Mr. Fox (23 page)

The scrawny soldier asked if I would tell him my name. “No,” I said. “You have no right to use it.” He told me his name, but I pretended he hadn’t spoken. To cheer him up, my daughter told him her name, and he said, “That’s great. A really, really good name. I might use it myself one day.”

“You can’t—it’s a girl’s name,” my daughter replied, her nostrils flared with scorn.

“Ugh,” said the soldier. “I meant for my daughter. . . .”

He shouldn’t have spoken about his unborn daughter out there in front of everyone, with his eyes and his voice full of hope and laughter. I can guarantee that some woman in the shadows was cursing the daughter he wanted to have. Even as he spoke someone was saying, May that girl be born withered for the grief people like you have caused us.

“Ugh,” said my daughter.

I began to follow the conversation better. The scrawny soldier told my daughter that he understood why the boys lined the roads with anger. “Inside my head I call them the children of Hamelin.”

“The what?” my daughter asked.

“The who?” I asked.

“I guess all I mean is that they’re paying the price for something they didn’t do.”

And then he told us the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, because we hadn’t heard it before. We had nightmares that night, all three of us—my mother, my daughter, and I. My mother hadn’t even heard the story, so I don’t know why she joined in. But somehow it was nice that she did.

 

 

On his second visit the scrawny soldier began to tell my daughter that there were foreign soldiers in his country, too, but that they were much more difficult to spot because they didn’t wear uniforms and some of them didn’t even seem foreign. They seemed like ordinary citizens, the sons and daughters of shopkeepers and dentists and restaurant owners and big businessmen. “That’s the most dangerous kind of soldier. The longer those ones live amongst us, the more they hate us, and everything we do disgusts them. . . . These are people we go to school with, ride the subway with—we watch the same movies, root for the same baseball teams. They’ll never be with us, though. We’ve been judged, and they’ll always be against us. Always.”

He’d wasted his breath, because almost as soon as he began with all that I put my hands over my daughter’s ears. She protested loudly, but I kept them there. “What you’re talking about is a different matter,” I said. “It doesn’t explain or excuse your being here. Not to this child. And don’t say ‘always’ to her. You have to think harder or just leave it alone and say sorry.”

He didn’t argue, but he didn’t apologise. He felt he’d spoken the truth, so he didn’t need to argue or apologise.

Later in the evening I asked my daughter if she was still racist against soldiers, and she said loftily, “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re referring to.” When she’s a bit older I’m going to ask her about that little outburst, what made her come out with such words in the first place. And I’m sure she’ll make up something that makes her seem cleverer and more sensitive than she really was.

 

 

We were expecting our scrawny soldier again the following afternoon, my daughter and I. My daughter’s friends had dropped her. Even the ones she had helped find favour with the other children forgot that their new position was due to her and urged the others to leave her out of everything. The women I knew snubbed me at market, but I didn’t need them. My daughter and I told each other that everyone would come round once they understood that what we were doing was innocent. In fact we were confident that we could convince our soldier of his wrongdoing and send him back to his country to begin life anew as an architect. He’d confessed a love of our minarets. He could take the image of our village home with him and make marvels of it.

Noura waited until our mothers, mine and hers, were busy gossiping at her house, then came to tell me that the men were discussing how best to deal with me. I was washing clothes in the bathtub and I almost fell in.

My crime was that I had insulted Bilal with my brazen pursuit of this soldier. . . .

“Noura! This soldier—he’s just a boy! He can hardly coax his beard to grow. How could you believe—”

“I’m not saying I believe it. I’m just saying you must stop this kind of socializing. And behave impeccably from now on. I mean—angelically.”

Three months before I had come to the village, Noura told me, there had been a young widow who talked back all the time and looked haughtily at the men. A few of them got fed up, and they took her out to the desert and beat her severely. She survived, but once they’d finished with her she couldn’t see out of her own eyes or talk out of her own lips. The women didn’t like to mention such a matter, but Noura was mentioning it now because she wanted me to be careful.

“I see,” I said. “You’re saying they can do this to me?”

