The 14th Day (6 page)

He opens the desk and withdraws the jar of black earth. Like a blind man reading braille he traces the letters of the familiar alphabet on the side of the jar. It once held delicious fruit preserves made from the berries that grow on the north shore of one of the Deep Lakes, one of his favorite treats as a boy. The sticky concoction whose sweetness was followed by a tart, smoky aftertaste always conjured up a scene from those lakes and the young Jory would imagine himself in a boat near the marshy shore, watching a flight of wild geese rise from the water. “I'm not going to forget,” he says to his uncle's ghost. He turns the cap on the jar and the thick, clotting richness of his native earth fills his nostrils. Only now can he breathe deeply, inhaling beneath the earthy smell a piercing, acrid something that brings tears. He moves his fingers among the black grains of dirt, probing its coolness. Strangely, he imagines Ila touching the native soil with him. The idea pleases him. The woman's eyes are intriguing: even when they seem to be laughing, they watch you with the shrewd alertness of a customs inspector, able to search out the most carefully hidden contraband from the false bottoms of suitcases. Ila can see things, he's sure; he remembers stories from his childhood of wise women who lived in the woods. Ila would understand him perfectly.

It wouldn't surprise him if she already knew about the long line of fathers and uncles who were patriots, a line broken by his own father who, when the Thirteen Days were at hand, allied himself with the men in the gray uniforms, which caused the rest of the family to disown him. “It's for the sake of our country,” his father insisted to the brother after whom he'd named Jory. “You'll see in five years.” Now they're all dead and their voices, the quiet, measured tones and the profane shouts, are silenced except for when Jory remembers. Does Ila know too, then, what happened to him months ago, the outbreak of desperation, the false papers Fotor gave him that even exiled him from his name?

He remembers her eyes. Yes, he can believe that somehow she knows all this.

Jory is careful, as always, to remove any pieces of the soil that cling to his fingers, returning them to the jar. For a few moments after he seals it the smell lingers in the room, mingling with the memory of Ila's eyes. His pleasure is disturbed, though, when he recalls something that happened to him recently. I'm not political, he hears himself saying. When did I say that, he wonders.

Then he remembers: the demonstration today, the table with leaflets, the woman reporter. I'm not political, he repeats but this time he isn't thinking of this town, he's thinking of his days at the university, of Helani standing behind a table very much like the one he passed an hour or so ago; and suddenly a rush of confused emotions surges up. No, no, he insists to himself, I wasn't political then either. Whatever I did, it didn't have to do with politics.

As he lights a cigarette his eye falls on the card with Fotor's address and the phone number that can be used to reach him, lying there among his mementos. It ought to look out of place and yet he has no wish to move it. Once more he hears himself saying, this time without passion but mechanically, as though it's a line he's trying to memorize: I'm not political.

The modest house is set among scrawny pines at the edge of town in a very ordinary neighborhood but Ila is excited. Even here under the corrugated metal roof on the small porch, she can still feel the listless heat rising from patches of red earth showing through the sparse lawn. Something has started to happen in her life; separate, seemingly unrelated events are really connected, part of a pattern that's going to bring a major change. She can feel this but her knowledge is limited and that's why she's come to see Miss Lorraine. She looks attentively at the handmade sign tacked to the doorframe, the woman's name above a crude drawing of an eye; then she takes a deep breath and she knocks on the door.

There's no answer and after a moment she knocks again, more forcefully this time. She listens: under the shrill quarrel of birds she hears sounds of movement in the house and she pulls herself straight, waiting; at last the door opens a crack and she's aware of someone looking at her. “Come on in.” The words are faint, they seem to come from some inner room, the speaker is still hidden in the shadows. Something stirs in Ila, she remembers how distant and weary her Aunt Estrid's voice was in the final days of her sickness and she thinks: my God, Miss Lorraine is dying.

