Cities of Refuge (3 page)

“You shouldn’t travel alone in some places. And I didn’t want you in that army of young, idealistic nortamericanos who go down to pick coffee beans and come back over-pronouncing Nicaragua.”

“So I shouldn’t be alone but I shouldn’t be with others.”

“I get waves of students who insist we’re all the same under the skin. We are not the same. History separates us. We celebrate skin and the surfaces of things in the well-to-do West. Culture is a difference-maker. And usually it fuels oppression and war. We like to pretend otherwise and pick beans and buy blankets and invite everyone to our house. And hide them in the basement if necessary.”

The argument against her volunteer work usually ran that she was in over her head and didn’t know it. She did in fact know it, but admitting doubt to him won her nothing. She had to seem sure of herself, not at all who she’d been in university. Long before quitting her Ph.D. there were signs she didn’t belong on her father’s career path. Her work lacked scholarly rigour. Her undergraduate history papers had admitted quite a lot of speculation. She’d even slipped into the voices of runaway slaves in the mountains of Jamaica and the last thoughts of Jean de Brébeuf, a Jesuit tortured to death by the Iroquois in the seventeenth century. The problem, as one of her profs had said, was that critical
understanding didn’t interest her as much as empathy. “But you can empathize on your own time, Kim. On mine, you just need to play by the rules.” And so she had. She had played pretty well. But her heart was never in it.

Inside the house a band started up and along came Sarah Vaughan. Moments later Marian appeared in their midst with a glass of wine, already half-consumed. She was wearing one of her muumuus, the red one with white orchids. For Marian, this hour in the dead of winter was sober and solitary, often accompanied by Glenn Gould or a Schubert sonata, reading by the front window wrapped up in a Hudson’s Bay blanket. In summer the hour was for drinking.

Harold moved his feet for her and she angled the chair away from him and sat. Kim told her she hadn’t missed anything. They’d been recycling old arguments.

“Historians do that, don’t they?” They were all looking out at the ivy. “It’s why I ended up with Donald. Historians argue about religious wars. Mathematicians decode the language of creation.”

“You’re quoting him,” said Harold. “I’d rather be an historian who can cross-multiply than a mathematician who calls himself a ‘history buff.’ Dressing up for battle recreations. Eating gruel and sleeping on hay. Christ.”

Dinner moved along a little too quickly. Marian and Kim sat across from one another, Harold at the head. As always his hands traded the knife and fork repeatedly as he cut and ate, correcting himself when he noticed he was gripping them like gavels. His uncultured use of utensils was the one marker of his origins – poor, rural, and for some months in his boyhood, itinerant – that he’d chosen not to erase. It reminded them all that he’d had to make something of himself.

In the street beyond the dining-room window, a car thumped by in musical assault.

“Never work in a uniform,” said Harold. “I should have told you that as a kid.”

Marian looked up, paused. “A rare lapse in your fathering.”

“Oh, please, the both of you. I’m not an aimless child you need to blame each other for. I don’t like being wielded. Let’s not do this tired thing again, okay?”

“Yes, indeed,” said Harold. “I’m all for defeating cliché.”

He’d had more to drink than usual, Kim noted. She hadn’t yet worked through how Marian’s illness, returned from a long remission, had force in herself, let alone in him.

Harold proposed a toast. “To the war on cliché.”

“I’ve heard that one before,” said Marian flatly.

They toasted.

At some point Kim asked about Donald’s trip to Quebec City. He’d delivered a paper on the current focus of his interests, Kurt Gödel, that would allow him to use research money to be in town for a re-enactment of the battle on the Plains of Abraham.

“Apparently he wandered into the middle of a battlefield to correct the choreography.” Marian was smiling without complication. “But he was a good sport. He joined the French side and mimed a great death. Donald, as you may have noticed, likes to play the fool.”

“He’s not playing.”

“I know the real from the false, Harold. That’s news to you, but Donald knows that about me.”

Marian lifted her chin slightly. Kim understood it was the moment her mother most wanted to look beautiful. Her father missed it.

