The 14th Day (7 page)

“Stipa,” Ila says again. She misses him overwhelmingly. “Is his soul resting, is he happy?” she asks. Stipa, who went into the world before her and invariably came back to report on it. She sees him in a white shirt with an open collar on the night of a Constitution Day party, a young man in his early twenties with the air of somebody much older, somebody, it's clear now, who uncannily guessed that he had to crowd all his life into a brief span. Ila, three years younger, had always felt closer to him than to any of her friends. She herself had a reputation for daring—fast driving, staying out all night, smoking cigars in restaurants—the kinds of things that would get back to her father and vex him; but Ila was always aware of a kinship with Stipa, for all his external conservatism, and she suspected that in his thoughts he might be more adventurous than she. At any rate, she was certain he understood her as no one else did.

That warm night, rich with the scent of lilacs, Stipa seemed so merrily sad. He'd been drinking, she'd had a few furtive sips herself. “Let's leave these boring people to themselves,” he said, taking her hand and walking with her through the night filled with fish flies, galaxies of them clustered around the lights on the walk. He'd brought some marijuana to the party and they smoked in the boathouse, looking at the darting silhouettes of fish in the luminous rectangle of water where their father had once kept a speedboat: dark shapes emerged, disappeared, random motions formed momentary patterns. “Maybe we could go for a swim,” Stipa suggested after a long silence. She looked at his white shirt turned blue in the dark. She was already unbuttoning her blouse before he'd even asked her, it seemed. She laughed at the way time had bent. “What is it?” he asked. “Why are you laughing?” “I don't know. Tell me a joke.”

They entered the water in the enclosed space of the boat house, then swam out into the chilly lake. Fragments of music from the party were suddenly close to them, then only faint murmurs drifting over the dark, bobbing surface of the lake. Every star in the heavens was visible above them. There was a sense of daring in the night air and when they came back to the boathouse, they wrapped themselves in musty tarpaulin boat covers that they used like blankets and they smoked some more, listening to the water lap against the wood, watching its faint, swimming light move across the walls. “You're a very attractive woman,” Stipa told her. The sweet scent of marijuana was everywhere, blending with the fishy smell of the water, the tarpaulin, the faint tang of creosote. The cover had slipped off Stipa's shoulder and his skin glowed palely in the reflected light of the water. “I wonder,” he said, “may I touch your breast in a brotherly way?” She laughed. “In a brotherly way? Of course.” He pulled down the tarpaulin and she felt his fingers gently, delicately move over her still-wet skin and even before he asked, with a voice not entirely under control, “Can I kiss you there in a brotherly way?” she was ready to answer yes, of course, please; but just at that moment the two of them heard voices calling “Stipa, Stipa, where are you? The party's just getting started.” Without any words between them she and Stipa dressed quickly—she remembers them handing each other articles of clothing, a wonderfully intimate act—and soon they were back among the partygoers; but many times when she hasn't been able to sleep, Ila has wondered how that uncompleted story would have ended had it had time to move to its conclusion. It was one more thing taken away in the Thirteen Days.

Ila looks at the woman across from her, who smiles distantly, as if she's listening to something Stipa is telling her from the other side. She nods. “He's at peace. He knows you remember him.”

Ila is flooded with joy. And yet, at the same time, she wants more, she isn't content just to explore the past. She came here because she's certain something is happening, something is going to happen here, in this town in the host country. “Is there someone else?” she asks the woman. “Is there another man? Now?”

“Yes,” Miss Lorraine says quietly and Ila is thrilled but even as she hears the words she sees something dark move across the woman's face. What she sees there is so troubling that she has to look away, toward the pictures on the wall, seeking comfort in the assembled mass of confident faces and gestures. But there's nothing there to calm her and she turns back to Miss Lorraine with some hesitation. When their eyes meet, Ila catches the residue of something that's already fading, something complicated and terrifying that almost makes her wish she hadn't come here. She feels a sadness that she can't attach to anything. She can recognize, though, that what she saw was some kind of signal, that for a moment Miss Lorraine allowed her an unguarded look at something she had no right to see, though she doesn't understand yet what it is that's been communicated. It isn't even about her, she knows somehow, or about Jory, it's about Miss Lorraine herself. But why did she let Ila see it?

“Yes,” the woman says after a while, her expression making it clear she knows what Ila is thinking. “There's a stranger. Someone who's come here recently.” Ila nods, her heart pounds: it's Jory, of course. But she's still thinking about what she saw in the woman's eyes. Miss Lorraine says nothing more, though; the next move is Ila's.

