The Cloud of Unknowing

by Mimi Lipson

  More chopping of vegetables. Cartoon animals scampered through the scene—a squirrel, a deer, a porcupine.

  “Movladi’s family pay a lot of money for this video,” Zabet said. “Is the best director in Almaty.”

  Now the camera followed a line of white Mercedes limousines, and now a row of men in dark, old-fashioned clothes sitting on wooden chairs. Helena recognized Axmet among them. She was startled for a moment, as though she had spotted him in a Stalin-era ethnographic film.

  “Zabet, how is Axmet doing? He didn’t seem well when I saw him just now.”

  Zabet sucked air between her teeth: tsstch. “You know his headache get all the time worse. And he don’t eat without throwing up.”

  “What does the doctor say?”

  “The doctor said he have to stop working, he need resting. But what working?” She offered a palm to the sky.

  The camera wobbled around a room full of women, stopping at Alla in her wedding dress. Zabet was fixing the veil on her head, which was surrounded by yellow cartoon birds.

  “There,” Zabet said, hitting pause. “There, see?” Handing the baby to Helena, she got up and tapped the screen. “One of my necklace—garnet and pearl. That one is Alla’s favorite. Galina, I have to get dinner started. There’s a bottle in the fridge for Malina, and Alla will coming home soon. She say 5:30, latest.” She kissed Malina on the cheek and let herself out the back door.

  Helena carried Malina to the kitchen and put her in her high chair. The baby reached up expectantly with her starfish hand, and Helena gave her a spoon—something for her to bang on her tray.

  “Buh,” said Malina.

  “Buh,” answered Helena.

  “Buh BAH.”

  Helena was thinking about Alla’s wedding dress, its scoop neck and princess sleeves. She wondered if Alla wore her head–scarf and abaya in Grozny.

  The front door slammed, then the bedroom door. Helena picked up the baby. She found Alla in the bedroom, dumping her suitcases out on the floor. The recent illness had made her face narrower, and Helena was struck by how different she looked from the girl in the video. She pushed her sleeves back and clawed through the pile. She still had on the thin black rubber bracelets she’d worn in high school—a dozen on each wrist.

  “What are you looking for?” Helena asked.

  “Malina’s passport.” She extracted it from a zippered pouch and tried to tear it in half, then started ripping out pages and crumpling them.

  “Stop that, Alla, and tell me what happened.”

  Alla dropped the passport and leaned against the bed. “He says I have to send her to Movladi’s family.” She spoke loudly to even out the tremor in her voice. Her eyes watered, and she bent forward, hiding her face.

  “Who said that?”

  “Papa,” she said through her hands. “I can’t believe you told him about Horizon House.”

  “Oh, Alla, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know it was a secret.”

  “Did you tell him about the herpes, too?”

  “Of course not!” But she wasn’t sure. Had she mentioned it?

  Malina whined and twisted toward her mother. Helena set her down on the floor next to Alla. “I’m sorry,” she said again, and she really was. Nothing she did turned out right.

  Jonathan’s mother looked up at him anxiously while he disassembled the top layer of scaffolding. He could see it was killing her not to be holding the hammer herself.

  “I would have come over and helped you with the shingles if you’d said something.”

  “I didn’t need help with the shingles. I just need you to loosen those couplings for me.”

  She was wearing a wraparound skirt and a sleeveless blouse. Her legs were covered in bruises. He noticed that her hair, pinned in a messy bun on top of her head, had turned from blonde to white.

  “You can’t do this by yourself,” he said. He hammered in silence for a while. “You know—” He stopped himself.

  “What? What do I know?”

  He turned around. “Okay. You could hire someone to do this shit for you if you’d stop giving your money away.”

  “I don’t want to hire someone.” Her mouth was puckered stubbornly. “I’m perfectly capable of shingling my own house. And it was a loan.”

  Jonathan exhaled “Right, the necklaces. I forgot.” He went back to hammering. “They aren’t your family,” he said. “You have a family. If they were your family, Adlan would be up here doing this instead of strutting around like a holy pimp. Treating his own sister like chattel.”

