Cities of Refuge (39 page)

She retrieved the phone from the house and called Eduardo Jofre’s cell number. She was leaving a message when he picked up. She asked if he had anything for her.

“Yes, I’ve prepared something, but I’m in Chicago. I intended to give it to you in person but I can send it if you want.”

“Please do. As soon as you can.”

“I’ll send it now. Call me again if you want to talk about it.”

Her thoughts stood outside her, converging in the slow burning street. Somewhere a woodpecker was tapping at a tree trunk at a speed that made a texture of the beats. She recalled a distant scene from the music store. Eduardo had told her that every day he would tune two guitars and hang them back on the wall ten minutes before a father and son would come in, saying nothing, and take them down and play. She saw them once. They were short, dark, maybe Roma, and when their music began it was the surest creature in the room. Immaculate folk jazz in black canvas shoes. When they stopped, the new absence had whole lost gods in it.

The air suggested rain. The day was lapsing, and implicit in the now deadening light was something very hard.

She clicked on the inbox.

Hello Kim,

My contact has had some back and forths with witnesses. I’ve attached a letter (in Spanish) from her with the details but, to summarize, 3 names on your father’s list were unknown to anyone, the German and the 2 Americans. Of the remaining
12
, my friend has identified all 5 on the list not in the Rettig Report through their connection to the 7 who were. I died in 1981 of illness. The other 4 are still alive, 3 still live in Santiago. These 3 were asked if they recalled a young Canadian student named Harold Lystrander. None knew the name. 2 knew of a Canadian only after their arrest, from the 3rd. The 3rd, Bastio Eyzaguirre, though not recognizing the name, had met or been in the presence of, on at least one occasion, a Canadian student of Orlando Sarmiento, in whose apartment he and the others were hiding on September 12, and believed that, as he and the others were being led outside and into a military bus, he saw the Canadian across the street, standing with army officers, unrestrained.

Eyzaguirre is quoted as saying that he thought he recognized the young man but didn’t place him until later. It is possible, he says, that now or then he confused the Canadian with some other foreign student, but at the time, he was sure it was the Canadian. He is quoted as saying that it was his impression that the soldiers’ attitude toward the young man suggested a complicity. The young man and the soldier next to him were both smoking cigarettes, “como si ellos contemplaran el enfoque de una tormenta,” as if watching the approach of a storm.

Eyzaguirre sat near the back of the bus. As he looked out the back window, he saw the 2 people whose apartment he’d been hiding in led out of the building and stopped in front of it. The
young Canadian, if that’s who he was, was led across the street toward them by a soldier. There were soldiers on all sides and some confusion and, he admits, the view from the bus wasn’t perfect. But Eyzaguirre says the young man stood before Orlando and Maria Alicia and there was a moment of talk. Then the bus, though it wasn’t yet full, began to pull away, and Eyzaguirre remembers thinking first that his friends would be spared arrest, and then that it was bad for them to still be on the street. The last thing he saw was Maria Alicia stepping forward and slapping the face of the Canadian.

I relayed the question, Was the Canadian there in the apartment at any time on September 12?

He was not present when Eyzaguirre was there. Eyzaguirre was in the apartment for about two hours before the soldiers arrived.

I relayed the question, Does the section in the Rettig Report addressing the deaths of the Sarmientos seem in any way lacking? Eyzaguirre points out that he and the others had been led away but were still present, in the bus, at the time the Sarmientos were led out of the building. None of the survivors in the bus testified as witnesses to the deaths – they didn’t see the killings – but the full story should include the fact that the couple was in the street before they ended up dead back inside the entryway, and that there was a confrontation between Maria Alicia and the young foreigner.

All of these exchanges were electronic. I then called my friend and asked her opinion of Eyzaguirre. She said that she’s known him all his life, and that though Eyzaguirre isn’t the smartest of her friends, and in fact in his youth he talked a lot of shit, he had grown into a reliable man.

