Elegy on Kinderklavier (16 page)

That spring they'd begun to play the game, or to attempt to play it, almost every day, testing the still-frigid water with their shins and feet. So far the season had not reached its hidden tipping point, but today Bajh had grown tired of waiting and, as Araz watched, he plunged into the cold water with a shout. He'd left his clothes in
a small pile on the bank as they always did, and Araz turned from where Bajh's pale buttocks had disappeared into the river, already unbuttoning his own shirt and stepping out of his shoes. Asti had begun picking up the clothes and stuffing them into her knapsack and she crouched, facing away, until Araz plunged in after Bajh, letting out an involuntary cry at the shock of the cold.

The game was this: one boy would float on his back as motionless as possible, simulating lifelessness, as the river's swift current whisked him along. The other would bridge the distance between them with heavy, strong strokes and attempt to support the first boy's body from beneath, making a sort of double-deckered raft. There was no goal, or sometimes Araz guessed the goal was to keep the other's body as high out of the water as possible; the test was to avoid all that might impede them: deadfalls, snags, small bars of sand or mud and whatever fleeting, rough fish sometimes glanced briefly against their feet. When they got to a calm stretch of the river or when the obstacles became insufficiently challenging, they switched. They traveled this way when they were playing, covering most of the distance to the town on the river's current.

Araz thought the game seemed for Bajh a natural extension of the playful feats of athleticism that his friend often displayed in the trio's boredom: vaulting over crippled fences or scrambling up the exterior of a small building and grinning down at Araz and Asti below. But for Araz, the game was different: a burst of sensation, a quickening of his pulse and breath—the basic state of being exhilaratingly present, alive.

Today, as Araz floated in the freezing water, his body numb, he watched the roiling clouds above the river, heavy and knuckling lower with the promise of rain. Their speed and course matched his own in the current and so gave the illusion of stillness. There was the suddenness then of Bajh's splashing, the surprise of his lithe body
drawing up against Araz's own from below, and then the delicate weight of Bajh's long forearm over Araz's chest, the tense knot of his penis (made small and dense by the cold) against the back of Araz's thigh, the warmth of Bajh's breath just past his ear. They moved like that, with the river, chest to back, chest to air. Bajh occasionally lifted his head to see an obstacle or, in an attempt to steer, waggled his free arm and feet, his breathing in the calm air something like laughter.

From his position, Araz could not see Bajh, only feel him, curiously stilled below, and so he watched the sky or the series of black faces of the sheep as they looked across the water, or he turned his head away, toward the bank, where Asti was walking as she always did: placid, arms folded with whatever neatly creased articles of clothing could not fit in her bag, keeping pace easily. She was quiet, wind flipping at her hair, and she looked either down at her path or ahead at the river or over to where Araz floated, meeting his eyes impassively.

•

That night the three were to make one of the long clothing runs up to Dahuk. There was a man there, a night watchman at an airplane hangar that had been converted by the Americans into a storage warehouse for the pallets of aid materials that now came over the Turkish border. As a toddler Araz had been adopted, taken from a religious orphanage by the widower Bertrand Baradost, a lawyer years ago returned from Beirut; the night watchman had once been a client of his, and it was understood that the clothing arrangement was in service of his fee. Bajh drove his father's rickety old flatbed pickup while Araz and Asti sat between the squares of stale hay in the back. By this time they knew what would be waiting for them after the two-hour chugging ride along the throughway into Dahuk: the gray canyons of
buildings; Bajh's craning neck as he carefully backed the truck up to the side of the hangar; the watchman, rousing himself from sleep to sip at a thermos of tea, watching them roll up the loading-bay door with a series of metal clangs. And inside, the dark labyrinth of shrink-wrapped pallets, stacked higher than their heads.

