Children of Paradise: A Novel (40 page)

He asks Nora to give him a shave and cut his hair. He reclines in his armchair and says all the men in the community should cut their hair and shave:

—No long hair, no Afros, no beards, no ponytails, no plaits, this is not a hippie commune.

Nora asks him to please keep still. He keeps muttering about the need to look like a tidy church no matter how big the challenges posed by the environment. Nora nips him with the razor, a small cut that produces a droplet of red over the white soap. She apologizes as he jumps out of the armchair, half of his face clean and half covered in soap and bristles. She drops the razor and he snatches it off the floor and chases her around the armchair and she runs to the front door screaming for help. He stops at the front door and she bounds down the stairs and he pelts the razor at her. He asks the guards at the door to retrieve his razor blade stuck down in the yard and to tell his assistant to come back to the house and to stop making a spectacle of herself.

Trina, Rose, and others bring Ryan food saved a little at a time from their meals. He thanks them but they remind him that he stole bread for them, the sweetest bread they ever tasted, and their scraps are nothing in comparison. He leaves the dormitory in a work detail with other children and never singles himself out from the group and the other children surround him so that he blends in as one of over three hundred children going about their daily chores.

T
he delegation of concerned parents and relatives, politicians and community leaders, and members of the press arrives at the capital to a full parade organized by the president’s office. They stay in the best hotel, with a view of the sea, as guests of the government. The hotel is the only tower of its kind for miles and boasts a bird’s-eye view of the muddy Atlantic shoreline. Children bathe in the surf and emerge with mud heads. The delegation watches the children cavorting, and once in a while a breeze lifts their voices to the twelfth-floor balconies. A seawall curves out of sight and couples walk arm in arm along a path on top of it. A fisherman riding a bike on the wall looks like a circus act. The entire lower half of his body and his bicycle draped with a fish net make him and his bicycle resemble a fresh catch getting away on two wheels.

The delegation arrives early to talk to locals who know the commune, to hear what they can about how the commune residents appear to outsiders. The woman who cleans the commune offices in the city says the building is always a hive of activity, even at five-thirty
A.M
., when she turns up to start cleaning the building from top to bottom—people of all shapes and sizes coming and going, meetings lasting all manner of hours, and lots of prayer, loud and persistent and liable to break out at any moment but nothing sinister. The electrician says the place uses a lot of electricity and has more electrical outlets and surveillance equipment than usual for that size property and for an ecclesiastical undertaking. The parking meter attendant says they always have cars coming and going, but they always beg him for grace when he tries to write a visitor a ticket. They carry guns, but they never make him feel that he cannot write them a ticket if he wants to write one.

No children are ever seen at the offices. No one in the city ever converts to the discipline because the terms of surrendering everything to the commune exceed by far the usual tithe or midweek Bible study or any of the extra demands of a church on its community to serve, to worship, to testify, to sing, and to bring in others. The delegation asks to tour the building, and the commune says the place has been recently mothballed and all activities moved back to the commune. The official date for their visit must be respected.

The president’s office outlines the social and economic benefits of the commune to the country. The delegation sees flowcharts and graphs of facts and figures about the jobs the commune creates for the country and the money it spends. Chief among the benefits to the young and the old, the ungodly and the materialist, has to be the commune’s Christian faith; it presents an enduring and convincing model of a productive citizen. The president’s office wants to know how a delegation can find fault with people who read the Bible and worship daily.

The American politician leading the delegation says he has testimony that those who join the church can never leave it and must cut all ties with relatives outside of it. If people really associate with the church of their own free will, then why the secrecy and remote location? Why the hostility to scrutiny from outsiders? What about the parents who have left the church and say their children are still being held captive? These are some of the questions that a visit will settle. Has the commune committed some crime, crossed some legal line, or contravened some rule? The delegation lists contempt of court and some shady financial dealings back in the U.S. The delegation must see the place to ascertain whether the inhabitants, who are still U.S. citizens though far away, remain there voluntarily. And there is the unresolved issue of the subpoena for the three children and the preacher’s dismissal of a court order. The delegation and the president’s office debate this for a while:

—Your police force, bound by the courts, needs to enforce these court orders.

—But our police force has its hands full chasing dangerous criminals. The commune leader is no danger to society.

—Not to your society maybe, but what about his thousand followers?

—They’re American citizens.

—In that case, a conscientious American is well within his rights to make a citizen’s arrest of this man.

—Have you traveled all this way to make a citizen’s arrest?

—No, the delegation’s mission is a fact-finding one.

The delegation tours the botanical gardens. They admire the gigantism of Rafflesia, and right on cue, a flower as big as a hand basin and sealed for twenty years opens its vault and emits the strongest and most nose-pinching rotten-meat smell south of the equator, to the delight of the delegation, who reach for cameras and handkerchiefs to cover their noses and mouths. The gardeners tell them that this is a lucky omen for their visit and that they should make a wish. Many people pause and think of something that they dearly want to happen. If only this sealed flower were the commune waiting to open its gates and reveal all to the delegation. At the zoo, they stop and wait for the sloth to stop imitating a carbuncle on a tree trunk, but to no avail, and an anteater snorkeling a viand of ants earns applause and shudders from the delegation. Many nibble at blood pudding but draw the line at souse—pig feet in a clear lime stew. And mutton in a bun proves too stringy for some. The biggest hit is the country’s red rum, for its sweetness and the traces of molasses. The iced tea, brewed from a root, tastes too medicinal; the shavings of sugared coconut, fried with a touch of spice, too distinctive. Most of the delegation tries to limbo but give up about waist-level and marvel at the locals scraping the floor with their backs to make it under the stick.