Kim, I can’t judge the accuracy of Eyzaguirre’s story or whether it should be admissible to the record. You might be surprised how many such stories, however well intended, however much their teller believes them, turn out to be full of error. So before you believe too readily, let me write Eyzaguirre myself. Do you have a photo of your father from that time? We could scan it and send it to him and see if he thinks it’s the man he saw that day.

There is a great responsibility in gathering these stories and trying to make them fit. But they don’t always fit. We mustn’t speculate without sound proof. Whether or not we have that here is a question I’ll leave to you.

Eduardo

She got onto her bike and she rode. Down through the upscale neighbourhoods, then south under the train tracks and into her favourite streets, emptying onto Bloor and up onto the sidewalk, then out and along in the heavy, honking traffic to the museum and then south. She rode into Queen’s Park and there was the homeless woman named Fran who’d once told her about seeing wolves bring down a deer in the snow. She was asleep under an oak tree and a torn wool coat. The last morning she left work at the museum, without waking her, Kim had opened her saddlebag and brought out the danish she’d been saving and wrote a hello on a paper napkin – “From Kim, who works at the rom” – and placed the note and the treat wrapped in wax paper by her side, and as she left, two mangy squirrels hopped near Fran’s head and froze, staring at the pastry. But now she rode past Fran and nearer the legislative buildings and
past the statue of Edward
VII
and the balls of his horse painted another lurid colour in prank and vaguely directed protest, out into traffic, along the curb, where ahead a border collie tied to a signpost greeted her like an old friend and then she rode hard, feeling herself working, thinking of the dog’s instinct to cower and wag all at once, into the residential streets east of campus, and saw a woman on a porch spank a child with two measured smacks and a tossed towel falling from an attic window, unfurling the word “Resort” into a garden.

And she rode through the rain that came suddenly and hard like pebbles, rode half-blindly past the cars with their wipers crazed and useless, and kept riding until the rain passed and the sun returned and the gutterflooded streets began to dry on the crests, and she was soaked through, and she looped around and near the bookstore came into the route she’d taken that night, so many nights, so many times in her writing of it, and swung her leg over, gliding on one pedal, then stepping into stride.

Something about the window had changed, not just the books, of course, now graphic novels, political lampoons, idiot’s guides to Islam and jazz, but the display itself, the size and frame of it, lit in her memory like a diorama, now seeming too small, without enough depth to have made an impression. Down the next block the hair salon that had served as a church was now a costume rental store. There were deals to be had on monsters and elves, it was not a season for getups, and everything about the shop seemed out of time. A single moment of overlaid worlds, the daily interchange of the downtown streets, extended through months. The shop that had been a church in a salon was only itself. What she’d returned for. Majorettes and alien faces, dummy cowboys with orange faux-hawk wigs. They made sense just for being.

From the costume shop window, wheeling her bike she walked at the pace she’d walked that night, as she’d walked in her stories replaying it. But it was afternoon now. She felt the sun hot on her and smelled the pavement’s fading carbon sheen. The night wasn’t coming back like she’d thought it would. A part of her wanted it back if only to attach it to this hour and this light because there was the night in her imagining, even in her blood, but now was another kind of revisiting, the literal kind, and she wanted it to mean all it could. The thing she couldn’t get inside, that had nothing to do with this street, was the feeling of being followed and the moment when she’d decided to do one thing and had done another. Here and there were not the same. She could come back but she couldn’t return.

The dying animal knows something we don’t, homeless Fran had said. And the wolves eat it up, the bones and the knowing and all.

The site was of course now a building, thirty-some storeys high. The Bonifice. New Urban Living. Available for Occupancy Soon. The former open darkness had been named and numbered. She could press a palm to it if she wanted.

She locked up her bike and went through the doors and a smiling redheaded woman sitting at what would soon be a security desk greeted her and asked if she’d like to see the show suite on the twenty-first floor, where the view was quite something.

“No.”

Kim turned. It was right here, she realized. It had all gone down around here. On this carpet and floor, through the lobby, under the chandelier, through the marble back wall, down along the banks of elevators.

