The Necessary Beggar (36 page)

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Authors: Susan Palwick

BOOK: The Necessary Beggar
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Lisa turned to Stan and said, “Well? And in the meantime, what do you have to say for yourself?” He should be the one asking that, Zamatryna thought bleakly. She's the one who lied to him. But she's scared and hurt, and she's feeling defensive. “Stan, what the hell are you doing here? You kicked me out of the house. You said things—”
“I was wrong,” he said, beaming. “Now I know how wrong I was, because Jesus came and told me so.”
“Really,” Lisa said, her eyebrows arching. “Is that so, Stan Buttle?” She didn't sound like she believed him.
Stan was oblivious. “Yes, that's so. I finally had a vision, Lisa, the thing I've wanted all my life, and it came when I was at my lowest point. I had a gun. I was going to—well, I wanted to die. Because the whole world was darkness, and nothing was right or true, and I thought God didn't exist anymore. And then Jesus came. He was wearing a white robe, just like he does in the picture we have in the kitchen, and there was a glow all around his head just like that, but his skin was dark, the way it really was, the way it should be. He looked like Timbor's folks.”
Timbor and Zamatryna exchanged a glance, and Lisa said steadily, “Right. That's good. Jesus wasn't a white boy from California.” Stan grinned at her, and Zamatryna had the feeling this was an old joke. “Go on. What happened?”
“He was crying because he felt so sorry for us,” Stan said, his voice dreamy. “Because he loves us. He had a mole on his face that looked like a starfish.” Jerry started to cough, and Zamatryna kicked him. Stan said, “I've never heard of that. I never heard of that mole before. I couldn't have made that up, Lisa.”
“No,” Lisa said. “I don't think you could.”
“It made him seem more real.”
“Sure it did. What did he say, Stan?” Lisa was leaning forward now, her eyes yearning: Zamatryna wondered if she was hungry for Jesus or for Stan himself, or for both of them.
“He told me love is the most important thing in the world,” Stan said, his face shining. “He told me he forgave you for your lies, Lisa, because you lied to help Tim's family, and that I had to forgive you, too. And he told me that he forgave me for my anger against you, and that I had to ask you to
forgive me, too. And now I know that Jesus is real, and that forgiveness is real. Because I've seen it. I've felt it. I've seen him. So how can I not believe? I'll never lose my faith again.” He turned to Timbor and said, “Oh, Tim, I wish you'd seen him! I wish I could show him to you. Because then you'd believe in Jesus, just like I do.”
“I believe in your Jesus,” Timbor said, very gently. “And I believe in what he told you.”
Stan looked back at Lisa. “So I'm here—to tell you I forgive you, and to ask if you forgive me. And if you love me. And if you'll live with me again. And—”
“Well, sure,” Lisa said. Her face was wet. “All you ever had to do was ask. Come on, Stan. Let's go home and talk this all out. Can you folks—will all of you be okay without me? Will you excuse us, please?”
“Of course,” Timbor said. “Of course we will.”
“Good,” Lisa said, wiping her face. “Betty can have Polly's room now.”
Betty had been sitting in the most overstuffed chair, quietly watching everything; Zamatryna wondered how much she understood. After the kitchen door had closed behind Lisa and Stan, she looked at Zamatryna.
“Is it good, what just happened? What those two men said? That was good, wasn't it?”
“Yes,” Zamatryna said, dazed. “Very good.”
“I want to lie down now, Zama. I'm tired. Is there a bed?”
“Yes. We have an entire room for you. Come on, Betty, I'll show you.”
Getting out clean sheets and making the bed steadied her somewhat, made her feel less crazy and unreal. Betty's labored breathing worried her, but at least Betty wasn't in the camp, or on the streets. One thing at a time. After Betty was tucked in, Zamatryna got some water from the kitchen—she'd suddenly realized she was desperately thirsty—and then went back into the living room. “Well,” she said. “Our Darroti's been a busy boy, hasn't he?”
“I don't think he had anything to do with Mr. Glenrock,” Timbor said.
“No, it doesn't sound like it. No starfish there.” She sat down on the couch next to Jerry, who put his arm around her. She was exhausted. She was glad everyone was gone. She couldn't deal with anything else happening today.
“Now,” Timbor said. “Macsofo, would you please tell me this business about Darroti and Gallicina? And would you tell me what makes you think that it was real, and not just a delusion, like the snakes?”
“I keep telling you, the snakes were real.” Macsofo shrugged. “But I believed the story about Darroti because it explained the necklace he brought from home, for one thing. Of course, I suppose I cannot be sure that my mind was not just inventing the story. But after everything else that has happened, it seems less likely.”
“I used to dream about the necklace too,” Timbor said, frowning. “When I dreamed about Darroti.”
