The Book of Jonas (14 page)

Rose had made two dozen chocolate-chip cookies. She baked them twelve at a time, on cookie sheets placed one over the other on racks in the oven. The first dozen was nearly done baking when she called to the boys in the backyard, and she deftly formed the second dozen from clumpy balls of dough using two floral-handled tablespoons. As the boys came inside, she pulled the first batch out of the oven with mitted hands, and she reminded them not to get dirt all over the floor.

The two children sat at the kitchen table, each with a glass of milk that she poured from the carton in the refrigerator, and they waited expectantly for her to bring them a large, ivory plate of chocolate-chip cookies. She baked them once every couple of weeks, and when she did there was a minor celebration in the house. Even Roy got excited, and was known to come home from work early, if he could, just to rescue a cookie or two from his voracious sons.

Several years after receiving the letter, Rose will remove one of the five chairs from around the kitchen table. She will not give any explanation, and the missing chair will never be mentioned again.

But for now the bright sun streamed in through the window, and the steam from fresh-baked cookies rose through it. The two boys sat around the kitchen table and bantered, while Rose carried the plate over to them. As she set it down, she heard the mail truck rattle to a stop outside, noticed the silence of its stopping, but she did not go outside to get the mail immediately, did not yet step out into the October sun, did not yet feel its warmth on her arms.

Under the table, one of the boys kicked the other. The other yelled out, and Rose just smiled as she pretended to take back the plate of cookies. Outside, the mail truck abruptly started its engine, drove away down the street, its fading rattle filling the neighborhood with the sound of its mandate. There was a brief moment of silence, until both boys realized that there was no way she would really take back this gift, this memory they would have for the rest of their lives.

Jonas hears a knock at the door.

He has lost track of how long he has been in the shower, and Shakri knocks again and asks if he is all right.

“Fine,” he says, and fills the empty beer bottle absentmindedly with water from the showerhead. He hears the phone ring, and knows from the tone of Shakri’s voice that it is her mother.

Shakri talks to her mother frequently. Her mother, father, and brother are all doctors, as Shakri will be one day. She will
be just like her parents, who still live in India, and her brother, in New York.

Photographs of the family—on vacation somewhere exotic and palm-lined, or visiting her once during the winter, gathered around a snowman on a white Pennsylvania day, looking like bundled-up raisins on a sugar-frosted cake, or standing in front of the Taj Mahal, tourists in their native land, or hunched with aunts and uncles and cousins over a board game in a comfortable family room—clutter Shakri’s bookshelves and tabletops. When he first visited her apartment, Jonas stood transfixed by the images of Shakri’s abundant family. But now he does not really look at them. He finds it too much like staring into a floodlight, the portraits and casual snapshots painting in stark relief his own want.

He keeps a portion of his heart to himself. Although he wants to do more, he finds himself loving her only halfway. He tells himself it is because he is young, too young to freely give away his heart. He tells himself it is because he needs to focus on his studies, or because of his friends, who do not always meet with her approval.

But he suspects there are larger reasons for holding back, reasons related to loss, related to the dangers inherent in loving anything fully, related to the speed with which it might be taken away.

He drinks unthinkingly from the beer bottle, and spits out what he suddenly realizes is warm shower water.

He suspects there are still bigger reasons.

He loves her only halfway. The half he gives basks in it, soaks it up. The half he gives is covered in light. But he knows
that there is a part of himself that must never be shown, that could never be loved, an animal part consumed by violence and rage and survival, a part he keeps locked away behind a heavy door.

In part, he loves her only halfway for his own protection, his wounded past, his fragile heart. But mostly he holds back because, deep down, underneath everything, below his thoughts and his movements and even his breath, he hears a knock at that door, low and incessant, and he knows that were it ever opened, were it ever to escape, she would be the first to get hurt.

