Read After the First Death Page 11


  “You said we,” Kate said. “Who was we? Your family, your parents?”

  “Only my brother Aniel and me. He was two years older.”

  “How about your parents?”

  He translated the American word parents into the word for mother and father in the old language and tried at the same time to summon feeling, emotion, something, but could not.

  “I never knew my father,” Miro said. “I never knew my mother.” For some reason, he always felt guilty about this: not knowing his parents, having no remembrance of them. Why did he feel guilty? He pondered this in the small hours of the night when sleep did not come. Do not waste your time with the past, Artkin had told him once. The past is gone; the present is enough. And the future will bring us back our homeland. He had said to Artkin: “My father and my mother are in the past, and if I don’t remember them, who will?” And Artkin had turned away without an answer. So Artkin did not know everything, after all.

  Now, Miro said to the girl, “I have no memory of them.”

  There was a strange expression on her face. What was it? Sadness? No. He would have treated a sad look from her with contempt. He did not want her sadness. The look told of something else but he could not name it. A strangeness in her eyes as if in a moment she would either burst forth with laughter or dissolve in tears. He was confused. No one had ever looked at him with such—such intimacy before. And to cover his confusion, he found himself telling her:

  “In those days, there were always attacks on the border. And there were times when we did not know who was enemy or friend. Mines were planted in the gardens. Cattle was slaughtered in border raids. Planes dropped bombs or raked the earth with machine-gun fire. Homes were burned. Aniel said that our father and mother were blown up by a mine planted in our garden. Someone told him this. But Aniel also said: ‘Let us not talk about it. They are alive in us. As long as we are alive, one of us, then they will never be dead.’ And now Aniel is dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. And he looked at her again. For signs of—he did not know what. She was only a girl, an American at that, and she meant nothing to him outside of the fact that she was his victim, his first death. She should have been dead hours ago. She would be dead hours from now. By his hand. His gun. Who was she to say I’m sorry? Only those most intimate should say words like that. Even Artkin had not said them, but had turned away in respect.

  Kate sensed that she was losing him, that she had said something to turn him off. He had been so open one moment and then his faced had closed her out, his eyes dropping away. Maybe it hurt him to talk about his parents and his dead brother. Maybe her instincts were correct, after all, and she was on the right track: he was vulnerable, sensitive. She couldn’t lose him now. Instinctively, she turned to the oldest weapon she knew, remembering how it had never failed her.

  “You speak English beautifully,” she said, flattering him, of course, but knowing there was truth in the flattery. “You must have a special talent for languages.”

  Miro blushed with pleasure. But like so many things, there was pain in the pleasure. The girl’s statement also made him think again of Aniel. Poor Aniel. Dead before his time. Good with weapons as Miro had been good with languages. Aniel had been good with his hands as well. His hands, too, were weapons. He struck swiftly and with accuracy. He knew the parts of the body that were most vulnerable to attack. His hands could kill as quickly as a knife or bullet. But Aniel had been a slow student in other respects. Especially language. Miro had excelled at languages. You should have been a scholar, his instructor had once said. In a time of peace, he might have have been.

  The girl persisted: “Did you go to a special language school?”

  “I went to a special school,” he said, wondering if she noticed the irony of his words. And then he found himself telling her about this special school that was not really a school at all, not with desks and chairs arranged neatly like the pictures he had seen of American classrooms. The building was sunk into the earth with no windows. The blackboards were sheets of wrinkled paper pinned to the walls. The education received in the school was intense and concentrated. You are here to learn what you must know to survive and what you must know to gain back our homeland, the instructor had said. He was an old man with many scars on his face. He taught the use of weapons and explosives. Combat: with the knife, the gun, the hands. The diagrams of the human body outlined on the blackboard were indelibly stamped on Miro’s mind. Even now, Miro could touch certain spots on a body that would cause a victim to grovel with pain. Yet Miro had enjoyed the other lessons more: reading and the languages. The languages were important because everyone was trained for a destination, to carry out revolutionary acts throughout the world. The countries of Europe. Africa. America. Miro and Aniel were assigned the English language; their destination, America. The instruction actually concentrated only on the rudiments of language, enough to read street signs and order food in restaurants and stores so as not to call attention to themselves, to know what newspaper head-lines meant or newscasts on radio and television. And the usual vocabulary of intimidation to be used in robberies, confrontations: pigs, war, up with your hands, we will kill, die.… Miro discovered that he had a talent for language, and a teacher who had lived in Brooklyn many years before (Miro felt a kind of regret when later they had blown up the post office there) had encouraged him and brought him books and gave him special instructions. But he had to study in secret. This had amused Aniel. The school itself was a secret place; while the authorities allowed the refugees to live citizenless in the camps, they forbade them to conduct schools, making education clandestine, carried out under guard. “Here you are,” Aniel had said, “studying secretly in a secret place. A secret within a secret.” And yet Miro knew that Aniel was proud of his brother’s talent, just as Miro was proud of Aniel’s skill with weapons.

  “Katie, Katie,” the child cried again—or perhaps it was another child—and Miro started in surprise. He had been carried away by his words and his memories, and had in fact forgotten the presence of the girl to whom he was addressing those words. Had he revealed too much of himself?

