The Necessary Beggar (11 page)
Read The Necessary Beggar Online
Authors: Susan Palwick
They hadn't thought about it. Lisa, it turned out, had thought about it a great deal, and had firm ideas on the subject. There were four bedrooms and a sunroom; she thought that the two biggest bedrooms should go to the married couples, and that Timbor should take the third bedroom, and that Poliniana and Zamatryna should take the fourth, “because they're girls and they can share. And Jamfret and Rikko can share the sunroom. It's not a real bedroom, but it will feel like camping out, and little boys like that.”
“Timbor is the head of our family,” Erolorit said. “He must have the biggest room. Harani and I can take one of the smaller ones.”
“Nonsense,” Timbor said in their own language. “I am one person: everyone else is two. I will take whichever room is smallest.”
“I want my own room,” Zamatryna said. “I don't want to share.” She couldn't do it anymore, keep Mim-Bim a secret while she was sharing a room with other people. She was tired of sneaking the beetle from one pocket into another, tired of having to pretend that she wasn't worried about what the insect meant, tired of the constant yearning to speak, to ask for help and advice. If she had a room to herself she could cry and whisper to Mim-Bim without everyone hearing her, and perhaps she'd be able to find out what the insect wanted. And surely, sometime, Mim-Bim would end its improbably long life, and then she would be free and she could share a room.
The others stared at her. “Zamatryna,” Harani said, “don't you love your cousin?”
“Yes, I love PolinianaâPoliniana, I love youâbut I want my own room! You can give me the littlest one and put Grandfather in a bigger one! I don't care! I want my own!”
“But even if you share one with your cousin, it will be more space than either of you had in the camp, Zamatryna.” Erolorit came and knelt next to her. “And you were happy sleeping with everyone last night, weren't you? You seemed happy.”
She couldn't explain it to them. Oh, how she wanted to, but she couldn't! It was against Mim-Bim's rules, which were as incomprehensible as Stan's or the government's. Rage and impotence filled her until her voice came out in a screech. “Iâwantâmyâownâroom!”
Harani shook her head. “Daughter, little one, this is selfish and unkindâ”
“Hush,” Timbor said sharply. “Harani, do not scold her. Zamatryna, come here.”
She went, sniffling, and he held her on his lap, as he had done in the camp after Erolorit sent Lisa away. “Lisa is right. You have had too much to do, translating, and too much to see, because you were with us when weâwhen we found Darroti. And so you want a place to be away from everyone, eh? It is not because you do not love us, or because you are bad. You need space to be sad in without worrying that you will make others sad, is that right?” She nodded, miserably, and put her head against his chest, where his heart went boom-boom-boom reassuringly. “All right,” Timbor said, stroking her hair. “All right, little one. That is all right. But we do not blame you for being sad. No one would blame you.”
She couldn't explain it to him. “I want my own room,” she said in a very small voice.
“Then you shall have it,” Timbor said, and hugged her.
“How?” Erolorit held up five fingers. “Four bedrooms and a sunroom. If you have one and she has one and Poliniana has oneâfor if Zamatryna demands her own, Poliniana must have one tooâand the twins have the sunroom, there is only one room left, and two couples. Where will everyone go?”
“This is stupid,” Harani said. “Stupid! We have more room in this house than we ever did in our tent in the camp, and only now are we fighting over it!”
“I do not need a bedroom,” Timbor said. “I will sleep in some other room, on the floor.”
“You are the head of our family!” Macsofo said. “You must notâ”
“I am the head of our family, and I have spoken! I will sleep wherever I wish, and what I wish is to give up a bedroom so that Zamatryna may have one! And I will not have you deny me!”
“Don't yell,” Zamatryna said into her grandfather's tunic. “Please don't yell. I'm sorry I was badâ”
“You are not bad, Zamatryna.” Timbor's voice was gentler now. “You have been hurt. We have all been hurt. We all have different ways of healing from hurt. It is a gift to know what you need to heal, Granddaughter, and a gift to be able to ask for it. And what I need to heal is to give you what you need to heal, eh? And I am glad I can do it. Harani, Erolorit, comfort your child, who is not unkind.”
