by Stephen Dau
8
The light bathed him and he woke, lying on his side beside a crackling fire, covered by a thin blanket, his limbs prickling and stiff as the feeling gradually returned to them, the flame’s glow wrestling with the darkness and cold. The smell of cooking food violently ignited his suppressed hunger. Squinting into the flickering light, he could make out only a shadow across the fire, a presence overwhelming the refuge in which he had been so isolated. He closed his eyes, mildly surprised to find that he was not yet dead, then opened them again, tried to focus on the figure opposite him.
“Salaam aleikum,” said the figure.
Younis heard the words, clear and accented, oddly pronounced, but was too weak and shocked to respond, and then he lost consciousness again.
“Are you okay? Can you hear my greeting?” said the figure. “I said, ‘Peace be with you.’”
Younis rubbed his head, then tried turning to get a good look at the place where the voice came from, but could not move. Gradually he brought the figure into vague focus, adjusting his vision to the harsh firelight. The man was dressed in an odd mix of local and foreign clothes, camouflage fatigues devoid of patches or insignia, a kamiz, and a pakol cap. He gazed levelly at Younis, patiently awaiting his response.
“And also with you,” Younis finally replied, weakly. “And you in return? Are you well?” His voice was barely louder than a whisper.
“I am well, sir, thank you,” said the man.
“You are English?” said Younis, in English.
“I speak English,” said the man.
“Why are you here?”
“I guess I am lost.”
9
Younis, his mind addled, tried to force his head clear and strained not just to understand the stranger’s English, but to place it. He could not, as it was so dissimilar from the English he had heard his father, or anyone else, speak.
He could feel the strength flowing back into his limbs, spurred by the warmth of the fire, and abruptly he tried to stand.
“If it is not too forward, sir,” began Younis, “may I ask where are you…” But he stumbled weakly, and fell back down to the earth.
“Have something to eat,” said the man, and stepped around the fire, stopping to pick up a shallow pan that had been warming there, and offered it to Younis. “I’m afraid it’s not much.”
Younis shoveled the food from the pan to his mouth with his hand. It tasted like beef and some sort of mashed vegetable, but had a plastic taste he could not place. He had to keep himself from throwing it back up out of his empty stomach. The man offered some water from an opaque bottle that faintly carried the same plastic odor.
“Are you from the village down there,” asked the man, pointing his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the valley, toward the bottom of the mountain.
Younis thought first to answer truthfully, and then thought better of it.
“No,” he said. “I come from Yokshal, on the other side of the mountain,” naming a village he had heard his father speak about occasionally, the home of some distant cousins, or perhaps an uncle.
“Huh,” said the man, evidently either unfamiliar or unconcerned with the other village. “We must have come from opposite directions. I came up from the river.”
As his eyes became more accustomed to the light, Younis could make out the man’s features a little more clearly, filling in the vague outline. He was several days unshaven, with light blue eyes rarely seen in that part of the world. His left forearm was wrapped in a dirty bandage, a mirror image of the wound on Younis’s right arm, and a thin cut, just beginning to heal, accented his left cheek and temple. He was well armed, a long rifle propped against a rock beside him, and the hilt of a combat knife protruded from a strap around his thigh.
“How long have you been here?” asked the man.
“I could ask you the same question,” said Younis, his voice weak and rasping.
“Here?” said the man, motioning to the ground around him. “About two hours. This part of the world? Nearly a year.”
“I don’t know how long I have been here,” said Younis, slowly gathering his strength. “I fell, injuring my arm, as you can see, and came here to this shelter because I could not walk home. But I have always lived here.”
The man looked at Younis coldly, as though measuring his words, then smiled a little half smile and said, nodding at Younis’s arm, “I can take a look at that, if you want. I have some supplies with me.”
The wind picked up, coursing down the valley and up the steep slope, carrying with it a faint smell, gunpowder and something else, like burning hair. Twenty minutes later, Younis rode a soft cloud of morphine, the roughly stitched wound on his forearm protected from infection by an injection of antibiotics. The morphine bore him up, higher than the mountain, far away from pain or fear or sorrow or loss. How wonderful it would have been to stay on that cloud, to ride on it forever, to drift eternally, untethered. Younis was thinking these thoughts when he fell into the deepest sleep he had ever known.
10
The story, as Jonas tells it, is mostly accurate. If Rose is able to spot what he changes or leaves out, her face gives no indication. But she does not relax, does not even breathe. She waits.
“I woke in a hospital bed,” he says, nodding up at the huge portrait over the mantel, its size directly proportional to the home’s grief. “I am sure that’s him, but I’m sorry I can’t help you any more than that.”
The faint background noises—the creaking chair legs, the ticking grandfather clock—grow to fill the room’s silence. Jonas sits back in his chair, but Rose remains balanced on the front of hers.
“But,” she says, “there must be more.”
Jonas says nothing. He bunches his shoulders in what could be a shrug, and bites his lip.
