Falling Sideways (35 page)
He turned toward the lakes, passed the halal butcher on his way out of his shop.
“Salaam aleikem.”
“Aleikem salaam.”
He passed an electronics shop, a clothing store, a café where young people sat entertaining themselves. He scanned their faces, expecting, hoping always, to see the face of his own youngest, Zaid. Jalâl had not seen the boy for eight, nine weeks now. Longer, perhaps. Last time they had expressed anger toward each other. Jalâl had expressed anger while the boy sat silently, sullenness lowering over his face like a curtain. It made Jalâl angry. It made him want to strike the boy’s face. Angry words filled his mouth and spilled out, and then the boy raised his voice, too, rose from his chair, crying, and fled from their home. Eight weeks ago. Longer. Anger was not of use. Jalâl’s anger was at himself. The boy’s absence was constant pain in Jalâl’s heart. He accepted the pain as his due. They had argued over money, the money Jalâl would save if the boy would work for him. A father and son should not argue over money. He knew the boy was in contact with Khadiya, and he trusted that Khadiya would inform him if Zaid was in a dangerous situation. He had no choice but to trust Khadiya’s reassurances.
Yet tonight again, the two of them would dine alone.
Oh, my Zaid! Forgive me and come home so that I may forgive you and bless you and have the blessing of your presence again.
If any do something bad in ignorance, but then repent and make amends, assuredly God is forgiving and merciful. With God are the keys of the unseen.
On the bank of Black Dam Lake, he opened the mouth of the plastic bag and began to break off pieces of the old bread and cast it out onto the surface of the water. Swans and ducks and the other funny little squeaking birds, like ducks with pointed bills, began to paddle toward him. There was a lot of bread today, and many birds came. Pigeons materialized around his feet, pecking at the crumbs, and seagulls hovered in the air above his head, swooping to get the larger pieces before they struck the water. One of the gulls was especially aggressive and successful at seizing far more than his fair share of the bread. He would catch a lump in his beak and swoop up again, swallow it, and be back in a moment for more.
Jalâl smiled. Greedy bird. He paused in his distribution of the bread and looked up at the gull hovering above him.
“What sort of bird are you?” he said. “Not the falcon of a king. Not a peacock to delight the eyes. Not a parrot asking for a sugar lump, or a nightingale singing like a man whose heart is in love. What exactly do you do? You swoop and seize. You want more than you need. You have forgotten that God feeds but is not fed—God, who owns everything and gives it to us to share and who knows nothing of taking profit from every exchange.”
His prayer did nothing to deter the bird, but it brought comfort to his own heart. It was a prayer written by the poet Rumi, from whom Jalâl had his name. When the bread had been distributed, he stuffed the bag into his jacket pocket and dusted the crumbs from his palms. Then he decided to take a long circle home to exercise his legs. His body grew stiff from sitting too long at his workbench in the shop.
Back across Queen Louise’s Bridge, he stopped to glance at the statue of a boy and girl sitting and gazing at each other. He smiled, thought of Zaid, who would surely soon be thinking to choose a young woman. He must choose wisely to have good fortune. Jalâl walked the whole length of Peblinge Lake, turned up Åboulevard, then right on Blågårds Street.
Perhaps somewhere he would see Zaid. Perhaps if they just saw each other on the street, in a neutral place, their eyes would meet and the memory of their angry words would fall away like scales from their eyes. They would approach each other and embrace and would be wiser in the future. Jalâl would be wiser. He had learned something about his anger and his will. When we choose incorrectly, God offers pain to help us choose the way back to the correct path. It is for us to choose. We must be attentive to the lessons that are available to us. We must remember that God forgives and that there is not anything green or withered but is an open book to God.
As he entered Blågårds Place he noticed, at the center of the small group of young people standing, talking, by the wall, a figure that was familiar to him. He saw only his back, and for a moment he grew confused with hope that it might be his youngest, Zaid. But this figure was much taller than Zaid. Then he saw it was his other “son,” young Jes, whose name sounded like “Yes” and who helped him in the shop.
He started across to greet him, for it was important to render greetings—to treat all as good neighbors in order to help them to be good neighbors.
