I told Richard all the things I could not tell anyone else. I told him about my dreams, for every night I dreamed about Darroti and about the woman he had killed. Often I dreamed about the silver pendant, the symbol Darroti had worn. And most nights I dreamed about the camp, about the bombing. I did not tell Richard this, because no one was supposed to know that we had been in the camps. I told him that I dreamt about people dying where we had come from. I told him about Darroti, how he had been a drunk, how he had killed a woman and then killed himself; I told him about Macsofo, who was drinking now also and being cruel to his wife, unkind in ways Darroti had never been. I was terrified for Macsofo, who would not listen to me, and sick for Aliniana, who had to endure his insults. She loved Macsofo still; and if she had not, where could she have gone? We were all her kin in this place, and all her country.
Richard listened. That was his work, and he did it very well. He listened and he talked. He told me that drinking and suicide run in families, and that they run together; he said it was good that I did not drink myself, and he told me to caution the children to beware of alcohol. He told me that Macsofo would stop drinking only when he was ready; he told me about treatment programs we could not afford. He suggested that Aliniana and I attend Al-Anon, which was free, but he also warned us that cultural differences might make it too foreign to us. “The Twelve-Step model hasn’t worked nearly as well for minorities as for whites. It’s a real problem in ethnic communities, especially Native American ones. Are there other people from your country here? Can you talk to them, form some kind of support group?”
“We have not found any,” I said bleakly. I was driving Richard home at the end of the day, in a blazing January sunset. There was fresh snow on the mountains, which glowed against the sky. We were still on the freeway, but soon we would exit onto local roads, and then turn onto Mount Rose Highway.
“Where are you from, again?”
I could not say Afghanistan. There were Afghan immigrants in Reno, quite a number of them, and Richard probably knew that. “It is—a very small country, very far away, very isolated. In Central Asia. You will not have heard of it, Richard.”
In the rear-view mirror, I saw him raise an eyebrow. “Well, all right. But how does your culture handle this problem? What would you have done at home, to cope with an alcoholic son?”
What had I done at home, to cope with an alcoholic son? I had been as loving as I could. I had hoped that he would stop. I had told myself that he would be all right, that he was young, that he would settle down, that surely everything was fine because he still came to the Great Market every day and still drove good bargains on carpets. I had been blind, and a fool, but there had been no way to know that then.
“In our culture,” I told Richard, “families help each other, always. And we help others. But problems stay within the family, and the family solves them. Not because the problems are shameful, but because that is what families are for, and so the person having the problem will always know that he is loved. But my son Max, the one who is drinking now, he has stopped listening to the family. He thinks our love is weakness; he thinks it is weakness to ask for help, or to give it, although where we come from, help is a blessing.” I was silent for a few minutes, while I negotiated the traffic getting off the freeway; Richard did not speak. When I was safely in the proper lane, I went on. “Max has rejected the old ways, and he claims to reject America, also, but it seems to me as if he has embraced the worst of American ways. And yet perhaps that is not fair. He works hard at his job. He brings home his pay to help us. And yet he uses that to insult us, to prove that we are weak; he says that he is better than we are. And he has begun to bring home less of his money, now. He says that if we are not working as hard as we might to help ourselves, there is no reason for him to help us. He says that he should be able to use some of his money as he pleases, and what pleases him is drinking. And he is cruel to his wife, as I have said. And yet he loves his three children, and he is proud of them, of how well they do in school, of how smart they are. He is gentle with them as he is with no one else. He is glad that they will make more money than he does, when it comes time for them to have jobs of their own.”
Richard listened, and then he spoke. “You know, in America, we say that alcoholism is a disease. That isn’t a shameful thing.”
“But he enjoys it. He enjoys drinking. No one enjoys being sick.”
Richard sighed. “He’ll stop enjoying it, at some point. Tim, how would your society explain what’s wrong with Max? What metaphor do you use? Some cultures believe that addiction is caused by spirits, for instance.”
“No,” I said, turning onto Mount Rose Highway. The highway is straight for perhaps ten miles, and then it becomes very twisty, very narrow and dangerous. I was always glad that Richard did not live farther up the mountain, because people die on that road every year, especially in the winter. “We do not believe that the dead can speak to the living; that is a grief to us. I wish more than anything to speak to Darroti.”
“Yes, of course you do.”
“Every night I dream about him. And sometimes I dream he is trying to tell me something, but he is always so sad, and I cannot bear to listen. And everything gets mixed up in his story: people dying, and the carpets we used to sell in the Great Market of our city, and the necklace he brought from home. I have never had such dreams before.”
“Post-traumatic stress syndrome,” Richard said quietly. “People who’ve been through terrible things often dream about them. It will help you if you can find somewhere to tell your story, Tim. If you can tell it in the world, it may stop dominating your dreams.”
“I am telling it to you, Richard. My family already knows it, and what they do not know would be too big a burden for them.”
“I’m honored,” he said. “Thank you for telling me. I’m sorry you’ve gone through so much. But if you don’t believe that drinking is an illness, or a form of possession, then how do you explain it?”