“What necklace?” Zamatryna asked. She'd closed her eyes; Jerry was stroking her hair, lulling her to sleep. She was only vaguely following the conversation, which sounded as if it was happening underwater. There would be time enough to learn everything else, later. She was too tired now. She couldn't absorb anything else.
“You never saw it,” Timbor said. “I never saw it, until Darroti died. The Army men found it. Darroti was wearing it. A black silk cord with a silver figure-eight on it.”
“A what?” Zamatryna asked, opening her eyes. She sat up, pulling away from Jerry. “A figure-eight? It doesn't—Grandfather, it doesn't look like an X, does it?”
“Well, yes, I suppose it does. Except that the ends are closed.”
“It is derived from an X,” Macsofo said. “That is what my dream said.”
“Oh my God. Grandfather, may I see it, please? Do you have it here?”
“Certainly,” he said, and pulled it out of his pocket. Zamatryna looked at it. She was no longer even remotely sleepy. Yes, it was the right shape. She remembered all those hours she'd spent watching the beetle: the ends of the X had been connected, rounded like that, and she'd always thought it was because beetles weren't very bright and the insect couldn't figure out how to make a better X, and anyway the ends were connected when parents drew it in the air to silence their children, too—
“Macsofo,” she said. “Uncle Max, can you tell me what it means? Do you know what it means? It's very important.”
“It's a kiss,” he said, sounding mystified. “It was their private symbol for a kiss. Darroti and Gallicina. Their symbol for their love.”
“Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God. She's
kissing
him?” They were all looking at her as if she'd lost her mind. “I have to go get something. Everybody stay here. Nobody move. I'll be right back. Just—stay here!”
She got up and ran into her room, into the closet. There was the jar. There was the impossibly long-lived beetle in the jar. There was the pattern, the same figure the beetle had been making every second for the past eleven years. “Oh, you poor thing,” Zamatryna said. “I'm so sorry. I didn't know!”
Clutching the jar, she ran back into the living room. “What,” Erolorit said, “is that?”
“It's Gallicina,” Zamatryna said. “It's her spirit, trapped in a beetle. She—she came into exile with us, to be with Darroti. She hid in my things. And she's stayed alive all this time, and I've kept her secret all this time because I thought it was an X, I thought she was telling me to stay quiet, but she wasn't. She was kissing Darroti.”
They were all gaping at her. She didn't care. “Grandfather, is the towel here?” He handed it to her, and she opened the jar and dumped the beetle out onto the towel, and then there was a flash and the smell of lightning. Macsofo yelped, and Jerry grabbed Zamatryna, and a blue door appeared in the middle of the living room.
Timbor
The most grievous acts may be forgiven if the transgressor repents, and if the victim forgives; but the dead cannot forgive. That is what we believed in Lémabantunk, where the dead cannot speak to the living. At home, we knew that no murderers could ever return from exile, because those they had killed would never be able to forgive them.
We never thought that someone who had not really murdered would accept a sentence as a murderer.
The Judges are just. We believed that, in Gandiffri; and although we also believed that they did not choose the worlds to which they sent the exiled, I wonder now. Do the Judges have more power than they know, or claim? Or does the Door itself sense, somehow, where the exiled need to go? In the Tale of the Great Breaking, the Elements are exiled, and find what they are seeking in the very punishment imposed on them for having sought it. Is that, then, how every exile works?
For this much is certain. Only in a world of ghosts, a world where the Great Breaking never happened, could our story have unfolded as it did. Only in a world where the dead speak to the living could Darroti have made his truth known, at last, and been reunited with his love, and been forgiven by her as she was by him. For she needed his forgiveness even more, I think, than he needed hers. Her action was the one that sent us into exile. It is fitting that she followed us, because she sent us here. But only here could the sentence have been reversed, the exile revoked, the Door reopened.
When the Door reopened, we stood staring, all of us in shock. I saw Jerry hugging Zamatryna, clutching her; I saw the terror on his face. I think he feared that she would leave him, go through the Door back home, where
he could never follow. None of the rest of us even thought that far: for while we stood there stunned, the beetle spread her wings and rose above the towel, and a mist rose from the towel to enfold her. And, still enclosed in mist, she flew then, through the Door, and vanished. And the Door did too. It winked from sight, gone just as suddenly as it had come.
And still we stared, until at last Macsofo walked to where the Door had been. He held a hand out, cautiously, and waved it through the air. “Nothing,” he said. I saw him tremble. “It is gone.” And then he looked at Zamatryna, who held the towel as tightly as Jerry held her. “That cloth is dry now,” he said. It was not a question.
She looked down at the towel, felt it. “Yes,” she said. “Completely dry.” She looked at me. “Grandfather, I'm sorry.”
“If he is home again,” I said, “I am not sorry.”