The beer was good in him. Jes felt its radiance glowing around him. He felt as though he had become his own father, had given birth to himself. He felt like a messenger of the gods, a prophet of mirth, a preacher of laughter. He perceived wonder in the eyes of his flock, Adam and Jytte and a couple of others from the North Bodega who stood off to the sides, slouched against the wall, grinning.
Jes rotated his hand before him as a flourishing fanfare.
“Consider,” he said, “the fig. God has more than one child. There is the fig, the apple, the cherry, the olive, the onion. I say unto you, marry the women who please you. Two, three, four, but if you cannot treat them equitably, then stick to one.”
His public sniggered.
“Do not take my words for mockery or sport, you apes and swine and slaves of seducers that do not understand. For yours is an evil state, you shaytaans of dhulma! You in the dark who cannot emerge from it. The intercourse between the man and the woman is of the sacredness.” He made a ring of his left thumb and forefinger and, tongue lolling, drove the right index finger through it.
His public laughed.
“But do not marry the orphan girl for her wealth, and always provide to the nakedness of the ignorant the clothing of wisdom.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Adam and Jytte were not laughing. They were not even smiling. What was this, the turn of the worms?
“Take on your woba golves, O you of little mirth,” he pronounced, popping his eyes. “Take not the dark without the light or without the daily clove of garlic for the sick, little organ in your neck, and remember that with God are the keys and the heels of the unseen, and do not take into your hand the boot of the man who has slain your daddyo …”
Something in their faces stopped him. They seemed to be looking behind him, and their faces were troubled. Jes turned and saw Jalâl there, in his gray dishdasha and kufi and padded sky blue ski jacket.
The little man’s face was impassive, and he said quietly, “You thought perhaps I was doing you a joke when I told to you these things I told?”
Jes’s lips parted, but no words came to his mouth.
“This I did not expect from you,” Jalâl said quietly, and Jes glimpsed hurt in the luster of his protruding eyes as he turned and hurried away across the square.
The man’s short legs moved swiftly, and Jes followed, trying to keep up, calling, “Jalâl!” and then again, more loudly, “Jalâl! Jalâl! Jalâl!” trying desperately to catch up with the man.
The view from Breathwaite’s south windows was dim, smudgy. The dome of the Marble Church up past Grønningen looked dirty through it, the green copper towers of the city tarnished.
He considered washing the windows to improve the view. Surprise Kis when she got home from her job. Win a smile. But Kis was not smiling these days. She was sad. She had never been sad for this long before.
“Because I lost my job?” he had asked her.
“Because you lied, Fred. You didn’t tell me. For how long?”
“It wasn’t a lie, exactly.”
“You can lie by not telling something, too.”
“I wanted to spare you.”
“You wanted to spare yourself.”
Take more than clean windows to make her smile. She needs a man.
So instead of going to the slop closet for a bucket and sponges and Windex, he went out into the hall, removed an ornamental bowl from the top of the antique trunk, flipped open the locks, and lifted the lid. Beneath folded blankets and tablecloths, surplus towels and old photo albums—which he stacked on the polished hardwood floor—was a false bottom. He wedged it up and removed a half-meter-long, clanking felt bag, closed by a knotted drawstring. Then he repositioned the false bottom, returned blankets, tablecloths, towels, and photo albums, closed the lid, and replaced the ornamental bowl.
In the library, on top of his antique mahogany desk, he unknotted the drawstring and took out and assembled the parts of his thirty-caliber Winchester underlever rifle and screwed on the telescopic scope. The rifle was not really built for a scope. It was meant to fire heavy bullets at short range and was not particularly accurate. So the telescopic sight was not of much benefit. But he used the sight only to play with. His objective today was short range. Very.
He checked the chamber. Empty.
He got the tall aluminum ladder from behind the utility closet door and climbed it to the top shelf there, felt around for a box of thirty-caliber cartridges, climbed down again, and pressed the bullets into the loading mechanism, one after another, each falling into position with a pleasing mechanical click. This was the rifle he had always wanted as a boy, ever since he had seen James Stewart in
Winchester ’73
.