“This man,” Ila begins. She wants to ask what will happen between them but, just as it happened earlier, a wave of physical exhaustion passes over her and Ila loses all track of time. When she recovers her attention she realizes at last what it was that Miss Lorraine has let her see: that she is in fact dying, just as Ila has guessed on first hearing her voice, that like Aunt Estrid, she has only a short time left. Ila looks at the woman's small gray hands on the table. How does she know this, what makes her guess about the woman's losses, the quarrel with her sister that was never made up, the children who haven't come to visit in years, the death that will come on the very sofa that Ila glimpsed, in the flickering glow of the TV set, a bag of potato chips lying open beside her, the utter loneliness of Miss Lorraine's final days? Suddenly Ila is crying.

“Now, now,” Miss Lorraine looks at her, her eyes calm. Ila recovers, she blows her nose, composes herself. “You go on now,” Miss Lorraine says. “What were you going to ask?”

All at once Ila understands the terms of the bargain she's made with the woman: Miss Lorraine has let her see this about herself in exchange for her silence about something else: she doesn't want to tell Ila what she sees about Jory's future. At first the idea disturbs her—what does the woman see? Ila can feel the trembling in her hands but she breathes deeply, she watches the candle's flame, and in time she's calmer. She doesn't need to know the future, she's willing to act in darkness. Still, she's curious about Jory and decides to venture a different question. “Will this man ever return to where he came from?” she asks. The woman looks at Ila scrutinizingly. Her face is blank. She shakes her head abstractly. “Things are not clear there,” she says. “I can't say for certain.” Ila can only guess what Miss Lorraine saw about her and Jory but she knows it's time to leave. I don't care, she tells herself, I don't want to know about the future. I want to be surprised. Acknowledging this, she feels a sudden strength.

But this feeling is checked by her awareness that she's never going to see this woman again. “Miss Lorraine, I'm so …” Her eyes are wet.

The woman's hand goes up. “You got your life to live.”

Back in the car she has to wait a moment to calm herself before starting for home. Zita, who told her about Miss Lorraine, will want to know what she said about the future and Ila will tell her she saw many large houses. This will thrill Zita, who's been talking about nothing else lately but her older sister who, like the two of them, is a stranger in this country. The sister, it seems, took a night course in real estate and within a very few years has managed to become quite successful. “We can do that too,” Zita has said, showing Ila the picture of her sister's new house hundreds of miles to the west. “We don't have to work forever at these jobs.” It wasn't so much the house that got Ila's attention, it was the barren mountains on the horizon, the desert landscape beyond, which had a strange appeal. What would it be like to live there, she wondered, where, as Zita said, your fingers were always smooth and dry?

Thinking of Zita as she starts her car, Ila smiles, warmed by the thought of her friend's optimism. She's confident that she can find that kind of success if she wants to. She can almost convince herself she's on her way to those real estate classes now. Yet at the very time she's thinking about her friend she's remembering Stipa, who was brought back so powerfully by Miss Lorraine.

Stipa was always dressed conservatively, which made older people like him, especially people at the bank where he worked, and he voted unashamedly for the Heritage party, as most of the leading bankers did. But when he had political discussions with Ila, whose loyalties were with the Progressives, his defense of Heritage was hardly that of a zealot. “No,” he'd say, “they weren't ordained by God to save us from chaos—they're hardly saviors.” He'd laugh quietly. “I vote for them knowing they're scoundrels because they reflect all our qualities, good and bad. The same legislators who find it perfectly valid to make improvements on their summer homes with public funds, the ones who appoint their in-laws to fat jobs, can sometimes surprise us with their bravery and odd moments of integrity. This is just like our people: all through our history we've had enlightened lawgivers who sprang up in the wake of tyrants, mad kings competing with saints for the souls of their people, warriors who became monks and holy women who faced down barbarian invaders. I find it refreshing when a group doesn't claim purity.”

And, she was quick to ask, speaking of those who saw themselves as saviors, what about the men in gray? To which he'd answer that the country had seen their like before and it could survive them.

Stipa, Stipa, she wants to say, all the while you posed as a cynic and you were the most idealistic of all.

