All That's Left to Tell

by Daniel Lowe

  8

  Two days had passed since the drive to the mountains. On the way back, once they were again in the outskirts of what he now knew was the city, Saabir had pulled the car over, and Josephine had stepped out without a word. For a night, Marc was taken to a different house, more pleasant, scented with what may have been incense, and where a small family may have lived—he heard their voices but saw no one other than Saabir and another man who stood guard with utter disinterest. He overheard Saabir arguing with someone he assumed was the father in the house, and the next day he was transported back to the room with the half-dirt floor and the high window. “Home,” he’d said to Saabir when he removed the blindfold, and even Saabir couldn’t help but give him a wry smile.

  But he hadn’t seen Azhar in several days now, and since he seemed a reluctant participant in whatever group Josephine was a member of, and because he seemed gentle, and had children, Marc worried that Azhar had been caught in some sort of crossfire when they’d driven out of the city.

  So Marc asked, “What happened to Azhar?” after Saabir had blindfolded him and tied his hands and he heard the woman come in and sit down.

  “Azhar’s with his family,” Josephine said. “You will see him again.”

  “Was he hurt?”

  “So much concern for a terrorist, Marc?” She had returned to her tone of the first few days.

  “He told you I called him that?”

  “He mentioned it.”

  “I like Azhar. But he sits watching me with a gun over his shoulder.”

  “I know,” she said, and she was suddenly no longer his interrogator. “It doesn’t suit him. Like many people here, his family needs the money.”

  “Does Saabir have a family?”

  “Of course.”

  “I mean a wife. Children.”

  She hesitated a moment.

  “He has a son.”

  “And a wife?”

  She seemed to turn her head toward the door.

  “It’s best if you don’t ask too many questions about Saabir. His wife is dead. Let’s leave it at that.”

  They sat quietly for what seemed several long minutes. He knew this was likely because of the intimacy of the storytelling during their past few meetings, which had perhaps surprised both of them, as if they somehow had become unintentional lovers who now had to bear the morning sun on their faces. The last time he’d felt such an awkwardness was the morning he woke in his home after Lynne had told him she wanted to separate. It was as if their years together had moved out before he had, and left him with nothing to say.

  “How long do you think it’ll be safe to stay here?” he asked.

  “It’s never been what I’d call safe,” she said. “It’s probably less so now. By now you know it’s almost impossible to predict what might happen on any given day. What I’ve learned—”

  She stopped there.

  “What you’ve learned?” he pressed. She shifted in her chair, perhaps uncrossing and recrossing her legs. He realized he now was attempting to imagine her legs.

  “I’m not going to tell you it’s thrilling to live with a knife at your throat. I don’t live that way, or at least I wouldn’t describe it like that. But in our little crucible, on some days, when something unexpected happens, you could say so much is revealed about others so fast. Sometimes it’s something about someone’s mother or someone’s home. Sometimes it’s about fear or something else that’s primitive.”

  “Like petroglyphs?”

  For a second, he imagined he could hear her smile.

  “Older than those,” she said. “Living this way—as someone who didn’t grow up here, who had someone else’s money, and who is fighting for a cause. It’s exciting for a long time. Even after the worst of everything it’s exciting. But you get tired of others’ blood…”

  Again he thought of Azhar. “Blood on your hands, Josephine?”

  “Don’t ask me that question. It’s not a relevant question today, and you know it. But I don’t mean literally. I’m talking about something else. Like the other day, when we were driving away. Your heart was pounding, wasn’t it? You might have thought you were about to die, and it’s possible right then that you were. I thought I could hear your heart in your ears. And as Saabir was driving I could see the artery in his neck throbbing with tension. That’s the kind of blood I mean. The blood that seems indifferent to anything other than escape, or flight, or some unwanted embrace that pushes it toward another generation.”

  “All right, Josephine. I get it.”

  “You think I’m overstating it?”

  “Not really.”

  “You have no idea what I’ve lived through here.”

  For the first time she sounded almost angry.