“Is everything all right?”

She lived in a place ever fuller of matter and her father was lost to her and these were the facts.

“Someone once tried to murder me here.”

She walked deeper into the lobby and did as she’d imagined, putting her hand on the marble wall, trying to let it work on her, this reassertion of substance and solid design. The only place left from that night was within her. She’d worked long and hard at it, remaking the space as she could. And she thought she’d nearly done it, engineering a new physical being – the bones, the knowing and all – though even now a heat was rising in her shoulders as if her body had only just discovered where she’d arrived, and it was time to leave these two places she was.

W
hen the rain let off, Harold got out of the car. Through the little window of the garage he saw that Kim’s bike was gone. He found the spare house key in the place he’d devised long ago, on top of the lamp by the door.

He took the white chair. Marian lay on the bedspread under a green and red blanket he’d never seen before with her body barely there among the folds. Her mouth was slightly open. Floral slippers by the side of the bed. Afternoon windowlight through lace curtains. He didn’t remember it, this light. The room was a new place, as if it had never been his.

He knew the moment she was awake before she did, before her eyes had even opened.

“Hello, Marian.”

She opened them. His presence made no more sense to her than wherever she’d emerged from.

“It’s just me.”

“God, what’s happened?”

“It’s me.”

“Are you drunk?”

With much effort she sat up against the headboard. Her face was still far away.

He shook his head.

“Then what is it? Tell me.”

“I’m not here with news.”

“What time is it? Where’s Donald? What are you here with, then? This is pretty creepy, Harold.”

He was calm. He said it had been raining hard.

“It didn’t wake you.”

“No. You woke me.”

“Do the drugs make you sleep?”

“You’ve come to enquire after my well-being?”

She brought her arms above the blanket and let her hands rest on her stomach, the sleeves of her thin, blue gown hanging as if empty. Even when they were young she kept her arms covered in summer. He remembered the shock when she bared them at night before bed. Arms known only in lamplight for months at a time. One by one, such memories lifted up and then fell away forever. He wouldn’t again think of her arms.

“We used to fly a kite. Kim and I. Whatever happened to that kite?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You and Kim never flew kites. You never even took her swimming.”

“Once, we did. Where were you? I saw some kids flying kites in a schoolyard and so I had the idea. I went out and bought it that afternoon. She must have been about eight or nine. And we
went up to that big park below St. Clair. I got it in the air for her. I had to run down a little slope to get any serviceable breeze, but then it took off and she screamed, she was so excited. I gave her the line and she flew it. All of about twenty minutes. A big kite up there with a cartoon face on it, a bear or something, peering down at us.”

“You’ve made all this up.”

“No, I haven’t. I don’t know where you were.”

“It’s another of your stories. This one with a bear on a kite. Am I supposed to think you had your moments as a father?”

The kite story had sounded made up but it wasn’t. He was almost certain.

“Do you remember Celina Shey?” She did not, and then, he saw, she did. The first affair. “I spoke to her, said hello, because she looked like my accuser.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I had an accuser. She looked like Celina Shey. Who looked like the dead girl, the dumpster girl from the news, named Anna Huard, it turns out. Or the sketch of her.”

“Stop. What’s wrong with you?”

He’d thought there was more to say about the resemblances. How they’d linked Kim to certain times past. Marian’s and his together, and his alone. But now he realized the connections meant less than he’d assumed. They might not have meant anything at all.

“I’m feeling fine just now, actually. I’m feeling good. It’s good to talk to you. I’m sorry I missed Kim.”

There followed some subtending moments when he thought she would right him. She drew up her knees. The blanket made voluted shapes of her feet.

“So this is about Kim. You’re worried about what she’s digging up on you. You should be told, I guess, that I gave her your list. I’ve had it for years, your mysterious list. I’ve begun divesting myself of things. And I don’t want you to put new things in their place. You come in here like a terrier with a rat. Dropping some old girlfriend at my feet.”