Falling Sideways (15 page)
That night in the North Bodega, Jes was quickly the star of the evening. Even the old-time regulars were amused. But now it occurred to Jes that they would refer to Jalâl as a perker, a spic, and anger stirred in him—at them, at himself. He despised that word.
Next day, Jalâl said, “Do you wish to work for me still? The pay is not great.”
“Thank you, Mr. al-Din.”
“Please, no ‘Mr.’ Is not necessary. I am Jalâl, like the great poet, you know him? No? You read him sometime. I have name from him. But they have sometimes call me Al-Jariz because my eyes, you know, they stick out. Al-Jariz it mean, how you say, ‘the Goggle-Eyed.’ ” He made a comical show of displaying his pop eyes. “They have said it indicates force to have the eyes protrude, but I know it indicates only a slight disturbing of a gland behind my throat. For this I swallow the heart of a garlic morning and night. This way there is no odor. For me to smell of the garlic is to invite the Danes to call me perker. Not wise to tempt. To swallow the garlic also regulate elimination system very well. So, how you say? The situation win-win.”
Now a woman came into the shop with two pair of men’s oxfords in a plastic bag. Jes marked them with the thick stub of yellow crayon Jalâl kept beside the cash register and passed them over the work desk to his boss. He watched Jalâl fit the shoes over his last and with a wide-jawed pliers peel away the remains of the old heels in one sweep. With another dark iron tool he clipped off the nail stumps and hammered flat the leather beneath. Then he painted the heel space of each shoe with glue and laid on a square of nylon that protruded all around the heel. Holding each shoe, in turn, to his chest, he carved away the excess nylon with a sharp knife. Jes’s fingers itched to try it himself.
“It must be nice,” he said. “To have a trade like that. To do something, you know, real.”
“My father was teacher,” said Jalâl. “It was no meant for me to repair boot. But it feed my family.”
“I would really like to have a trade like that.”
The back of the index finger rose and twitched before him. “No for you. You father would be sad.”
“My father is a big shot, but he’s not happy. He spends all day in an office doing nothing as far as I can see.”
Jalâl tilted his head, and his eyes glistened as he peered into Jes’s face. “You say this to me of your father?”
“Don’t get me wrong, I love my father, but his work …”
“Do you know your father recommend you to me?”
Jes was confused. “You know my father?”
“When you apply I see your name and I look in telephone book and I call to your father. We speak on telephone. I tell him I like you for this job for me, and I ask if he approve that. He tell me about his work, what he do. He is important fellow. Educated. You must become educated, too.”
Jes felt his confusion faltering on the border of anger. He felt like a child, being discussed by two men. He didn’t need his father’s approval, goddammit! Yet the mild, good-natured certainty of Jalâl was too much for him, and he stilled his own sharp, quick tongue. He couldn’t be angry. “The problem here, Jalâl, is that there is nothing worth being educated for.”
Jalâl laughed. “Nothing? My son Daoud will be doctor in three year time. My daughter studies the IT. My young son Zaid, he is confusing. He listens only to the music techno. All day, all time, the music techno. Boom boom boom. It drive a nail of tympanics in the soul. He is no happy.” Jalâl’s eyes glistened, and he looked at Jes. “You know, seven weeks now I no see Zaid. His mother he see, but not his father. He is no happy. The young are confusing. You are of much intelligence, I see this in your face, but your intelligence is like the morning sun when there are many clouds before it. The clouds will pass in time, and you will see light.”
Jes watched the man’s thick hands place each shoe on the last of the nailer before he toed the pedal, turning the shoe as nails slammed neatly into the nylon, affixing it to the glued surface, and he felt as though he had wandered into the great cliché factory. He got an idea for a little skit he would play out at the North Bodega, then:
Another Day at Jalâl’s Great Northern Cliché Fabrik.
Yet he was tempted by Jalâl’s words; if only such simplisms could be believed! Maybe they could. Or maybe he was being tempted by candy floss.
When the heels were in place, Jes took the shoes over to the finishing machine, hit the drive baton, and ran the edges of the heels against the waxing wheel, watching the raw pale nylon take on a deep black luster before he painted on polish and buffed them on the spinning brush. As he worked, Jalâl began speaking again.