Already Ila is back in the university town, amid familiar scenes. Passing the thickly shaded campus, she feels again the excitement that's come to her recently, she recognizes that her life is now being lived in this other country, where there's no Heritage party, no men in gray and no Stipa. There's a sadness that comes with this realization but she left Miss Lorraine's feeling that the future is hers to shape. Ila is determined she isn't going to wait for things to happen, she knows she's going to act. There's no question, something's going to happen and Ila accepts the consequences. The thought excites her, she feels exactly as she did when she awakened from her dream of the ocean. That was only a foretaste, she realizes. There's a real ocean and there's no reason she can't go there.

Jory sits among the plants and tools in the back of the truck. From here he can see Carl's broad shoulders, sunburned neck and prominent ears framed within the cab's window; without even looking at him, the big man is able to communicate his disapproval. Jory turns away with a flush of resentment: Carl is a fool, a small-minded man who probably couldn't find the homeland on a map. It's no surprise that he strikes out at someone he doesn't understand. Would he be more hospitable if Jory learned to prattle about basketball with him? Blessedly, the engine starts up. When the truck pulls away, rakes and shovels clatter, an earthy smell rises from the bushes bound with twine, their roots encased in burlap. As the engine shudders into gear, vibrations pass into Jory's back through the cool metal; the ride settles into an even pace. He watches the landscape move by, absently running his finger across the hard, pointed tines of a rake, his earlier feelings already subsiding. It's taken only a few moments of the truck's steady, jittering progress to calm him, to allow him to think more clearly.

Because, he's beginning to realize, it isn't really Carl he's upset about. Carl is stupid and narrow-minded but he isn't worth the trouble, he isn't the problem. Jory glances toward the cab: this time the sight of the man brings no reaction. Still, there is something that's bothering him: it's that message from Fotor that Jory can't put behind him. Reaching out like that, all the way from his island, Fotor is the demon at the bottom of the lake who teasingly brushes the swimmer's leg. Jory doesn't want to follow that thought, though. He lets his mind go blank for a few moments before he catches a glimpse of the university's arboretum, a green rectangle bounded by a low stone wall. He walked through it not long ago—it might have been that day after he got Fotor's message, when he was so upset. And still, he remembers, he told himself this town was going to be his last place of exile. He smiles at the memory. He was hopeful then; he's determined to be hopeful once more. What's happening now has nothing to do with either Carl or Fotor. It's his life, after all.

The truck climbs a hill, stone dormitories slide by. His earlier discomfort is only a faint, bitter aftertaste; out here in the sunshine it's easy to feel better about things. Yes, he assures himself, I can still make choices, I'm not trapped. Really, there's no reason to be upset by Fotor, who's an amusing man in his own detached way. It would be just like him to send that emissary of his as a kind of joke. And from Fotor's point of view, giving him that phone number might be considered a thoughtful gesture. In case of emergency, the man who gave him the number said. As Fotor and Jory have good reason to know, emergencies can never be discounted. No, he shouldn't be upset by his countryman's action, he ought to be grateful. It must mean something, after all, that he didn't tear up the paper with the phone number but has kept it all this while.

Once more he remembers the face of his fellow exile, the little smile that always played about the corners of his mouth. There were times when Jory was convinced the man had the moral vision of a lizard but he was pleasant company, and he had a brain. In that country to the north Fotor took an interest in Jory; he was always trying to make a convert of him. Chameleon that he was, he found his countryman's dedication to the homeland droll. “You can't really believe that a sane man would agree to hold his breath until those thugs who are running things there are finally sent packing,” he'd say. Then he'd gesture with the bottle and refill Jory's glass. “Oh, they'll be gone eventually but as the nuns used to say about the end of the world, only God knows when it will happen.” He'd laugh to himself. “I've heard people say that God has a sense of humor. That may be, but I've never been able to understand his sense of timing.” Fotor's little performances would go through several stages, the least welcome for Jory being the one near the end when the man was quite far into his cups, or pretended to be. His voice would take on a wavering quality that made Jory think of a signal on a shortwave radio coming from an enormous distance, at times barely audible, then all at once strikingly clear. “You and I,” he'd declare, “we aren't all that different.” This pronouncement would be accompanied by a halting motion of the hands, his head moving in unison, as if he were conducting a complex and mournful piece of music, perhaps for the first time. “Neither of us really believes in anything,” he'd insist. “You're just trying to convince yourself otherwise.” He'd fall silent for a time, his head lowered so that Jory might hope the liquor had got to him at last; and then, without looking up, he'd say, “You can make a vocation out of your exile.”