can I put them on now? Please?”
“You’re already wearing five barrettes,” Aliniana said with a small smile. It was the first time she’d smiled in days. Poliniana adored American hair things, and would have worn so many that no one could have seen her actual hair, had her mother permitted it. “Thank Lisa for the gift, child.”
“Thank you, Lisa.”
“I’ll go put mine away now, please,” Zamatryna said. She felt a little sick that Lisa was giving her all these things, and that she had nothing to give in return.
“Yes, honey. And I got you some new socks since you lost those others. I’ll never understand how dryers eat socks and only ever eat just one, but anyway, here you go. You can put them away, too.”
“Thank you,” Zamatryna said, and took the things and went to her room. She loved her room, with its view of flowers and its wallpaper covered with butterflies, although she still felt a pang of guilt about the tantrum she’d thrown to get it. But Poliniana liked her room, too, and Grandfather Timbor seemed to be fine sl
eeping in the family room, so maybe it was all right.
And she needed her own room, because of Mim-Bim. She opened the closet door to put her socks away, and there was the peanut butter jar with holes in the top, Mim-Bim tracing its X inside. It was a relief to have the insect in a jar, not to have to worry about keeping it in her pocket anymore, but the beetle was still a burden. Every morning Zamatryna opened the closet door, hoping that Mim-Bim had died during the night, but its improbably stubborn existence continued. If anyone else had lived in the room, the insect would have quickly been discovered; as it was, Zamatryna had gone to great lengths to convince Lisa and her mother and auntie that she was an extraordinarily neat child, so that they wouldn’t feel the urge to come into her room to straighten up. The boy-cousins helped her without meaning to, for Jamfret and Rikko’s sunroom was a constant obstacle course of toys, rocks, books, piles of clothing, and small mounds of decomposing food the twins had brought to bed and then forgotten. They had only been in Lisa’s house two months, and already they had amassed so many belongings that sometimes it was impossible to see the floor around their beds.
So Zamatryna went out of her way to be tidy with her own things. On the shelf next to the peanut butter jar was the wooden doll Darroti had given her so long ago. It was still blind and bald, as it had been ever since the Americans washed it in the camp. Zamatryna no longer wished to repair it. It was ugly, infinitely less alluring than the sleek, jointed Barbie dolls Lisa had given Zamatryna and Poliniana. Barbie could not have been less like Darroti’s doll; in all of her manifestations—homemaker Barbie, cheerleader Barbie, astronaut Barbie—she had eyes that filled half her face, and hair half as long as her body. Zamatryna loved the Barbies and hated the wooden doll, but she was afraid to throw it away, just as she was afraid to do anything to actively shorten Mim-Bim’s monotonous life. And so they sat together, two dimly understood reproaches.
“If you never say anything new, I’ll never know what you want,” Zamatryna whispered to Mim-Bim. “And it will be your own fault. So there.” More than once she had been tempted to let Mim-Bim out of its jar, but Stan killed insects when he found them in the house. He said they had no souls: he said that was devilish superstition. He said that they were just vermin.
And yet he delighted in the butterflies in the garden, which were also insects. Zamatryna did not understand Stan at all.
She very deliberately turned her back on the beetle and put her new socks next to a small collection of underwear on another shelf in the closet. Her leggings and tunics from Lémabantunk were there, too, but Zamatryna rarely wore them anymore, and indeed, would soon outgrow them. She preferred the brightly colored American sun-dresses and shorts, which made her feel like a flower, especially when she also got to wear Lisa’s perfume.
When they got the new papers, she would be able to go to school. That was what Lisa had told her. Lisa said that going to school was very important, and the people in the camp had said the same thing. Doing well in school was the secret to doing well in America, they said. Lisa said it would be easy for Zamatryna, because she was smart and learned things quickly. “Just look how fast you picked up English, honey. Your English is better than anybody else’s, although all of you are pretty good at it. And the memory on you, child! I never will forget how you said the whole Cat in the Hat that time. I wish we had those church camps Stan said he went to when he was a little boy, the ones where you had to memorize the names of all the books of the Bible. They gave a prize to the kid who could say them all right and do it fastest: they timed it with a stopwatch, Stan said. And every year he tried, every single year, and he always got something wrong: forgot a book, or got it out of order, or said it just a little slower than some other kid. But you’d win that prize with no trouble at all, Zamatryna, wouldn’t you?”
Zamatryna had already started memorizing things from the homeschool materials Lisa borrowed from a friend. She’d memorized the alphabet and all the times tables and the periodic table and the first half of the W ebster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, which was how she’d learned the word latrine. She’d memorized the names of all the states and all their capitals, because Lisa said that was something she’d had to do in third grade. She’d memorized Green Eggs and H am and And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. Lisa had begun to bring her other books, books for older children; now Zamatryna was working on memorizing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a story she loved because the children in it had walked through a door into another world, as she had.