“Don’t smile; they can do it. You know they can do it! You know that with those soldiers here our men are twice as fiery. Six or seven of them will even gather to kick a stray dog for stealing food. . . .”

“Yes, I saw that yesterday. Fiery, you call it. Did they bring this woman out of her home at night or in the morning, Noura? Did they drag her by her hair?”

Noura averted her eyes because I was asking her why she had let it happen and she didn’t want to answer.

“You’re not thinking clearly. Not only can they do this to you but they can take your daughter from you first, and put her somewhere she would never again see the light of day. Better that than have her grow up like her mother. Can’t you see that that’s how it would go? I’m telling you this as a friend, a true friend. . . . My husband doesn’t want me to talk to you anymore. He says your ideas are wicked and bizarre.”

I didn’t ask Noura what her husband could possibly know about my ideas. Instead I said, “You know me a little. Do you find my ideas wicked and bizarre?”

Noura hurried to the door. “Yes. I do. I think your husband spoilt you. He gave you illusions. . . . You feel too free. We are not free.”

 

 

I drew my nails down my palm, down then back up the other way, deep and hard. I thought about what Noura had told me. I didn’t think for very long. I had no choice—I couldn’t afford another visit from him. I wrote him a letter. I wonder if I’ll ever get a chance to take back all that I wrote in that letter; it was hideous from beginning to end. Human beings shouldn’t say such things to each other. I put the letter into an unsealed envelope and found a local boy who knew where the scrawny soldier lived. Doubtless Bilal read the letter before the soldier did, because by evening everyone but my daughter knew what I had done. My daughter waited for the soldier until it was fully dark, and I waited with her, pretending that I was still expecting our friend. There was a song she wanted to sing to him. I asked her to sing it to me instead, but she said I wouldn’t appreciate it. When we went inside at last, my daughter asked me if the soldier could have gone home without telling us. He probably hated good-byes.

“He said he would come. . . . I hope he’s all right. . . .” my daughter fretted.

“He’s gone home to build minarets.”

“With matchsticks, probably.”

And we were both very sad.

 

 

My daughter didn’t smile for six days. On the seventh she said she couldn’t go to school.

“You have to go to school,” I told her. “How else will you get your friends back again?”

“What if I can’t?” she wailed. “What if I can’t get them back again?”

“Do you really think you won’t get them back again?”

“Oh, you don’t even care that our friend is gone. Mothers have no feelings and are enemies of progress.”

(I really wonder who my daughter has been talking to lately. Someone with a sense of humour very like her father’s. . . . )

I tickled the sole of her foot until she shouted.

“Let this enemy of progress tell you something,” I said. “I’m never sad when a friend goes far away, because whichever city or country that friend goes to, they turn the place friendly. They turn a suspicious-looking name on the map into a place where a welcome can be found. Maybe the friend will talk about you sometimes, to other friends that live around him, and then that’s almost as good as being there yourself. You’re in several places at once! In fact, my daughter, I would even go so far as to say that the farther away your friends are, and the more spread out they are, the better your chances of going safely through the world. . . .”

“Ugh,” my daughter said.

 

I
’ve grown a beard or two in my time. Long, full, Mosesin-the-wilderness—that type of beard. Mainly as a way to relax, hiding my face so I can take it easy behind my beard. A while ago I went to London, to see a play they’d cooked up out of one of my favourite novels—I couldn’t wait the eight months it would take to cross the Atlantic. And in the weeks leading up to the visit I must have just quietly left shaving out of my mornings, so quietly I didn’t notice I was doing it, because when I got to London the beard was so bushy it distracted me from the sights. Big Ben and my beard. Buckingham Palace and my beard. The Tower of London and my beard. Caw, caw, said the ravens. (Were they making reference to the beard?) I had a great time. No one bothered me that entire trip. Funny to do something and then realise the reason for it afterwards—I’d grown the beard so that no one would bother me. Time to start another beard. If only I could remember how long it took for the last one to grow.