“I would rather she were unkind than in pain,” Erolorit said grimly.
“Then allow her to have what will salve her pain, and do not scold her for it!”
“Please don't yell,” Zamatryna said, shaking. How she wanted to squash Mim-Bim! But she knew that would be wrong, truly unkind.
“What's the matter?” Lisa said in English. She'd been watching the argument, frowning. “Why is everyone upset? Is there anything I can do?”
“Nothing,” Timbor told her crisply. “It is family business. We have settled the matter of the rooms, Lisa, and we thank you.”
And so Zamatryna, heartsick, got her own room, the smallest one. It had a wonderful view of the garden, and she asked Poliniana if she wanted the bigger of the small roomsâwhich had no viewâor wanted the one where she could see the flowers. “You can have the flowers because you're sad,” Poliniana said, but Zamatryna could tell that the littler girl was trying not to cry, and her heart twisted. She hugged her cousin, vowing to be as nice to her in every other way as she could, and Harani put a hand on both their heads.
“Everyone can see the flowers when we go outside. Poliniana, we will teach you about the garden, eh? Your cousin will help you learn to make things grow.”
They heard the front door open, and Lisa called cheerfully, “Stan's back! So how'd you do with the clothing, honey? Let's see what you found.”
He had found great piles of socks and underwear, of which he was very proud. He had overalls for Timbor and the uncles, skirts for the women, little pants for the twins. And for Poliniana and Zamatryna he had bought t-shirts and sun-dresses.
“I hope they'll fit,” he said happily. “I thought they were real pretty, see, they have flowers on them, you girls like flowers, and this one here has ladybugs. Aren't they cute?”
Lisa beamed. “You did real well, honey. I couldn't have done any better myself.”
“Poliniana can have the one with the beetles,” Zamatryna said. The ladybugs reminded her too much of Mim-Bim. And looking at the sun-dresses, she was more grateful than ever that she had demanded her own room, for the dresses had no pockets. She would have to find some other place to hide her fellow exile.
Timbor
I would have preferred my own bedroom, because I had my own hurts to hide. But whenever I looked at Zamatryna I saw Darroti at the same ageâfor both were bright and headstrong, and both had Frella's almond-shaped green eyesâand my heart twisted. Darroti had begun his life as just such a responsible, curious child, and I had missed some wound in him, with what results you know. And if his fate on the fence was not my fault, what father would not feel it was? And so I was loath to deny Zamatryna whatever she might need to mend, especially when she began to scream and cry; for she had never acted so befofe. And my feeling then was that we had all had too much to bear, and that she merely voiced what all of us carried inside.
And so Zamatryna took the little room overlooking the garden, and I claimed a corner of the family room. I was most comfortable sleeping on the floor, for I found American beds too soft, but the woman Lisa found a screen for me, to make the spot more private, and cleared some clowns out of a bookcase, so I could keep my few things there. I still had my old clothes to wear in the house, because I could not bear to discard them, although I only wore American ones outside. I had my prayer carpet. I had an ivory box, a courting gift from Frella, the one treasure I had brought into exile. Inside the box was a lock of her hair. I had a box the Americans had given me, with Darroti's ashes inside, for they had burned his body as we would have done at home. Of course his spirit was not in them, could not be, but the ashes would be fine fertilizer if we ever gained a garden of our own. I kept Darroti's prayer carpet rolled next to mine; he had seldom used itârarely before the Mendicant's death, and never afterâso it brought back no memories of him, but I could not bear to discard the pattern of his soul.
I had something else, too: a silk cord Darroti had worn around his neck and kept hidden under his clothing, and which the Americans had given back to me before they burned his body. On it hung a silver pendant, two circles touching at a point: what Americans would call a figure-eight. I had never seen such a symbol before, and it puzzled me, and Darroti's brothersâwho had been with me when the Americans brought the thing, with Darroti's clothing, to our tentâknew no more about it than I did. “A bauble he bought in the market,” Macsofo said with a shrug.
