The Journey Prize Stories 22

by Various

  As Mitsuo would not leave his room even to eat, Yumiko left his meals on a tray outside his bedroom door. In the morning she would find the tray in the same spot neatly piled with empty dishes and a “thank you” note written in Mitsuo’s small cramped script, as impersonal as if he were addressing a maid. From the telltale signs he left, they knew he came out after they had gone to sleep. Toshiyuki imagined that in the stillness of night, Mitsuo roamed freely through their house like a ghost.

  They suspected he was the victim of bullying at school. From the time he was small, Mitsuo had been a nervous boy, with a tentative, wide-eyed look, as if he was waiting for someone to poke him with a sharp pencil tip or stick a dead cockroach in his lunch box. In adolescence he’d grown into a tall, broad-shouldered young man, but that look in his eyes had never changed. His teachers, however, claimed they had witnessed nothing unusual. The district school psychologist was no help at all, merely reciting a litany of pat phrases: “hormones,” “adolescent angst,” “panic attacks,” “fear of growing up.”

  No matter how late Toshiyuki returned home from the office, he would find Yumiko sound asleep at the kitchen table, her head cradled in her arms. He knew she was waiting not for him but for Mitsuo, hoping against hope to catch a glimpse of his shadow when he emerged after darkness. Afraid to disturb her, Toshiyuki sometimes stood for as long as twenty minutes staring at his wife, memorizing the curls of hair that fell forward over her arms, listening to her soft breathing. It was then that he noticed the whorl, the spot where her hair swirled like a tiny ferocious eddy. When Yumiko did wake up, he could tell by the dark shadows under her eyes and the long creases on her cheeks that she had cried herself to sleep. At those moments, though he knew it was wrong, his feelings about his son verged on hate.

  “You never talk to your son.” He heard Yumiko’s reproachful voice. “That’s why this happened.”

  Nonetheless it was his own voice that reverberated loudest in the dark chambers of his head, chastising him, chasing him down. You don’t deserve to be a father. You don’t deserve to be a husband. Not only was he unable to reach his son or comfort his wife, he didn’t even know how not to be a stranger in his own house.

  Almost ten months to the day, Mitsuo emerged from his room and began taking steps to reintegrate into the outside world. He lost that year, although in the long run repeating an extra year of high school probably helped him get accepted into Reimei University, a place that a few years earlier they had assumed was beyond his reach. Toshiyuki often wondered what had really happened during that brief, strained period, that interlude of utter unhappiness. What had happened to all of them? Mitsuo never talked about it, and Yumiko and Toshiyuki never asked. They couldn’t ask. It was as if a heavy oak door had clicked firmly shut.

  Toshiyuki felt sure that eventually Mitsuo would find his own way, just as he’d managed to pull himself out of his depression. Just as he had summoned the will to return to school and pick up his life where he had left off. It had taken courage, Toshiyuki knew that.

  It wasn’t easy to be a son.

  When the seat beside Yumiko finally became free, Toshiyuki sat down.

  “Are we there yet?” Yumiko’s eyelids fluttered open sleepily.

  “Almost. Two more stops.”

  With that she shut her eyes again.

  Toshiyuki closed his eyes, too. The steady clickaty-clack of the train wheels over iron tracks, the long ride home. He recalled a night over thirty-five years ago when a much younger Yumiko had sat with her shoulder pressed against his, sound asleep. They had spent the whole Sunday at the zoo, standing in line for over two hours to get a glimpse of the newly arrived pandas, then racing off to see the lions, the giant gorillas, the hippos, the giraffes. They had wanted to see everything. By the end of the day they were dizzy with exhaustion, and on the train going home, Yumiko had fallen asleep instantly. At the time they had been married less than a month, and Toshiyuki, tired as he was, had been unable to sleep, feeling bound by duty to stay awake and watch over her. He had marvelled at the sight, the touch, of the young woman – his wife! – leaning against him. If only they could ride the train forever, he remembered thinking, shoulder to shoulder, the scent of Yumiko’s hair filling his nostrils.

