The Book of Jonas

by Stephen Dau

  This time, he doesn’t bother wondering which one he is.

  34

  The fight lends him an air of credibility, of danger. He is suddenly someone not to be fucked with. He learns of another refugee who attends the school, Hakma, a Kurd, who has lived in America since he was two years old. He does not have Jonas’s accent, but shares his dark skin and hair, and they hit it off instantly. Hakma does not remember his brief time as an infant in Kurdistan, but injustice suffuses his soul. They pal around, meeting up after school to walk to one or the other’s house and sitting conspiratorially across from each other in the cafeteria.

  Students begin to talk to him. Girls seem to like him, mostly, he thinks, because he looks so different from the towheaded boys they usually know. He has sharp features, which he claims are the product of generations spent in the wind and mountains, pale green eyes, and ink black hair. He learns to cultivate an aura of mystery, of danger, hinting at past experiences and feats without ever coming right out and describing them. Some of his classmates think it is all an act, a reputation built on air and a lucky punch, while others are reverential. He is invited to parties, and often, because he looks older, he is able to buy the beer.

  His grades fall.

  His teachers describe him as well-adjusted.

  35

  But there are events about which he refuses to speak.

  Paul says, “Maybe you can tell me more about that.”

  Jonas signals his reluctance in one of two ways: either he talks purposefully about other things, real things, imagined things, or some combination of the two, or else he is silent, fixing his gaze on the floor in front of him and waiting for the subject to shift of its own volition.

  “This is important,” says Paul.

  “Did you know,” says Jonas, taking a quick, deep breath, “that as a young boy I met the Dalai Lama?”

  “Really,” says Paul.

  “Really,” says Jonas. “A brave man, Mr. Lama. Very brave. For him to travel to our village, as he did. We were not always particularly tolerant of other perspectives. But he came, paying no heed to the potential danger. He stood out, to be sure, in his red-and-yellow robes, and his shaved head. He was a sight, I can tell you.

  “It was the planting season, and I was out in the field, as we all were at that time of year. Mr. Lama, he came walking up the road, up from the river. I do not remember, exactly, whether he came by himself, or whether he was accompanied by others. Now that I think about it, though, I realize he must have had others with him, some sort of retinue. There is a fine line between brave and foolhardy, is there not? Mr. Lama would not have traveled to us alone. That would have crossed the line into foolishness.

  “But I remember him, not his accompaniment. He walked up the road in his bright robes and his shaved head, walked right out into the freshly turned field, walked until he stood directly in front of me. And he looked down at me and smiled. Then he said something to me that I will never forget.”

  “Jonas,” says Paul.

  “He said, ‘Just as the seed you sow today will grow to feed your village, so shall you, my young friend, grow to nourish the world.’”

  “Jonas.”

  “And then he took my hand in his…”

  “Jonas.”

  “And he held it, and…”

  “Jonas, we were talking about the last time you saw your sister alive.”

  “Yes,” says Jonas, fixing a dull gaze somewhere in the space between them. “Yes. Mr. Lama liked her very much, as well.”

  36

  Another memory: It must have been spring, the gullies filled with meltwater, and they have finished supper. His father stands up and strokes his beard, then goes outside, muttering for Younis to follow. There has been talk all winter. Talk of something big happening, some change, or threat, but he is so young, and it is nearly impossible to reconstruct from the scattered clues of memory. They make their way down to the river, his father several steps ahead, and then they turn onto the river road, walking upstream.

  “I’m going to show you something,” says his father, “and I want you to remember it.”

  They walk along the packed stone road, and after an hour they take a break, stooping to drink from a shallow pool near the shore. Out in its middle, the river flows savagely, but it is placid along the bank. The tempest out in the center seems to be totally unconnected to the calm water gently lapping the rocks beside their feet, and yet he can watch a stick or a leaf drifting near the shore, suddenly swept up into the rapids, dancing wildly away.

  Eventually they come to one large, flat stone balanced on top of another, forming a distinctive, crooked T shape at the edge of the river, the water roaring around the base.

  “See that rock?” asks his father over the river’s din, pointing. “Remember that rock. Memorize it, so that you will know it when you see it again.”

  They turn west, away from the river and toward the mountains, white-capped and imposing. When they come to the base of the foothills, the sun is low in the sky, and his father points to a thin path, little more than a faint wear in the stone and dirt, that leads away and straight up the hill, weaving around a large boulder and disappearing into a hollow in the hills.

  His father looks up at the half-formed trail and then down at Younis. “Two hours’ walk up this path there is a cave,” he says. “If anything ever happens, go there.” He looks up again at the mountains, impervious and assured and unconcerned. “I will meet you if I can.”

  37

  The letter, when it arrives, is expected. It is in a thick manila envelope that hints at packets of information enclosed, forms to be filled out and returned. He is happy to receive it, grateful even, but not surprised. Conversations had occurred, things had been arranged, and he had received a phone call the week before, explaining, in congratulatory tones, what was to come.