What if you become convinced that, even though you are there to help them, the locals are not only unappreciative, but might actively hate you? What if you start calling all the locals hajjis? What if you start to see them less and less as human beings and more and more as things to be categorized as either very threatening or less threatening? What if your SAW gunner accidentally pops off a round or two in the general direction of a crowd of hajjis who have gathered for some purpose you don’t fully understand, but don’t like the look of? What if you all start popping off at the slightest provocation? What if you start looking for provocations? What if you start to feel bored when your weapon is silent?

For a long time after she received the letter, Rose carried on as though it had never arrived. Her two boys still lived at home, and she was still married. She had activities to keep her busy. She attended PTA meetings. She bought groceries. With perhaps the mildest hint of desperation, she hacked at the weeds that seemed always on the verge of overgrowing the wall in the backyard. She drank coffee with friends.

And when anyone would ask, as they regularly did, whether she had received any news of Christopher, she would smile and say, “Not yet,” as though she had just been asked about her tax refund, or a new pair of jeans she had ordered by mail.

And then, at some point, she realized that he was not coming back. Perhaps it was when she went into his room and noticed, as if for the first time, the accumulation of dust on the dresser and shelves. Maybe it was when she looked up from the casserole she had just removed from the oven and realized that his chair at the kitchen table had not been used in years. Perhaps it was the day she saw that the stacks of unopened mail she had been saving for him filled three large boxes.

Not that she accepted his death, per se, merely that she accepted that she would most probably never see him again.

She had been told that once she arrived at the point of acceptance, she would be able to move forward. It would mark a turning point. And they were correct, whoever it was who
told her this. It did mark a turning point. But it was not the kind of turning point she had expected. She had come to think of her life as being on hold. She had an inkling that once she reached the point of acceptance, everything could finally begin again. But looking back on it, she realizes that rather than marking the point her life restarted, the day she finally accepted loss marked the point when it all fell apart.

You probably know a little bit what it’s like. If you’ve ever shot a gun, even if you’ve ever used a slingshot, or a bow and arrow, anything like that. You see something out there, a bottle, or a tin can, something far away from you, something that looks to be totally unconnected to you, and you aim at it, pull the trigger, let go of the stone, and the thing you aimed at explodes, disappears.

Now, imagine that times a hundred, times a thousand. We use really big guns. Bombs. Mortars. It’s alluring. That’s power. Real power. You see a car out there, you see a truck, you see a building, you see a whole fucking village.

Gone.

Out of the shower at last, he finds a clean pair of his own jeans and a shirt, left on a previous visit, which Shakri has folded
and placed on a stand outside the bathroom. He puts them on, then tells Shakri he’s going for a walk.

“Why don’t you stay here?” she says.

“I need to think,” he says.

And then he’s out the door and alone with his thoughts and his footfalls on the rough concrete of the sidewalk.

He feels a pleasant numb sensation in his arms, and out of habit he plays a game with himself in which he tries not to step on the cracks in the battered pavement. Whether from playing this game or not, he has developed a half fear of the cracks, a sort of ridiculous phobia, as though stepping on a crack will open a chasm in the sidewalk through which he will fall. In his mind, the game assumes larger significance.

Stupid, he thinks. Silly thoughts.

And yet he can’t help but notice that he is good at it, that he has always been good at it. Good at avoiding pitfalls, avoiding problems, even imaginary problems, like cracks in the cement.

The cracked sidewalk leads Jonas to the house on Adams Street in which Hakma rents a tiny bedroom.

“You look awful,” says Hakma.

“Thanks,” says Jonas, as he steps into the sparse room that Hakma uses as a bedroom, study, kitchen, and dining room. Over the single bed, Hakma has tacked up a map of the world large enough to take up most of the wall. Large-headed pins protrude from various points on the map’s surface, like tiny mushroom clouds. Jonas had once asked whether they marked places Hakma had visited.

“No,” Hakma had said. “Each pin is a place where I have a relative.”

