Forgiving Ararat (16 page)

C
ity Hall in Buffalo, New York rises thirty-two stories from the eastern shore of Lake Erie, floating upon the waves of the city skyline like an art deco frigate making a port of call. So prominent is the thick spire at the top of the building that pilots, navigating their barges laden with Midwestern grain and ore, use it to reckon their courses from twenty miles out. Inside the sturdy office tower, a different form of reckoning takes place.

As if by some tasteless architectural joke, the Marriage License Office and the chambers of the Divorce Court are both located on the third floor of the building, either making a commentary on the impermanence of marriage or, perhaps more benignly, affording one-stop convenience to people entering into, and departing from, life’s most important voluntary relationship. The irony of this curious placement of governmental services is not lost on Amina Rabun Meinert while walking past the doors of the former, which she visited with her fiancé only four years earlier, and through the doors of the latter, where she now intends to be rid of him. The crisp clip-clip of her heels echoing from the vaulted, melon-colored ceiling telegraphs news of her return and rouses the sleepy young clerk—a somber man of slight build and possessing the exaggerated nasally accent peculiar to those who live near the Great Lakes, as if that water also fills their sinuses. The clerk bars Amina entry because the court, at the moment, is sitting in closed session—something about abuse of a minor and confidentiality. He explains that the case of
Meinert v. Meinert
will not be called before ten-thirty; and, no, her attorney has not signed in yet.

“When the weather is nice,” the clerk says, trying to be helpful, “folks go up to the observation deck to wait.”

And the weather is indeed nice, surprisingly so for early March. A confused mass of warm southern air has raced up the coast, blessing cities as far north as Montreal with three consecutive sixty degree days.

“What is observation deck?” Amina asks in her broken English and German accent.

The clerk looks puzzled for a moment, then points at the roof. “You can see the lake from the top of the building,” he says, speaking more loudly now, as if the accent is an indication that Amina is deaf; he also waves his arms in a crude attempt to sign his words. “Take the elevator over there to the twenty-eighth floor.”

“
Bitte
,” she says. “Thank you.”

Amina tucks her handbag under her arm and clip-clips her heels back down the hall, past the Marriage License Office and into the restroom to check her makeup. She presents a perfectly respectable image in the mirror: mousy brown hair bunned respectably tight, pale lipstick applied respectably light, white cotton blouse buttoned respectably tight. The reflection is reassuring. George will be fine, it says to her. He understands. You cannot be with him in that way, with
any
man in that way. You encouraged him to go to other women, which was generous. And you thanked him by giving him money to establish a business. You owe him nothing. You are doing the right thing, the reflection insists.

But you have seen him cry, Amina, and you did not know men could cry.

This plea comes from a different Amina Rabun, one of five Aminas whose views are arbitrated by Rational Amina, the one who first appeared in the mirror. This is the weak voice of Nurturing Amina. It was this voice that consoled Barratte with whispered lullabies after the Russian soldiers left the house in Kamenz. There is also Fearful Amina, who since arriving in the United States has permitted Amina to venture beyond her home only rarely and wonders at the motives of men and the sources of sounds in the night. Vengeful Amina stokes the constant rage over the destruction of her family—a rage directed against no person, for Vengeful Amina lays the blame squarely on God. She had been raised to give thanks for all good things, but logic demands that God must not take credit for the good without also taking blame for the bad. Finally, there is Survivor Amina, the most dominate of the five Aminas Rabun. Survivor Amina carried Barratte five miles to the hospital at Kamenz and then returned to the country to bury her mother, grandfather, aunt, and cousins. One month later, Survivor Amina identified the bloodied bodies of her father and uncle in a Berlin morgue and buried them too. Most importantly, Survivor Amina located her family’s trusted advisor, Hanz Stossel, the Swiss lawyer who, in exchange for twenty percent, liquidated Jos. A. Rabun & Sons, A.G. and all the Rabun wealth—the land holdings, equipment, automobiles, art collections, gold, and also the Schriebergs’ home and theaters—and moved the fortune to a secure Swiss bank account. It was Survivor Amina who later bribed the Russian officers into allowing her and Barratte to board a train pulled by a Soviet zone locomotive out of Berlin on 13 May 1949, the day after the blockade was lifted. And it was also Survivor Amina who overcame Fearful Amina and seduced Captain George Meinert of the U.S. Army into a bed at the Hotel Heidelberg, then onto an ocean liner with Barratte, and, ultimately, into the Marriage License Office on the third floor of City Hall in Buffalo, New York.

