The Best American Short Stories 2015 (45 page)

It was dark. There were a few stars, not many. The sliver of moon cast hardly any light. They scurried under the bogie, up a few cars, toward the engine, and lay on the couplings, facedown, their arms wrapped tight around them. Neither spoke. Kavitha waited until the guards had run past, checking under the bogies and inside them, then indicated the ladder that led to the roof of the train. They climbed up—the rungs digging into Kavitha's bare feet—and crawled to the middle, if for no other reason than to be at the halfway point in case they had to run in either direction. It was from this vantage point that Kavitha saw a road in the distance, a full kilometer away, at least; a thin, dark ribbon that she assumed was a road. But it was empty, not a car or a lorry or a bullock cart passed.

The night deepened.

She could not have said how much time had gone by when she saw a small light in the distance, almost a puncture in the night sky. It grew—slowly, because it was so far away. There, she whispered, look. The boy raised his head. What do we do, he said. They waited. The light got bigger. Alarmingly fast. She knew there was no way for both of them to reach the road before the light passed them. She studied the ground. Near the train was a small tree. Further along was what looked to be a pile of luggage.

She handed the boy the second pebble.

She saw, after a time, his small, murky shape moving to the tree. Then the luggage. He had told her, before he'd descended the ladder, that he'd aimed pebbles at moving trains lots of times, in his village. I never missed, he boasted. Kavitha didn't point out to him that the moving light was not a train, but something much smaller. She didn't tell him, but it's dark. And she didn't say, we only get to play this game once.

She heard a clink. Didn't she? What else could it be? There was nothing for many, many kilometers surrounding the train. That was of course why Ahmed and his men had picked this spot. And that's what she had thought while traveling on the train: that to journey through such emptiness was to invite it inside.

The light stopped.

The driver of the lorry, a burly Sikh who spoke very little, except to say, I'm going to Attari, no further, ignored Kavitha. But we have to get the police, she said, the authorities, the military, I don't know. That train is under siege, she cried. My husband is on it, his father. People are hurt. The cabin of the lorry was dark. She turned from the driver to the boy. He was staring out of the window. He wasn't my father, the boy said, falling silent again.

Kavitha looked at him, as if for the first time. What's your name? she asked.

Mustafa.

A Muslim. But why was he going to India? They drove on and on, eastward.

You didn't miss, she said to Mustafa. Then she said, Was that luggage?

No.

What was it?

Kerosene, he said.

And she too fell silent.

They reached Attari late the next morning. She'd learned from Mustafa that the man she'd taken to be his father was a Hindu friend of his parents', entrusted to take their son to relatives living in East Pakistan. But where are your parents? she'd asked. He'd looked away, and said nothing. After a moment he'd turned to her and said, My cousins are waiting.

She knew she would take him there. He refused to take another train, and she was not keen on it, either, so they traveled slowly, overland by road. Mostly lorries and bullock carts, a passing car if they were fortunate. She had silver anklets she'd pushed up her calves, so that Ahmed wouldn't see, and she traded these for money. It ran out well before they got to East Pakistan. In the presence of other people, the two were often silent, letting them assume they were mother and son. That seemed easiest.

Sitting for these long stretches of quiet, Kavitha was surprised by how often she thought of Vinod. She knew he was gone, that she was now a widow. The awareness was not startling. Not even frightening. I was widowed long ago, she thought. And she knew that on the train, when she'd laid her head on his shoulder and had felt the roundness and knobbiness of a bone so funny, so irreverent, so unlike him, she had said her goodbye.

They were on a horse cart, nearing East Pakistan. Maybe a day, no more. It was late afternoon. It was a covered, two-wheeled cart and Kavitha lay in its shade, dozing. Mustafa lay beside her. The motion of the cart woke her (or was it a dream?) and she said to Mustafa, What happened to us, it's ours. Yours and mine. Don't speak of it.

And in his half-sleep, perhaps also dreaming, Mustafa heard, You are mine. Don't speak. And so he never did.