  “You could tell me.”

  At this, she stayed silent for a while. He had spoken with more tenderness than he’d intended.

  “Is that why you gave me the little house on the lake? Those quiet years? The summer rowing across the pond?”

  “That was Genevieve.”

  “Genevieve. Josephine. Any difference?”

  “It’s important you don’t confuse the two.”

  She had told him the story of Claire and Genevieve’s journey across Nevada while he sat at the base of the cliff with his back to her, and as her shadow, shrinking as the sun rose, moved a few steps one direction, and then another as she spoke, and Saabir burned through cigarette after cigarette, the smoke and the smell of the sparse trees on the rocky outcroppings heavier in the warming early afternoon. Sentence by sentence he was pulled in, not into the life of the Claire he knew, but the Claire he could barely have recognized. And had Josephine not stepped out of the car somewhere on the way back to the city, had he not been taken to a different house and had an additional glimpse of his own vulnerability, he would have asked her to stay to tell him more of that story.

  “I’m not sure why that’s important. Are you saying Genevieve’s not like you?”

  She laughed briefly, but chose not to answer him directly.

  “I don’t want you to think I’m being held here like you, against my will, though as I’ve already told you, I’m not free to travel,” she said. “But I’ve spent years here, as a woman, in a place where the rules and roles for women are well defined and Americans are not exactly embraced.”

  “So you are American?”

  “You know, I’m tired of the tone of these questions. You have no power here, and you know it. But if there’s something specific you want to know about me, then ask. Yes, I’m American. And no, living here isn’t exactly The Sheltering Sky, if you’ve read it. But there are times it’s reminiscent.”

  “Honestly, I wasn’t aware of my tone. And I haven’t read it, of course.”

  “I think you’re still carrying on as if the strangeness of this place is outside you, and you might endure it, and someday go home. It’s a different thing once the strangeness is inside you. I bet Claire understood that at the moment she was killed. But when she doesn’t die, like in our story, I don’t know what she understands. We’ll see, won’t we?” She seemed to think about this for a moment. “And would I like for my own life a house on a lake where daily I could row across a pond and watch the little whirlpools spin away under the oars? Yes. Of course yes. At some point, everyone wants to have that for as long as they can hang on to it.”

  “It doesn’t seem like many get that here. I wouldn’t know, but life seems a hell of a lot less innocent than it does at home.”

  “This is my home now. And I think the man rowing across the lake in our story, he’s not looking for a return to innocence. He’s looking for something, but not that.”

  “Josephine,” he said, lowering his voice as it dawned on him. “After your lover was killed. Did someone—what happened to you?”

  She sat entirely still, the room silent, and then he heard her move forward on her chair.

  “Let me see your hand.” He extended it toward her. She bent it at the
wrist and said, “Spread your fingers.” After he did, she set the base of her palm against his, and then pressed against it with her entire hand. He could feel her fingers extend well above his own, and the tiny spaces the creases in them made, and her palm was cool and dry. He felt the intimacy of his effort to see her through the pressure of her hand on his. And then she tightened her fingers around his, squeezing, and he could feel the strength in them.

  “That shouldn’t necessarily be a complicated question, should it? But for me, it is. I’ve kept others from hurting me when I could.”

  She pulled her hand away.

  The evening deepened as they continued to sit for a time without speaking. Outside, he occasionally heard voices, then a door closing and someone laughing. He remembered the table he’d seen days ago with the three place settings, and he had wanted to sit down there with that small family. And then the call went out for the evening prayer—he wasn’t sure how far away the mosque was, but it was surely equipped with loudspeakers for the muezzin’s voice to carry this far. Odd that a man’s singing, with no instruments to support him, calling people to gather, could sometimes sound like a mournful plea for company.

  “When I was seventeen,” Josephine said, “a girl in my high school took an interest in my mortal soul. I think of her every time I hear that particular muezzin. He sounds like a woman, don’t you think?”