Years before, when Jes was ten or eleven, Breathwaite had had an opportunity to buy it from a colleague who hunted. He’d had dreams of taking up hunting, bringing Jes along, having something physical to share with the boy, but also to lift himself up a notch in Danish society. Hunting was an aristocratic sport. He and Kis had been invited to a party at the home of a baroness, and there had been talk of the hunt. The baroness herself had trophies mounted on the walls of her library—a deer’s head, the skin of a two-meter alligator she’d shot years before on the Bernard Baruch estate in South Carolina. An invitation to the hunt seemed imminent.
But he never got far. He never even really started. Hiking in the deer park with Jes one autumn Sunday, they observed the deer and stags in rut, and Jes asked, “Will you be shooting
them
, Dad?” And he saw in the mirror of the boy’s gentle eyes the reflection of his own once cherished innocence, and he knew he would not be getting up some dawn to go out in expensive hunting boots to stalk and kill an animal. Even if that innocence was dead in his own heart, he would not trample on its corpse for his boy to see. He would not enlist in a society of animal killers to fabricate an identity. Not even that he
would
not, he
could
not. Because it was not for the meat or the hunt or the sport, it was for the identity: Frederick Breathwaite, hunter. Deerslayer. Strictly uppa crust.
Who are you, Fred? Who
are
you?
Now, however, with the rifle across his knees and his death a mere arm’s length from him, he was free of that. He carried the rifle in the crook of his arm out onto the south balcony, let himself out into the nippy late afternoon. He sighted through the telescopic mount, set the crosshairs on the head of a man climbing onto the East Port trestle, followed him up and across to the street. Could pick him right off if he wanted.
Bing!
Maybe miss. See dirt fly up where the bullet hit beside him. See the man look around, wonder. Or he could put this in the sports bag he never used and carry it across the city, station himself in the bushes of the botanical garden and watch Kampman’s window, lever a cartridge into the chamber, wait for his face to appear, sight, squeeze, watch him drop.
Or he could take off his shoe, put his big toe on the trigger and the muzzle in his mouth, and … Leave that terrible mess for Kis? No.
He pumped the cartridges out of the rifle, broke it, checked the chamber to be certain it was empty, and stuffed it back into the felt bag, which he knotted and returned to the false bottom of the antique chest.
With a Tullamore rocks and his last Cohiba, he sat on the balcony on the two-man outdoor sofa. The concrete wall was a little more than a meter high, topped by a brass rail that needed polish. He could step up onto the wall, step off, leap, dive, fall. Let the city clean the bloody pavement. He’d already paid for more than that in taxes.
Leave a note: “Dearest Kis, I am so sorry, but I could not face and did not want you to have to face the pain of a long dying with this cancer …”
Not a lie, really. Just a metaphor.
Or I could just climb up and fall. An accident. Lost my footing. Take the camera up with me, make it look as if I’d been going for a telescopic picture of the Marble Church, say, and lost my footing. Took a wrong step. Drank a few whiskeys. Misjudged my balance under the influence. Drunk is something I love getting but hate being. To the edge. Faced away from the plunge to snap a picture of the roof, faulty gutter up there, insurance purposes. Staggered sideways. Stepped away from an approaching figure. Optical illusion. Startled me. Blank air sucked me down into its boundless well.
Bang!
The impact of a body on the pavement from this height makes a terrible loud noise and actually rattles the walls and floors above. Infinity of pain in an instant as life is driven from the body in one shot, all those friendly cells that gathered together to become you—under the direction of what or who?—dispersed on impact.
The undoing of me.
Skull cracked like a hollow rock. Spillage of gray brain. Drops of it sprayed about, skull fragments flying all over the place, teeth! Free of them at last. All systems stop. You are dead. You are a dead man.
An ether rises from the mess. The essence of you, but not the
you
you know as you. That
you
was a mere shell and a surface. Disposable wrapper. You knew nothing of the infinity you bore in the capsule of your body, for you wasted your life on superficial trivialities. Gone gone gone the chance you had. Game too complex and scary. You stayed on the sidelines. You were scared. Pleasured yourself, turned your back on the masses. Be gone, faint heart. Pale fire. Lukewarm you. Spewed from your own mouth. Judge, jury, defendant, and executioner in a single step over the edge of the wall and down.
Whoosh!
Be vomited out the mouth and washed away by sacred rain and wind, return to the cosmic weird economy, foreign particle in the WC bowl.