  “You don’t know anything about it,” Helena said, shouting over the clang of Jonathan’s hammer.

  “I know you think you’re helping, but you’re not,” he said reasonably. “Throwing money at those people will not solve their problems.”

  When he looked down again, she’d gone inside the house. He’d resolved to go upstairs and make some sort of conciliatory gesture when she reappeared, holding a sheet of paper.

  “Axmet asked me to show you this,” she said. “Adlan’s college essay. He wants a man’s opinion.” She handed it up to him and went back inside.

  I would like to thank the Admission Committee for wondering to know more about me. As you will see in my record, I am a very good student in math, and also Physics. I hope to be a mechanical engineer one day, so it is not important that I don’t have such a good marks in English and some other subjects, though of course I love the English Language very much. Also, that I graduated from Highschool over two years ago.

  One more thing you might like to know about me is the person I most admire. This Person is my father, Mr. Axmet Gulnaev, age 45. He is a strong Patriarch of our family, when we came seven years ago from Chechnya. In Chechnya, as you may know, we have two wars so that we can be a free country from Russia. This is what I admire most about America that it became free from Britain after much bloodshed and courage and it is no different for Chechnya. I admire Axmet Gulnaev because he was kidnaped by the police and beaten, but he took us his family, to this country. My father was is was a mechanical engineer in Chechnya, as I will be one here. That is the other think I admire about America, that anyone who works hard will get his reward.

  In the jewelry stores up and down Newbury Street, they’d taken one look at Zabet’s hijab and directed her elsewhere, hands hovering above panic buttons. That was what she told Helena.

  “You think I was carrying bomb,” she said.

  Someone told her about a specialist in Downtown Crossing who bought antique jewelry for private clients. They knew what she had, but they didn’t think she did.

  “’Where did you get this?’ They ask me that, and then they insulted me with their offers.”

  She took the necklaces to Brookline, where she hoped her Russian would do her some good, but no one offered even a quarter of what they were worth. Finally, an appraiser told her that the market for her jewelry was in Moscow, so the Gulnaevs pooled their money and bought her a plane ticket. She had an appointment that Axmet’s cousin’s husband’s college roommate set up.

  “I’d love to see Moscow again,” Helena said to Zabet on the way to the airport.

  “You have been to Moscow, Galina?”

  “I was there in, let’s see, 1968. With my first husband.”

  “1968,” Zabet said wonderingly. “That was a long time ago.” She opened her pocketbook and checked to see that she had remembered all her documents. “Thank you for looking after Alla and Malina,” she added in Russian.

  “Ne problema. No problem.”

  “Oh,” she said, returning to English, “This is insurance card for Axmet. I don’t let him keep it, because he will lose. Can you remind him he have doctor appointment on Friday?”

  “Friday. Yes, what time?”

  “Friday at ten.”

  “I’ll make sure he gets there,” Helena said. “I’ll take care of everything.”

  She stopped at the curb outside the international terminal. She meant to wait until Zabet got ins
ide, but a shuttle van pulled up behind her and honked. As soon as she got home, exhaustion overtook her and she lay down on the sofa. The shingling was done and she’d replaced two windows, but she’d meant to accomplish so much more, and now the summer was over.

  She closed her eyes and saw Moscow, washed in Instamatic green.

  Monumental plazas, fountains lined with tulips. Streets nearly empty; shop windows displaying Bulgarian canned goods in sparse pyramids. Zabet steps off a green and white electric tram. Her hair is cut stylishly short and dyed a reddish brown. She looks at the street name high up on the corner building. She shows a piece of paper to an old grandmother sweeping the sidewalk in front of a store, and follows her indicating gesture through a gate to an inner courtyard.

