A Time of Miracles (6 page)

After a while, though, the line moves and suddenly tightens. We jump up. Stambek begins pulling with all his strength.

“A big one! A big one!” he shouts as a silvery back and fin float up. “Hurry, Koumaïl!”

I rush to help. I lean over to catch the line, when suddenly I slide on the slippery bank and fall into the ice-cold lake. I sink! I choke on a mouthful of water!
Helpmehelpme!

Stambek lets go of everything and pulls me out. I’m shaking all over, my lips are blue, and my ears are sore. The big fish is gone, together with the radio antenna, the line, and the nail.

I’m the only thing that Stambeck has caught.

I cough up putrid water from my lungs, then I throw up, and Stambek takes me back home straightaway.

Back in the shed my teeth are chattering so much that Gloria says she thinks she hears Spanish castanets. She swears as she undresses me. My clothes are so stiff with cold that they’re like cardboard.

“God damn it, Koumaïl!” she groans. “What a strange idea to go swimming in this kind of weather.”

She rubs me hard enough to skin me, but I keep shivering and I can’t say a word. My thoughts are frozen in my head.

Stambek and Mr. Betov come back, their arms loaded with blankets. They take me to the corner of the room where Gloria has set up a stove, and they cover me with several layers and start a fire. Stambek mumbles some excuses as his father slaps his head.

“There’s nothing in there!” he keeps repeating. “Nothing but wind!”

I fall into such a deep sleep that it feels as if I’m sinking to the center of the earth.

I’M
sick. I can’t get up. I can’t do anything.

Gloria can’t stop working, otherwise we won’t have any money. So Mr. Betov asks his daughters Suki and Maya to take turns watching me while Gloria drives the truck.

“We are a large family and yours is small,” Mr. Betov says. “I can lend my daughters for a few days!”

My illness lasts exactly six days.

The twins stay by my bedside. They burn fragrant herbs; they dab my feverish forehead with a wet cloth and put their cool hands under my neck to help me sit up. They make me drink tea. Liters of it! With honey and extracts.

I try to remember the names of the medicinal plants old Lin taught us at the university for the poor. In the fog of my fever, I recite: “Suma powder, excellent tonic … 
Eucalyptus globulus
to treat sinus infections … cinnamon oil to soothe a cough and fever … camphor for massages …”

Suki takes my pulse. Her fingers are as light and delicate
as a bird’s legs. I tell her silly things, and when she laughs, I see her beauty spot disappear in a dimple.

Maya sings. Her voice lulls me and I go to sleep without coughing, submerged by a flow of sweetness. When I wake up, I feel her face near me, with the beauty spot that punctuates the sentence of her eyebrows. I ask her what is written there.

She squints a little and answers.

“Suki is right! You just say any foolish thing, Koumaïl!”

Unlike Stambek, Maya and Suki don’t have wind in their heads. They tell me what their life was like before the war, when they lived in a large brick house, far from Souma-Soula. One day a bomb fell and their house collapsed. Stambek stayed for three days and nights under the debris, and everybody thought he was dead.

“But when the rescuers got him out, he was whole!” Maya smiles. “It took us a while to notice that his mind had stayed in the rubble.”

Suki sighs. “Maybe one day we’ll find it again,” she says. “The war has taken many things from many people.”

I shiver under my blankets. “But if your house hadn’t collapsed,” I say, “if the train hadn’t derailed, if the militia hadn’t taken Vassili’s orchard, and if they hadn’t chased us to the other side of the Psezkaya River, I wouldn’t have fallen in the lake.”

“So?” Suki inquires, perplexed.

I turn red and shut my eyes. War is bad, that much is true. And it’s true that it has taken many things from many people. But it has also given me Gloria and my first taste of love. How can you explain something so strange? I wonder.

When Gloria comes back from work, her face so coated in road dust that she looks like a relative of Abdelmalik, I ask her if one has the right to be happy in wartime. She looks at me gravely and wipes her dirty cheeks before answering.

“To be happy is recommended at all times, Monsieur Blaise!” she says.

UNFORTUNATELY
, the best of times have to come to an end. I have no choice but to get better and go back to work on the mountain. From now on I am forbidden to accompany Stambek on his walks, and he’s not allowed to go to the lake anymore. But Suki and Maya still visit us in the evening.