I scratched my ear. “I do not know. I am not sure I ever heard anyone talk about that before. I suppose we would say that the Elements were not in balance in that person. Darroti was mostly earth and water, aye, and so perhaps liquor kindled fire in him. I do not know.”
“Medieval humors,” Richard said. I did not know what he meant. “That’s a very ancient model, but it’s not really so far from how we think about some things now. Your son probably has some sort of biochemical imbalance, triggered by trauma. Medication might help him, along with therapy.”
“That would mean asking for help,” I said. “He would not do that.”
In the rear-view mirror, I saw Richard make a face. “Well, he’s become a good American that way, at any rate. Or a good Nevadan. Self-reliance.”
Yes, I thought. Self-reliance. Like paying seventy dollars a day for a taxi because you will not ask your friends for rides. What Richard spent on cab fare was incomprehensible to me. What he was paying the taxi company, I should have been paying him, for listening to me talk.
We were in the trees now, the thick pines at the base of the mountain, the very end of the place where the highway was still straight. Richard lived among these trees, in a huge house that made me shiver whenever I imagined living in it without any family to warm the rooms. Richard had no children. I dropped him at his house and told him I would see him in the morning, and then I turned the taxi around and began the lonely drive back home. It was less pretty in this direction, driving away from the mountain, and it was not always good for me to have so much time to think. I worried about many things, many people. I worried about Max and Aliniana, of course. I worried about Betty, who still did not have a permanent place to live, who had been in and out of shelters and group homes, and who more than once had been robbed and beaten on the street. Betty looked older and more frightened every time I brought her peanut butter. And I worried about Stan.
I talked to Richard; Stan talked to me. He talked to me while we were working on the three cran
ky cars my family owned, and he talked to me every Saturday when we went to the Automobile Museum to visit our beautiful vintage taxicab, so much more elegant than the ordinary yellow one I drove. The shining De Soto, with its happy plastic suns on top, never failed to cheer me, but as much as Stan loved it, it seemed to make him sad. He wanted there to be cars like that still on the streets, and there were not, except during Hot August Nights, the antique car festival in Reno. But too many people got drunk during Hot August Nights, and there was too much loud music. I did not enjoy it, and neither did Stan. He wanted the cars at the museum to be everyday cars, not party cars.
Stan was sad about many things, not just about cars. When we first came to America, he had told us endlessly about Jesus. But now, so many years later, he talked to me not to convince me that his faith was the only correct one, but to complain that he himself had lost his way. “I don’t know, old man. I always thought that if I followed Jesus and did what was right, I’d be rewarded, you know, and people would flock to me because I could give them the Word of God. But I don’t feel like I have anything to give anybody anymore. I see people lying and robbing and stealing and they don’t get struck down; they’re doing better than I am. How can God allow that? How can I talk to my flock about God’s righteousness when I can’t see it in the world myself?”
I thought about all the people who had died when the camp was bombed, and wondered just when Stan had begun to notice that bad things happened to good people. But he was glad that the bombers would be put to death, I knew, and he probably thought that the people they had killed were in Heaven, standing on clouds and playing harps. Whenever I tried to picture angels, I saw Harpo Marx, with wings. “What is it exactly,” I asked him, “that you want your God to do?”
“Punish evildoers,” Stan said. “Reward the faithful. There’s this guy at work, now, his name’s Harry, he’s a total sumbitch. Gambles and drinks and cheats on his wife, and he’s making out like Flynn. He went to Hawaii for two weeks on his last vacation. Hell, Tim, I can barely afford the thirty-five dollars a year to come here and look at these cars, you know? And I know you and the family are working real hard and paying Lisa rent, and I don’t meddle in her mama’s property, because we decided a long time ago that that was her business. And I guess it’s okay that we’re still meeting for worship in our own house; there are fewer people now anyway, so there are enough chairs for everybody. But it seems to me like, with what her mama left her and with what you folks are paying, we should be doing better.”
We were paying her back what her mother had left her, and we had paid only a fraction of it. I could not tell him that. Lisa had been a bad person before she became a good one; maybe he would think that she was still a bad person, if he knew what had happened to her mother’s money.
“Maybe your God is waiting,” I said. “To see if these people learn. Maybe Harry will be better someday.” Maybe Macsofo would, too. “Does your holy book not say that the last will be first? That seems a kind and good saying, to me.”
I had read Stan’s New Testament as soon as I knew enough English, because I wanted to understand his beliefs better; but I had never been able to make the God he talked about, the God of punishment, fit with the God of forgiveness described in those pages. The Jesus of the New Testament would have loved Macsofo, and probably Harry too. Lisa worshiped the Jesus of the New Testament. Stan worshiped some other Jesus. I could not worship either of them. I was a father myself, and I could not conceive of any loving father who would require his child to die in agony. Jesus’ father had not saved him from the cross, not even after Jesus begged him to do so in the garden. I would have done anything to save Darroti from the fence. I would have died myself, gladly. And so now I said, “It must have seemed to the people who watched Jesus die that God was not acting then, either. And yet you believe that good came of that, Stan.”