This warehouse was where the NGOs for the northern half of the country stored secondhand clothing donated from America. The tightly wrapped plastic glistened in the dark, catching the dim light from the opened bay as Araz walked down the rows. The best pallets had many T-shirts of bright colors or thick clothes good for the winter or anything that had a prominent logo, and the three had been instructed to try to discern the contents of the pallets and pick one that looked to have the most of these. Though Araz knew the pallets were basically all the same anyway; he had watched the children employed by his father in the market hawking the T-shirts with large seals of American sports teams, the endless Christian youth group fund-raising slogans, the button-up shirts with armpits yellowed by years of sweat. The warehouse was endlessly refilled, and the watchman insisted that the NGO in charge of distribution didn't even keep records of what it received.

This night, the trip had been quiet so far. Twice before, on previous runs, they'd been stopped by local security of the towns they guided the truck through (Bajh had been instructed to stay off the main roads on the way back), but each time they'd gotten by with only the loss of a few shirts and a blazer. They'd only had to go through an American checkpoint once, very late at night, with Araz whispering translations of the soldiers' orders through the back window of the truck's cab, where Bajh, fingers white around the wheel, carefully obeyed them.

Now Araz and Asti lay as they always did on the return trip, squeezed on either side of the mound of clothing (once the pallet was
loaded, the plastic had to be cut away and discarded so as to avoid suspicion), pressed against the low containing rails of the truck's flatbed. On the more bumpy roads, they were to keep the clothes from flying off.

Araz sighed and put his hands behind his head, looking up into the litter of stars that shifted slightly with each jounce of the truck. In the cab, Bajh turned off the radio he'd been listening to and a silence surrounded the exertions of the engine. After a while there were the sounds of other cars, and distant voices, and the truck eased to a stop.

Araz sat up and looked around. The small side road they'd taken, which ran parallel to the highway, was full of headlights and the sounds of motors stopping and starting. There was a traffic jam, stretching as far down as Araz could see. Maybe a breakdown, or a convoy moving through.

“What's going on?” Araz said through the back window.

Bajh pointed to the slim, false horizon of the actual highway dimly glowing in the distance to their right. “It's stopped there too,” he said. He opened the door and leaned out to look behind the truck. There was no one there. They were the last car.

“No problem,” he said. “I guess.”

Bajh got back in and reversed, using the shoulder to turn around. They traced back to the nearest turnoff and followed it, the tires making a dull thump as they went from the paved road to the dirt one. They traveled like this for a while, the roughness of the road causing Araz and Asti to sit up. The commotion of the late-night traffic jam eventually receded until its luminescence only barely troubled the dark of the sky behind them.

Araz watched Asti, who was sitting with her legs pulled up beside and under her. He thought again of her body, the form that her simple long-sleeved shirts and jeans under dresses both embraced and
obscured, of the quality of her skin, the way it held light, its grace over her naked hollows and rises as he had seen her the afternoon two weeks before, laid along Bajh's body on the cot in the abandoned guard hut outside town. The afternoon light had been warm and came tripping down through the gentle movement of a tree's lower limbs outside, finally falling through the glassless window, making of their pose a shifting chiaroscuro, revealing then hiding Bajh's huddled nakedness behind her. They were asleep, pressed together in the slight chill of the hut's shadows, even though it was a balmy day. Bajh's face was turned down, nestled between the stiff material of the cot and Asti's shoulder blades. Asti's hair was folded under and hung over the metal brace of the cot, where the long sun of the afternoon alighted on it in bits and pieces, leaving the rest to sit darkly in the shadow of her body. Araz had stood for a second, stilled at the doorway, and carefully taken in the fact of her nakedness, letting his eyes run down to the dip of her stomach and the rise of her hip, Bajh's own hip behind hers, the slim line of his body, mostly hidden behind hers, grayed and blued by the foregrounding distance, even in that small room. There was the pocket of dark hair, surprisingly silky and flat, where her legs met, and the easy curve of her calf, her delicate ankles. They did not wake as he turned away and left.