Every day she worked on memorizing something new, so that she wouldn’t forget how, and so she’d do well in school. That way, maybe everyone would be happier. Stan would decide that he’d done the right thing by helping her family, and Uncle Macsofo would know that being in America wasn’t such a terrible thing after all, and Auntie Aliniana would stop crying all the time.
Keeping Stan happy was especially important: all the adults said so, although Zamatryna didn’t completely understand why. She had heard her parents talking about it many times, worrying that Stan would make them leave the house unless they accepted his god. “His faith is monstrous,” Erolorit had said once, when he thought Zamatryna had fallen asleep on the couch. “His god handed his own son, who is also himself, to the executioners. This is a god of murder and suicide, and furthermore this god has too many souls inside, like a seed or a flower crammed with too many dead.”
“He says it is a god of forgiveness,” Harani had murmured. “Lisa says so also, and even Timbor—he says Stan’s god is like the Necessary Beggar, who erases past wrongs.”
“And yet Stan says that Darroti is burning in hellfire forever for having taken his own life. Where is the forgiveness there?”
“I do not understand it,” Harani had admitted with a sigh. “It is very confusing.”
“We must not let him convince the children of these things.”
“We cannot reject his ideas too openly, beloved. We depend on his goodwill for everything, until we can get our papers and get jobs and get our own house. And Lisa says that houses are expensive.”
The grown-ups talked a lot about what jobs they would try to get when they had their papers. They talked about jobs the way Zamatryna talked about school, although it seemed to her that they did not welcome the idea of working the way she welcomed the idea of learning; they did not think that jobs would make them happy.
“For really good jobs you need to go to school,” Lisa told them one morning over breakfast. “It’s hard to get a nice clean job if you haven’t been to college, or at least to high school. The kids will have it easier. But you folks, well, maybe you guys, Erolorit and Macsofo, can get into some kind of construction work, if you’re good with your hands: Stan has connections, although you have to worry about union stuff on those jobs. You can do things like selling newspapers, I guess. You see guys standing by Kmart all the time, waving the Gazette-Journal at people who don’t even nod at them or say hello, let alone slow down to dig change out of their pockets. I swear I’ve never seen someone buy a paper from one of those folks: don’t ask me how they make any money from it.”
“Are they Mendicants?” Zamatryna asked.
“Are they what, honey?”
“Mendicants. Holy beggars.”
“Holy beggars? They have those in your country? Holy like sacred, you mean? Our beggars are just holey because all their clothing is full of holes. Oh, Lord, no, the newspaper sellers aren’t begging: they’re working. The beggars are downtown, heaven help them, sleeping in the park by the river, under the bridges and whatnot. The cops sweep ’em out every few weeks. We don’t have nearly enough shelters here. No, you don’t want to wind up homeless, believe me. We’re not going to let that happen.”
“This is a job?” Erolorit asked, frowning. “Sleeping in parks?”
“Oh no, no, that’s what happens to people who can’t get jobs, or can’t keep them. Or some people who can, for that matter. I was almost there a couple times myself, before I
went to jail. If it hadn’t been for Mama—”
Lisa wiped her face with her napkin, and Harani said gently, “You were telling us about jobs.”
“Jobs. Right. Thank you, sweetie. So anyway, you can flip burgers, plenty of high-school kids do that, but it doesn’t pay enough to keep you in toilet paper.” The cousins shrieked again, as they had at the word latrine, and Lisa chuckled. “Kids. They always love potty humor: doesn’t matter what country they come from, does it? So yeah, you can flip burgers. Or, um, well, sometimes you see ads for people to stuff envelopes at home, housewife type work: I don’t have a clue what that pays. Not much, probably. If you can count and make change you can clerk at convenience stores like 7-Eleven, although that can be dangerous. They get robbed.”
“Robbed?” Erolorit asked. “What is that?”
“Well, you know, people stealing things. Criminals. They come into the store and put a gun to your head and ask for all your money.”
Poliniana cocked her head. “Are they Mendicants?”
“What? Your holy beggars?” Lisa laughed. “Lord, no! You have a choice about whether to give your money to a beggar: crooks make you do it, or they’ll kill you.”
Poliniana squinted up at Lisa. “Why would they have to do that? Why wouldn’t people just give them the money?”
“Bless you, honey, people do give them money if they want to stay alive. Sometimes the crooks kill them anyway, though. But if you gave your money away all the time you wouldn’t have anything left, now would you?”
“Not if you only gave them what they needed to live.”
“Now, how would you know that? Crooks would tell you they needed all of it, even if they didn’t.”
“Why would they do that?” Rikko asked. “What would they do with money they didn’t need?”
The Necessary Beggar Page 11
