The 14th Day (16 page)

Vaniok pulls himself forward expectantly; he takes a quick swallow of beer. All at once it seems as if he and Carl are enclosed in a separate sphere while the rowdy good cheer of the restaurant is taking place behind a transparent wall. “What's wrong with him?” Carl repeats. “That man treats everybody like they've got body odor or something.”

Vaniok can't help smiling. At the same time, though, he feels he ought to stand up for his countryman. The newcomer hasn't been here very long, he tells Carl. Besides, he's just reserved, it's his manner. But these defenses are muttered quickly and Vaniok makes no effort to elaborate. It would be pointless to try to explain the differences between the people from the Deep Lakes and those from the region of the capital, who actually fought each other at times during their nation's troubled history. Carl listens, his brow concentrated into a frown. Clearly, he isn't satisfied. “I can see what you mean, though,” Vaniok concedes. “He's a bit stiff.”

Carl smiles thinly. “Stiff, that's true. He's stiff, all right.” But he frowns again, a man convinced there's more to the story. “Sometimes it seems like he's running away from something,” he says. “You know what I mean?”

Vaniok shrugs but the man's words have struck a chord. “Well,” he says evasively, realizing he wants to hear more. What does Carl think about Jory? The idea that Carl is suspicious of him intrigues Vaniok. What would the man say if he'd been in the car on the highway, seen what Vaniok had seen in Jory's eyes when the policeman pulled them over. What if he'd heard what Vaniok is now sure he heard Jory say to Ila about his papers? Yes, Carl would agree: Jory acted very much like someone who was running away from something. Vaniok takes a quick drink to quell the rising excitement he feels.

Carl is a big man with broad shoulders and a nose too small for his face. He wears a checked shirt and a billed cap pushed back on his head. “I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't some kind of criminal back there,” he says and looks at Vaniok with a fitful steadiness.

Vaniok's skin prickles; his heart is pounding but he can't put his name on what he's feeling. What does he really know about Jory except for his jar of soil and his fondness for churches—and whatever it was he heard in that car? Yes, he could say to Carl, a criminal. Or something. But, of course, what would that mean? The truth is, he'd have to explain, they're all regarded as criminals back there.

“I mean,” Carl leans forward, “just the way he acts, so secret, you don't know what to believe about him.” He's smiling loosely, making it clear he has no such feelings about Vaniok. “You know what I mean?” he insists.

Vaniok can barely keep from answering. I heard him, he wants to say. I heard him talking about traveling on false papers. You're just guessing, Carl, but I heard him. But Vaniok keeps himself in check, he simply nods. Who are you, Mr. Jory? he says to himself. He smiles, imagining himself confronting the man from the capital with that question.

Carl smiles back, then flicks his head in the general direction of the street and says in a quieter voice, “I'm not making any accusations, I want you to understand that, but it wouldn't surprise me at all to see him hanging around with those people out there holding signs, the ones protesting the war.” He looks at Vaniok steadily. “Anyway,” he says, “you've got to admit he's not very friendly.” Another worker who happens to have turned in their direction grunts in agreement, then turns away. Carl takes a deep drag on his cigarette and exhales thoughtfully. “I mean, he could be hiding something, couldn't he?”

Vaniok is a spectator to his own conversation with Carl. He's still thinking about the urgent exchange between Jory and Ila in the car: he can see the silhouettes of their heads above the backs of the seats. Yes, he wants to say, he's hiding something but I'm sure it doesn't have anything to do with that war—why should Jory have any interest in the conflict? “Well,” Vaniok turns up his hand, “lots of people are hiding something.” He tries to make it sound neutral and Carl seems disappointed. “Still,” Vaniok adds, “I can see why you think that about him, though. Yes, I understand that. A man you might be suspicious of.” After he's said it he can't believe he actually uttered those words.

Carl takes a long swallow of beer and nods thoughtfully. Vaniok wishes he were alone so he could pursue the things he's been thinking about: the almighty Jory suddenly seems more vulnerable. “Who knows?” he says dismissively.

