The Optimists

by Andrew Miller

  ‘Protesting?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Good for them.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  They drove past the doors of a big hotel; Silverman U-turned and brought them up to the kerb on the other side of the road. ‘Union Station,’ he said, pointing to the row of green railings and solid grey pillars that faced the hotel. ‘Nineteen thirty. Classical revival. The railroad built the hotel too.’

  On the pavement in front of the station were two hotdog stands (Great-tasting Sausage in Toronto!), makeshift affairs with coloured canvas covers. To one of these they started to carry the cool-boxes.

  ‘I have an arrangement with the man whose pitch this is,’ said Silverman, fitting a key into the padlock that secured the lashing at the back of the stall. He ducked under the canvas. A minute later he let down a board at the front. Clem brought the last of the boxes over. Silverman hung a pair of electric storm-lamps from the roof of the stall, then opened the valve of the gas bottle and lit the rings.

  Since getting down from the van, Clem had been aware of movement, a flickering of shadows around the bases of the station pillars. Now he heard voices and, turning, found himself in the company of a half-dozen ragged, bright-eyed men. ‘We too early?’ asked one, peering at Clem from under the brim of his slouch hat.

  ‘Give me fifteen!’ called Silverman, rattling pans on to the burners. The men withdrew a few steps; others began to join them, men and women of all ages, many of them carrying bags or little packs, a blanket over the shoulder, a sleeping-bag rolled under an arm. They were patient, orderly, now and then sniffing the air as it became savoury.

  ‘Hey, Clem! You know which box the fettunata’s in?’

  Clem said that he thought he did.

  They served for an hour. The soup went into plastic beakers, everything else on to disposable party plates. With the two of them inside the stall, both long-limbed men, they had to move with due regard. Many of those they served Silverman knew by name. ‘You back for seconds, Mac? How are the feet today, Patrick? Is Debbie coming down tonight?’ By two twenty they were serving the stragglers and by two forty the last had tottered away to whatever nook of the city sheltered him. The range went off, the pans were stacked, the empty cool-boxes returned to the back of the van. Silverman poured the remaining soup into a pair of flasks. There was also half a bag of rolls left, some rice salad, two of the blueberry pies.

  ‘Phase one,’ said Silverman, padlocking the stall.

  ‘There’s more?’

  Silverman put his hand on Clem’s shoulder and, with a quick look round at the street, guided him towards the station. ‘This is what I wanted you to see. What I was trying to tell you about.’ He tapped at a tall green door.

  ‘Silverman?’ challenged a muffled voice.

  ‘Yeah, it’s me,’ said Silverman.

  The door opened; they slid inside. ‘This is Defoe,’ said Silverman, nodding to the young security guard. ‘Defoe, this is Clem. A compadre from the mother country.’

  ‘Getting worried you weren’t coming,’ said Defoe, locking the door.

  ‘You should know me better than that,’ said Silverman, soothingly.

  They were standing in the station ticket hall—archways, arched windows, high walls of hewn stone, a vaulted roof. For these night hours the lighting was minimal. The hall, eerie as any public space deserted, seemed set for the arrival of a troupe of actors. Clem found himself suddenly remembering the painting in the doctor’s office at Ithaca, the red-haired girl on the mule. It would not be so strange to see her here, ambiguous sprite, observing them from the watery shadows beneath an archway.

  ‘Defoe and his uncle Edward do alternate nights,’ explained Silverman. ‘It was Defoe who told me about the people we’re going to now. Right, Defoe?’

  ‘Right,’ said Defoe, touching the red line where his collar scratched the skin of his neck.

  ‘But we tread with care,’ said Silverman. ‘There are parties who would not be sympathetic to this. Not at all.’

  They went down a flight of steps to a small arcade. A juice bar, a bakery, a place to buy souvenirs, newspapers. Between a florist’s and an ATM was a painted door, the top of it about the height of Clem’s lowest ribs. After a glance at Silverman, Defoe knocked with his keys. They waited. Defoe knocked again. From the other side of the door came the sound of some obstruction being dragged free of the way.