Would we have gone back through the Door ourselves, had it stayed open? We have discussed this question many times. Erolorit believes that it closed so quickly so we would not have that choice, which would have tortured us: for how could we have chosen? Lémabantunk is my home, still, but Zamatryna is American, and Jerry is American, and Alini and the cousins were not with us. We still believe that families must remain together: if not in the same household, at least in the same dimension. How could we have gone back to Gandiffri, and left them behind? And Jerry says, quite sensibly I think, that perhaps the Door that beckoned Darroti and Gallicina home from exile could not do so for us. Perhaps we are, in fact, at home now, our exile tamed and turned to something else: if not yet quite to home, then to the hope of home.
For Jerry and Zamatryna did get married. The Monday after that fateful Friday, they had their civil wedding at City Hall. Civil: say invisible, for it took twenty seconds, and there was no rejoicing, not as yet. They did it to try to slow the INS, should Kenneth Glenrock find himself unable to spare us. But so far we have not yet heard from him, and so we hope we never will. And that was several months ago.
They do not yet live together, and they have not had their wedding with the Necessary Beggar: the Real Wedding, they call it. They will have that in the spring, or maybe in the summer, when Zama is eighteen and after Betty has recovered from her surgery. The surgery is scheduled for next week. The children have been working very hard, to raise the money. They got Betty in the Reno newspapers, and Stan and Lisa told many churches about her, and doctors and nurses came forward to donate their time, so that all the children need to pay for are the facilities and the equipment, and the many medicines Betty needs. It is still a huge amount of money, but Betty
has become a celebrity. She has been in
People
magazine, and on TV, and now the money comes from many places, not just Reno. And so we hope that she survives her surgery, which terrifies us all, and terrifies her most.
I am glad about Betty. How could I not be? Watching her rest in Poliniana's old bed, her face sweaty from exertion if she has only walked across the room, is terrible. She barely has the energy to flap her hand, which always flaps. It has kept her with us, this weakness; it has kept her from wandering as she used to do, and I wonder if she will wander again when she is better, if we will once again have to search for her in the parks and by the river. And yet it troubles me, that she had to become a celebrity to get the help she needed, that help is not given to everyone here. There are still all those people in the camp, the ones we could not bring back with us when we brought her back. New people go there every week, on the buses. And so the parks are safe and seemly now, while the camp grows ever more crowded. The camp is out of sight. Most people can forget it. We cannot.
And so Jerry and Zamatryna's wedding will be unconventional, both for America and for Gandiffri. They will have their Necessary Beggar—if she lives—but they will already have given her their gift, for Jerry's savings are still the largest single sum she has received. And I suspect that they will receive other gifts, gifts for themselves, although they only plan to ask for help for Betty. Certainly Zamatryna will wear an American wedding gown, and carry flowers, although they will be flowers she has grown herself; and afterwards she and Jerry will live in an apartment by themselves, not with Jerry's family, as they would have done in Lémabantunk. At any rate they will live in Reno until she goes to law school. Since there is no law school in town, I do not know where she will be then. That will be terrible, to have her in a different city for three years, but many families live in different places here. I wonder how they can, how they can bear it, but they do. And after law school, Jerry and Zamatryna will come back here, where they are loved, to be with us.
And does she love him? She still will tell you that she is not sure, and yet I think she does. I see it in her face; always she notices when he comes into the room, or leaves it, and she begins to fret about his health and future, and her smile is brighter when he is the cause of it. And I grow fond of him, for he is not as simple as we thought. Jerry studies carefully, and if he does not learn as quickly as Zamatryna does, he learns deeply and well, and speaks thoughtfully, and steadies her. And there is no doubt that he loves her; she is his world. I begin to believe that she could do no better, although at first I thought she could scarcely do worse.
She will wake up one morning, or look up one evening at a sunset or a tree, and know that she loves him. This is my hope for her: that she will find her love has grown in secret, as a plant grows underground before it flowers. And one does not poke at the plant before it lifts its head from the soil; one lets it be. And so I do not nag her about loving Jerry, or tell her what I see in her face when she looks at him or speaks of him. I let her chatter on about the wedding, and about her plot to reunite Macsofo and Alini.
Well, perhaps it could happen. I do not know. They speak now; she lets him see his children, who are sullen but polite enough. He has apologized, and she has said she needs more time to learn to trust him again, and that is fair. He is not drinking now. We all begin to hope he will not start again. He has stopped working on the poison trains and gone back to bricklaying, and that is certainly a relief. He likes his job more than he has in years. And if he is sad, I think it is a healthy sadness, the grief he never let himself express before. He is easier to be with now, far easier to love.