  University of Pittsburgh

  Office of Admissions

  5413 Fifth Avenue

  Pittsburgh, PA 15601

  Dear Jonas Iskander,

  We are writing to officially inform you that you have been awarded the Nelson A. Atkinson scholarship for the current academic year. As you may know, the scholarship is awarded annually to an incoming freshman from outside the United States who has, in the view of the scholarship committee, overcome significant adversity in his or her quest for higher education.

  The scholarship covers the full cost of tuition for the academic year, and includes a stipend to defray the expenses of housing, board, and materials. It is renewable each year, commensurate with satisfactory academic progress.

  The enclosed information includes a more detailed description of the scholarship, its provisions and requirements, as well as several forms for you to complete and return. If you have any questions or need any further information, please feel free to contact me.

  In the meantime, please accept my heartfelt congratulations and best wishes for a promising academic career.

  Sincerely,

  Edith J. Pearl

  Dean of Admissions

  38

  He fills out forms. For everything he needs to do, there seems to be a corresponding form. It began even before he completed the landing card on the plane the day he arrived. It began with a visa application. Then something called a relocation agreement. Then, early on, an application for the health insurance that would eventually pay for his visits with Paul. Some of these forms he completes with the assistance of a volunteer from the Friends International Assistance Society, but quickly his ability to fill them out by himself improves.

  There is a residence card application, school admission forms, class enrollment forms, host family questionnaires. Because he receives monetary support, there are tax forms, academic progress reports, something called an “Adaptation Report,” which is used, he figures out, to determine his level of social isolation.

  Early on, he must complete a form to obtain a social security card. He is mildly surprised to find that it request
s the same information that is requested by the form he must complete to obtain a library card, and that they both request the same information as the form he must fill out for a video rental card.

  To go to college he must take a standardized test, which he finds to be nothing more than a big, complicated form. Eventually, he will fill out forms to apply for college, then to enroll there, then to apply for an apartment near campus. He fills out more forms for school: emergency contact forms, allergy declarations, vaccination certificates, more insurance forms.

  Curious about this peculiar obsession with filling out forms, he does some research in the library. (He does this research on the same day he fills out the form to apply for his library card.) He reads that over the course of a lifetime the average person living in America will spend six months filling out forms. He learns that forms really didn’t catch on until the late eighteen hundreds, when the volume of activities people were doing—being born, dying, and getting married the top three—grew so great that the Victorian mind felt the overwhelming need to organize them scientifically. He learns that the form, in its current form, was originally called a formulary, and was invented by an Englishman named Charles Babbage, the same man who invented both an early kind of computer and the cow catcher, a device attached to the front of locomotives to clear debris from train tracks. He learns that Babbage once wrote to Alfred Tennyson to correct two lines from one of Tennyson’s poems, which Babbage felt lacked scientific accuracy. This, thinks Jonas, tells you everything you need to know about both the man and the invention of forms.

  He will fill out forms to apply for a credit card (he will be denied), to sign up for classes, once he is enrolled in the university, to obtain a bank account, into which his scholarship money is deposited, to reapply for a credit card (accepted this time, with a limit of five hundred dollars, which he will immediately spend on pizza, beer, and a series of baseball games).

  Aptly named, the form, he feels. For not only is it orderly in appearance, but it also gives form to that which is hidden. His name, his age, ethnicity, religion, all mental constructs, made manifest through the use of forms. Collected passively, placed on blank lines waiting for answers, the information allows for the efficient counting, sorting, ordering, and categorizing of him, the actual thing the forms represent.

  Filling out the forms helps Jonas memorize this information. The ink, usually black, as required by the form, sometimes blue, which Jonas prefers, flows from his pen and into the shapes of the letters and numbers that signify him. Often, after he completes a form, he has the eerie feeling of having just replicated himself, sending off a paper copy that will then live in the files of a cabinet in some warehouse, or be inputted into a computer. To the clerk at the bank or school or business or library or government agency, the form is now him. “Ah, yes,” the form says to its reader, “I can tell you all you need to know.” He feels dissected and displayed. Worse, he has begun to wonder what all these replicas of himself will get up to, once they are set free.

  Nauseated by the thought of filling out yet another form, much less being tested for anything, he refuses to get a driver’s license.

  39

  The first time he sees her, she is surrounded by a field of poppies.

  It’s their freshman year. They are at a Remembrance Sunday reception in the ornate English classroom in the Cathedral of Learning, to which he assumes they have been invited because of their connections to Commonwealth countries. The wood-paneled room, one of the towering, Gothic building’s many nationality-themed classrooms, was built after the war with artifacts rescued from the bombed ruins of the House of Commons, then transported across the Atlantic to be presented to the university as a gift. Something about it, the smell, or the way the light falls on the thick-grained tables, reminds Jonas of his boyhood schoolroom, and he feels as though it had been built especially for him. Tonight it is filled with gray-haired men and women and a smattering of students, all of whom wear the red-paper flowers of remembrance. She is tall and willowy and dark and cuts through the pomp like a thorn. Like a rose.