  ‘We still don’t know how any of them got in here,’ said Silverman. ‘There may be a way in from the tracks. The whole place is a maze. Watch your head now.’

  Clem crouched low and moved, an awkward shuffling, into the dim space ahead of him. Silverman came next; Defoe remained outside, to keep watch perhaps, or for fear that his uniform, not unlike a policeman’s, might spread alarm. The ceiling of the room—it must once have served as storage space—was not quite high enough to stand under. Along one side, four men and three women sat with their knees drawn up, their backs against the wall.

  Silverman shook their hands. One of the women, her hair under a red or brown scarf, tried to press his fingers to her lips but he withdrew them, gently. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’m not the bishop.’

  He began to unpack the food.

  ‘Where are they from?’ whispered Clem, helping to set up.

  ‘As best as I can make out they’re Moldovans. Or Romanians. Maybe gypsies. About three words of English between them. No papers, of course. No money.’

  ‘Couldn’t they just claim asylum?’

  ‘My guess is they tried that last time and found themselves on a flight back to Chişinău. Picked up pan-handling. Fell foul of some cop or city bylaw. Who knows?’

  ‘A better chance here than in the States?’

  ‘Actually,’ said Silverman, ‘I suspect that’s where they think they are.’

  The men were thin, delicately made, dressed in white shirts and cheap suits. The women wore the kind of traditional outfits peasants in Dracula films wore. Clem doled out the rolls and cups of soup. They muttered their thanks. He pitied them.

  ‘They get to stretch their legs at night for an hour,’ said Silverman, tapping softly at an even smaller door at the rear of the room. ‘Use the station restrooms. I’m sorting some legal rep. When the time’s right we’ll move them out. Make them all Canadians.’

  The smaller door swung open. A long, sallow face peered out and blinked at them.

  ‘Buenas tardes,’ said Silverman.

  ‘Buenas tardes, Señor,’ said the man.

  ‘Previously of Guatemala City,’ said Silverman to Clem. ‘They arrived with even less if you can imagine it. The good people here let them share the place.’

  As if on cue, one of the men from Moldova or Romania waved a neighbourly greeting to the Guatemalan and, shifting stiffly from the wall, began to pass through the remaining food. Clem knelt by the door—more hatch than door—and looked inside. Around a single source of light, chiaroscuro fashion, the man and two solemn women nodded to him as they began their supper. Beyond them, laid in a crib of carboard boxes, a child, four or five years old, sucked at a piece of bread and stared at Clem from satin, unamazed eyes.

  ‘He’s not theirs,’ said Silverman, his voice thickening with emotion.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Little mite must have become separated from his parents on the way through. Anyway, these folks care for him. Treat him like their own.’

  The child stirred, and from under his blanket produced a tin, an old milk-powder or coffee tin perhaps, harvested from trackside jetsam. The lid had been punctured with some kind of spike. The boy waved to Clem: an odd, languorous gesture.

  ‘Go on,’ said Silverman. ‘This is priceless...’

  Clem went in on hands and knees. The adults moved aside to let him pass. The women smiled. ‘Hola,’ said Clem to the child.

  ‘Mira,’ whispered the boy. With the points of frail fingers he struggled to dislodge the lid from the tin. Clem slid a coin from his pocket, a Canadian dollar, and prised t
he lid loose; the boy lifted it away. It was, at first, too dark to see what was inside (what moved in the can’s black air) but behind Clem someone raised the lamp until the light fell on the raw snouts of a pair of nude-looking mice, the kind of vermin Clem had often seen scurrying beneath the rails of the London Underground, intent, semi-blind creatures that fed off dust and ashes.

  ‘Son míos,’ said the boy, gazing at them, his expression split between ruthlessness and love, like a little dictator smiling on the crowd from a palace balcony. He dropped a scrap of bread inside, then quickly sealed the tin, stealing it back into the gloom beneath his blanket.