But whether Aliniana will fall swooning into his arms when she sees him in a tux, as Zama claims, I cannot say. I rather doubt it. I will be happy if they simply dance. The other day Alini told Harani she had dumped her lover, who only wanted her body; this news sent Zamatryna into ecstasies. “He never existed,” she said triumphantly. “I told you! He was never real to begin with. That's why we've never met him, and why I can never get Polly or Rick or Jamfret to talk about him. He was just a story. But now she's ready to start thinking about coming home to Uncle Max, so she's clearing the decks. And when she sees him in that tux, she'll be a goner, I'm telling you.”
“You can tell me all you want,” I told her. “I will believe it when I see it.”
“Oh, Grandfather,” Zamatryna said, laughing. “Alini's an incurable romantic. And she loves him. She always has.”
“If you say so. I still remember the night she threw the clown.”
Zamatryna rolled her eyes. “Yes, but that's the sign of how much she really loves him. The passion was going in the wrong direction, that's all.”
“If that is love,” I said, “I will take indifference.”
“No, you won't. You're not indifferent, and neither are they. We aren't indifferent people. Everything will be fine, Grandfather. I promise.”
“That is not your promise to keep,” I told her, and she laughed and kissed me and danced off to get dressed for her date with Jerry that night. Her room has grown much messier, since she no longer has Gallicina to hide. But Zama tells me that Jerry is neat enough for both of them, and Jerry seems to agree, at least for the moment. We will see if he agrees once they begin to live together. If she is messier, she is also happier, for the weight of the beetle
has been lifted from her shoulders. It was an awful burden, that peanut butter jar. I wonder how she bore it for so long, beginning when she was so little. I wonder how she hid it from us all. She moves more lightly now, so much so that it seems impossible we never saw her heaviness before. And yet, how could we? We had no basis for comparison except the old days, in Gandiffri: and exile and the camp, and Darroti's death, would have been weight enough, if we had seen her weariness and questioned it. Instead, we thought her flawless. We saw the child we wanted her to be, not Zama as she was. I like her better now. She shares her flaws now, and her fears, and so I also trust her joy. I think it is no longer a clown's joy, hiding the tears inside. I think it is real, and growing.
Stan and Lisa are back together, of course. I think that was Darroti's kindest act. We thought at first that we would not tell them what had really happened, but at last I told Lisa: secrets had hurt us so, and I feared to keep any more.
“Oh, I already knew,” she said. We were in the kitchen, where we always seem to have important conversations: only Lisa and I, for everyone else was gone. “Jerry told me about his dreams, over coffee that day. He told me about your city, and about the door. He thought I'd already known; he was horrified when he realized I didn't, poor kid, thought he'd spilled the beans and broken his word to Zama. But you know, Timbor, it was okay. I already knew it had to be something like that, the way you guys could never tell anyone where you were from. And it doesn't matter. You're here now. That's the important thing. So anyway, Jerry told me about Darroti, about that funny mole he had, and then when I heard Stan talk about his vision, I figured out what was going on.”
“But if Stan found out,” I said, “his faith would be broken again. And we must not let that happen.”
Lisa shook her head and put her hand over mine. “Timbor, you know what? If he found out, it wouldn't make any difference. It doesn't make any difference. Jesus comes to us in other people, always. That's the way it works. Stan always knew that with his head: he just couldn't wrap his heart around it. The trick is learning to see Jesus everyplace, learning to see Christ in whatever poor schlub is walking down the street. Stan can talk about that to beat the band, but he was never very good at doing it. Because he was too afraid, you know, afraid of the other people he knew it was his job to love. Afraid that he'd get hurt, or that he'd go to hell for loving somebody who'd done something wrong, even though that's the entire point, that's what we're supposed to do, because everybody does things wrong. So if Stan learned to see Jesus in a ghost, well, then, that's fine. Because now he's learning to see
Jesus in the checkout kids at the supermarket, too, even when they shortchange him or break the eggs or take too long loading the cart because they're gossiping with their friends.”
“But you don't believe in ghosts,” I said, frowning.
“I'm saying ghost because that's your word, honey. I'd call Darroti an angel, myself.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. American angels are nauseating. “He had no harp or wings.”
Lisa snorted. “I didn't say he was a Hallmark angel. I don't believe in those any more than you do. Angel means messenger. And he certainly delivered messages, didn't he?”
Perhaps Lisa is right, that it wouldn't make any difference if Stan knew about the ghost. I still have never told him; I will let her do that. Instead, I let him tell me about Jesus, which he does every Saturday when we go to visit the De Soto. We sit on the bench by the beautiful car with the plastic sunbursts on top, and Stan tells me about his vision, about how Jesus came and gave him hope. He never tires of telling me, and because I know it was my son who gave him hope, I never tire of listening. I would surely lose my patience otherwise, for Stan's sermons now are much more fervent even than they were when first we came here. I wonder sometimes how Lisa can stand it. And yet she is happy, and Stan's church has begun to grow again: he has found his fire, Lisa says, and its light is drawing others.

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