  He stands at the long table filled with hors d’oeuvres and bottled water, speaking with one of the English professors. He watches her peripherally, tracking her red dress and graceful legs. He reaches out to pick up some sort of crab cake or cream puff, stretching his arm out of the sleeve as he does so, and sees the professor to whom he is speaking notice the scar on his forearm. He pulls the sleeve down.

  “Climbing a tree as a child,” he says. “I fell.”

  Then, unexpectedly, they are standing next to each other, both of them sipping from their warm bottles of water, looking intently at stained-glass windows bearing the coats of arms of various famous English institutions or people. Her name tag says Shakri.

  “India?” he says.

  “Delhi,” she says. “And you?”

  Unlike him, he thinks, she wears her accent beautifully, effortlessly, like wings.

  He tells her to guess, like he did, but she gives up after three tries.

  Together they tour the room, closely regarding the oak desks, appraising two chairs rescued from Parliament and set in the place of honor at the head of the room, near the fireplace. “What do you want to bet they sat in someone’s loo?” says Jonas. “There’s an Englishman somewhere chuckling about that.”

  He tries desperately to think of something else clever to say, something to make her laugh again, but everything he can think of seems contrived or forced. He asks her whether she enjoyed the cream puffs, then silently curses his mouth for allowing such inanity to escape it.

  In the end, Shakri herself provides the opening. She asks him, with a forwardness that catches him off guard, whether he doesn’t want to just bag it and go for french fries—chips, she calls them—at the O, a local dive known for its french fries.

  “Sure,” he says, trying to force himself to sound relaxed.

  They cross the broad lawn outside the cathedral in the dusky light. He experiences her as a presence walking beside him, a voice. He does not want to look directly at her for fear that he will end up simply staring. So he looks straight ahead as they talk about school, his friends, her family, movies and music, likes and dislikes, and anything else they can come up with, all the mundane details, all the minutiae of existence, but it is really just a pretext to be close to her, an excuse to extend their time, because all he can think is bliss.

  40

  Absent a nation, he creates his own. There is no initiation, no Pledge of Allegiance, no flag. Just a vague understanding, a discomfited sense of belonging. Hakma the Kurd is the first, and between the two of them, he and Jonas accrete new citizens, they joke, like a ball of tar.

  They are different. They are slanty-eyed and dark-skinned. Their names are different. They are Ching Ji and Sinhal and Lhotsu and Thierry, the French kid they mostly just put up with because he pays for everything. They are Trevor from Zimbabwe, or from London, where he added a cockney twang to his southern African dialect of hollowed vowels and soft consonants (speaking, they tease him, like Nelson Mandela would speak if he found work as a chimney sweep). They are James, from Montana, who is someone’s roommate and who, as he is frequently reminded, is kept around as the token Yankee, a trapping of respectability, to be traded or sold at any convenient moment. They are interestingly garbed, avant-garde, and nerdy. They listen to diverse music: electronica and funk, jazz and reggae. One of them may be royalty.

  They are known everywhere, whether they are welcomed at chic lounges by bartenders who are eager to add a touch of ethnicity to their ambience, or they are the dark kids in the corner, most likely engineering students, who talk funny. Or maybe they are something in between, something more like their classmates, like everyone of a certain age: on their own, confident and self-absorbed and accomplished and immature and cruel and generous and smart and unconcerned and cavalier and sensitive and ambitious, and, and, and.

  41

  This sticks in my mind.

&
nbsp; They tell us to put on our gas masks. They file us into a low, cinder-block hut. They make us stand against the walls. The sergeant enters and closes the door behind him. In the middle of the room is a low, wrought-iron table, and on top of it sits a silver cylinder, like a thermos. Its edges are brown with liquid stains, like coffee. The sergeant twists off the top of the cylinder and drops in several white pellets, releasing a thin haze. Then we are all ordered to take off our masks. None of us wants to do it. But he is yelling at us, telling us we will be court-martialed if we don’t.

  My eyes tear up as soon as I take off the mask, and I gag on the smoke entering my lungs. We all start coughing up thick gobs of mucus, and our skin burns like it’s under a heat lamp. I panic, nearly dropping the mask. I think I can see the silhouettes of people burned onto the walls. Just when I think I am going to black out, he tells us to put our masks back on. My skin still burns, but with the mask on, at least I can see clearly and breathe. After a minute, we are ordered to take off our masks again. This time we do it quickly, knowing that the faster we get them off, the faster we will be allowed to get them back on. This done, we file quickly out of the building and fall into a retching mass on the cool grass outside.

  42

  He soon finds that, except to those in the middle of it, being in love is the most boring thing, the most incomprehensible thing in the world.

  They dine at a secluded corner table on a red-and-white paper tablecloth, upon which the food before them either loses all meaning or becomes their entire existence. Her hands fly around as she talks, seeming to push the words through the air in front of her, and he hangs from them like a strand of overcooked fettuccini.