“Wandering onto a battlefield,” he muttered. “The man believes in observing codes, no matter what’s actually going on around him. Did you know that he asked my permission to take you to dinner?”

“When? What are you talking about?”

“Back in the beginning. He came to my office, of all places. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t blow up at him there. We were both junior faculty, watching our step in parallel wings of the building. He shows up as if I were your father and asks what I’d think about the idea. I assumed the scene was out of some old foreign novel he’d read. I’m surprised he didn’t want us both to drink from a chalice or something.”

“I think I’ll wait to hear his side of the story.”

“What did you say to him?” asked Kim.

“Nothing. I just stared at him until he left. Seems he interpreted this to mean I’d given him the all-clear.”

“You were never one for gallantry,” said Marian. “Quite the opposite.”

He pretended to ignore her. Here was a conversational place he wouldn’t be led, at least not in front of Kim. Whether it concerned Donald or some distant episode was not clear. In Marian’s exchanges with Harold, Kim saw something of the prize student her mother had once been. She’d practised criminal law at a small firm for three years before Kim was born. Since then she’d mothered and travelled with her husbands. But when drinking around either of her husbands, it was evident that the woman’s life had disappointed her. In recent months Kim saw that even the disappointment wasn’t real, but rather was a mask for a great dark despair. The mask hadn’t worked for some time now.

“At what point do I ask you to let up on the wine, Mom?”

“The wine makes me feel good. The drugs don’t. All the best things are contraindicated. But there’s something to be said for chalices.”

How does the past bear upon us?

Harold had once told Kim that the question mattered less than it might seem to. “The past belongs to itself first, and its value is the same whether an old war still turns heads on the nationalist holidays or it’s been completely forgotten.” He’d been driving her home from a high school gymnastics meet in which she’d sprained an ankle on the beam. It was the only competition he’d ever attended. She badly wanted to impress him, and when she’d fallen, it took great determination not to cry. She looked at him there in the stands, his mouth open, an “o” of concern she didn’t recognize, and waved to him, and he nodded and smiled and assured her afterwards that it was “all a good show,” as if he’d been watching a dance number. Beside him in the car with light snow falling on the windshield, Kim began telling him about a new trick she wanted to learn for her best apparatus, the floor, and he interjected that the tumbling had brought to his mind past Olympic Games, and Nadia Comaneci, a name he remembered, and then Romania and tyranny, and the whole destabilized, capitalizing world. Then the lesson about the uniform values of pasts.

The evening had ended with Marian back in bed and Kim and Harold in the living room. He sat in his favourite armchair, his hands palm down on his thighs as he stared out the front window.

“When it came apart for your mother and me, it felt inevitable. It felt right. Sad but right. But you don’t think about this state of things up ahead. You don’t think about illness. And when it comes, you see things are backwards.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she has the wrong man looking after her.”

It was small of her not to relieve him of the self-punishing thought.

Kim knew the guest room had been prepared but she pretended to go check it. Harold would stay over until mid-morning, when Donald returned. Her three parents could have a late breakfast together, but wouldn’t. Sometime after Kim had made the bed that afternoon, she now saw, Marian had come in and placed on the night table Harold’s preferred night reading, books on architecture and art.

Just past eleven she changed into her uniform. Before leaving she woke Marian with a kiss on the forehead and told her she’d come around again in two days. For a minute she held her mother’s hand, her thumb in Marian’s palm as if pressing into it a lucky coin.

She went out and loaded up her saddlebags for the ride to work. The streetlights had taken up in the maple branches. Harold emerged and walked her to the sidewalk and along the block, feigning an interest in her bike. By now he’d have realized he’d said more than he should have inside. It was odd to see him out in open, public space. How could this ever have been his street? He seemed incomplete in it. She recalled, then and now, accidentally meeting him in a bookstore, one of his women friends standing by, waiting to be introduced.

“Is this volunteer work you’re doing dangerous? Be honest.”

And it was as if he’d struck the final note of a chord, and she felt it as a vibration. Was it then or later that she thought it wasn’t just worry in his voice, but a foreknowledge he couldn’t expel?

