The Necessary Beggar (22 page)
Read The Necessary Beggar Online
Authors: Susan Palwick
And so when the City Guard finds him, he does not try to defend himself. He does not tell them that she cut her own throat, or why. He accepts the sentence of murder and exile. For to tell the entire story now, he would have to further shame her family, and his own. Her people could only be disgusted that she had been with him; his people could only be disgusted, and betrayed, by all his lies. So he maintains the lie by silence, and adds another. To his family's distraught demands to know what happened, he tells them he was drunk, that he succumbed again to wine that terrible night, and killed the Mendicant woman without knowing what he did. It is close enough to truth.
And now his spirit is here, in America, weeping into the towel in Timbor's bookcase. And now, at last, he wishes them to know the truth, to know what really happened, for if he cannot make known the story of his love, that love will truly die, as if it never were. Telling the story is his only way to bring Gallicina to life again; to bring himself to life, as he was in the first days of their love, when he was brave and generous and happy.
There has been no Great Breaking here. Timbor could know the story if he would only listen. But always, after Darroti has tried to speak in Timbor's dreams, the old man wakes frowning, shaking off the fragments of the tale. Sometimes, when no one else is there, Timbor takes out the pendant, the silver kiss Darroti brought with him into exileâboth piercing joy and terrible reproach, but nothing he could ever leave behindâand ponders it. But the fragments do not form a whole, for him. Timbor stays bewildered.
And so Darroti weeps. He would do anything to ease his family's pain, anything to change the past. He would give anything to hold his love again, to feel her fingers tracing on his skin the pattern of their kiss.
Honors
Zamatryna kept Gallicina in her closet for years. She didn't know what else to do; the command for silence never changed. She wondered what Gallicina was learning from being in the beetle, if she was learning anything. Gallicina must have been a very complicated person. Clearly the force of her will was sustaining her beetle body, which should have died after one summer.
The girl concocted theories. She read ghost storiesâcareful not to let Stan know that she was doing so, since he wouldn't have approvedâand watched soap operas with Lisa. The plots of soap operas also went on for years, every bit as improbable as the beetle's survival. Soap operas were always about love and money, and so Zamatryna found herself spinning stories about Gallicina and Darroti. They must have known each other, for Gallicina to have followed the family into exile, and for her spirit to be so stubborn now. They must have either loved or hated each other, or maybe both, and there had probably been money involved too, since Gallicina's family had been rich. But whenever Zamatryna thought about her uncle, she could only summon increasingly blurry snapshots of a laughing clown, often drunk, but never hurtful. It was hard to fit the Darroti she remembered into a soap opera.
The ghost stories all agreed that the living needed to take action on behalf of the dead, to release them, to free them from having to haunt. Here in America, spirits needed to be freed from the world, whereas in Gandiffri, they lived within it. And so perhaps Gallicina, for whom the beetle's body would have been a blessing back home, found it a prison here, in this new world. But Zamatryna had no idea how to free her. She knew only that she
was not allowed to speak of the beetle to anyone else, and that she dared not release it from its jar, lest Stan find and kill it.
was not allowed to speak of the beetle to anyone else, and that she dared not release it from its jar, lest Stan find and kill it.
She did not think about the beetle all the time, of course. She had too much else to do. Although the subjects she studied in school were very easy, she quickly learned that there were other challenges. Her family, and Stan and Lisa, wanted her to be successful, to get good grades. But success also meant being accepted as an American, being seen as normal, and being very smart was not considered normal. Part of success was popularity. The smartest students were rarely also popular. They were excluded and called names, “nerd” and “freak,” the things that Zamatryna had been called her first day in school. Some were put in special classes for gifted and talented children; the grown-ups said this made you special, but special was also what they called children whose brains had been damaged at birth. Special children of either type weren't popular, and therefore weren't successful, and therefore weren't the best Americans.
The trick, then, was to be as much like other, normal children as you could, while being smart enough to please the adults. So Zamatryna worked very hard at making friends. She studied commercials and magazines to learn what to wear, what to watch, what songs to sing. She learned to get top grades without seeming so interested or special that she would be put in the gifted and talented classes. She dutifully studied sports, although they baffled her. She spent hours at the mall with other girls. She concocted crushes on singers and movie stars, on everyone but the actual boys in her classes, whom she and her friends pretended to despise until the second half of middle school, when they began to date. You could date in middle school, but you couldn't really fall in love: that had to wait until high school, where it was also safer to be smart.
In high school, students in Advanced Placement classes weren't automatically called freaks. They could be popular, too, if only among themselves, but that was all right, because belonging to a clique, any clique, meant you were successful, although it was better to belong to several cliques. High school was a big relief.