We are less tired now that we’re used to working hard. We sit on the tarp and play with cards that I made out of cardboard. I teach them the rules of poker, bridge, and blackjack the way Kouzma taught us, which means cheating. Suki has lots of fun, and Maya gets irritated because she doesn’t like to lose. When we need a fourth player, we call Stambek.

“It’s very simple,” I say. “You have five cards. When two of them have the same numerical rank, you’ve got a pair. If you have three of the same numerical rank, it’s even better. If all your cards are of the same color, it’s a flush.”

Stambek concentrates so hard that he breaks into a
sweat. It’s sad to see him like this, with his brain full of holes! I promise myself that one day I’ll take my grapnel and, instead of looking for nickel wires, I’ll dig in the ruins to recover Stambek’s intelligence.

“Well, I’m sleepy,” Maya says suddenly.

“Yes, I’m exhausted,” Suki adds.

We put the cards aside, and Stambek is relieved to be going back home. Before they leave, the twins kiss me on the cheek. My heart lights on fire faster than dry straw. But as soon as they’re gone, the fire dies down and a feeling of emptiness fills my stomach. Love makes me feel hot and cold; the pure and simple truth is that I’m not sure I can survive it.

More and more wounded soldiers arrive in Souma-Soula. Some have lost an eye, a leg, an arm. Some have lost their minds and wander around shouting like crazy. That’s all we see of the war. Mr. Betov says that “the theater of operations” is far from us, somewhere up north, and that we are refugees. I like the word “refugees.” It must mean that we are sheltered, which reassures me.

In my mind, war looks like a ferocious and famished beast hiding in the nooks of the mountains and the dark forests shown on page 79 of my green atlas. I put my finger on the winding roads and imagine the unavoidable advance of armies looking for one another. Bombs crush and rip villages open. War chases families away, destroys pasturelands, gobbles up soldiers. It is voracious.

Sometimes I think about Zemzem and about Gloria’s brothers. This monstrous animal may have devoured them.
I don’t dare ask Gloria what she thinks, because I don’t want to make her sad.

“And what if the war comes to Souma-Soula?” is the only thing I say. “What will we do?”

“What we’ve always done, Koumaïl,” she answers. “Walk straight ahead toward new horizons.”

“OK, but we’ll go with the Betovs, right?”

“Who knows? There are so many ways to get lost. Especially in the Caucasus!”

I study the maps again and I see the dotted lines of borders that get entangled from one valley to the other. I see Georgia, Abkhazia, Armenia, Chechnya, North Ossetia and South Ossetia, Ingushetia, Dagestan.…

Gloria shakes her head. “Too many countries,” she says. “Too many people! Borderlines move and names change constantly. At the end of the day, only ruins and unhappy people are left. It’s useless to try to understand the Caucasus, Monsieur Blaise. Leave it alone. It’s not your concern, little French guy, OK?”

“OK.”

I turn the pages. My fingers slide west, following winding paths, until I land in France, as usual. No war. No militia. Things are much simpler over there, thanks to the republic.

“What would be nice,” I say, “is for all of us to go there. Even Vassili, Zemzem, your brothers, Emil and Baksa. And my father, too, if we can find him. That would be a good surprise for my mother. We could organize a big reunion!”

I get overexcited: we could even go farther, per page 17, up to England! Gloria bends over my shoulder to study the
route with me. We jump over the mountains, the dotted lines, the rivers, and my finger reaches France, where there is a town named Calais.

“We’ll take a boat because there’s no bridge,” I say.

“No need. Even better, there’s a tunnel,” Gloria explains to me. “Engineers spent a lot of time studying the best way to dig it. It was finished last year.”

“A tunnel under the sea?”

“Exactly!” Gloria says. “A tunnel with a train.”

I can hardly believe this. My finger stays on this part of the world where people were digging under the sea. “I want to cross the English Channel through the tunnel,” I say. “The two of us.”

“OK,” she says.

Gloria never discourages my dreams. But she tells me that in the meantime I have to go to sleep because it’s late. I ask her to tell me my story, with every detail, like always. As I lie half-asleep, the trains get jumbled and I see the express train catch on fire as it cuts through waves and shoves aside bewildered fish.