•

The truck gave a wrenching creak and came to an abrupt stop. Bajh jumped out, cursing. A thin tree of smoke assembled itself out of the air above the cab. Araz got down and watched Bajh kick the front wheel, cough a little from the smoke and pace away, mashing down a button on the cell phone they carried for emergencies and waiting for its small square of light to come on. Asti stayed up in the truck.

The truck's interior lights then quit and Araz found himself in a deep darkness, able to see almost nothing at all. He strained to look around. They were on a farming road, and he thought he could make out the dull metal of an irrigation well-marker glinting flatly a little way off, though he couldn't be sure.

Araz turned to look back toward Bajh and the night came alive, breaking itself around Araz's head.

A skirling came out of the sky, a mechanical screaming, directionless, as if out of the molecules of air itself, its howling barely even a discrete sound. By the time Araz was able to process it at all, the sound was alive in his chest, his hands, his skull, his mouth—percussive, felt more than heard, as was his own voice; if his scream even existed, he couldn't tell. Araz only heard the blast once; the night was blown to a lucid muteness afterward, though he could not yet feel the wetness of the blood trickling from his ears and coating the sides of his jaw and neck.

Later, Araz would find himself unable to divorce his actual memory of what happened from the strange, otherworldly vision of the Internet video he would be shown by a roommate at his boarding school in London. Araz's memory of that night was thus perpetually recast in the shaky, falsely illuminated field of a helicopter's night-vision recording, the only omniscience able to sort the physical chaos. Though the particular video he saw was certainly not of his own night (and though no such video record of his own experience even existed, as far as he knew), Araz would forever afterward bear the acute feeling that he'd witnessed what happened to himself only through the real-time eye of the gun-sighted screen.

In Araz's mind: the glowing white shape of his own prone body beside the truck; of Bajh, statant, in the field's furrows; of Asti, limbs held close, a jumbled blob of the white that signaled body heat to the helicopter's lens. The trio had not been aimed at, so none of them
were hit. Instead, the rounds meant to disable the already-disabled truck (a hundred? a thousand?) found something (a half-full oil can forgotten under the truck's seat? a spare gasoline container wedged without thought under the hay in the back?) to alight on, and the viewfinder was quickly awash with a riot of heat-shapes, an amorphous monster mounting the vehicle—fire.

From the sky came more screaming of metal, though Araz did not hear it. Here, the false implantation in Araz's memory of the concussion of air made by the helicopter's blades. The truth, of course, was that he heard nothing.

Finally, the brief sensations that would not end up savaged by the violence of time passing: the load of clothes, half ablaze, lifting up and up into flight and falling, slowly, slowly, onto Araz's back, lighting his own clothes. Araz struggling up, wildly glimpsing what must have been the shape of Asti's body in the bed of the truck, where she was somehow embracing the clothes, the fire, to her; then Araz knocked flat by the collision of Bajh's panicked, tilting run. At some point, Asti was pulled down off the truck and landed near where Araz lay. A scurry of dirt as Bajh smothered her flames, Araz somehow still burning, the heat spreading up his side and reaching around to his chest like a grasping hand, then the feeling of Bajh returning to smother him again, the heaviness of Bajh's body landing on his own, seeming—because Araz never quite got his breath back—to last for hours and hours.

The afterward Araz would remember better, the coming of morning. He lay situated in a position where he could see only the flat expanse of the field and the horizon beyond. He assumed the truck, Bajh, and Asti to be somewhere behind him, but in the strange otherworld of his condition he did not really think of them, and the emptiness of his mind was even vaguely pleasant. He felt no pain (or he felt pain so completely that all other sensation was wholly
undone, and so did not suffer). There came a distant, rainless storm, and the brief office of lightning gave way to an ataraxic lightlessness just before dawn. The subsequent creep of color into the sky had a curious physical presence to it, limning the ridges of the field and the dirt nearest Araz's face. Just before daylight was full, a drizzle stung Araz's eyes, and he woke for a moment simultaneously into the effluvium of the morning and the insanity of his reverie, just enough to process the arrival of other cars and other people, after which there was only the long surrender of unconsciousness.