“How could it be dangerous?”

“These people you work with, the rejects, you don’t know them. There are reasons they get rejected.”

“We don’t hide torturers or terrorists. Haven’t we been through this?”

“But the truth is, you don’t know whether they’re dangerous or not. You can hardly take them at their word. It’s not enough to say it’s the price of living in an open society.”

“Sometimes it frightens me to think of you in front of a class.”

Down the block the little parkette sat bright and dead. In the playground, far below the lone vapour light, a small green whale smiled on its coiled spring.

“What sorts of people are they? Where do they come from? The ones you hide under your rug.”

She said if they had money they’d be immigrants. She said the usual something about the highest immigration rate in the world, three times higher than the U.S. He said pressure on screening mechanisms.

She said, “We screen by sending back the poorest unless they’re in danger, so we’re bound to make mistakes and send people off to their deaths. We already knowingly hand them over to torturers. It might do you good to get a little more involved in history instead of shuffling its footnotes. I work with real people, not national weaknesses or products of my misplaced idealism.”

“It’s the real people that worry me.”

“Well then come and meet some. I’ll call you this week. You can drop by the office and see who shows up. You can’t know these people and not want to help them. I’m not inviting you. I’m asking you please to come.”

The idea was sound, she must have thought. It had arrived before her as if out of its own integrity.

“Dangerous people are often attractive. Dangerous work is often noble.”

“I’m riding off now.”

She turned on her light.

“Think about what I’ve said, Kim.”

“I’ll call.”

She was gliding away from him. In forty-some minutes she’d be gagged, falling.

“Be careful,” he said.

Without looking back she waved with one hand and with the other shook the handlebars, tossed out a little wobble for effect, and the weak beam shivered before her, then steadied on its small spot of the world to come.

She drifted, looking for signs. Something she might have read in the flux, the weave of light street to street, face to face. Always she landed on the same hours, from four days before the attack, when she’d felt a foreignness pass into her that now seemed a kind of fate.

Just past sunrise she had left the museum in her blue and grey guard’s uniforms and pedalled onto campus, riding crouched across the playing field with her shadow running long before her in the shape of a huge keyhole on the grass, turning north and
west along a strip of coffee shops just opening, the bakery smells mixing with the morning’s first blasts of exhaust, past a kid bent in a doorway with tattooed forearms and a mop of hair cutting straps from bundled weeklies, the city getting to its feet, these best hours when she felt that she was racing it, dodging delivery vans, a quick stop-and-go at the international newsstand, sweating in her polyester clothes in the fumes. She dipped away from a car door and swerved onto the sidewalk, rebalancing, to coast past produce vendors and people stooped over newspaper boxes, reading the stories above the fold. On into the west-end residential streets, still cool, with the light now tall on red- and burnt-yellow-brick houses, open doors, small pissing dogs, shoulder bags hitched up, wet-haired workers leaving their houses, patting their pockets, pointing remotes at car locks, tossing blind waves behind them, the morning emerging in each yard, until finally she arrived at her three-storey building, to begin the end of her day.

In the hallway she passed fumigation notices that conjured images of men in masks with metal wands in private spaces, uncovering all variety of secretings and abandonments, onward to her numbered door. She went in to find a handwritten message on the entryway stand: “gone out – Sadaf.” On the small desk Sadaf’s laptop sat open, not yet dormant, with text on the screen, the blinking cursor stopped mid-sentence. She read the half-composed story and felt the little tremor in her core at the descriptions of events in the infamous prison in Tehran. The story was a version of Sadaf’s own, altered to give to another refugee claimant in her world of local Iranians. A good story, without the fatal inconsistencies of the original. The other claimant had her own history to tell, but wanted a better one.

The screen went dark.

She stepped into the kitchen and stopped. There was something wrong she couldn’t place. She saw the phone reflected enormously in the toaster. Empty dish rack. Artwork fridge magnets, Kahlo, Mondrian. The tray of sunflower seeds on the counter. Someone, Sadaf, had run a finger through, dividing them into continents.