Sugar Rain (45 page)

A feeling of longing rose up in his throat, hopeless, like unrequited love. “Jenny?” he whispered. “Jenny?” She didn’t turn around. Adjusting his pajamas, he got up to see what she was doing.

Before her on the table a drawing was spread out. It was in black-and-sepia pencil, with traces of red ink—the pen was still in her hand. But she was staring at it without moving. The drawing was finished. It showed a woman dressed in rags, her face hidden in shadow. She was lying on the ground next to an empty bowl, her ankle shackled to a post. Beside her stood a chicken, searching the ground for insects with its curious snout. Behind her a wire fence intersected with the wall of a small building.

This was in the corner of the picture. Most of the drawing was about the sky—a study of dark clouds and sugar rain. But one more artifact was visible: At the top of the page, a span of metal drawn in red. The clouds were parted by its edge.

“The Whisper Bridge,” said Thanakar. “How did you know?”

Jenny said nothing. Only she made a notation in red pen in the margin of the page: “21596.” And under it, in careful print: “17.78 mi.”

“How did you hear of it?” asked Thanakar. He leaned forward over the page. From his neck, his golden locket hung down close beside her ear. She turned and grabbed it, pulled it loose. The small chain snapped in her small hand.

Surprised, Thanakar pulled back. Then he reached out his hand. But she had found the locket’s clasp, had opened it, and was staring at the photograph inside. Cut from the yearbook of the Starbridge Schools, it was a photograph of a young girl with long black hair, thick eyebrows, and black eyes. A wide mouth, a wide jaw; two months after it was taken, Charity had married the old man.

Thanakar reached out to grab it back, but then he stopped. Jenny Pentecost had dipped her pen into her well, and she was drawing the profile of a face under her numerical notation: Just a few quick lines, so fast, so expert, and so sure. Thanakar cried out, with a pain like a needle in his heart. Then Jenny threw the pen down on the page, spattering it with ink. She turned in her chair and put her arms around his neck, squeezing until it hurt. She locked her arms around his neck and squeezed with all her strength, and he could feel her small lips on his cheek. “Trust me,” she whispered next to his ear, her voice so soft, almost inaudible. “Trust me,” she repeated.

There were no horses. All had been sequestered by the army, or bought by wealthy refugees. But after some negotiation he obtained a bicycle. He tied his knee in linen strips, injecting lubricants into the joint, and at six-thirty he wheeled his bicycle out onto the road. It was an old, stiff, cast-iron model with enormous rubber wheels. For hours he rode it grimly over the deserted countryside, along a roadbed of crushed cinders.

The Whisper Bridge was in a range of washed-out hills, and there was no one on the road. At eight o’clock it started raining. Thanakar cursed aloud. Once, at the bottom of a long hill, with the rain pulsing from the sky like bullets of wet glass, he almost turned around. But finally, towards ten, he reached the border.

By the banks of the Moldau River, in a landscape of wet clay, the road came to an end. The fog was low upon the ground. He could not see the barricade; he could not see the bridge, but he could hear it in the wind. In front of him there was a mailbox, across the way a small tarpaper shack. Nearby, at the top of a high flagpole, flew an ensign he remembered well—the endless knot of the unravelers. Under it, the swine of Caladon, red upon a field of white.

Thanakar parked his bike next to the pole. He took off his hat. His leg was so weak he could barely stand. It throbbed and trembled under his weight.

He waited a minute and then walked around the shack. It was a two-story, dilapidated wooden structure. In back there was an empty chicken run.

Returning to the road, he limped up the steps of the shack onto the porch. Through the screen door he could see the unraveler at his desk, stretched back in his chair, his gaunt frame swathed in bandages. His eyes were veiled, his face turned to one side. With a broken pencil he tapped idly upon his desk.

Thanakar tried the door. It was locked.

“Are you applying for a visa?” asked the unraveler, his voice high and soft. “Office hours start at four o’clock.”

The screen was rotten near the clasp. Thanakar punched it with his fist and broke the lock. Already he was angry, but also he was weak and close to falling. He stepped inside the door and leaned against it, his back against the screen. “Is there a woman staying here?” he asked.