“That was only three days,” he said. “How long will I have to wait?” We were standing in front of the De Soto, then; Stan reached out as if to touch it, and then withdrew his hand, for it was forbidden to touch the cars at the museum, unless we were cleaning them. And I thought then that he was like a child, reaching for a toy. He wanted his God to be a father who gave him toys and lollipops, and also he wanted his God to heel like a puppy and come at his command.
In Gandiffri we knew that we could not command the Elements. We could try to discern their patterns, and to work within them rather than destroying them, but we did not make those patterns. Our own weavings, our own stories, were only tiny pieces of the whole, for the Elements and all their shapes had existed long before us, and would exist long after. And so when something seemed to destroy the pattern, as Darroti had when he killed the Mendicant, we tried to act kindly and carefully to repair it, as one would mend a beloved carpet. But I could not say this to Stan, because although he no longer quite held to his own faith, he would still reject mine. He no longer believed in God, but he believed very firmly in the Devil.
“It isn’t right,” he said, still staring at the De Soto. “Your family has suffered so. You lost one son, and now Max is wandering, too. And that poor woman, Betty! How can anybody make sense of what’s happened to her?”
“I do not know,” I said. “We make sense of it by trying to help, yes?”
“Yes,” he said, and reached out and gripped my shoulder. “We’re Christ’s army in the world, old man, battling the forces of Satan. Thank you. You strengthen my faith when nothing else does.”
I wondered how I could strengthen a faith I did not share. I wondered how Stan could feel sorry for Betty and Max, and not feel sorry for Harry. I wondered how he could say that giving someone peanut butter was part of a battle. I thought that I would never be a real American, and I thought that I was glad of it.
But also I was glad that the children were such excellent Americans. Richard went to AA for comfort, and Stan went to me for comfort, and I went to Zamatryna for comfort. She had graduated as valedictorian of her high-school class, and had won a number of awards for math and science and service, and now she was in the honors program at UNR. She had a double major in political science and environmental science, and planned to go to law school. She had so many friends that I could not keep their names straight. She managed the food bank at UNR to help poor people, and she still ran Planting Pals, but also she worked in a law office. She bought her clothing and books with her own money now, to help the family, and her endless chatter about classes and roses and football games was one of the few things that could make Aliniana laugh. Zamatryna bought very garish outfits in the strangest colors she could find—peach and purple and bright green, yellow and blue and black—and challenged Aliniana to paint her nails to match them, and the two of them giggled like children. And Zamatryna’s cousins adored her, and wanted to be just like her, and indeed they were also very smart and good, although they were still in high school. And even Macsofo admired her. “She will become President,” he said, blinking at her through bloodshot eyes.
That is why we were all so surprised when she began to date Jerry. He was a fine football player, but he was not good enough to be professional, and he received B’s in his accounting classes. Aliniana, who had followed Zamatryna’s social life as carefully as she followed soap operas—which, indeed, it sometimes resembled—shook her head and sighed. “Ah, he has loved her forever. That is very clear. He loved her when he was still dating Jenny, and then when Jenny dumped him and Zamatryna was dating Howard the math genius, he watched and waited until she should be free again. And when Zamatryna dumped Howard because he criticized the food bank, there was Jerry with bags of rice to give her, and tickets to a movie. He is a sweet boy, and when I tell her to be careful of his feelings, she laughs at me. She says they are just friends. I do not think Jerry thinks so. He worships her. But what does she see in him, other than kindness?”
It seemed to me that kindness was enough. And also, he did not drink. But it was true that I could not imagine what they talked ab
out. “The other girls in her sorority are jealous,” I said. “Because he is the top football player. So maybe she dates him to impress them.”
Aliniana made a sniffing noise. “They are silly girls. She belongs to that sorority only so she can ask them to garden for the old people.”
“They are her friends, Aliniana.”
“Yes, but she is better than they are. She needs to find friends at her own level.”
“Howard the math genius was at her own level, but she dumped him because he was not kind.”
“Her own level in all ways,” Aliniana said. “Which will be difficult.”
Richard, when I told him this news—for sometimes I told him of the good things in the family, too—said that Zamatryna might be weary of her level. “She and her cousins have been working very hard to make up for everything else that’s gone wrong in the family, Tim. That’s a huge burden. Dating an ordinary kid is probably a relief for her.”
It was a mild May day, the spring of Zamatryna’s freshman year; in a few more weeks, Richard would have his license back, and I would no longer get to talk to him. “Why a burden?” I said. “She is successful, and she is happy.”
“Would she tell you if she weren’t?”
“Oh, she tells us everything. You should hear her chatter to her auntie!” How little I knew, then! But Richard made me angry, for I could not bear to think that Zamatryna was not truly happy; and now I can see that there were times when she tried to tell us that, and we would not listen. “I will miss you when you can drive again,” I told Richard, to change the subject. “I will miss talking to you.”
“I’ll miss you too, Tim. I wish you could find other people to talk to. You’re still having those dreams, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Every night, always the same.”
Richard was quiet for a little while, and then said, “You could write about it. Write down what you’d tell Darroti, if he were still alive. That might help. Write him letters.”
The Necessary Beggar Page 22