  There was no room for Clem to turn round without inconveniencing the others. He thanked the boy, and for a second or two locked eyes with him, then he lowered his head and began, very slowly, crawling backwards towards the door.

  12

  He slept for only a few hours, waking still dressed, lying on the bed covers, cut in two by sunlight. He had been dreaming but the dream was in fragments. An image of himself scrabbling among rubbish. A room. The room at the station. And Silverman? Yes. Silverman, the Guatemalans, the boy (possessed now of the enormous liquid gaze of a doomed cartoon fawn) looking back at him from the door. Silverman pushing the door shut with his bishop’s crook, shouting, ‘We have orders,’ or ‘Our orders are clear’. Unnerving, senseless stuff.

  He sat up. The hotel was quiet, the road too. He left the bed and went to the window, squinted against the light, remembered, looking on to the angles and morning shadows of an empty street, that the day was Sunday.

  In the bathroom he swilled his mouth with water from the tap. There was some discomfort in his head, a point above his right eye, like the hot tip of a wire, an ache running back along the wire an inch or two into the interior of his skull. He leaned and examined his eye in the mirror. His right eye, his view-finder eye. He had a certain professional knowledge of eyes—the sclera, the choroid, the myriad cells in the cup of the retina where the light converges. With his left hand he covered his left eye. The right, singled out, looked back at him like a small cowed animal. Leaning closer he noticed a hint of inflammation, a redness around the inner rim of the lid that was perhaps the beginning of something, something he had been expecting for a long time. Could an eye be damaged by what it looked at? Too fierce a light will burn it. What else? Though he had studied it as the camera’s conjunct, a metaphor for what the camera will do with metal and glass, the eye was not a machine. It lived, glittered in the face, was washed by tears. Could it look on a living child the way it looked on a child’s two-day corpse? Hard to believe something so delicate would not be altered. Hard to believe it. He could not, in truth, believe it.

  In the bedroom he picked up the remote control, turned on the television and scrolled through the channels until he reached the US Weather Channel (‘Well, Diane, we’re looking at highs in the high eighties outside of Lawton today...’) The sun in the room made the picture hard to see but he didn’t want to see it, he wanted to listen. He had had a certain fascination with this channel ever since he came across it in a motel in Texas, years ago; was amused by it at first, surprised that an entire channel should be devoted to weather, then found the seamless detailing of ephemeral conditions in places he knew little or nothing about soothing, like hearing in childhood the lullaby voices of adults talking round the table late into the night.

  He had told Silverman, when Silverman, after a short, wordless trip from Union Station, dropped him off outside the Inn at a quarter to four in the morning, that he intended to spend the day sightseeing, a trip to Niagara perhaps. Silverman had approved. The Falls, though heavily exploited, were, he said, worth seeing. There was a cable-car ride over the water, and it was always fun to see the honeymooners. Then Clem had reached through the van’s window and they had clasped hands, the pair of them grave as generals at a surrender, or as though their leavetaking were not for a night but final and for ever.

  Clem had seen cards for the tour companies in boxes on the curve of the reception desk. If asked, the manager would surely arrange something. He could take a coach, eat lunch out there, see the Falls, and be back by early evening, not having spent the entire day in his hotel room. He thought—aware he was not thinking well and that soon he would have to do much better—going to the Falls would make some sense of his coming over. What did he do? He went to see the Falls, one of the wonders of the world. And how were they? They were impressive. They were very impressive.

  From the fridge with its mock-wood door he took a bottle of beer, a bag of salted nuts, and propped himself against the headboard of his bed. Later, if he was hungry, he could send out for something from Chinatown. Everything else—painkillers, drink, cigarettes—he had there with him. On the screen, shades in human form loomed against the landscape. Deserts, cities. There were updates from the Mississippi Delta, the Virginia Highlands, from Flathead Lake. The news from Calvert County was that a freak storm had blown a child through a store window, but the storm was over, people were sweeping up, and the child was doing well, considering.