The delegation walks along Market Street outside the covered area with its cavernous alleys and lopsided shops of dubious commercial brokerage. They interview vendors and shoppers alike, and each time they ask about the commune, they are painted the same picture of efficiency and beneficence. But then the handpicked guides of the delegation confuse a right turn with a left, and by the time they get their bearings, it is too late. The delegation is halfway along a row of diminutive shops and overstocked stalls belonging to the government opposition, and the same question to shoppers and vendors results in talk about commune men moving around the city in packs, wielding Kalashnikovs and big sticks and buying favors from high-ranking ministers, and in one instance armed commune guards look on as a woman from the commune whips a grown man in public for going about his humble business in ways of which the commune does not approve.

—The government hires them to break up our demonstrations.

—They run people out of business and out of town if you cross them.

An old woman lifts the blouse to show the delegation the scars on her back from a beating she claims she received at the hands of commune guards at the central office, who accused her of stealing. Like judge, jury, and executioner, they just decided she must be guilty, and they beat her black and blue and threw her into the street half-naked. No police would take her case, she says, when they heard from her mouth that the commune had beaten her up like that.

Others say that pork-knockers embark on diamond prospecting trips into the jungle and emerge months later from the bush with precious stones and with stories of a commune where people disappear.

—They walk into the place and are never seen again, and the ovens smell of burning flesh.

—The children have no parents, and the adults behave as if they were born full grown and self-sufficient and never needed suckling.

A man with long dreadlocks and a crooked staff (to correct a limp he says he got from a snakebitten ankle) describes how he worked as a guide in the jungle interior for a U.S. government agent who told him that the commune is a mind-control experiment.

—How else can so many Americans commandeer so much of our land and do whatever they please without any inquiry from our government?

—They’re there to mount an attack on the neighboring country because they occupy disputed territory.

—They have enough guns and chemicals to defeat our army and take over our country.

The delegation makes copious notes. Their time in the country has been managed so well that, to this point, they have encountered only citizens held under the government’s mesmeric influence. But the picture of the commune painted by these eyewitness accounts, even if partially hearsay, adds to the troublesome one the delegation left their own land with and crossed the sea to find corroborative evidence about. Nearly a thousand lives are at stake, many hundreds of them children.

—I don’t want to give my name. My child is held captive at the commune. I made the mistake of walking into their office and asking about their commune after they gave me food and money to get me through a bad patch I was going through. I took the boat ride with my child, and we got there, and after a day or so, no more, I realized my big mistake. The food was scarce and the children trained to punish each other for the slightest mistakes, and the adults worked from sunup to sundown and the kids were put to work before and after school, and the one sermon I heard made me believe I was in hell and waiting to get to heaven. I wanted to take the next boat out of there. But they would not let me leave. They surrounded me and asked what made me such a weak woman and a bad mother for a child who needed guidance. They said I had to stay. That faith in the commune was a process. They carried long sticks, and I could see I was next in line for a beating. But I kept saying I wanted to leave. Then they told me: Okay, you can go, but your child must stay. They insisted I was free to leave and they made my child tell me to my face that I could go but she wanted to stay there. I was chased out of the place with big sticks, and my poor girl had to stay behind. No one in charge in this city wants to hear my story. Thank you for coming all this way to do something about it. My girl’s name is Rose. She’s seven now, this was taken a little after her sixth birthday.

She hands them a passport-sized color photo of a little girl with a broad toothless smile. Other mothers and fathers press similar pictures of their missing children into the hands of the delegation. The government officials, with help from the police, chase off the surprise petitioners and herd the delegation back onto the official path to the isolated privacy of the luxury hotel. The next thing the delegation knows, the time arrives for their long-anticipated visit to the People’s Commune.

A twin-propeller Cessna chartered from an ex–military officer turned entrepreneur waits for them at the capital’s private airport. The same flight operator organizes tours of the country’s interior for dignitaries from abroad who invariably want to fly over the rain forest and land near a waterfall for lunch, meet a local indigenous tribe, buy a few arts and crafts, and fly back in time for a sumptuous dinner at the best hotel in the city.

As a result of the eyewitness accounts at the market and the pictorial evidence of several children in captivity, the leader of the delegation requests a last-minute meeting with the country’s president. Granted a mere fifteen minutes, the delegation leader presents a number of questions. First, does the delegation require security for their visit to the commune? The president replies that he thinks it would be overkill to send a peaceful delegation under armed guard to a Christian camp. The leader of the delegation agrees that their intention is peaceful, a fact-finding mission, and perhaps they have nothing to worry about. Second, can the president guarantee the delegation’s safety? And third, what about the rescue of those captive children? The president replies in his most legal voice, tinged with thinly disguised irritation, that because the delegation’s visit is not from government to government, and because both delegation and commune are guests of his country and welcome guests so long as both obey the laws of the land, the answer has to be no, his government cannot guarantee the safety of the delegation even if, in his government’s humble estimation, no such security is necessary. The president explains away the use of guns by the commune guards this way: One, commune guards have security clearance to bear arms; two, they carry guns as a result of their remote location frequented by wildlife, bandits, and pork-knockers; and three, with no proper police presence in the area to summon in an emergency, it makes sense for them to police themselves. The president even tries to make light of the situation with an anecdote. He says the only rumor he ever hears is about some drunkard watch repairman whose sole complaint against the commune is that the guards fired on him and destroyed his precious timepieces. The president can hardly contain himself as he chuckles and concludes by saying that by firing on the watch repairman’s merchandise of various and sundry timepieces, it is clear that the commune guards were not trying to kill the watch repairman but trying to kill time.