  The child persisted in her cries.

  “I should go to her,” the girl said, apologetically.

  Miro was pleased with her reluctance to leave. Perhaps she had been interested in what he had been saying. Perhaps he was winning her over, at last.

  The crying child was Karen, the dark-haired girl who wore tiny onyx earrings, no larger than periods at the end of sentences. She was half asleep, whimpering, having a bad dream maybe. Kate drew her on her lap and pressed the child close. The child spoke unintelligibly, gibberish, the language of dreams and nightmares.

  “There, there,” Kate murmured, herself dreamy, held in the thrall of Miro’s words. The boy stumbling through refugee camps, no parents, his brother dead, taught violence in an underground school. She thought of her own life, placid and pointless by comparison, safe and secure. On the edge of pity for the boy, she realized that their two lives had brought them here to the bus where she was a victim, not the boy. His life had prepared him for this moment. Hers hadn’t. He was prepared to hurt and to kill. She was prepared for nothing. Certainly, not to be brave. But being brave shouldn’t be something that you are trained for, should it? Bravery should be an interior quality, summoned from within. Where is mine? Kate asked herself dismally. Where is mine?

  The child dozed, the dream having passed, her face serene once more. Although it was hot in the bus, Kate drew comfort from the child’s closeness, the warmth and softness against her. She closed her eyes and it was nice to rest for a moment, suspend her thoughts, drift in the darkness.

  She might have fallen asleep for a few moments, floating beautifully, suspended in time, cut loose from here and now. Then her eyes flew open and Miro was there, crouched on the floor beside her.

  “Do you like Elvis Presley?” he asked, his face so close she could smell his breath, faintly acid.

  Th
e question was so unexpected that she laughed, laughter as unplanned as a hiccup.

  “Why do you laugh?” He was serious, unsmiling.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. You surprised me.” Boy! Elvis Presley. “Yes, I like Elvis Presley.” But she didn’t, really; she neither liked nor disliked him: he was passé, old stuff, dead a few years now. “I didn’t expect you even knew about Elvis Presley,” she said.

  “I have been here in America more than three years. I have a transistor but it is not allowed on operations. I like the Bee Gees, too. And disco.”

  He stood up abruptly and turned away, as if he had said too much. Kate watched him return to the back of the bus. She marveled at him. He could tell her casually about his ability to hurt a person with his hands, but it embarrassed him to say he liked Presley and the Bee Gees.

  After a while, she placed the child on the seat and made her way down the aisle. She had to continue her pursuit of Miro. She couldn’t lose him.

  He sat alert as usual; he never really relaxed, always watching, always on guard.

  She sat in the seat next to the last, legs out in the aisle, conscious of the key in her sneaker. Keep him talking, she told herself, keep him talking.

  “If you and your brother wandered through the camps with nobody to look after you, how did you end up in school?” she asked.

  He said nothing. Didn’t stir. As if she had not spoken.

  She felt enclosed in the silence, removed from the small sounds of the children sleeping and stirring, sounds that had become so familiar that she was barely aware of them, like the sound of her own breathing. The outside world was distant, far away.

  “Artkin,” Miro said, finally. “Artkin found us in the camps and brought us to the school.”

  “How old were you?”

  He hesitated again. Should he be telling the girl all this? He had never spoken of these things before. And his age. He was not sure, really, of his age. In the camp, they had given him a birth date, and it had been chosen to suit his height and weight and growth. The same with Aniel. So now he passed for sixteen but it was possible that he was fifteen or seventeen. “I was eight or nine when I went to the school,” he said. “I do not remember.” But he did remember how Artkin found them. They had been living for a few weeks in the ruins of a house that had been burned. The smell of embers filled their nostrils as they slept at night. It was the season of chill, when the winds blew dust across the land and the dust entered everywhere, even the pores. Aniel was older and a hotblood. So he let Miro make use of whatever they had to cover them, old coats and rags or sometimes paper. Artkin came along and saw them. They were afraid of him at first. He stared at them a long time from across the street one morning as they prepared for another day of foraging for food or whatever they could turn to food. Artkin crossed the street and questioned them gruffly. “Are you hungry?” he said finally after asking them about their comings and goings and receiving only vague answers. The answers were vague because they had only a dim idea of where they were and where they had wandered, and for how long. Wandering was their way of life and they did not question it—just as one does not question how one learns to run or walk or leap across puddles. When Artkin asked if they were hungry, they gave him a positive reply. He grunted and beckoned them to follow. He took them to the school in a nearby refugee camp. It looked like all the other camps from the outside, but Miro and Aniel learned that it was really a training school for freedom fighters. Artkin left them there. The camp and the school became their home for the next few years. Artkin visited them on occasion. He recruited other fighters, although Miro and Aniel were the youngest. Artkin seldom allowed an expression to show on his face, but he seemed proud of their accomplishments; interested, at least. Then at last their assignment was given: America. And their leader: Artkin.

  Miro hesitated now. Again, he wondered: Have I told too much?

  Kate, almost mesmerized by Miro’s recital, asked, “What was your assignment in America?”