  “Before I came here, if I’d heard him, I would have been sure of it.” He was feeling a sympathy for Josephine that he couldn’t have explained.

  “Years ago, I used to wonder if they tried to. Sound like women, I mean. I’m not sure why I wanted to think that. Jibril laughed at me when I asked him about it.”

  “Jibril was the man you traveled with?”

  He imagined she nodded, sensed that she did, which meant that she had forgotten his blindfold because of the memory.

  “The girl in my school,” she said. “She was tiny, really. One of those young women who somehow managed to be short and thin at the same time. I towered over her. She wasn’t particularly popular with the other kids, but she had that kind of sunflower face, round and always turning toward the light, and her brightness was appealing, so most of the kids forgave the Bible she hauled around with her schoolbooks. She didn’t push it most of the time, but once she invited me to a concert in a small, open-air stadium in a park. I didn’t believe in God then, but because she was sweet, and I considered her a friend, I spent the evening there with her. It was Christian rock, which I didn’t have much patience for, but it was played well enough, and the lead singer would occasionally tell stories in between songs. In the middle of one of those stories, an ambulance went by with its siren blaring, louder and louder as it neared the venue, and the singer broke off his story and asked everyone to bow their heads, and as he was saying a prayer for whoever it was who was hurt or dying, my girlfriend took my hand. It was the only thing that reached me in the entire show.”

  Beneath the blindfold, he could see the two of them sitting at the concert with their heads lowered, but he still couldn’t imagine Josephine’s face, and for a moment he saw it as a featureless oval from which a voice emerged, and he tightened his eyes against its opacity.

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I guess it’s because of the one time I heard her sing, and how she reminded me of that muezzin. She had a boyfriend who went to a different school. The same church, apparently. They were serious about it in the way only seventeen-year-olds can get. He’d given her a ring. Anyway, our last year of school together, we took a trip with the other kids from our class to an amusement park that was a few hours’ drive away, and we came back after nightfall. She was sitting with a boy who’d always liked her. I didn’t make anything of it. I slept most of the way back. But when we got off that bus, she asked if I could give her a ride home, and when I looked over at her after she pulled the car door shut, she was crying, and was pulling her knees up to her chest. She said, ‘I don’t think he’ll forgive me,’ and, given the way she sometimes talked, I thought she might have been talking about Jesus. Maybe she was. I asked her what had happened, but she only shook her head. I was surprised to see that sunny face so dark, and it’s possible part of me enjoyed that. She started rocking back and forth in the seat. I told her that whatever it was, she was taking it way too seriously. But she shook her head, and started humming. I didn’t recognize the tune, but assumed it was a hymn. And when she started singing the words, her voice changed. Since she was so small, when she spoke people compared it to a Munchkin’s. And her singing voice still had something of that quality. But it was overlaid with something mournful, something deeper, and resonant. She sang it all the way through, and when I pulled into her drive, I looked at her and said, ‘My God, that was beautiful.’ But she only nodded and wiped her eyes with her palm and said, ‘Thanks for the ride.’ She looked like an old woman when she walked hunched over into the porch light and pushed open the door to her house.”

  After Josephine finished speaking, she let out a long sigh.

  “Anyway, when I hear that muezzin, I think of that girl. He’s probably fifty years old, but his voice has the same quality. Of someone singing beautifully in the hope they’ll be forgiven.”

  Her words hung in the air, and he cleared his throat.

  “Or because they know they never will be,” he said.

  “Maybe that, too.”

  She stood up then, walked to the door, opened it, and said something to Saabir. He seemed to protest, but she insisted, and then pushed the door closed again.

  “Saabir won’t be standing guard for a short time, just so you know. He understands more English than you probably realize.”

  Marc heard her settle in the chair across from him.

  “So I’ve been thinking about the stories you’ve told about Claire,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, almost every one you’ve told was when she was slightly older. At twelve when she cut herself. Fourteen when you kissed her. Sixteen when she stole and went camping. Every story a time when she was on the verge of something. Or you were.”