“There must be more,” says Rose.
“I wish I could—”
“There must be more. You have to remember something else. I can’t believe it. That’s it? You just ‘woke up’?”
“I know, and I’m very sorry I can’t help you more.”
“But maybe if you tried. Anything. What was he wearing? How badly was he hurt? Was he scared? Did he tell you anything else? I just can’t believe it.”
“I wish I could remember something else, something more.”
“Yes, anything. Did you see him leave? Did you see where he went? Did he tell you if he had plans?”
“Look, I know how you must feel.”
“You have no idea how I feel!” says Rose. “You have no idea what it’s like to know that you might never see—” She wipes her cheek quickly with a tissue. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Of course you do. I’m sorry. I just, well. I just miss him very much.”
The sound of the clock in the corner seems to grow again to fill the room, and when Jonas speaks, he does so almost as much to drown out the sound as anything else.
“There is one thing,” he says.
Rose leans even farther forward.
“I just have this image, really. This thing I remember. He had this book that he wrote in, like a diary. Quite a lot. I don’t know what he put in it. But he had it. Maybe that is something.”
For a long time Rose doesn’t say anything. Then, almost reluctantly, she nods. “Thank you,” she says. “But really, may-be you’ll remember something else. Maybe you’ll wake up one morning and think of something. Maybe something will just come to you. You can call me anytime, if it does. I would be grateful.”
They talk awhile longer. Jonas thinks that Rose’s face looks somehow older than it did when she first opened the door. She asks more questions about his time on the mountain, with her son, but he is unable or unwilling to give any further information, and she leans back, reluctantly, and allows the conversation to drift.
Which it does, meandering around Christopher’s early childhood, school and friends, trailing off as its subject ages, closes in on his ultimate fate, which hovers, phantomlike, over the room. Other th
an seeking to discover what happened to him, Rose does not seem to have any real interest in talking about the military, or Chris’s life once he entered it. It is as though the portrait on the wall was taken as his life ended, and the subsequent years turned into hazy recollections and unending sadness.
Jonas and Shakri sense that it is time to leave before any one states the fact. The sunlight through the windows is golden, the shadows elongated, and they reach an unspoken consensus. Rose hugs them awkwardly to say good-bye as they get up, and again before they go out the door.
And then she is nearly pushing them out into the cool, late afternoon. They stand on the front step, and she holds the door open with her hand across the threshold like a gate, preventing them from reentering the house. She makes it clear they should leave, but at the same time she tells them to come back anytime they want.
1
For a time, they were little more than rumors spread by children.
The imam argued that, removed as the village was from the capital and its arcane politics, the Americans could have no possible interest in it. The only contact they would ever know would come in the form of the planes seen far overhead. If Younis’s father ventured to make a counterargument, that there existed a real and imminent danger, it didn’t seem to make an immediate impression.
So when Azar’s youngest son, who was no more than ten years old, told his father that he had watched that very afternoon as a patch of reeds along the river moved in an unnatural way, counter to the current and the prevailing mountain wind, it was written off as a figment of the youngster’s imagination.
And when Jangi Shah’s middle son claimed to have found a boot print in the dew-moistened earth at the base of the rise to the west of the village, he fetched his friends to go and take a look. But one of the boys stepped on it by accident, blurring the impression and making it impossible for anyone else to tell for sure what it was.
Then one evening Ahmand’s nephew said that he thought he had glimpsed a parachute falling from the sky on the other side of the river. But when he was questioned further, he conceded that it could have been a kite, or maybe an old plastic bag swept along on the breeze.
In those places where the children gathered, one could perceive, if one cared to listen, in their hushed tones and joking insults, a certain skepticism about what their mothers had told them: that the Americans had come to take away naughty children who did not obey their parents, that they lurked in the dark places between the houses, waiting patiently for those who had been instructed not to go outside after sunset.
But when Ali’s teenage daughter came running home at dusk one evening, closing the door quickly behind her, and explained breathlessly that she had seen a lone man stalking in the brush beside the river road, a giant of a man with brilliant blue eyes and a chest like a horse, it was finally conceded that something strange must be happening.
The most probable explanation, it was widely agreed, was that the village was suffering the hauntings of ghosts.
2
Occasionally he hears the voice of his savior.
Usually he tries to ignore it.
It comes to him when he is tired, or drunk, or asleep, or not asleep, simply lying in his bed and unable to turn his thoughts to anything else. He tries to force it to join the chorus in his head, the background noise that reminds him he is alive.
“Perhaps she is correct,” says Paul. “Perhaps there is more to the story.”
The voice in his head is softly accented by the Pennsylvania hills. It is gentle, and deep, and brings with it the haunted souvenirs of the past: the scent of woodsmoke and reheated rations drifting up a mountain slope, the echo of metal on whetstone as a combat knife is sharpened, the scratching sound of pencil on paper, the crackle and pop of burning cedar, the thin, high tearing noise of another blister pack being opened, another morphine-filled syringe prepared.