  Zabet comes out of her appointment smiling. The envelope she’s holding bulges with hard currency. She crosses to the median island of the wide boulevard, disappears briefly behind a passing bus, and reappears on the opposite sidewalk in front of a kiosk, the kind that sells sausages and piroshki and potatoes stuffed with herring. She changes her mind, and instead, she walks a few blocks west and crosses the Borodinsky Bridge to the market near the Kievsky train station. She’ll buy some bread and apricots, and maybe some tomatoes, the kind they grow in Kizlyar: deep red, almost the color of plums. She’ll eat her picnic on a bench in the vaulted waiting room of the station. Zabet is gone.

  The Cloud of Unknowing

  Meanwhile the Corinthians completed their preparations and sailed for Corcyra with a hundred and fifty ships. Of these Elis furnished ten, Megara twelve, Leucas ten, Ambracia twenty-seven—

  Kitty’s eyes slid off the page and up to the bleary halo of light surrounding the lamppost outside the library window. She was a slow reader. The syllabus for Humanities 110—Herodotus, Hesiod, Thucydides, mandatory for all Reed College freshmen—had defeated her last semester, and she’d taken an incomplete. Then, instead of reading The Peloponnesian War, she’d spent her break in a stupor watching Jack Benny reruns as 1982 wound down. It was February now, cold and green, and the bare branches of the cherry trees along the campus paths were dark in the Portland drizzle. In another month they would be swelling with buds.

  Each of these contingents had its own admiral, the Corinthians being under the command of Xenoclides, son of Euthycles—

  Her eyes slid again. The steam heat was making her drowsy. She resolved to finish the chapter at home.

  Outside the library, she stood for a moment looking back at the vaulted windows of the reserve room. It was a beautiful building: turrets and ivy and gothic arches, everything she’d imagined when she’d fantasized about going away to college, but she was glad to turn from it now. She cut across the lawn, soaking her tennis shoes instantly. The air was saturated with something between a heavy mist and a light rain. A searchlight raked the low sky somewhere beyond the river, miles away. She walked in that direction, following the slope of Woodstock Boulevard.

  It wasn’t until Kitty left campus that it became real—the distance between Oregon and the New England city where she’d grown up. The streets to the south of Woodstock were wide, curving arbitrarily past low houses landscaped with strange conifers and succulents and gravel that glowed like moon rock under tall western streetlights. Up the hill from campus the houses were bigger and older, but not like the big old houses back home. They lacked ornamentation. The roofs of their wide porches were supported by a kind of column she didn’t remember seeing before: square and tapering, like a crude optical illusion. In her mind, those houses were closer to lumber than the shingled and gabled Victorians in her town. They made her think of the great trees that stood in every direction outside the city.

  Kitty had lived up the hill from campus for a few months. Midway through the fall semester she’d moved out of her dormitory and into a group house with some older students. She’d been infatuated with someone who lived there, but things had ended badly with him. She moved again, right before the fall break, into another big house—this one on a cul-de-sac off Powell Boulevard, a mile and a half north of campus: her third address in six months, each a little farther afield.

  She crossed 28th Street at the bottom of the hill. From the 7-Eleven parking lot, she could read the big clock inside the store. It was only 11:40. Now she wished she’d stayed at the library until closing. She had a question for Jim, but he worked the graveyard shift. He wouldn’t be there for another twenty minutes, and she didn’t want him to find her waiting. “Don’t come too often,” he had said the first time she visited him at work. She hadn’t been offended, though. She’d accepted it as a kind of intimacy.

  She walked home along 28th Street past small, temporary-looking houses, and apartment complexes that reminded her of motels, with their rows of parking spots and numbered doors. Turning onto Powell, she left the residential streets behind. Two cars idled side-by-side outside the all-night bowling alley across the highway. She stood for a moment admiring the reflection of their taillights on the wet pavement. On rare sunny days she could see the snowcap of Mount Hood rising above the boulevard, but on a rainy night it could be anywhere.