When the door is fully opened, the woman she sees has none of the haunted look of her aunt in her last sickness: the bloodless face, the eyes that seemed to want to take in the entire world before they closed for good; but neither does she look much like what Ila expects from a seer: Miss Lorraine, who could be any age between forty and sixty, is a thin woman of uncertain race with dirty gray hair. She stands before Ila with a cigarette in her hand. She's wearing a rumpled gray skirt and and a green blouse, both too large for her, and on her feet are a pair of worn sneakers. Squinting into the sunlight, she stands in the doorway a moment, puts her cigarette to her mouth briefly and exhales. “She don't look like much,” the woman at work told Ila, “but she'll surprise you.” Still, Ila can't help feeling let down.

“Come on in here.” From a dim corridor Ila glimpses the darkened living room with blinds drawn, an open bag of potato chips on the sofa shimmering in the glow of the soundless TV set. She follows Miss Lorraine into a small, windowless anteroom with a couple of steel chairs and a card table, a short thick candle burning there. In spite of the drab surroundings the smell of wax reminds Ila of church, which makes her feel better. She can detect other scents as well, a vague suggestion of herbs, something sharper underneath. Pasted to the wall are religious pictures and photos of people from newspapers: there are one or two political leaders Ila can recognize, some men who look like athletes, but most of the faces are unknown to her. With a heavy sigh Miss Lorraine takes a seat and waves a dismissive hand. “Sit down, sit down.”

Ila does so, leaning forward a little, as she does when she drives, trying to see around curves. She wants to recover the sense of expectation she felt when she was standing outside this house, the sense that she was on the verge of discoveries; she doesn't want to lose the feeling that important things are going to happen to her. She's swallowed her initial disappointment with the way Miss Lorraine's place looks; instead she watches the candle flame, clearing her mind of distractions. Appearances, she reminds herself, are not important. The woman across the table from her coughs into her hand—curt, muffled, like a dog's bark—then crushes her cigarette in a metal ashtray. Her eyes narrow. Wordlessly, she extends her hand to Ila, who gives her her own. “Mmm,” Miss Lorraine hums to herself, cradling Ila's open hand in hers, which is as dry as a lizard's. The woman's thumb searches the soft flesh of Ila's palm and Ila tenses as she feels the gentle, exploratory pressure, the sudden halt, the retracing of a line. At last, after a few seconds Miss Lorraine abruptly releases Ila's hand. “Oh, yes,” she says. “You come a long way. You come a long way to here.”

No, Ila wants to protest, no, I didn't. She hasn't come a long way today, though Miss Lorraine can certainly guess from her accent that she wasn't born in this place—but that's too easy and obvious. Don't let this turn out to be a total waste of time, she prays, don't turn me into a fool. She tries to keep her reaction out of her face, reminding herself that how far she traveled to get here isn't important, it isn't what she came here to find out. But then Miss Lorraine says something even more upsetting: “You miss your father.” Ila's fists tighten: she distinctly does not miss her father! She mourns him abstractly but he was a small-minded man, a shadow across her aspirations. It would be truer to say she missed him while he was still alive because even as a child she could see the way he turned inward, after the ghost of his first wife came back to haunt him and he transformed his earlier marriage into a time of hope and joy, the measure of his present failure. That was when he started drinking heavily. He and Ila's mother fought all the time, things were spinning out of control, long before the Thirteen Days. Here in a stranger's house in another part of the world, Ila's insides tighten exactly as they used to when she was growing up.

“You been on a trip to the ocean recently,” Miss Lorraine says and now Ila is embarrassed for the woman, even more embarrassed for herself, it's all she can do to keep from shaking her head. I'm such a fool, she thinks, to have believed this stranger would know anything. She feels an overwhelming sadness, a vast grief floods her, beyond anything warranted by the present situation—she's surprised by the depth of her feeling. But even as all this is happening, a wave of physical exhaustion sweeps over her, a depletion of her energies so total that she knows she couldn't push away the chair she's sitting in and walk to the door if she had to. Ila is startled, frightened. What's happened to her? Her blood has become thick, heavy, her heartbeat a muffled, insistent cry. It's difficult to keep her head erect. She looks at Miss Lorraine wonderingly. Did she cause all this?