“Very well,” says Jonas. “Perhaps there is.”
With effort, he begins to talk. He tries to get it right, tries to match the words exactly, but has the familiar feeling that he is adding and subtracting, substituting what should have been said for what he fails to remember accurately. He channels the voice as best he can, feels it condense within him and propel out of him, and as he speaks, as this voice speaks through him, he feels himself take a step, as though off a cliff and into the unknown.
3
For a while we were stationed in Uganda. What we were doing there is not important. Weekends, we used to go to the wildlife preserve, just to look around, see the animals. There was an agreement with the government, and we got in free.
So many animals. Animals I had never seen before in real life: giraffes, rhinos, hyenas, lions. The preserve was just a small area of land, and most of the surrounding countryside was being logged or mined. So all these animals were crowded into this little wild area, like ants on a leaf in a rainstorm.
Once, we were driving along and we came upon a woman pulled over beside the dirt trail they used for a road. She’s a wildlife biologist, she says, and she’s sitting there in her vehicle, staring through binoculars, off into the brush.
“Look at this,” she says. I look, and for a long time I don’t see anything. She hands me her binoculars. The colors there in the bush, at that time of year, well, there’s really only one color, a sort of sand or tan or khaki, just lots of different shades of it, so everything blends together, the earth and the shrubs and the trees and everything, all just the color of the sand. So I’m looking at this, and I don’t see anything. I’m starting to get a little frustrated, maybe, because this woman is obviously convinced that something spectacular is there.
“No,” she says, “over there, a little to the left.”
And then I see it.
There in the underbrush, not fifty yards away, is a lion. It’s a lioness, actually, the biologist tells me. She has been watching this lioness for two days.
“A lioness,” I said. “Wow, that’s great.”
“No,” she said, “look closer.”
And then I think I must have gasped, because standing there right next to the lioness was a little baby gazelle. He was tiny, and so weak he could barely stand, his legs all skinny and sort of quivering, whether from his own weight or fear or both. Every once in a while, the lioness would reach out with one of her huge paws, wrap it around the gazelle, pull him over, and lick his face, just like a dog licking your hand. It seemed like two competing instincts were fighting it out inside of her: her urge to hunt, and her urge to mother. In response, the gazelle would nuzzle up against the lioness’s side, maybe not entirely comfortable with the whole situation, but feeling, for a moment, safe.
What had happened, the biologist explained, was that two days previously, the pride’s big alpha male had killed both the baby gazelle’s mother and the lioness’s cub.
“They’re heartbroken,” she said. “They’ve adopted each other.”
“That’s impossible,” I said. But there I was, looking at it, unable to convince myself that it wasn’t true.
We went back the next afternoon, and they were all still there: the lioness, the gazelle, and the biologist, who stayed there for days. She had never seen anything like it, she said, and she had been studying lions for years. It really affected her. She couldn’t think about anything else for weeks afterward, lost her appetite, spent days alone in the bush.
The situation couldn’t last. They weren’t eating, and sooner or later something had to give.
It ended badly.
But I have never forgotten it. I carry it with me. Somehow, the fact that it ended is not as important to me as the fact that it happened. In a way, they’re still there, now that I’ve seen them, set together by chance or fate under the African sun, safe, for the moment, from the surrounding cruelty, each one’s life given meaning by the other’s.
4
As soon as they are back in the car, Jonas glances through the packet Rose handed to him, and before they are even out
of the neighborhood, he begins to form some initial impressions. They are copies of articles clipped from newspapers, and letters, or memos, and photographs.
The photographs hold Jonas’s most immediate attention.
Some of them are black-and-white, and others have been reproduced in color, apparently printed using a newer photocopier. They present varying degrees of clarity. Some of them are more toner smudge than anything else, while others are tack-sharp. They are interspersed among printed-out e-mail and official-looking correspondence. Jonas is struck by the feeling that he has seen them before, if not these exact photographs, then images eerily similar to them. In one photo, a young Christopher stands with his arm around another soldier in front of a tank, starkly silhouetted under a blazing sky. There is a picture of him at some sort of dance or function, in a formal dress uniform, holding hands with a blond-haired girl who is nearly as tall as he is. Another shows him mud-spattered and obviously exhausted, hunched over a picnic table, but managing despite his fatigue to smile up at the camera. Still another shows him wearing a camouflage uniform, with a large duffel slung over his back, making his way up the ramp of a cargo plane.
5
Rose Henderson pushes the front door closed as Jonas and Shakri leave, then leans against the wooden frame, feeling the cool October breeze through the open living room window. Next to the front door, a tall wooden box that Christopher once dragged home from shop class holds a pair of umbrellas, angled gently away from each other. An old horseshoe, collected during one of the family’s innumerable treks through the Pennsylvania countryside, hangs upturned over the doorsill. She feels suffocated as soon as the door is closed, unable to breathe deeply.