  Kitty’s street dead-ended at the locked gate of a fuel company. Hers was the only house on the block, next to the drive-thru window of a Wendy’s that fronted on Powell. Sometimes she sat on the back porch and listened to the voices on the speaker box. Good afternoon, sir. Would you like to try our new baked stuffed potato? It comes in four exciting flavors. We have chili, sour cream and chive, cheddar cheese and chive, and ranch—over and over, until the flare and crackle of the speaker was a little like surf hitting sand. She got to know the voices of the different girls who worked there. When she had no classes and could stay home all day, she would go next door and buy a small coffee and sweeten it to syrup. She’d stuff some crackers and hot sauce in her pockets for lunch, and return for coffee refills until her cup was too soggy to use.

  She shared the house with three other Reedies, but she had her own entrance: a side door opening into the basement. Her room was partitioned off by a plywood wall. It had been built as a practice space for a band whose members had lived in the house at some point. They’d cut Styrofoam inserts to fit into the narrow windowsills. She pulled them out, but she could do nothing about the spray-on soundproofing that hung like dust from the ceiling. The lighting, too, was ghastly: a double fluorescent fixture. One tube was strobing. She kept meaning to look for a replacement in the basement clutter outside her room.

  She hung her coat on the pipe running along the ceiling, took off her wet tennis shoes, and went upstairs. A light-gray cat was on the kitchen counter, licking at a stick of butter.

  “Come on, Windex. We can do better than that,” she said, shaking some dry food into the cat’s bowl. She’d found the little cat on the back porch a few weeks earlier and taken her into the house, and so far, none of her roommates had said anything. It was possible they hadn’t noticed. They weren’t around much. The name, Windex, was her private joke, an answer to the campus dogs that lounged on the floor of the Student Union: Wittgenstein, Antigone, Mingus. Windex purred while she ate, and Kitty put a saucepan of water on the stove for oatmeal. It was all she had in the house besides cat chow. She dressed it with some extra cream and sugar packets she’d stolen from Wendy’s and carried it downstairs, Windex close at her heels.

  She sat at her writing desk and pulled the books out of her backpack. She opened The Peloponnesian War, then put it down again and picked up Dionysius the Areopagite instead. She’d taken an incomplete in that course too—Western Mystical Philosophy. She still had to write the term paper. The reading was denser, but there was a lot less of it. Lately she’d found that she could become immersed if she read closely and tried to follow the arguments. Maybe it was the effect of her new room: monkish and cell-like. There was a thrill of secret initiation that, had she been raised in a religion, she would have recognized.

  She took an index card out of her desk and copied out a passage. “For if all the branches
of knowledge belong to things that have being, then that which is beyond Being must also be transcendent above all Knowledge.” She read it over and added, “Cf Cloud of Unknowing.” She’d made a pile of notes already, but she didn’t know what to do with the ideas as a group. That was what she’d wanted to talk to Jim about tonight. He’d mentioned something to her the last time she’d talked to him, some theory that God is a sentence without meaning, or maybe a grammatical formula for making all the sentences of the world.

  The first time Kitty saw Jim was on a sunny September afternoon just a few weeks after she’d arrived on campus. She was still enjoying a kind of automatic popularity with some of the older guys. She sat on the steps of the student union with someone she’d just met, a Chemistry major from New York City named Conrad. He was telling her about Renaissance Fair, a campus-wide “bacchanal” that marked the end of the school year in May. He used the word as though it were a neutral term, like “prom” or “social.” She was only half-listening, though. While he talked, her eyes followed someone walking across the lawn. He wore a red and black checked hunting cap and work pants and a matching jacket, like a TV repairman’s uniform. He took long steps, swinging his arms almost comically. From where they sat, a hundred feet away, Kitty sensed a coiled energy.

  Conrad noticed her looking. “That’s Jim Frank,” he said. “He’s a real wild man. Do you want to meet him? Hey Jim,” he called, “do you want to meet my friend Kitty?” Kitty got the impression he was showing off a little, pleased with himself for knowing this person well enough to make an introduction. The walker stopped and pivoted in their direction. “No!” he called back, flashing a wide grin. He continued on the path, disappearing into the campus radio station—which was in the basement of Kitty’s dorm block.

  Half an hour later Kitty was sitting on the toilet in a bathroom stall on her dormitory floor when Jim Frank’s face appeared between the door and the frame.