Close to the geographical center of the map is an oblong circle drawn in thick black marker. The circle takes up portions of Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, and is labeled “Kurdi stan.” Hanging on the wall opposite the map is the Kurdish flag, green-and-white-and-red-striped, a bright yellow sun taking up most of the field.

“I called you earlier,” says Hakma. “You were out?”

“Yes,” says Jonas.

“Where’d you go?”

“Hey, tell me again about your flag.”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“Well, as I may have mentioned to you previously, it is made up of three stripes, which, from bottom to top, are green, white, and red, with a large golden sunburst in the middle.”

“And tell me again, what do those colors represent?”

“I’m glad you asked. The green stripe represents the land itself, verdant, fertile, the cradle of…”

“Is it not mostly desert?”

“It is not. It is verdant and fertile. The white band represents peace, which is what every Kurd wants, the right to live peacefully within the borders of our ancestral homeland.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And the red band, at the top, represents…”

“The blood of the people?”

“The red band represents the blood of the people, their struggle for a homeland free of foreign domination. And the sunburst in the middle is yellow, representing light and power,
and it has twenty-one rays, which is important for specific religious reasons.”

“What sort of religious reasons?”

“It’s, um, the number, twenty-one, is the number of, um, true purity. I think.”

“Well, it’s a beautiful flag,” says Jonas.

“It is beautiful, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

They stand and look at the flag for what seems to Jonas to be a long time.

“Listen,” says Jonas at last, “do you fancy getting a drink?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” says Hakma.

They grab their jackets and go out the front door, and the cracked cement sidewalk leads them several blocks farther downtown, to Wilson’s, where they find a few more acquaintances already gathered together in a large corner booth.

Trevor carries a pyramid of pint glasses to the faux-wood table, the top of which is already covered with wet rings.

“Here’s to Kurdistan,” says Hakma, and out of habit, they all raise their glasses and drink.

In the photograph’s background is a large, square limestone building with ornately carved columns and a frieze over the entrance. It looks almost classically Greek. It is pockmarked
with bullet holes, and parts of it, the sharp corners, the most delicately carved figures, lie crumbled around its base. The building is the least noticeable thing in the image, the foreground of which is dominated by a soldier who may be Christopher. He wears dark sunglasses and a uniform of sand-colored camouflage the exact same hue as the shot-up building behind him. His helmet, same color, is emblazoned with sergeant’s stripes, and he carries a long gun, pointed down, his finger carefully laid along its side, away from the trigger.

The soldier who may be Christopher looks down at a dark-haired boy who appears to be in his early teens, a tightly wound
lugee
wrapped around his head, and a billowing white cloth around his shoulders, tied on top of a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt. They are obviously talking, the boy looking off into the middle distance, and his hands seem to be absently twirling the fringe of the cloth. The soldier, who stands well over a head taller than the boy, is looking down at him with an earnest expression barely discernible behind his large, nearly black sunglasses. It is as though he is trying to convince the boy of something.

“Do not be afraid,” he seems to be saying. “We are here to help.”

For a time, Rose cursed the sun.

She stayed awake all night. She went to sleep at sunrise and tried to remain unconscious as long as she could. She
stopped showering. She stopped taking care of Roy and the two remaining boys. They were also suffering. She knew it. But they could rot for all she cared. No, she thought, that was far too harsh. She didn’t mean it. She didn’t want to lose them, too. But they required so much, and she simply didn’t have the energy to devote to keeping them. It was, she found, no easier to lose one just because you had others.

She made occasional, heartfelt efforts to move on. She joined a bowling league. She didn’t know why. A friend had joined, and in a fit of optimism, Rose signed up, too. It was a silly idea. She hadn’t been bowling since she was a girl, when the owner of the local bowling lane hosted all-night bowling parties on the weekend, locking the doors so that parents knew where their children would be. She would stay up all night long with her friends. But she remembered that it wasn’t about the bowling; it was about just being there, surrounded by everyone. She remembered that it was happy.