Carl answers with a somber nod, then he winks at him, as if the two of them have come to some agreement. Vaniok responds with a vague gesture. Nobody says anything for a while and the noise surges around them. Vaniok takes another drink of beer, then puts the glass down. The scene around him wears an element of strangeness and he wonders if he's become drunk on a few swallows of beer.

A few feet away Carl draws on his cigarette and exhales. He's silent, thoughtful, as the cloud of smoke thins, absorbed into the band of haze between them. At last he shakes his head. “There must have been a lot of funny stuff that went on back there,” he says confidentially, his eyes narrowing. “You know, I've got a lady friend at the university that can track down just about anything on her computer if you give her enough time. I'll bet she could find out a thing or two about our friend Jory.”

“Oh?” Vaniok tries to cover his excitement. “That's interesting.”

“She's real good,” Carl says. “What do you think? Think Jory would have something to worry about if she got on the job?”

To his astonishment, Vaniok actually smiles as he says, “Yes. For sure.” Carl nods back at him solemnly. It's clear he feels he's talking to an ally.

All at once, as if he's awakened to find himself sleepwalking, Vaniok is uncomfortable with the drift of this conversation, he wishes they'd start talking about basketball again. The idea of someone checking up on them, any one of them, is disturbing. Why do these men want to know anything about the homeland anyway? It's too small and remote to be of any concern to them. He makes a motion with his hand as if he's shooting a basketball and then pronounces the name of one of the players. “Oh, he can shoot,” Vaniok says.

Carl smiles and settles back. “We've got a real fan here,” he calls to the other men and they all turn toward him. “Do that again,” Carl says, apparently no longer interested in Jory, and now, with the others watching, Vaniok makes the same motion, more hurried this time, and he mumbles the words. As he says them he looks away from the smiling faces at the table and sees Jory and Ila in the street. They aren't talking, they aren't looking at each other but they move by silently and, it seems, gravely, as if they have some understanding, so absorbed in whatever they're talking about that they never even notice their countryman. Vaniok feels a damp chill of despair. All day he's tried to avoid thinking about the major consequence of the picnic: that from now on Ila will be more distant from him. Now he can't help recognizing that fact.

In less than a second Vaniok realizes he's made a mistake. The couple in the street aren't his cousin and Jory; and yet it makes no difference: he knows he's right about them, whether or not they actually passed before him. His former high spirits are gone now.

When he looks back to the men at the table, who are smiling, Vaniok remembers that moments ago he was excited to hear Carl's suspicions about his countryman; in his heart he was willing to betray Jory before these strangers, possibly he even did. “Sign him up,” one of the men says. Carl pats him on the shoulder. Anyone looking in from the street would think they were all the best of friends, innocently happy. But Vaniok is suddenly remorseful, as if in some strange way Jory's being with Ila is his punishment for having talked so freely about him to Carl.

All betrayals are one betrayal and here amid the cheerful sounds of his friends from work he's paying the price by remembering Ranush. When the first suggestions were made about going to the mayor's office to protest the jailing of a journalist, he and Ranush gripped hands and swore to join the others on that street corner. But that was when it was only an idea: they'd just finished dinner in the Old Hunter with its low arches and mounted heads of animals on the walls, they'd been drinking, they were excited. It wasn't long, though, before things began to change very quickly. After the Thirteen Days started, anybody who was paying attention to the reports coming in from other parts of the country could see that the situation was suddenly much more dangerous, that this protest was no longer just the expression of an opinion that might be changed later. By the time the appointed hour arrived it was clear to Vaniok that gathering in an unarmed group was the equivalent of mass suicide and he'd have said that to Ranush if he'd have had the chance. But they'd been separated, Ranush was hurrying back from his brother's place in the east, they had no time to talk. “You can't fight them when you're dead,” Vaniok told himself again and again in the hours before the gathering was to take place. How could he be sure it was even going to be held? Later he could imagine all too clearly what his friend must have felt seeing the men in the gray uniforms approaching that street corner. He learned the next day that Ranush and the few who showed up with him were taken to the woods where they were shot while Vaniok, who'd managed to find an important errand he had to go on with his uncle Gyorg, was rewarded for his actions by being spared. The following evening in the Old Hunter, as he drank by himself, the liquor brought no elation and the mounted head of a boar stared at him with a blankly accusatory gaze.