While Zamatryna and her cousins were working at all this, the adults were working, too. They had all gotten jobs. Timbor had learned to operate a car, and now drove a taxicab. Harani was a cook in a casino restaurant. Erolorit had started out as a bagger at Albertson's, and now managed the meat department. Aliniana painted women's nails in a hair salon. Macsofo, who had been a bricklayer in Lémabantunk, did the same thing here, and made more money than any of the others.
None of them made a lot of money, though: not enough for their own house. So they paid Lisa rentâwhich was really repayment for their documentsâand continued to live among the clowns, in the lovely old house by the river. Stan and Lisa must have reached some sort of agreement, because he continued holding his little church in their own house. He seemed more tired to Zamatryna every year, grayer, his prayers less fervent. He had stopped trying so hard to convert the family, although they were still careful to avoid anything that might actively offend him. He and Timbor were fast friends now: they had adopted one of the cars at the Automobile Museum, a 1936 De Soto Airstream taxicab, cream with orange and white trim and orange plastic sunbursts on top. They had picked the taxi in honor of Timbor's job, and Zama thought it looked like a creamsicle. Stan and her grandfather went to the museum every Saturday, and spent ten hours a year polishing and maintaining the De Soto; their names were on the display card next to it. Stan looked happy whenever he came back from spending time with the car, and happiest after the quarterly parties the Auto Museum gave for the cars' adoptive parents. “He acts like that thing's an actual child,” Lisa said once, shaking her head, “and your grandpa isn't much better.”
“Lisa,” Zamatryna said, “is Stan all right? He seemsâold.”
“Well, he's older than he used to be. We all are. Mainly, I think he's having a real long midlife crisis. He started out with high hopes for our church, you know, and it's just the same little group of people it was at the beginning, and folks are starting to wander away. Stan feels like the Spirit's meandered off someplace, like the fire in his belly's gone. He's never spoken in tongues, you know, or had a vision of Jesus, even. He feels like he's just an ordinary man. And I tell him that's all he has to be, an ordinary man who's following the Lord and doing good, but I don't think he believes it. I don't think he sees that he is doing good, just by being himself. He thinks good has to be dramatic, you know. He has trouble seeing the quiet stuff, like the way your mom does good just by cooking for people.”
If cooking was a way of doing good, though, it wasn't good enough. The children understood that their job was to make more money than their parents did, to go to college and acquire careers. Jamfret and Rikko already knew that they wanted to be engineers; Jamfret wanted to build bridges, while Rikko wanted to design computers. Poliniana wanted to be the kind of doctor who sucked the fat from women's bodies and injected poison into their faces. The family agreed that this would be perfect for her; Polly loved to make people look pretty, and this kind of work was very profitable.
Zamatryna couldn't decide what she wanted to do. She was interested in several lucrative careers, but she was most drawn to the non-lucrative
versions of them. Even as she studied how to look like the models in
Seventeen
magazine, she found herself unable to forget the refugees, who still lived in camps north of town and were still vulnerable to attacks from Nuts. The Nuts responsible for the bombing, the disaster that had freed Zamatryna's family, had been caught; they were on death row. Zamatryna was very confused by the idea of killing someone as punishment for having killed someone. Exile seemed far kinder and more sensible. But Timbor, who had watched the televised trials and read all the stories in the paper, shrugged and said, “America has no doorways to other dimensions. And after the criminals die, their spirits will go into simple things, and learn love and compassion.”
versions of them. Even as she studied how to look like the models in
Seventeen
magazine, she found herself unable to forget the refugees, who still lived in camps north of town and were still vulnerable to attacks from Nuts. The Nuts responsible for the bombing, the disaster that had freed Zamatryna's family, had been caught; they were on death row. Zamatryna was very confused by the idea of killing someone as punishment for having killed someone. Exile seemed far kinder and more sensible. But Timbor, who had watched the televised trials and read all the stories in the paper, shrugged and said, “America has no doorways to other dimensions. And after the criminals die, their spirits will go into simple things, and learn love and compassion.”
“But that's not why the State's doing it,” Zamatryna said. “That's not what the Americans believe, Grandfather. They believe you can only learn things while you're still alive. They believe these people will go to hell when they die.”
“And roast like chickens,” Timbor said with a sigh.
“Like the people who died in the camps,” Macsofo said grimly. “It is fitting, is it not? Zamatryna, do you feel sorrier for the criminals than you do for the victims?”
She shook her head. “I feel sorry for all of them. If I feel sorry for the bombing victims who were killed, shouldn't I also feel sorry for the criminals who will be killed? It's the same thing.”
“The criminals deserve death. The victims didn't.”
“Ah,” Timbor said gently, “you hate America, Macsofo. And yet you have become more American than any of us. More than the children, even.”