  “To bomb,” Miro said. “To plant bombs in the cities. Brooklyn, the post office. Detroit, the automobile plant. Los Angeles …”

  Headlines leaped to Kate’s mind. Television newscasts as well. Those bombings. The explosion in the Brooklyn post office where innocent people died—a young mother and child blown to bits as the woman mailed a letter. And the others. Kate was hazy about statistics, how many dead, how many injured. But she remembered that people had died and were hurt. She remembered the passing outrage she’d felt in the moment before the commercial came on or just before she turned to the entertainment section of the paper to see what was playing at Cinema 1 or 2 or 3 or 4. But for an agonizing moment she had been caught up in the horror of the news, and now that horror visited her again as she sat across from Miro and realized that he had been involved in all those explosions which killed and wounded innocent people. And mixed up with the horror was guilt, as well, for having allowed the terrible events to pass over her without impact except for that small pause of momentary sympathy before she checked on the movie she might go to that night.

  “All those people who died,” Kate said. “How could you?”

  Miro looked at her patiently. “But this is war, Kate. I told you. We are at war, and people die in wartime.”

  She wanted to say: Don’t call me Kate, don’t you dare call me Kate. But didn’t. Another small defeat.

  “Didn’t you feel anything for them at all?”

  “Who?”

  “Those who died. The mother and child in the post office. Didn’t you realize what you were doing?”

  Miro looked at her blankly. What did she want from him? What did she want him to say?

  My God, Kate thought, turning away, looking at the blank taped window. She brought her knees up to her chin and sank back in the seat out of his view. She did not want to see him at this moment. He had seduced her with his pathetic tale of wandering through the camps as a child and had somehow enlisted her sympathy. But now she recognized him for what he was: a monster. And the greatest horror of all was that he did not know he was a monster. He had looked at her with innocent eyes as he told her of killing people. She’d always thought of innocence as something good, something to cherish. People mourned the death of innocence. Someone had written a theme paper on the topic in school. But innocence, she saw now, could also be evil. Monstrous.

  Miro sat in anguish, empty of words now. Anguish because he could not understand this girl. And he also wondered why he tried to understand her. Her life was one way of living, his another. He felt anger as she continued to remain hidden from him, out of sight. She did not see the world as it existed. She looked at the world through her ignorant American eyes as she drifted through her schoolgirl years. His life had purpose and direction. Dedication. Who was this girl to turn away from that kind of dedication?

  He came to his feet and looked down at her. She seemed shriveled into a ball, her face indistinct in the shadows. He searched for words to bring her out into the open again. “The blood that spills is the fuel that will bring us back our homeland,” he said, trying to recall slogans he had learned in the school. “Some must die so that others may live. We are all soldiers although we wear no uniforms.”

  “But the children,” Kate said. “They’re not soldiers. What do they know about the world, your terrible war? One child has already died. He might have grown up to be somebody special. Someone who might have been a great man.”

  “Aniel, too, might have been a great man, but he is dead and you do not mourn him,” Miro said. But even as he said the words he pondered a truth as bleak as the camps he had roamed as a child: Had he mourned not for Aniel but for himself?

  part

  7

  Where are you, Ben?

  I’ve been waiting here for you more than a half hour, although it seems longer. But you haven’t appeared. I returned to the room after swallowing the pill and visiting awhile with Dean Albertson—he’s as long-winded as ever, impossible to get aw
ay from—and arrived here to find the room empty.

  This is a nice room, Ben, as rooms at Castle go. Your bed is neatly made—you have always been fastidious. Your papers are piled in a neat stack near the typewriter; a theme paper, I suppose. The walls are bare like your room at home. Clutter always irritated you. I lived in the John Quincy Adams wing as a student. On the second floor. I went up there today before going to meet Dean Albertson and stood outside the room. The door was closed, the corridor deserted.

  But I didn’t go in.

  Maybe I was afraid of seeing ghosts.

  Which is ridiculous, of course. If I should encounter ghosts here, they would be friendly ghosts. I spent some of the happiest years of my life here at Castle. Too brief, however. And too swift. Along came the war and I didn’t see this place for years and years until they asked me to appear as a guest lecturer some time ago.

  I was always happy here, Ben, with my friends. I hoped you would be, too. And make friends like mine. Jack Harkness was my closest friend. On the Monday morning after December 7, 1941, we joined up together, fled this place in a fever of patriotism, hitched a ride and made our way to Boston. We served overseas together. The Pacific Theater. The islands. All those places for which the streets at Fort Delta are named. I walk down Iwo Jima Avenue at Delta and remember Jack Harkness who died there and is buried there. I vowed over his grave that he would not have died in vain. Does that sound naive and embarrassingly patriotic and old-fashioned? A vow like that? We were poorly trained in those days, Ben, but trained superbly in one thing: patriotism. There are all kinds of patriotism; ours was pure and sweet and unquestioning. We were the good guys. Today, there is still patriotism, of course. But this generation is questioning. This generation looks at itself in a mirror as it performs its duties. And wonders: Who are the good guys? Is it possible we are the bad guys? They should never ask that question, Ben, or even contemplate it.