He is patient, urges Nurturing Amina. Don’t hurt him, there’s been enough of that for many lifetimes. Maybe in time—

The blue tiled wall behind Amina in the mirror fills with the brown shoulders and arms of a different man. His face is hidden behind Amina’s head. A red insignia is on his sleeve. Amina Rabun knows this man well. She has been living unfaithfully with him for years, and he accompanies her wherever she goes; he is a jealous, harsh man. But she has grown accustomed to his presence and his demands, and she gave up trying to escape him long ago. She can deceive him, but for only for short periods. All of the Aminas Rabun close their eyes.

Yes, you are doing the right thing, says Rational Amina. You are doing the right thing for George and Barratte, for Bette and your mother, for your grandfather, your aunt, your father, and your uncle. For all the Hetzels and Rabuns. You will not betray them.

From the observation deck atop City Hall, Amina Rabun looks out across the vast blinding expanse of white that is Lake Erie in late winter under a cloudless blue sky. The sudden thaw caused by the warm front has caused the thick crust of ice and snow on the lake to heave and break away at the mouth of the Niagara River where the undercurrent is strongest, grinding huge ice floes against the massive concrete supports of the Peace Bridge between Buffalo and Fort Erie, Canada. If the ice refuses to break up and move downriver soon, the Coast Guard will detonate explosive charges to clear the jam for fear of damaging the bridge supports. Amina can see men with ropes cinched around their waists walking on the slabs of ice piled beneath the bridge, jabbing long poles into the crevices to set them free. Despite living so close to Canada, she has never paid a visit to that land. She is afraid of the border officials, who are rumored still to be suspicious of Germans, and she is also distinctly not curious about what she might find there; she has seen enough of the world to know that the same hatreds and fears inhabit both sides of all borders.

Two men stand at the southwestern end of the observation deck, smoking cigarettes. The men’s faces are in the shadows, but as time advances and the earth turns, the sun touches the top of the taller man’s hat, turning it into a gray flannel torch. The men appear very animated in their discussion; one of them keeps pointing at a newspaper folded in half on the ledge. The date on front page is March 6, 1953. Amina draws closer.

“Goodbye, comrade,” the larger man says, flicking his cigarette over the rail.

Fearful Amina is startled by this term, comrade. It is a word used only by communists, a term she heard often when the Russian soldiers spoke to one another throughout that horrible night in Kamenz. Suddenly the rendezvous seems clandestine and dangerous; perhaps she has stumbled across spies.

“Yeah, good riddance,” says the smaller man.

They both laugh and turn inside for the elevator.

Rational Amina picks up the newspaper. It is the morning edition of the
Buffalo Daily News
and the headline reads, “STALIN DEAD.” A sarcastically benign black and white photograph of the dictator looks from the newspaper upon the assembled Aminas who race their eyes over his features and then back to the headline. They read it again to confirm their understanding, and smile in unison. Not even Nurturing Amina feels shame in such delight. Indeed, the Aminas Rabun on top of City Hall believe that all who learn this news will benefit from it, even Premier Stalin’s own family and perhaps, too, the black soul of his now decaying body, which can no longer wreak its havoc upon the world of the living. The Aminas read on to learn the cause of death and their smiles fade.
A stroke in the middle of the night?
How unjust and inadequate! It should have been a bullet. A thousand bullets. He should have been made to watch bullets tearing into the flesh of his wife and children, and, only then, his own body; he should have died the slowest and most painful death in the history of the world.

But the news is good just the same. Very, very good. And the air is crisp and warm, the sky blue, the sun bright, the day hopeful. Stalin’s death is certain to emancipate Amina Rabun from the nightmares, and twenty-five stories below, a judge will soon emancipate her from the strains of a marriage of convenience. Perhaps the reckoning of accounts, like the reckoning of barges on the lake after the ice melts, has finally begun for Amina Rabun formerly of Kamenz.

And here, she thinks, is a very strange coincidence. George had asked her to attend Ash Wednesday services with him two weeks earlier; she had said yes, but still did not understand why. Could there be a connection to the death of evil and a change of fortune? Certainly one had been hoped for. Amina had not been inside a church since the funeral of her father, and not once with George, making him all the more bitter. George Meinert wanted all the trappings of a family, including his beautiful wife, sitting in the pew beside him every Sunday morning in the church where he had been baptized. Amina not only denied him the physical intimacies of marriage but also these tiny morsels of relationship and respect. Yet for some strange reason, on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, just two weeks before their divorce would become final, Amina relented. Perhaps in apology for the times her absence had caused George such pain? Perhaps to disprove his conviction that kneeling before an altar would somehow make her a different person and save their marriage? Or perhaps she had begun to forgive God?