“It is said that God has sealed the hearts and covered the eyes and ears of the ungrateful and placed them in the torment where they cannot hear or see or feel what is true. But I believe it is the ungrateful who refuse to open their eyes and ears because they have fallen in love with their own lies and no longer can to see the falseness of them. They have become obsessed and made themselves so sick they will not know the good.”
If only it were so simple
, Jes thought. “Do you know the good, Jalâl?” he asked, thinking the question a subtle form of rebuttal. Surely the man could see reality was more complex than that.
“Yes,” Jalâl said.
“Yes?”
“Yes. Is simple. Worship nothing but God, be good to your parents and relatifs and to those who are without parents and to the poor and to the animal. Speak nicely to people, very important. Treat your neighbor as good neighbor so he can become good neighbor. Remember to pray and to give charity.”
Jes’s instinct was to scoff, but he tempered his challenge into the form of a question. “Can it really be that simple?”
“Yes.”
“I respect you, Jalâl, but I don’t know.”
“My friend: Do not wrong or sorrow your own soul.”
“Jalâl, my father’s country is destroying the world. My own country is helping. I think more than simple homilies are needed.”
“I understand these words and their source, my friend. Someday those who oppress will wish there were a great distance between them and their evil. My friend: Ways of life have passed away before us. If you travel the earth, you will see how scorners have ended up. Do not wrong your own soul.”
Jes decided to say nothing more then as he took the last shoe in his hands and leaned into the turning wheel, welcoming the high, shrill whine of it into his ears.
Breathwaite closed Kampman’s door behind him and moved slowly along the hall, hand in his pocket, stirring the coins there. He remembered then how his own father used to do that and how that sound of dimes and nickels and quarters and fifty-cent pieces clicking against one another had seemed wondrous to him when he was a boy. The wonder of money in the possession of adults. Pockets full of jingling coins. Wallets fat with green folding currency. The very word
cash
. The silver money clip his father carried in the buttoned back pocket of his suit pants, bills folded in ascending denominations from ones to twenties, the occasional fifty. His mother’s black purse with the snap clasp, inside of it a smaller purse with its own snap clasp and separate compartments for coins and bills.
Many years had passed before the unconsidered assumption that adult pockets came filled with cash revealed itself as false, before he recognized the relationship between labor and monetary recompense. It embarrassed him now to think how old he was. Not that he’d been lazy. Breathwaite had worked all his life. Newspaper routes, delivery boy for a grocery store, runner for a druggist. Unlike most of his friends, he was allowed to keep and use what he earned as he pleased. Candy, comic books, movie money, popcorn and, later, cigarettes, clothes, pizza, even restaurants, six-packs of beer. It was not until after high school when, for reasons still murky to him—was it his father’s drinking, his mother’s infidelity, a tight economy (but this was the 1960s!), or just bad karma?—his parents had sold their house and moved into a three-room apartment that Breathwaite recognized the ride here on out would not be free. That he awoke to the fact he would have to work for the rest of his life to earn his keep.
Late waker. Until then he had a little ironic motto he used to employ on people he considered unnecessarily and ostentatiously industrious: “You have got to get up early and work hard; otherwise other people will look at you and say, ‘He doesn’t get up early and work hard.’ ”
With his mother and father living in a small apartment, Breathwaite slept on a pull-out sofa bed for a while, then got a room of his own and began to turn the fruit of his labor to essentials—food, rent, college tuition. If he got a toothache, he had to pay the dentist to make it go away. A shot of penicillin for the flu cost money. Razor blades and shaving cream, toothpaste, toilet paper, the use of a washer and dryer, shoe leather, the dry cleaner’s, meat and bread and cheese and condiments, ketchup, mustard, subway tokens, bus fare—everything cost money. And that was not even to mention luxuries, which cost a lot of money. A lot more than he was earning as he, with painful slowness, inched his way toward the American dream of having everything you wanted and your parents never quite had, until it began to appear that everything you wanted was at the cost of everything you had to give. You could have it, everything, but you couldn’t have the time to enjoy it.