  Monday was departure day. He woke after thirteen hours’ dead sleep to find another message on the carpet by the door. It informed him that a Mr Silverton had called (apparently Clem had slept right through it). He was sorry not to be able to see Mr Glass today but there were errands, an unexpected weight of work. He wished Mr Glass a bon voyage. He looked forward to seeing him at some other time.

  Clem showered, then walked to the café where he had sat beside the students on his first day in the city. It was a cooler morning with rafts of low, moist cloud. At the café he ordered an espresso and a bagel with cream cheese. He ate half the bagel then swallowed a pair of ibuprofen. Overnight, the wire-tip had become the complicated head of a small flower, a circle of overlapping petals pressing against the skin beneath his eyebrow. He thought, lugubriously, of Nora falling stone-dead into the front row of the South Bristol Women’s Low Pay Action Group; then briefly of Silverman’s delicacy (or rank cowardice) in sparing them both any fresh embarrassments. He lit his first cigarette of the day, sputtered, ground it out, and left the café—‘Have a good one!’ called the boy from behind the counter—to spend an hour or two on foot, a hike to shake off this sluggishness. His blood was thick as syrup. He walked fast, almost running. It rained for a while; he kept going; the rain was helpful. At two, he ate a bowl of udon in a noodle bar on Dundas Street. At three, he returned to the Trillium Inn and packed. When he tried to pay the bill his Visa card was rejected, twice. ‘Maybe the system,’ said the manager, doubtfully. Clem dug in his pockets, found dollars he didn’t know he had, paid cash.

  Down to his last twenty-five, he took the subway to a station called Yorkdale, then caught a transit bus to the airport for less than three dollars. He was late for his check-in but the queues were short and he had no luggage for the hold. He bought a pack of painkillers at the airport pharmacy, then used the change to buy a word-search puzzle book and a biro. He was in the line for security, almost at its head, when he heard his name called and looked back to see Frank Silverman jogging towards him, a rolled newspaper in one hand, a large brown envelope in the other.

  ‘Jesus, Clem! Almost missed you.’ He bent slightly to catch his breath. ‘Expressway’s fender to fender. What time’s the flight?’

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Let’s get ourselves a quick drink. There’s a place right here. Damned convenient.’

  They went in and leaned at the bar. Silverman ordered a double tonic water; Clem had beer.

  ‘If I’d known you were coming,’ said Clem.

  ‘Didn’t know myself until a couple of hours ago. Thought you’d go home with a poor impression of Canadian hospitality.’ He grinned. ‘How were the Falls?’

  ‘I didn’t go.’

  ‘No, well, I didn’t think you were going. Here’s mud in your eye.’ They tapped glasses. Silverman said, ‘I’m sorry we haven’t had more chance to talk.’

 
‘We’ll talk some time,’ said Clem.

  ‘It’s knowing what to say.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say, Clem.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘You’re not exactly effusive yourself.’

  ‘I’m glad I saw you.’

  ‘I’m glad too.’

  Distracted, they turned to look along the bar to where a man in a white linen jacket was talking at high volume to an embarrassed-looking woman. They watched a moment.

  ‘Ass,’ said Silverman. He turned back to Clem. ‘You’ll stay in touch?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Of course! Is that Brit-speak for no?’

  ‘It’s Brit-speak for of course.’

  ‘We need to get past this, Clem. If we can’t get past this then Ruzindana wins.’

  ‘And if they find him,’ asked Clem, ‘what will you do?’

  ‘Other than hope they make him swing? Nothing.’ He paused. ‘What is there to do?’

  Clem shook his head.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Silverman, fishing the lemon slice from his glass, ‘don’t hold your breath. It’s a big world. He could be anywhere.’

  ‘But you think he’s alive?’

  ‘In one of the camps maybe. Or someone’s protecting him. Europe. The States, even. The Devil takes care of his own.’

  ‘Agree on one thing,’ said Clem.