And why Ash Wednesday? It was such a strange liturgy, the most primitive and ghoulish of all the Christian holy days. How bone chilling for a priest to whisper those terrifying words: “Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return,” and then, to be certain his grim message was not soon forgotten, to feel his thumb coated with the ashes of last year’s palms smearing an ugly black cross upon your forehead as a badge of mortification. Yet a miracle of sorts had taken place during the service: Amina heard a more subversive message that afternoon than she had ever heard before. “In ancient days,” the priest had said during his homily, “Lent was observed as a time when notorious sinners and criminals who had been excluded from the church were reconciled with the congregation and God.” As the priest spoke, Amina believed she could actually hear the cries of all the penitents of the world daring to ask for forgiveness, and the joyful weeping when open hands were extended, rather than fists. At that instant, Amina Rabun Meinert wondered whether this is what Christianity offered the world—not sacred marks and secret words, but reconciliation. On Ash Wednesday in nineteen fifty-three, Amina Rabun Meinert accepted that offer—on behalf of herself, yes, but, more importantly to her, on behalf of her father and uncle, whose sins committed during the war were unspeakable and who could not ask for forgiveness themselves. Indeed, on that magical Ash Wednesday, Amina Rabun sought forgiveness for all things done and left undone; and for this momentous act of contrition—because God was to blame for all she had suffered—Amina Rabun expected nothing less of God than an end to the long punishment of her family—for she believed the murders and rapes in Kamenz to be a punishment for the sins of her father and uncle—and the beginning of punishment for the men who had caused her such pain.

The sun’s searing, cleansing waves wash across the observation deck, spilling over the edge onto the street below. Perhaps, think the Aminas Rabun, news of the death of Joseph Vissarionvich Stalin is a symbol of the truce reached with God on that Ash Wednesday. And perhaps, I might have added, were I standing in the Urartu Chamber presenting the case of Amina Rabun, the death of Joseph Stalin was as fine a symbol of a covenant with God as the billions of small rainbows sealed into ice crystals across the frozen surface of Lake Erie.

W
hen the High Jurisconsult of Shemaya deemed that I had spent sufficient time digesting the life of Amina Rabun, he summoned me to his office in the infinite corridor, which seemed even more cheerless and institutional than during my first visit—a department of motor vehicles for souls. Luas was the chief technocrat. My only question was whether the bureaucrat, or the bureaucracy itself, was corrupted?

I resented him for not informing me of Elymas and the ability to visit Bo and Sarah. For this, I resented him a lot. He knew I had gone, of course, without me saying a word. I expected the scolding Elymas had warned me would come, but instead Luas smiled benignly from across his desk and said:

“So, how shall we present Ms. Rabun?”

We were both playing the same game of evasion. He needed my help as much as I needed his.

“Just as she is,” I replied.

“Naturally,” he said. He was dressed in the same sport coat, trousers, and open-collared shirt he had been wearing when he found me bleeding and naked in the train station. I wore blue jeans, a t-shirt, and sneakers—the outfit I would have worn to my office Sunday to write the brief in the Alan Fleming case. He rocked back in his chair. Three thin ribbons of smoke rose into the stale air from the two candles on the desk and the pipe he held in his left hand. “But which part of her? We can’t replay every moment of her life; that would serve no purpose. Our role as presenters is more selective. We must present the choices she made.”

Choices. The same word Haissem had used in the Urartu Chamber to begin the presentation of Toby Bowles: “He has chosen!” Chosen what? To wait in a train shed with thousands of other souls while bureaucrats work the algorithms of their eternities?

“What choices are those?” I asked.

“The choices Yahweh promised Noah we would make,” Luas replied, gripping the pipe between his teeth and talking between them. He was obviously obsessed with Noah and the Great Flood; all his metaphors eventually began and ended there.

“Did you get here by drowning?” I asked with a smirk.

“No. I was decapitated, actually. See—”

Luas’ head, with the pipe still clenched in its teeth, rolled right off his neck and onto the desk, as if the blade of a guillotine had dropped out of the ceiling and chopped it off. A gush of blood shot up between his shoulders like a small fountain. I jumped back and screamed. Having made his point, his arms retrieved his head from the desk and put it back where it belonged.