JOAN SILBER

FROM
Tin House

T
HIS HAPPENS A
lot—people travel and they find places they like so much, they think they've risen to their best selves just by being there. They feel distant from everyone at home who can't begin to understand. If they're young, they take up with beautiful locals of the opposite sex; they settle in; they get used to how everything works; they make homes. But usually not forever.

I had an aunt who was such a person. She went to Istanbul when she was in her twenties. She met a good-looking carpet seller from Cappadocia. She'd been a classics major in college and had many questions to ask him, many observations to offer. He was a gentle and intelligent man who spent his days talking to travelers. He'd come to think he no longer knew what to say to Turkish girls, and he loved my aunt's airy conversation. When her girlfriends went back to Greece, she stayed behind and moved in with him. This was in 1970.

His shop was in Sultanahmet, a well-touristed part of the city, and he lived in Fener, an old and jumbled neighborhood. Kiki, my aunt, liked having people over, and their apartment was always filled with men from her husband's region and expats of various ages. She was happy to cook big semi-Turkish meals and make up the couch for anyone passing through. She helped out in the store, explained carpet motifs to anyone who walked in—those were stars for happiness, scorpion designs to keep real scorpions away. In her letters home, she sounded enormously pleased with herself—she dropped Turkish phrases into her sentences, reported days spent sipping
çay
and
kahve
. She sent home to Brooklyn a carpet she said was Kurdish.

Then Kiki's boyfriend's business took a turn for the worse. There was a flood in the basement of his store and a bill someone never paid and a new shop nearby that was getting all the business. Or something. The store had to close. Her family thought this meant that Kiki was coming home at last. But no. Osman, her guy, had decided to move back to his village to help his father, who raised pumpkins for their seed oil, as well as tomatoes, green squash, and eggplant. Kiki was up for the move; she wanted to see the real Turkey. Istanbul was really so Western now. Cappadocia was very ancient and she couldn't wait to see the volcanic rock. She was getting married! Her family in Brooklyn was surprised about that part. Were they invited to the wedding? Apparently not. In fact, it had probably happened already by the time they got the letter. “Wearing a beaded hat and a glitzy head scarf, the whole shebang,” Kiki wrote. “I still can't believe it.”

Neither could any of her relatives. But they sent presents, once they had an address. A microwave oven, a Mr. Coffee, an electric blanket for the cold mountains. They were a practical and liberal family; they wanted to be helpful. “I know it's hard for you to imagine,” Kiki wrote, “but we do very well without electricity here. Every morning I make a wood fire in the stove. Very good-smelling smoke. I make a little fire in the bottom of the water heater too.”

Kiki built fires? No one could imagine her as the pioneer wife. Her brother, Alan (who later became my father), was always hoping to visit. Kiki said not a word about making any visits home. No one nagged her; she'd been a touchy teenager, given to sullen outbursts, and everyone was afraid of that Kiki appearing again.

She stayed for eight years. Her letters said, “My husband thinks I sew as well as his sisters” and “I'm rereading my copy of Ovid in Latin. It's not bad!” and “Winter sooo long this year, I hate it. Osman has already taught me all he knows about the stars.” No one could make sense of who she was now. There were no children and no pregnancies that anyone heard about, and the family avoided asking.

Her brother was just about to finally get himself over for a visit when Kiki wrote to say, “Guess what? I'm coming back at last. For good.” No, the husband was not coming with her. “My life here has reached its natural conclusion,” Kiki wrote. “Osman will be my dear friend forever but we've come to the end of our road.”

“So who ran around on who?” the relatives kept asking. “She'll never say, will she?”

Everybody wondered what she would look like when she returned. Would she be sun-dried and weather-beaten, would she wear billowing silk trousers like a belly dancer's, would the newer buildings of New York amaze her? None of the above. She looked like the same old Kiki, thirty-one with very good skin, and she was wearing jeans and a turtleneck, possibly the same ones she'd left home with.