The Danish dream, on the other hand, was more modest and manageable. All you needed here was a house or apartment in the city, a house in the country, a car or two, maybe even a time-share in the south of France, TV, stereo, delicious furniture, a cozy, well-equipped kitchen and bath, a garden, and a six-week holiday to enjoy it all in, as well as a society that takes care of everything else for everybody so you could enjoy what you had without guilt and without too much worry about being envied, robbed, or murdered for it. Breathwaite pretty much had the furnishings of his Danish dream in place. Or had had, before this pulling of the plug. He could already hear the water of comfort gurgling down the drain.
Marianne, he was pleased to note, was not at her desk, so he didn’t have to muster energy to raise a mask with which to reassure and comfort her that he would be okay. He closed the door of his office behind him and sat with his feet up on the desk, gazing out his window toward the autumn-withered botanical garden.
His work for an NGO in his twenties had brought him to a conference in Copenhagen, where he got a glimpse of the Danish dream, with which you didn’t get everything, just a nice piece of it all (town house, summer house, a car or two if you wanted), and you still got to keep something of yourself. What really sold him was the six-week annual holiday leave, not to mention the numerous three-, four-, and five-day weekends and a society that seemed not quite so predicated on the shaft. Taxes were high, but you got something back for them—education, health care, and a security net if you fell on your butt.
Well, now he was on his butt, or about to be, and that net did not look quite so attractive from this position. And it was beginning to look worse.
He’d just had that one piece to get into place—Jes’s future—and he realized now his mistake: He had assumed that Kampman might feel he owed him something for agreeing to leave quietly after twenty-seven years of service, but a man like Kampman did not think that way. He had also tried to flank him with surprise, and that was always a mistake with someone like Kampman.
“I’ve been thinking about the new international structure, Martin, and it would work, but you’ll still be missing one vital thing.”
Kampman lifted his brow. The question that was not a question.
I didn’t ask, so whatever you offer might well be gratuitous. Answer at your own peril.
Breathwaite answered nonetheless. “Someone who is perfect in English.”
“Not a problem.”
“Believe me, it’s a problem. When you represent the Tank—I don’t mean you, but one—with pidgin applications, the Brits will shoot you down as sure as Nelson and Wellington did. If for no other reason, they’ll do it because they see a way of doing so.”
Kampman lifted one brow. Danger. He didn’t understand.
Don’t embarrass the man.
“We can buy the language expertise we need in town,” he said. “Ad hoc. Which is a lot cheaper than the little butter-hole we have been maintaining in the international department.” He laughed then, as if his frankness excused his insult.
Breathwaite ignored it. “Fee for service,” he said. “Will cost you a fortune. And you’ll have no means of quality control because no one here has the English.”
Smiling broadly, the CEO lifted his hand expansively. “
Everyone
here has the English.”
“Everyone here has school English. There’s a difference.”
“I take it you have a suggestion.”
“I do. Would you like to hear it?”
Kampman only stared at him, smiling inscrutably.
As though there had been an affirmative reply, Breathwaited plunged on. “Take someone on. Part-time. Trial basis. Assistant to the chief. A right hand for Jaeger.”
The smile was sweetly incredulous with pity. “You?”
Sit on the outrage. Even if it sticks up the butt. Breathwaite shook his head mildly. “When I’m gone, I’m gone. My son.”
“That might be a thought, but … Don’t have a budget.”
“Take it from the translation budget.”
“Already used most of that on your, uh, handshake.”
More like a kick in the ass—as a prelude to this one. All lies, but it was imperative that Breathwaite maintain the mask. “The first two years wouldn’t cost more than two hundred K. Quarter million tops. I know what the boy can do. You’ll get more than the value of the cost. You’ll be glad.”
“And you’d be glad?”
“Of course, but I wouldn’t suggest it if I didn’t know that he can do the job you need done.”
Kampman’s lips soured as if on a bad taste. Breathwaite saw the inevitable. He had to give something here. “Give him a two-year contract and you can skim the half of it from my, uh, handshake.”
“The half of it won’t pay the half of it.”