“Sorry to startle you,” he said coyly, “but you did ask.”

“Don’t ever do that again!” I said. “How did it happen? I mean, how were you decapitated? Were you in an accident?”

Luas puffed thoughtfully on his pipe. “One must begin at the beginning to answer such a question. Why did Yahweh promise not to destroy the earth after having just destroyed it?”

Like I said, obsessed. “I think we went all through this when I got here,” I reminded him.

“Did we...? Oh, yes, you’re right. Sorry. I’ve confused you with one of the other new presenters. Let’s pick up where we left off, then. What if Noah had disobeyed?”

“Already asked and answered, your honor,” I said impatiently.

“He’d have been killed with the others. The price of disobedience was exceptionally high, don’t you think?”

“Well, the death penalty
is
the ultimate punishment,” I said. I was in a very snitty mood. I wanted him to know I was upset.

“But this was the ultimate death penalty, Brek. Not only Noah’s life but his family’s and the entire human race. The animal kingdom as well. Disobedience meant the end of everything, not just the end of Noah. The stakes could not have been higher.”

“You’re all about choices,” I said. “What choice did Noah have? Build an ark or everything dies? People make him out to be some kind of hero doing God’s bidding. He had the biggest gun in the world pressed against his head; who wouldn’t build an ark? He was just doing what anybody else would have done to save their own neck.”

Luas put his pipe in an ashtray on his desk and got up.

“Precisely. Now, how shall we present Ms. Rabun?”

“Precisely
what
?” I said.

“What’s the first thing Noah did after the Flood?”

“Towel off?”

“He made a burnt offering.”

“That’s what the Bible says.”

“Why make a burnt offering?”

“To give God thanks.”

Luas began pacing the small room. “Correct, and what was it worth, this offering?”

“I guess what all offerings are worth.”

“Really?” Luas said. “This man, Noah, had just witnessed the mass murder of millions of people and animals. As you said about building the ark under threat, who wouldn’t have been grateful for having been spared after all that? But look at it from God’s perspective, Brek. What did God really want in all this?”

“Love, I guess. Love, respect, the same things everybody wants.”

“Precisely. Now, is that what billowed up from Noah’s burnt offering? Love? Or was it the stench of fear? The fear of instant death and annihilation—”

“But—”

“Throughout history, the tendency has always been to read Genesis from mankind’s perspective, from the perspective of the accused:
man’s
fall,
man’s
destruction,
one man’s
obedience,
one man’s
deliverance,
one man’s
thanksgiving,
mankind’s
guaranteed survival. Perhaps the story is told not so we understand better the condition of man, which we know all too well; perhaps it is told so we understand better the condition of
God
. Noah built the ark because the price of disobedience was intolerable and later praised God to appease God, not out of love for God. Not that we should criticize Noah...he did exactly what was his to do. But if we look more closely, we see that it was divinity itself, entangled in the greatest of all ironies, that cheapened the gesture and desecrated both the obedience and the sacrifice. The story of Noah is the story of God’s need for man, Brek, not man’s need for God. It also explains why, because of that divine need, the possibility of evil must be permitted to exist for there to be any possibility of love; it explains why a serpent inhabited the Garden at the beginning of time, and why it will continue to coil around our feet until the end of the age.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Look,” Luas said. “What changed in those forty days was the very essence of God’s relationship to man, not man’s relationship to God. God changed
His
ways; we didn’t change ours. Yahweh recognized the problem instantly, the moment the waters receded and the sacrificial fire was lit. By punishing man for disobeying and turning away, the Flood had destroyed love itself. For true love to exist, the option not to love—without compulsion—must also exist. When love is demanded and extorted, it becomes fear, and fear is the opposite of love. So, Yahweh had a
choice
: He could accept the possibility of sin to achieve the greater prize of love, or He could endure the false praises of creatures too terrified to do anything else. He chose the former, gifting to humanity the freedom to choose. So critical is our understanding of this act that Yahweh selected the refraction of sunlight into the many colors of a rainbow as the eternal symbol of our freedom to follow many different paths. No matter how far we may stray, no matter how much it hurts—God or us.”

Luas returned to his chair behind the desk.

“Amina Rabun is an heir to that promise, Brek. But that promise is both a gift and a curse. With the freedom to choose comes the responsibility for one’s choices. The Urartu Chamber is the place where those choices and responsibilities are reckoned. So, I ask you again: How shall we present the case of Amina Rabun?”