  He felt a poke in his ribs. Their station was next. Yumiko had pulled the brown leather bag containing Mitsuo’s pictures onto her lap and was sitting poised on the edge of her seat, ready to get up. She looked refreshed – her brief nap had done her good it seemed – and oddly expectant, like a schoolgirl clutching her book satchel. As soon as the train began to slow, Yumiko got up and stood at the doors. Over the PA system the conductor’s nasal voice announced the name of their station.

  Yumiko suddenly turned her head and gave Toshiyuki a quick, shy smile. It lasted only a second, then other people wanting to get off at the station crowded behind her. The train shuddered to a stop, a bell rang, and again the conductor’s voice cut through the air.

  Toshiyuki leapt to his feet and pressed his body through the crowd, like a swimmer pushing through surf towards the shore.

  BEN LOF

  WHEN IN THE FIELD

  WITH HER AT HIS BACK

  Almost a month before the button of a landmine de-pressed into its plastic disc beneath his boot near a river in Croatia, Sander waited in Munich for the connecting flight that would take him to the last assignment of his career. Back in Canada he was retiring far before his diplomat colleagues, comfortably they would say, due in part to a large life insurance payment from his wife’s death two years prior. Lately he had felt rather out of step with himself, marvelling at his states of loneliness. How did I get here? he would think.

  Sander was at the airport in Munich, trying to undermine the four-hour wait between flights. He bought his son a Bayern Munich soccer jersey from a boutique store, unable to remember if his only child still cared for the sport. He ate a giant pretzel as slowly as he could. After he washed his face and brushed his teeth for the second time, he went outside with his black duffle bag to the plaza between terminals, where dance music and an excited announcer drowned out the back and forth movement of travellers with luggage in tow. Next to the beer gardens, a beach volleyball court sat as if it had risen spontaneously through the concrete, its players – loud, strutting women and toothy, subdued men – uniformly muscled and nearly naked, punching and slapping the ball in the fifteen-degree weather. Sander imagined goosebumps like pox covering their bodies. A giant screen above showed player pictures and vital statistics as the announcer seemed to enthuse – from what Sander understood with a limited sense of German – about the greatness of every possible thing. At that moment his phone buzzed and it showed a message from his son, David: WHERE ON EARTH IS MY FATHER? A running joke between them. Despite his boredom, or because of it, Sander couldn’t rouse himself into replying.

  The announcement of his retirement had been received with businesslike approval from the Ministry. He was a minor diplomat, but lately he had managed to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, embarrassing the Ministry, government, and nation with astonishing economy – a few words, really – at two luncheons and a gala. An interview in Moscow had made small headlines, one where he went on about what he called the “death of diplomacy,” ridiculing his government’s efforts as “teeth-first” and “at times duplicitous” when dealing with nations in conflict. He would have been severely reassigned had he not stepped aside himself. It was made clear to him that this last job, Sarajevo, ought to be a trip without incident: simply exchange debriefings on positions with the opposing functionary, work the conferences, and bring back the new portfolio. “Opportunities for Canadian-Bosnian Economic Partnership” was the study, as remote from his mind as anything could be.

  It was anyone’s guess what to do once a career was over. There was maintaining David, but – perhaps when it mattered most now that the boy’s mother was gone – Sander had lost the desire to tend to that particular connection between father and son. When David did
n’t come home for two days in July, Sander enjoyed the solace without too much worry, felt only stood up, as if by a friend. He hadn’t noticed that David had already been disappearing with regularity. His thoughts were elsewhere, indistinguishable planets orbiting around a hazy cluster of dust instead of a sun.

  Sander felt a chill and turned his jacket collar up, watching the airport volleyball with detachment, as if it was part of an unsettling dream. A jumping man cocked his arm and spiked the ball into the net, eliciting cheers. It was as if they had been playing since the beginning of time, and would spring, lunge, and yell forever.