I want to be on my own for a spell. But there’s nowhere I can be on my own. I went to the library in town, thinking, It’s such a nice Saturday, so fine out, no one will be there—but it was full of bespectacled girls “studying.” The bluestockings of today. Dressed up just to go to the library, making eyes at a fellow across a room, bold as anything. I like to look, but I don’t like it when they look back. All you’re doing is taking an appreciative moment, maybe two or three, if she’s a serious matter, and she’s staring back and thinking,
I’ve caught his eye. Good. Now what I’d really like to do is keep it until his dying day.
It’s some kind of God-awful whim she has. This isn’t just talk; I know this type of girl, the type who looks back. I know her all too well. She’s the type who’s really trying to start something. Rousing at the beginning, the heated command, until you realise she can’t get enough attention, and she needs all of yours, every last scrap of it. And then come the ugly scenes. And I don’t mean confrontations but hissed exchanges, half hours of being kept waiting for her in some lobby or other for no good reason, parties where she bestows one freezing-cold glance upon you and then spends the rest of the evening holed up in some cosy corner with someone else; that kind of scene fixes the equivalent of a jeweller’s loupe to your eye. You examine your diamond and find her edges blurred with tawdry cracks; stay involved for a few more months and you’ll find she worsens over time. Rapidly, too. All these tactical attempts at mind control; I’m not kidding. It sounds like an exaggeration until someone tries it on you. It’s hard to find a woman without tactics. That’ll be why I made one up. Then she started a game, had me pursue her through Africa. She cast me as a desperate spinster with an antique sword. She cast me as a fellow who ditched his woman out in some foreign country because he couldn’t handle her. Mary Foxe has been taking more than a few liberties. So I’ll correct my statement. It’s hard to even imagine a woman without tactics.

When the third pretty bluestocking made eyes at me, I left. Libraries always make me feel covered in ink, anyway. Ink on my clothes, ink in my eyes. Terrible. All the body heat in there is bound to make the pages mushy. My parents met in a library. My mother was a junior librarian, and my father’s books were always overdue. He asked my mother’s best friend what her favourite books were, and he took them out, one by one—
La Dame aux Camélias. Thérèse Raquin. Madame Bovary. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Anna Karenina.
He couldn’t make head nor tail of them—“Hasty women,” he told me, shaking his head. “Hasty women.” But he told my mother how much he enjoyed them, and when he got around to asking whether she objected to his calling on her at her family home some Sunday afternoon to continue their discussion, she didn’t say no.

I thought briefly about going to see my mother, in her tiny apartment two hours’ drive away, but I know she doesn’t want to see me, and I know it’s not because of anything I’ve done or failed to do. She doesn’t want to see anyone. She’s happy like that, I think. Always relieved at the end of a visit. I think she’s too old to want to talk anymore; she doesn’t mind listening, but she’s got a radio set for that. She’s still in good health; she’s still got her wits about her. She had a lot more to say for herself before my father passed away, but then he was a fine man, great company—really great company, actually—let you have your opinions and talked about his own in a way that never put your nose out of joint. And now that he’s gone she’d rather not talk to anyone else. Solitary people, these book lovers. I think it’s swell that there are people you don’t have to worry about when you don’t see them for a long time, you don’t have to wonder what they do, how they’re getting along with themselves. You just know that they’re all right, and probably doing something they like. Last time I saw my mother she kept nodding and saying, “Everything’s just fine, dear. Everything’s just fine.” This was before I’d even made an opening remark—she was in such a hurry to get her part of the conversation out of the way. If I went to see my mother, what would I tell her, anyway?

I drove around instead, just drove around, trying to decide where to stop. As I drove I tried to think of a word, a single word to sum up the way Daphne’s been behaving lately. Inscrutable. The woman has become inscrutable.

Take yesterday morning. Daphne was right outside my study, watering the flowers in the window box, warbling to herself—a pretty little racket, and I was somehow enjoying it and getting a little work done at the same time. Then suddenly she stopped and said, “Well, St. John . . . You know what Ralph Waldo Emerson says. . . .”