The unraveler leaned forward in his chair. “What do you mean?”

“I swear to God,” said Thanakar. “Tell me where she is, and then I’ll go.”

The unraveler placed his pencil on his desk, carefully among the littered paper. He seemed to frown under the veil. “She is no longer here,” he said. When Thanakar said nothing, he went on. “You do not understand. She was a foreign national, on Caladonian soil, without documentation. Not of any kind. I could not let her stay.”

Thanakar limped forward into the room. He put his hands upon the desk, then stopped. From underneath a pile of paper the unraveler had produced a gun.

“No violence,” he said. “You are the one. Yes, I have heard of you.” With one hand he held the small revolver, and with the other he rummaged in the papers on his desk. “Hah,” he said. “This is from the district headquarters at Sreshta Breaks,” he said, naming the border town where Thanakar had spent so long. “Distinguishing marks? Tattoos upon both hands. A golden briarweed, among others. Yes. You are the one. It says you failed to go through proper channels.”

Thanakar was leaning forward on the desk, supporting his weight upon his wrists. He caught a wisp of a sweet smell. He breathed deeply. It was whiskey. A jar half full of whiskey stood upon the corner of the desk between some books. He could smell whiskey on the breath of the unraveler, though it was not yet noon.

“Here,” the man continued, reading from a crumpled piece of paper. “Yes. Thanakar Starbridge. Yes, he has disrupted the morale of the entire district. Since he left, illegal penetration of the Sreshta Gate has increased more than thirty times. Thirty times! And you have the impudence to threaten me.”

There was a pause. Thanakar sat down in a chair and put both hands over his knee. The unraveler stared up at the ceiling. “Tell me what this woman is to you,” he said at last.

Thanakar put his hand up to his face. “Then she’s still here. You didn’t send her back?”

“No. It would not have been … humane. In your country they are murdering civilians. They have no respect for regulations of all kinds. This woman, she would not even give her name. What is she to you?”

He turned his head. His face under the veil was thin and bony, hairless and gray. “I too,” he said. “I should have sent her back. No, for her sake I have broken elementary statutes numbers fifteen through twenty-one. Yesterday morning I detained her in the proper place. But it was raining. Now she is upstairs, sleeping in my bed. Last night I fed her rations that were meant for me.”

Thanakar sat back. The unraveler gestured wearily with the revolver. It sank low to the desk, as if too heavy for his frail wrist. “The fact remains,” he said, “she is an unlawful alien, on Caladonian soil. She possesses two items of jewelry, but otherwise no means of livelihood, not to mention very little in the way of clothes. That is why I ask you, what is she to you? Is she your wife?”

“Yes,” said Thanakar.

“Papers, please.”

Thanakar took them from the inside pocket of his oilskin and slid them across the desk. The unraveler peeled them apart with his long fingers and held the seal up to the window. “You come under the protection of a powerful personage,” he said. “But what is this? Marital status: S.”

Again Thanakar pressed his hand against his lips. Then he spoke. “Please,” he said, “I speak of my intent. I have the means to support her. The government has granted me a house in K–-” He named the village by the lake.

“I see that.”

“Please,” said Thanakar again. But there was no sincerity in the way he said the word: His teeth were clenched. Frustration had overcome his thoughts. That morning, cycling along the cinder road while his knee clanked and throbbed, his thoughts had all been routed by an army of conflicting hopes and doubts. They had driven him forward to the place where he now sat, his fingers twitching with frustration, an empty buzzing in his mind. Once again, he put his hands down to his knee, rubbing at the swollen joint.

The unraveler reached for the jar of whiskey on his desk. He tilted it in his left hand, staring at the level of the fluid. He laid down the pistol next to his right hand and once more turned his attention to Thanakar’s papers. “It says here that you are traveling with your two children, both suffering from mental handicaps. Where are they?”

“I left them with my housekeeper,” said Thanakar, naming the town and the hotel where he had spent the night.

“Let me see. You left Charn on October forty-seventh. I don’t think so much travel can be salutary for children of that kind. Such children need a stable home. Is that what you hope to provide for them, in K–-?”