WINTER
returns to Souma-Soula, and a rumor circulates from shed to shed that a curse has fallen over the dwellers of the lake area. It seems that several women have given birth to monstrous children.

“The first one didn’t have a head!” Suki tells me.

“The second one had two of them!” Maya says with a grimace.

“Who told you that?” I ask.

“Chief! He saw them!” they both say.

After further investigation it turns out that Chief didn’t see anything, but that he knows an older Russian man whose sister-in-law gave birth to a child with three arms.

“Ugh!” the girls cry out. “Three arms!”

The grown-ups refuse to believe us until Gloria meets a special convoy on the road to the factory.

“Men in armored cars,” she tells me. “They were wearing coveralls, glasses, and masks over their mouths.”

“Like astronauts?”

“Exactly! And they were going straight to the lake. It must be serious!”

Shortly after that we learn that fishing is forbidden and that all access to the lake has been cordoned off. The men in coveralls have set up tents. According to Mr. Betov, they are scientists sent by the government to analyze the water, the soil, and even the innards of the fish. It seems likely that the lake has been spoiled by toxic waste coming from the former lightbulb factory. This would explain the birth of monstrous children. But how, exactly? Nobody knows! Everyone is fearful. Several families have already left the area, and others are beginning to pack up.

As a result, Mr. Betov gives me sideways glances, as if I were headless or had a third arm growing out of my back. Suddenly I feel ill at ease.

“Sorry, Koumaïl, but you fell in the lake’s poisoned water,” he tells me. “One has to be careful. As long as we don’t know what’s going on, Suki and Maya can’t visit you anymore. And I have to ask you to work at a distance from us. I hope you understand?”

His words strike me like a blow. To be kept away is the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I cry a long time in Gloria’s arms, shouting that it’s unfair, that I’m not sick, and that if I hadn’t fallen in the lake, we would have eaten fish and would all be contaminated.

But it’s too late.

Suki and Maya avoid me. They keep their heads down and walk faster when they see me. As for Stambek, he looks very sad but he obeys his father.

*   *   *

I no longer have a sense of belonging on the mountain of glass. I’m like a wounded soul, alone with my grapnel and my sorrow. To cheer myself up, I dig through the trash and look for strings for Oleg’s violin and batteries for Fotia’s radio. I manage to find what I need; now instead of playing cards at night, I fix the precious things. When I’m done, the violin squeaks a sinister sound and the radio crackles.

“Better than nothing!” Gloria says encouragingly.

But I can see that she’s forcing herself to smile.

More and more families are leaving, and army recruiters fall on us like locusts on the harvest. They come to recruit volunteers for the front. One day I see Chief in a military truck with other men. He makes a V sign to me as they take off, and I remain alone in the gusts of autumn wind.

I wander the streets, which feel chilled with an atmosphere of doom, as Gloria struggles to keep driving the now half-filled truck. She will drive as long as possible because each coin earned is a step toward the future.

“What future?” I ask with a sigh.

“Come on, Koumaïl, cheer up! You’re much too young to say such things!”

But one morning I discover that the Betovs’ shed is empty. Nothing left. No pots or pans, no blanket. They left without even saying goodbye.

I stand in the deserted room, my throat so knotted that I cannot breathe.

When I turn around, I see one of my playing cards pinned on the door. I remove it. It’s the ace of hearts: the only message of love that Suki and Maya had time to leave me.

I
am ten now, with a broken heart and bleeding feet and an empty stomach. And once again I’m walking on endless roads toward the unknown with Gloria and our gear. We’re refugees without refuge, and I really believe that I’ve caught a despair.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk!” Gloria says. “If I give you a thorough inspection, Koumaïl, I’m sure that I won’t find any parasites!”

I shrug. “Don’t bother. I’m older. I know that what I feel has nothing to do with lice.”

Abruptly Gloria stops walking and gives me a sideways glance. She throws the gear on the ground and opens it. We are in the middle of a snow-covered field, under a heavy sky filled with circling crows. What is she doing? I wonder. Does she think I want to camp here?

“It’s true that you’ve grown a lot, Koumaïl,” she says as she looks into the opening of the gear. “It’s time that I confide in you what my secret remedy is.”