“He wore few ornaments,” Erolorit answered. “It must have been precious to him, for him to have brought it here.”
“Whatever the mystery is, we will never unravel it.” Macsofo's voice was harsh, hoarsened by the smoke we all breathed then. “Father, put that thing away. I do not want to look at it. I do not want to think about Darroti! Darroti brought this doom upon us all!”
And so I put it away, and kept it away, to spare my surviving sons. Our story might have gone very differently if I had shown it to the others, but I believed then what I had said in the camp, after Erolorit sent Lisa away: that we must all become Americans as far as possible, and cease to dwell in the past. Our job now was to help the children adapt fully to this new place, even if we never could ourselves. So I kept my little store of old things in the bookcase, and hung a blanket over the front of it, and tried to train myself not to reach behind the blanket, although at least once a week I did, despite myself. Something would remind me of Lémabantunkâthe smell of roses in sunlight or the sound of the river flowing over rocksâand a great hunger for home would come over me, and I would find myself cradling in my arms the box my wife had given me. I understood then, for the first time, what Darroti's thirst for liquor must have been, the force that drives your hands to reach for something your mind believes you should not have.
And so each night, having either reached for the bookcase or successfully resisted, I lay behind my screen and talked to the clown on the wall. He was a large clown in clashing shades of pink and yellow and purple; he was one of the weeping clowns, and his tears were palest blue. Lisa had offered to take him down when she removed the smaller clowns from the bookcase, but I told her that I welcomed him, that he would keep me company. And so he did.
I spoke to him partly as a way of delaying sleep, for every night I dreamed of the burning camp, of screaming and the smell of smoke; and every night Darroti came into my dreams, urgently trying to tell me something I could not understand, and every night I was overjoyed to have found Darroti again, although he could not speak to me. And every morning I
awoke and Darroti was gone again, still dead, and the people who had died in the fire were still dead, and sorrow crushed my chest as if an ox were standing on me. Mornings were terrible.
awoke and Darroti was gone again, still dead, and the people who had died in the fire were still dead, and sorrow crushed my chest as if an ox were standing on me. Mornings were terrible.
And so at night I talked to the clown to keep the dreams at bay, although I always entered them at last. “Clown,” I would say to him, but not aloud, “this is hard work, this being merry when all you want to do is weep. Clown, this feels like death. Tell me how you smile for the crowds, Clown, for I must become like you. I must put on my floppy shoes and my rubber nose, and cheer the children. Clown, why do you weep? Do you miss your home? Do you have a child dead by his own hand, a child whose hands dealt death to someone else? Clown, are you like me, enmeshed in lies and riddles, in things you cannot say?”
For there was also the puzzle of the towel which would not dry. I had ceased to cry, outwardly at least, but the towel remained damp, no matter if I put it in the sun or in Lisa's dryer. The water I squeezed from it was salt; the towel was wet with tears. “Clown, are they your tears that wet the towel?” But they could not have been, because the towel had come with us from the camp. And so I kept the damp towel folded in the bookcase, behind the blanket, and did not speak of it. It was too strange. It was a hole into which Stan, I feared, would plug his Devil.
And thus I felt myself swallowed by a maw of many silences. For outside the house, of course, we could no longer speak of the camp, any more than we could speak of Lémabantunk. The Army must believe that we had died in the fire. And yet the fire, and the people dead in it, haunted me almost as much as Darroti did. We had known many of those people. The family in the tent next to ours, from Pakistan, had died: a mother and a father and three children. One of the social workers had died who so often asked us questions. And the Army man with the buttons and ribbons on his shirt, the one who had stood in our tent with his hat in his hand, the one who had tried to comfort me when Darroti diedâhe too was dead, burned. His name was Neil Glenrock, I learned from the television. I had not paid attention to it when he came to our tent. I had been rude to him when he tried to be kind, and I had no way to make amends. I could not go to his widow and his children and tell them I was sorry. I could not tell them the story of how he had been decent to a fellow man in pain, who was churlish in return. I could not do that, because the Timbor who had been there was not supposed to be alive.