Zamatryna thought about that conversation for a long time. Gallicina hadn't deserved death, surely, but neither had Darroti. It seemed to her that someone somewhere must love the criminals who were going to be put to death, as people had loved the victims who died, as her family had loved her hapless uncle. What good could come of making more families suffer, of sending more people into the voicelessness of death?
And so, when she pictured being a lawyer, she always saw herself defending people who could not speak, or could not make themselves heard: immigrants, or poor people, or people on death row, or animals, or trees. When she pictured herself as a doctor, she imagined healing people in the camps, or homeless people living by the river, or babies in orphanages. But while one could be popularâat least with some peopleâand do all this, one could not be rich. Half of the ingredients for success would still be missing.
Left entirely free to choose, she would probably have been a social worker, but that was out of the question. Her family approved of her warm
heart, she knew. Timbor and Aliniana did, especially; in their own jobs, they heard many sad stories about failed marriages and estranged children, about illnesses and deaths, about lost dreams and crushing debts. Their most successful customers never told them anything important; such people merely sat, in their expensive clothing and fine accessories, impatient to get what they were paying for, and then to leave. But unsuccessful people liked cabs and manicures, even though the least successful people couldn't afford such things. The middling-unsuccessfulâoften rich enough, but unhappyâwould talk to Timbor and Aliniana for hours, if they were permitted.
heart, she knew. Timbor and Aliniana did, especially; in their own jobs, they heard many sad stories about failed marriages and estranged children, about illnesses and deaths, about lost dreams and crushing debts. Their most successful customers never told them anything important; such people merely sat, in their expensive clothing and fine accessories, impatient to get what they were paying for, and then to leave. But unsuccessful people liked cabs and manicures, even though the least successful people couldn't afford such things. The middling-unsuccessfulâoften rich enough, but unhappyâwould talk to Timbor and Aliniana for hours, if they were permitted.
Zamatryna loved the stories her grandfather and her aunt brought home, loved sitting around the kitchen table, discussing what advice to give these customers if they returned. Lisa often sat with them; she said that Timbor and Aliniana were practicing a kind of ministry. Lisa and Zamatryna both found themselves doing research on all kinds of odd problems: Gamblers Anonymous meetings for swing-shift workers, therapists who specialized in underwear phobias, sources of free dentures. And sometimes the customers came back, and Timbor and Aliniana got to pass along what they had learned, and the customers were grateful, and tipped well when they could.
Zamatryna would have been glad to do such work for a living. But she was also the oldest child, the one who would enter the workforce soonest, the first one who would be able to help the family acquire real independence. And so she tried to be practical. Medical school was six years at least, law school only three. She would go to law school, then, and work eighty-hour weeks for a firm until her family had their own house, and then follow her heart, and help poor people and trees.
In the meantime, community service was important for getting into college, and also law school and medical school. So while she took her AP classes and edited the yearbook and did cheerleading splitsâa combination which made her guidance counselor scratch his head and say, “We don't get many like you”âshe also collected canned beans for the food pantry, and volunteered at the library, and started a club called “Growing Girls,” consisting of young women who helped old people do their gardening.
“
When
do you sleep?” asked the guidance counselor. His name was Ronnie Hilliard, and he was known as Rumpled Ron around the school; he was a short man, pale and heavy, his clothing perpetually wrinkled. There were always sweat stains under his arms, even in winter. Zamatryna had gone to his office to discuss college applications.
When
do you sleep?” asked the guidance counselor. His name was Ronnie Hilliard, and he was known as Rumpled Ron around the school; he was a short man, pale and heavy, his clothing perpetually wrinkled. There were always sweat stains under his arms, even in winter. Zamatryna had gone to his office to discuss college applications.
“At night,” she said. “Like everyone else.”
“That wasn't what I meant.” He nudged her file warily, as if it might bite him. “You're fifteen. And you're planning on graduating next year, right? You're doing high school in three years?”
“Yes. Is there something wrong with that?”
“No,” Ron said, but he sounded unhappy. “It's justâit's awfully fast. You were already accelerated a year. You're only young once, Zama. You should enjoy it.”
“I'll enjoy it in college,” she said impatiently. “Why should I stay here longer, when I can already do all the schoolwork? It's boring.”
“Boring? You're taking AP Bio, AP English, AP Calculus, AP History, and AP Art. And you're fifteen. If you're bored by that stuff, you're going to be bored by college, too.”
“If I'm bored by college, I'll do college in three years. And then I'll go to law school and then I'll get a job. That's what I want to do, to help my family. I want to make money. I need a college degree for that.”
“Right,” Ron said, and sighed. “No wonder so many people around here feel threatened by immigrants. Okay, so where are you planning to apply?”
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