Flushed, lightheaded, Ila looks at the woman with an eager desperation, for the first time she pays attention to the brown eyes across the table: the large pupils are still, even as they reflect the dancing light of the candle. “I'm sorry,” Ila says aloud, in a child's whisper; but the woman shows no interest in her, her gaze seems directed toward some place far beyond this room. The silence deepens, time slows, the candle flame seems to freeze; then the light moves differently in Miss Lorraine's eyes and Ila feels something pass over her like a gust of wind, her exhaustion lifts as suddenly as it came upon her and in its place is a calm acceptance of everything, a willingness to believe, the expectation that she's about to learn something. All the while Miss Lorraine hums softly to herself as if she's forgotten that Ila is there. Ila nods to her, responding to questions that haven't been asked; she realizes that without having willed it she's smiling. She knows now that this woman understands everything that she's thinking, that she's aware of her earlier doubts but that she doesn't blame her for them. Ila continues to smile at Miss Lorraine, knowing that everything has shifted beneath her.

Of course, she sees, the woman was right about the trip to the ocean: Ila went there in the dream she had not long ago: she was at the seashore somewhere near here, looking down from high dunes at the dazzling beach where waves rolled in, an endless white thunder. The coast curved gently; sun sparkled on the moving water. She'd never been to this place before and yet everything seemed familiar. Though nobody else was in sight she knew that someone was with her, which made her happy because soon that person would be beside her. She awakened full of expectation.

That sense of expectation has returned. At the same time Ila remembers driving into the countryside after work not long ago and stopping by the side of the empty road. Then too she was looking from a high place, this time at the land that fell away in green hilly waves to a pond shining in the distance, a red barn, as far away as the stars. It was then that she spoke the words from the language of her childhood. At the time. she'd felt that pronouncing those syllables was like flinging a few small coins into the alien landscape. She felt her own puniness then, she remembers listening for something—she didn't know what—and hearing only the soft rustle of the trees in the breeze, a dry, desolating hiss. Her bright coins had fallen soundlessly to the earth and were lost in the grass. And yet, remarkably, at the same time she experienced a surge of elation. Even standing there acknowledging her smallness, she was alive. Even then, that was enough for her.

But she realizes now that those coins worked their magic after all; she had cast a spell, only it had taken time. It was after she spoke those words, she believes, that the whole world changed, changed because she'd wanted it to change. Or maybe what's changed is her awareness. Now she can feel the motion in things, she feels herself being pulled toward something. What was it that started that motion? Was it Jory's coming here?

Across the table, Miss Lorraine knows all this. Ila looks at her intently, aware that everything she's thinking is communicated to this woman, she can feel the weight of her thoughts being lifted as she hands them to Miss Lorraine. Ila is calmly expectant, knowing that Miss Lorraine will be directing the next moves. She leans further forward, she's aware that underneath the smell of herbs in the room there's a sharp, astringent tang of camphor. She looks at the candle flame that twists violently without any obvious source of agitation.

“I see a man,” Miss Lorraine says, “I see a tall man.” Ila nods: of course it's Jory. “The man limps,” the woman adds and Ila is suddenly more attentive. “Only a little,” Miss Lorraine goes on, “but you can notice when he gets up. His first step isn't steady.” Ila's breath is pulled out of her. “Stipa,” she says aloud, surprising herself. “He's holding flowers in his hand,” Miss Lorraine tells her and Ila sees her half-brother, his head bent over the bunch of lilacs he's brought her. She sees the complex blue of his eyes, the icy sadness just below the cheerful surface, she sees the way he smiled with half of his mouth. “This man is a lover from the past,” Miss Lorraine declares and Ila nods. She listens gravely, thinking, yes, he's a lover, and in the space of a breath she remembers the two of them as children hunched together among the clothes in the closet under the stairs while the shouts of her father and mother came to them from a distance, in the darkness that smelled of wet wool with a trace of camphor. She was very young then and when she told him the darkness frightened her he instructed her to close her eyes so that it would be her own darkness she inhabited. Years later, under the farmer's hay while the soldiers searched the barn, she occupied her own darkness once more and tried to touch that earlier one, desperately preferring any darkness to her imagination of what they'd done to Stipa's face.