  In Eastern Croatia, the day Dragana saw a ghost, she had stopped at her husband’s instead of going directly home. She was thinking of physical things: the sight of her students joyously pushing out of her classroom at the sound of the gymnasium’s last bell. The chalk dust opening into the air like pollen of spent flowers as she cleaned the blackboard brushes. The muscle burn in her calves and her satchel, heavy with assignments, digging into her shoulder as she pedalled her bicycle towards her estranged husband’s flat – their marriage apartment before the war over a decade earlier. She’d lived with her mother ever since.

  Lately she had been dividing things into categories of physical and spiritual without knowing why, and this troubled her. There was a blind need to place things on one side or the other. The odd trip to mass with her mother was physical, the water, the wafer, crossing herself and occasionally beating her chest. Writing in her notebook at night was physical, the smell of the pages, the type of pen and pace of cursive and irrevocability of ink on paper. Coaxing her houseplants to grow, however, was spiritual, as was imagining a baby. She had been jumpy and irritated for days when she arrived at Krešo’s door, which – unlike Krešo himself – would be labelled spiritual, as all points of passage were.

  “Hey, love, you made it.” Krešo smiled with his eyebrows raised as Dragana walked past him into the living room. He followed and lightly pinched her side. “You’re getting solid – have you gained a few?” He grinned at her with his head tilted.

  “Take off your shirt, won’t you? I don’t have much time,” she said, producing a tin of ointment from her bag. He pulled his collar over his head and slid off the shirt before lying on his stomach on the sofa-bed. There was a half-finished puzzle of a spaceship launch on the coffee table, unfitted pieces of blue sky and cirrus clouds scattered to the edges and onto the floor. She straddled his waist with her knees and massaged the pungent jelly into the scar tissue on his broad back. She relished the strange, almost green light of the room, the remaining brightness of late afternoon filtering through the canopy lowered over the window, being in that familiar shade with a man she once fiercely loved.

  Krešo grimaced as she prodded him. “They’re reconstructing one of those office buildings, to think, after letting them be for so long.” His tone stopped mocking wonder, softening. “Looks like work for me.”

  Dragana knew this to be a lie. He hadn’t worked regularly in nearly fifteen years. “Krešo, you haven’t a clue about building things. There you are reading a blueprint upside down and scratching your head.”

  “Well, what else? My life’s as exciting as lumpy yoghurt.” Krešo put his shirt back on as she took her earrings off in front of the mirror. She was forty-two but could have passed for ten years younger. She wanted to change before he could, she would get away from this city once and for all. They talked often of each moving somewhere else. Yet of course she would never leave. How stupid life was! Everything that seemed urgent one day would be forgotten the next. Krešo lifted her long black hair and kissed the back of her neck. Pigeons burbled away outside on the balcony. “By the way, I decided to humbly donate my talents to your cause, if you wish.” Last week she had told him she wanted to risk it, have a baby – she was already well old for that. But her life without a child now appeared solitary, full of second guesses. She hadn’t told him that a father hanging around wasn’t in the picture she held in her mind. But this day she didn’t want a baby either, just a quick lay. “Forget all that,” she said flatly, rolling her eyes. “You’re too generous.”

  They went back to the sofa bed and exercised their marriage rights in that dreamlike light, as if they were a functioning husband and wife. To Dragana this exercising was peppered with nostalgia, grief for an imagined existence they once almost had. When Krešo had come home injured and burnt just before the fall of Vukovar, Dragana was already at a place for refugees near Zagreb with her mother. Krešo then waited the war out with some relatives in Hungary, telling Dragana by letter that he was through with her. His wedding band had been blown off with part of his hand so he wouldn’t be sending that back either. They had been married for just over a year. Dragana left her devastation alone during those months away, and when she returned to her town she acted the only way she saw fit. By then Krešo’s comrades from the 89th battalion had returned too, but that didn’t stop Dragana from telling her mother, stumbling into the kitchen drunk one afternoon – and by way of her mother the neighbourhood – that Krešo was missing and probably dead. When Krešo reappeared living and breathing six months later to stay, Dragana felt that she had tempted fate by lying about death when there were so many dead, her own father among them.