  “Those are the stories you remember. Those are the ones that collide, like Genevieve said about her mom.” He caught himself thinking about Genevieve as a living, breathing person.

  “I know,” she said. “I remember. But you’ve never described her as a small child.”

  Reflexively, he tried to recall an image of her at that age, but most of what he remembered he knew were photographs that Lynne had stored in albums that, at various ages, he’d find Claire occasionally leafing through.

  “She was—” But he stopped himself, since he was about to resort to the words anyone would use: beautiful, so bright, so sweet, precious, precocious, when in truth, more and more, what he understood was the slow, cold creep of the word was.

  “This,” he started. “This story—” he said again, and swallowed down whatever was attempting to rise. “It’s more Lynne’s story than mine. I mean, she was the one who told it to me. About Claire. I’m not sure why it occurs to me, other than it’s partly about a woman who wanted a child. But maybe it’s because of the story of your friend. How it’s about something that happened, and after that how things never felt the same again.”

  “Like all stories.”

  “I guess. Claire was probably about five years old. The summer before her first year of school. Kindergarten. And Lynne, at that point, well, she’d stopped working when Claire was born. And because soon Claire would be in school full time, she’d finally be able to go back. By then—well, it’s not like she’d had her fill of child-rearing, but maybe it was something close to that. Like a lot of mothers, she missed the world of adults, and that summer she was pretty much at her wit’s end trying to find things to do that would keep Claire entertained until school started. One day she took Claire to the park, and Lynne had a friend with her. A woman she’d known since college who was back in town for the week. The park had a pond, almost as big as a s
mall lake, really, filled with lily pads and a few ducks and geese, probably domestic ones that the township brought in. We took Claire there a few times a year. They even had those machines, you know, where for a quarter you could buy a few pellets of food so the kids could feed the birds.

  “Anyway, Claire had fed the ducks and was sitting between Lynne and her friend. Beth, that was her name. The sun was beating down, and there was no wind, and the smell of the pond was probably rank. Claire’s cheeks would have been flushed red, and her hair was still strawberry-blond at that age, probably curling in the humidity. And according to Lynne, Beth, who’d been married for a couple of years now, was telling her she would be unable to have children. That’s not a great tragedy in this age, but the woman had wanted babies as long as she could remember. She had been the kind of little girl who loved playing with dolls, and, when she got older, would save every one she ever owned and keep each in a proper place on the shelf in her closet, hidden away so her friends couldn’t see how much she still loved them. So she was crying when she was telling Lynne about it. Whatever the problem was physiologically, it was with her, and not her husband, who also wanted kids. Lynne said Beth was having trouble stifling her sobs, but that when she glanced down at Claire, she was looking at her own feet, bobbing them up and down to a tune she must have been hearing in her head. Oblivious, Lynne thought.

  “There was a rule at the park that any dog had to be on a leash. With the kids running around, and birds, it made perfect sense. But that afternoon, some guy materializes out of nowhere with his dog at his heels, and throws a ball into the pond, and of course the dog dives into the lily pads to retrieve it. The ducks and geese on the water, pretty well fattened on all of the pellets the kids were constantly feeding them, squawk and flap awkwardly in the other direction, trying to get away. A woman stands up from a nearby bench and hollers, ‘Hey! Where’s the goddamn leash?’ But the guy just kind of shrugs his shoulders while his dog paddles back to shore. And of course, the second after it drops the ball and shakes the water from its hide, it takes off after one of the geese, one of those white ones, you know, that you used to see on a farm, so it’s not much of a chase. The dog has it by the neck within a few seconds, gives it a few shakes, and of course it’s dead. The other geese and ducks are honking and quacking from the other side of the pond, flapping their wings, raising their bills and shaking their heads. And the woman from the bench is shouting, ‘You fucking asshole! Now see what you’ve done? That poor thing!’ And the whole time Lynne is watching from the bench with Beth, when she suddenly remembers that Claire is sitting beside her, witnessing everything, and she pulls her off the bench, and the three of them head back to the car.”