“I'll do it,” Lisa said. I broke down when we saw the man's face on the televisionâAliniana was outside with the children, and Stan was off building houses, but the rest of us adults were watching the morning newsâand she made me tell her why I wept. “Timbor, you just tell me anything you want to
say about that man, and I'll tell his family. I can say I was there. I'll make it sound like I was in your tent when he did that, or like you told me about it. All of you: you just tell me anything you want anybody to know about all those poor souls, and I'll be your voice. I'm the reason you can't talk about it, so I'll talk for you. That's the least I can do.”
say about that man, and I'll tell his family. I can say I was there. I'll make it sound like I was in your tent when he did that, or like you told me about it. All of you: you just tell me anything you want anybody to know about all those poor souls, and I'll be your voice. I'm the reason you can't talk about it, so I'll talk for you. That's the least I can do.”
And so she did. I told her the story, and she went to see Neil Glenrock's wife and grown sons and told it to them. They were very grateful, she said. There were Nuts in their familyâthe kind who wrote letters, not the kind who built bombsâwho did not approve of the camp and had not approved of the work Neil Glenrock did there. It comforted them to know that other people thought he had been of value.
She stopped for a moment, then, and went on carefully. “They'd heard about you and your family, Timbor. Neil, he'd told them about Darroti and how bad he felt about what happened, how you'd lost your son and all. It ate at him, that his men were the ones who weren't paying attention when Darroti died. So it meant a lot to his family when I showed up and said how nice he'd been. He'd felt like he hadn't done any good. He'd told his wife that, and I was able to tell her that he'd been wrong, that he had so done good. I was able to comfort her.”
“And now she thinks we are all dead,” I said, seeing nothing but gloom.
Lisa looked unhappy. “I know. Timbor, I'm sorry. I don't know how else to handle it. We'll turn this all to good yet, I promise. You'll all learn English and get jobs and earn money, and the kids will go to school and do real well, and someday you'll look back on everything you're going through now and it will have been worth it, just like being in jail was worth it for me. You just have to be patient. It's hard now. I know it is. It's hard for me too. We all just have to do the best we can. If I hadn't gotten you out of there, you might really be dead.”
She was a good woman, Lisa. But her secrets worried me, for I did not see how she could keep them from her husband for long, and I foresaw nothing but trouble when he learned that she had been lying to him. She was treating him like a fool, although she loved him. The love would make the lies sting more, when they emerged. And Stan Buttle was no fool, although I had thought he was at first; I felt for him even as I feared him. For he was determined that my family become the followers of his god. That, I knew, was why he allowed us to stay in the house he wanted for his church. He would not tolerate us long if we refused, whatever Lisa said.
And I could not follow his god, Jesus who had risen from the dead, and who was useless to me. The forgiveness I recognized and valued, for Jesus
did what the Necessary Beggar does in Gandiffri: blesses people and releases them from the past, that they may venture into the future unburdened, free and able to do good again. But Stan insisted that the dead would rise again in their bodies at the Judgment, and my deadâDarroti and the people in the campsâhad no bodies left but ashes. And Stan insisted that the only path to heaven was through Jesus, and how could I accept that, who had come from a world where Jesus had never existed, and where no one knew his name? And Stan insisted, when I was bold enough to ask him, that Jesus had forgiven everyone once and for all, everywhere and in all times. But I could not accept that either, for it made a mockery of crime. How could Jesus already have forgiven Darroti for murder, which had caused such pain to Gallicina's family? And if Darroti had already been forgiven, then our exile meant nothing, and I needed to believeâindeed, I did believeâthat it was just. I clung to that belief in justice, lest all that we had suffered be a waste.
did what the Necessary Beggar does in Gandiffri: blesses people and releases them from the past, that they may venture into the future unburdened, free and able to do good again. But Stan insisted that the dead would rise again in their bodies at the Judgment, and my deadâDarroti and the people in the campsâhad no bodies left but ashes. And Stan insisted that the only path to heaven was through Jesus, and how could I accept that, who had come from a world where Jesus had never existed, and where no one knew his name? And Stan insisted, when I was bold enough to ask him, that Jesus had forgiven everyone once and for all, everywhere and in all times. But I could not accept that either, for it made a mockery of crime. How could Jesus already have forgiven Darroti for murder, which had caused such pain to Gallicina's family? And if Darroti had already been forgiven, then our exile meant nothing, and I needed to believeâindeed, I did believeâthat it was just. I clung to that belief in justice, lest all that we had suffered be a waste.