  Now, once they finished on the sofa, she needed to go. It was Festival week and she had to help her mother get the house ready for a dinner. Krešo passed her a Kleenex from the coffee table and she wiped off her stomach. He quickly resumed work on the spaceship puzzle and sang a folk tune in loud falsetto, slapping his knee with his three-fingered hand: “Amer-ika, Amer-ika, don’t go there unless you have to!”

  At the bottom of the apartment stairs Dragana opened the door and then paused. She rifled her hands through roping, sweaty hair. A man carrying a black duffle bag walked on the road, about ten metres away, his feet making a faint crunch on the gravel. Dragana froze with her hands on her head and hairpin between her lips. Something was familiar about the man. After a moment she realized it was like a vision from her youth. Back in 1985, a Canadian boy she had been with for a few days, though she hadn’t travelled to him in her mind for many years. But she must have been seeing things, for those years had barely touched him.

  In the moment, the spectre had not registered her presence, looking straight forward, like celluloid film projected onto the street, a cut-out from another decade. It moved with purpose. A delivery truck pulled up and parked in front of the building, obscuring her view. She shook herself into motion and walked out onto the street. The spirit had disappeared, like it was never there; a man could not have vanished so quickly. She looked back to where it had come from. The train station stood silent at the head of the intersection down the way. Do ghosts travel by rail? She unlocked her bicycle from the lamppost and began to walk it home.

  Sander woke up late in the new city and looked out of the hotel room window at the cloudy morning and street below. Three old men on the sidewalk talked with hands in their pockets. A young man entered an electronics store as cars meandered back and forth. Would Sander know her if he saw her? The day before, his assignment complete, he had boarded the return flight from Sarajevo, but at the stopover in Zagreb he didn’t get back on the plane. It was early evening when he arrived in the small Slavonian city from Zagreb by train. He secured a hotel and found the woman’s number in the book. In a cafe, he drank two beers and, with only minor confusion, understood that the waiter had never heard of the woman. Before sleeping he’d been satisfied with the progress made – her name in the directory was a promise that she still lived there after all – but as he stood at the dreary hotel window that morning, bewilderment flooded in and it staggered him. He tried to focus. It had been two weeks since he left Canada. He picked up the phone from the nightstand and called to update his son on his whereabouts. There was a long pause, familiar to both men. “You’re supposed to be in Toronto tomorrow. I mean today,” David warned, sleep still in his voice.

  “You’re ri
ght,” Sander spoke softly. “But I need to, well, take care of some stuff.”

  “It’s real early here, Dad. Four o’clock early.… Appreciate you calling but this probably could have waited. I’ve got things tomorrow. Today. Got university.”

  “It couldn’t wait. It seemed like the thing to do, you know, let you know.”

  “Well, now you have,” said David, collecting himself, sounding truly tired.

  “I just popped up here, to Croatia. Sort of a whim, really.”

  “How long, Dad?”

  “You can call me Sander if you want, like when you were younger. Angrier.”

  “Holy fuck. Happy? You never used to pull this nonsense.” Sander heard an exasperated clicking. The connection, or the sound of a son whose mother has been dead for two years, he thought. It was true that the only reason Sander could put foot in front of foot in this other country was because of his wife’s absolute and total absence. It was a nagging equation, but one that had bothered him less and less. He took a long breath, irritated, wondering why a child thinks a parent could be so incapable of change.

  “Don’t worry. Don’t keep tabs on me, David. Just keep an eye on things there.”

  Air was audibly forced out of his son’s nostrils in a long stream of disapproval. Or disappointment. “The phone’s been ringing a lot. Your office keeps leaving messages.”

  Sander flipped channels on the hotel room television and waited for him to say something else. He came across an ad for a new hotel at a beach on the Adriatic. “If you need me back tomorrow,” said Sander, distracted.

  “What a colossal joke this is,” David said, just warmly enough that Sander knew he was off the hook, that he could let the conversation drift into some dark corner in the back of his mind and not trouble it.