A thousand times afterward Vaniok has imagined his friend on that street corner, nervously brushing away the stray lock of hair that always fell across his face. He would have looked around at the shapes huddled against the chill, aware that the numbers didn't add up. What was keeping Vaniok, he'd wonder. Maybe Ranush died thinking his friend had already been captured. Vaniok prays it was so. Now, while the men around him make the motions of basketball players, shooting, guarding, and Carl throws him an imaginary pass which Vaniok catches mechanically, his heart is heavy again.

It's Jory who's done it. As if sent by the devil, Jory has turned up in this town with his jar of soil. Except for Jory, Vaniok would have been perfectly happy this evening, one of a merry crowd drinking after work on a Monday.

But for all the misery he's caused, maybe he isn't so formidable after all, Jory with his false papers. Beware, he says in his mind to his countryman, from now on Carl is going to be watching you.

A week has passed since the drive to the ocean and Jory and Ila have seen each other as often as possible—on campus, in town, at his apartment—yet even their love-making can't satisfy their hunger to learn and relearn things about each other. Looking into the dark of his bedroom, Jory listens to Ila's account of her first trip to the capital: “I couldn't sleep. I actually prayed that God wouldn't end the world before I was able to take my trip …” He smiles to himself; he leans in her direction as if by sheer concentration he'll be able to enter her past, to sit beside her on that fresh-smelling train and feel the first lurch of its motion toward the place she's dreamed of for so long.
I want to walk in your dreams,
he thinks, remembering what she said on the beach. And in her grip on his arms he can feel the same appetite in Ila. “Tell me again about this scar,” she's demanded of him, her finger tracing the line on the healed skin, feeling for the cold of that country where Jory stood bleeding over the man he knocked to the snowy street. “When did you first know your Aunt Estrid was dying?” he's asked her, his thumb seeking out the slight bump of her wristbone, trying to imagine how much smaller that wrist was when the younger Ila sat at the bedside of her dying aunt. In the newly discovered landscape of each other's bodies, they've searched for clues about the other people who existed before they met. “What are you doing?” he hears her call in the dark. “I'm counting the vertebrae in your back,” he tells her. A silence: “I'm sure I have the usual number.” He laughs. “Oh, there's nothing usual about your back.”

He lies beside her now in the darkness that could be anywhere. His arm is flung out at his side; he's a shipwrecked sailor who's reached a warm and tranquil shore at last. His other hand rests lightly on her stomach, rising and falling with the tidal rhythm of her breath. No shimmering archangel, the power of exploding suns in his folded wings, could persuade him to trade places just now and leave this bed. He pushes his face against the damp, rumpled sheet, savors its rough feel. His eyes closed, he plunges deeper into the sweet darkness. A breeze from the open window skims his legs; when he moves his hand Ila makes a sound like humming.

“I love the way you sing,” he mumbles into the bunched sheet.

“Mmm,” she answers from some place far away.

Jory listens, delighted: her answer is a wordless blessing. The soft night pours in through the window: insects chitter, a man's voice calls goodbye, a car door slams, tires hiss. His hand absently traces the curve of Ila's thigh as he follows the car in his mind: it speeds along a dark, empty road, its headlights peeling the night's skin, the vivid, dimensionless illusion created instant by instant, a movie on the windshield that lulls the driver until everything is black.

“Where did you go?” She calls him back from his drive into oblivion. “Were you on that island with your friend Fotor?” she asks. “I can see you there with a big straw hat. You have no shoes, you haven't shaved in a week.” She runs her hand along the side of his face. “I know I'm going to lose you to that island yet.” Her voice is a comic lament.

He lifts his head, looks around wonderingly. “Did I fall asleep?”

“I don't seem to be very stimulating company to you.”