Stan Buttle's god would have turned my sorrows into nonsense. And Stan Buttle's heaven seemed a bleak, cold place, for as he told it, the spirits of the dead were plucked forever from the world, rather than remaining in fruit and flowers, in leaves and lizards. And I needed to believe that my dead were in sight, even if I could not speak to them. I needed to believe that they were growing and learning and alive.
And so I used the blessings we had brought with us from home. I allowed Stan to say his grace, but I always said my own.
Souls of the dead, thank you for succoring us, that we may remain among the living
. I could wear American clothing, eat American food, speak American words, but I could not forego the grace of Gandiffri, for Darroti could be in anything I blessed. And when Stan insisted that I tell him what the words meant, and frowned and called them Satanic superstition, and said that he feared greatly for my soul, I answered only, “I am fifty-nine years old, Stan, and I have been saying this prayer my entire life, and it is a piece of my homeland. I have lost more than you will ever understand. You cannot expect me to give this up so quickly.”
Souls of the dead, thank you for succoring us, that we may remain among the living
. I could wear American clothing, eat American food, speak American words, but I could not forego the grace of Gandiffri, for Darroti could be in anything I blessed. And when Stan insisted that I tell him what the words meant, and frowned and called them Satanic superstition, and said that he feared greatly for my soul, I answered only, “I am fifty-nine years old, Stan, and I have been saying this prayer my entire life, and it is a piece of my homeland. I have lost more than you will ever understand. You cannot expect me to give this up so quickly.”
I did not intend ever to give it up, but I could not tell him that. I had to let him believe that he might convert us, in time. I had to let him have that hope, lest he cast us out of this new, precarious home, as he had told us that his god cast unrepentant sinners into the outer darkness, where there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. And yet he called his god a god of love. I could not fathom it, unless the outer darkness be like exile. Certainly we had wailed and gnashed our teeth, in this new world. And yet there was hope here, too, and beauty, and kindness, and wonders like toilets and ice cream.
There were flowers here and rainbows. It was not all the endless, dreary misery of Stanley Buttle's hell.
There were flowers here and rainbows. It was not all the endless, dreary misery of Stanley Buttle's hell.
And so, for my sake and my family's, I worked at being friends with Stan. I wanted there to be some bond between us, so that he would continue to help us for our own sake, not simply for his god's. Before he learned of Lisa's lies, as I knew he someday must, I wanted him also to have learned to care for us as people in ourselves, apart from her.
So I asked Stan questions about many things other than his god: about his work, and the machine he used to cut the grass, and the things we saw on television. I let Stan teach me about wristwatches and peanut butter and jogging shoes. I learned that he missed his father, who had died when he was small, and who had loved old cars and old movies, as Stanley loved them now.
I spent many hours sitting in the dark with Stanley, watching Chaplin and the Marx Brothers and fifties comedies, in which people who spoke entirely too quickly blundered through endless errors, always emerging into marriage and money. “Now, those were movies,” Stan said happily. “None of this stuff with half-naked teenagers being chased by psychos with chainsaws. Good movies don't need blood and cussing: there's too much of that in the world already. Give me Groucho and Harpo any day.” And indeed, the movies made me laugh and eased my heart, and the children loved them too, and in that way Stanley grew to love the children. Poliniana learned to walk like Charlie Chaplin, and Rikko and Jamfret memorized the lines from “A Night at the Opera,” and Stanley laughed until his cheeks grew red, and praised them.
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