Thanakar said nothing, only stared at the unraveler and rubbed his knee. Angkhdt save us, a philosopher! he thought.

The unraveler looked at him steadily over the top of his papers, and then he laid them down. In his left hand he held the jar of whiskey, and he tilted it so that the amber fluid hesitated just inside the brim. “Answer my questions, please,” he said. “It says here that one of your children suffers from neurophrenia, and the other has adulterated blood. Is that correct?”

“No. Neurophrenia—it is the language of documents. How could it be correct?”

“Ah,” said the unraveler, staring at his whiskey. His voice was melancholic: “Perhaps you can explain for me this difference.”

Outside it had started raining, and the rain was beating on the window beside Thanakar’s chair. He felt a disadvantage that he couldn’t name. He shook his head. “My daughter,” he said, “is suffering from an overdose of a hallucinogenic drug. But I feel that’s not the source of her condition. I don’t know. Sometimes I feel she is not sick at all. Is it sickness when her visions are the truth?”

“Interesting,” said the unraveler. “But what difference does it make?”

“What do you mean? The difference is obvious. In one case the drug is everything, and all my effort must be aimed towards understanding it. In the other case the drug has simply aggravated something else, some other sorrow.”

“You don’t understand,” said the unraveler. “I mean, what is the difference in her treatment? Perhaps that is the only thing that matters. For example, I have no idea whether your knee is congenitally crippled, or whether you have injured it. You are a doctor, no doubt you have a theory. But there is something you don’t seem to know: In either case, the worst thing that you could do to it is to ride a bicycle twenty miles over these roads.”

Once again Thanakar felt a rush of anger and frustration. Once again he felt he was losing a game whose rules he didn’t know. “What do you mean?” he said. “This drug is compounded of an insect, which, in mutated form, seems to be connected to the outbreak of a terrible illness in this region. Surely you’d agree it is a link that we must trace.”

The unraveler looked at him steadily, and then he shrugged. “Mutations,” he said, shifting his attention to the window, where the rain was beating on the glass. “Sugar births, mutations. Life changes as the weather changes—is that not the center of all science? No doubt last spring also there was some illness like the one you mention. Yet here we are. And the only thing we’ve learned is that men and women can’t try to bear these burdens by themselves. They need a context. They need a shield against the world.”

Thanakar cast his eyes around the bare, disheveled room. “Yes,” said the unraveler. “I live here by myself. That’s how I know.” He picked up Thanakar’s passport again, stared at it, and laid it down. “Do you understand what I mean?” he asked. “Children need parents more than doctors. And they need a home.”

With a sigh, the unraveler replaced his jar of whiskey on his desk. He picked up a pencil, and made a small notation in the margin of the doctor’s passport; then he erased it. “Now, I know it has been difficult,” he said. “But it looks to me as if you’ve spent a month and a half in hotels and refugee camps. We are in a war zone here. It is not a place to leave two handicapped children in a hotel by themselves.”

“I don’t understand the purpose of these questions,” said Thanakar after a pause.

“Don’t you? I am contemplating releasing into your custody a female refugee from Charn with no means of support. It is my job to determine what is best for her.”

Thanakar held his breath and then released it slowly. “Can I see her?” he asked.

“No. The decision rests with me. Her wishes are of no importance. Neither are yours. Once again, I stress she is in Caladon unlawfully, with no documents of any kind. Though I admit, your name is one that she has mentioned once or twice.”

Thanakar said nothing. He leaned backwards in his seat.

“That being the case,” continued the unraveler, “for the sake of your children, and in lieu of any good alternative, I am inclined to grant you this request. Only I must reassure myself about the kind of life you plan to lead. It says here, in your own country, you were once an army officer. That is not auspicious. Nothing in these papers is auspicious. In your favor, only this: You have been granted an employment, and a house in K–-. I have been there. It is beautiful. There is a lake.”

The unraveler shook his head and then went on. “In your favor, only this: What does this woman mean to you? You have stated an intention to be married. It is a question of paperwork. As your wife, she would be free to go. I would not be able to prevent her.”