Her luggage was a mess, woven plastic valises baled up with string, very third world, and there were a lot of them. She had brought back nine carpets! What was she thinking? She intended to sell them.

Her brother always remembered that when they ate their first meal together, Kiki held her knife and fork like a European. She laughed at things lightly, as if the absurdity of it all wasn't worth shrieking over. She teased Alan about his eyeglasses (“you look like a genius in them”) and his large appetite (“has not changed since you were eight”). She certainly sounded like herself.

Before very long, she moved in with someone named Marcy she'd known at Brooklyn College. Marcy's mother bought the biggest of the rugs, and Kiki used the proceeds to rent a storefront in the East Village where she displayed her carpets and other items she had brought back—a brass tea set and turquoise beads and cotton pants with tucked hems that she herself had once worn.

The store stayed afloat for a while. Her brother wondered if she was dealing drugs—hashish was all over Istanbul in the movie
Midnight Express
, which had come out just before her return. Kiki refused to see such a film, with its lurid scenes of mean Turkish prisons. “Who has
nice
prisons?” she said. “Name one single country in the world. Just one.”

When her store began to fail and she had to give it up, Kiki supported herself by cleaning houses. She evidently did this with a good spirit; the family was much more embarrassed about it than she was. “People here don't know
how
to clean their houses,” she would say. “It's sort of remarkable, isn't it?”

By the time I was a little kid, Kiki had become the assistant director of a small agency that booked housekeepers and nannies. She was the one you got on the phone, the one who didn't take any nonsense from clients or workers either. She was friendly but strict and kept people on point.

As a child I was a teeny bit afraid of her. She could be very withering if I was acting up and getting crazy and knocking over chairs. But when my parents took me to visit, Kiki had special cookies for me (I loved Mallomars) and for a while she had a boyfriend named Hernando who would play airplane with me and go buzzing around the room with me on his back. I loved visiting her.

My father told me later that Hernando had wanted to marry Kiki. “But she wasn't made for marriage,” he said. “It's not all roses, you know.” He and my mother had a history of having, as they say, their differences.

“Kiki was always like a bird,” my father said. “Flying here and there.”

What a corny thing to say.

I grew up outside Boston, in a small suburban town, whose leafy safety I spurned once I was old enough for hip disdain. I moved to New York as soon as I finished high school, which I barely did. My parents and I were not on good terms in my early years in the city, but Kiki made a point of keeping in touch. She'd call on the phone and say, “I'm thirsty, let's go have a drink. OK?” At first I was up in Inwood, as far north in Manhattan as you can get, so it was a long subway ride to see her in the East Village, but once I moved to Harlem it wasn't quite so bad. When my son was born, four years ago, Kiki brought me the most useful baby stuff, things a person couldn't even know she needed. Oliver would calm down and sleep when she walked him around. He grew up calling her Aunt Great Kiki.

The two of us lived in a housing project, but one of the nicer ones, in an apartment illegally passed on to me by an ex-boyfriend. It was a decent size, with good light, and I liked my neighbors. That fall the TV started telling us to get prepared for Hurricane Sandy, and Oliver had a great time flicking the flashlight on and off (a really annoying game) and watching me tape giant X's on the window glass. All the kids on our floor were hyped up and excited, running around and shrieking. We kept looking out the windows as the sky turned a sepia tint. When the rains broke and began to come down hard, we could hear the moaning of the winds and things clattering and banging in the night, awnings and trees getting the hell beaten out of them. I kept switching to different channels on the TV so we wouldn't miss any of it. The television had better coverage than my view out the window. A newscaster in a suit told us the Con Ed transformer on Fourteenth Street exploded! The lights in the bottom of Manhattan had gone out! I made efforts to explain electricity to Oliver, as if I knew. Never, never put your finger in a socket. Oliver wanted to watch a better program.

At nine-thirty my father called to say, “Your aunt Kiki doesn't have power, you know. She's probably sitting in the dark.” I had forgotten about her entirely. She was on East Fifth Street, in the no-electricity zone. I promised I'd check on Kiki in the morning.