The Juliet Stories (7 page)

The pieces of the night fall where they may. If a child is clever, loose in a forest of grown-ups, she won’t draw attention to herself. She will be forgotten, which is not the same thing as being neglected. It’s like going invisible, by choice, like hiding in the underbrush to spy, to explore, to play — untroubled.

“Do we have to go to school?”

“Yes, or you can never stay up that late again. Ever.”

“I hate school.”

“You don’t.”

“I do.”

“Where are those green barrettes? Your hair is a mess.”

“I don’t care.”

“Juliet!”

“What? I don’t, and it’s my hair. Why should you care?”

“I have to care. It’s my job. I’m your mother.”

“That’s stupid.”

“It is. How about that: I don’t care either. My head is splitting and Emmanuel was up nursing half the night and your father’s leaving tomorrow for the
campo
with the delegation and I really and truly don’t care about your hair. How about that.”

Oh.

There
is
something worse to be found, in handwriting, in the office. Here is Juliet, reading about — words, words — torture. She cannot take it in.
Forced to swallow his own tongue, cut out of his own head
. And worse. The children are watching, the fields are on fire, the animals are screaming from a shed where they have been shut up and set alight, and the bayonet digs into the mother’s belly and pulls out a baby. Tossed to the dogs. The children are watching. The children are forced at gunpoint to watch.

She cannot take it in, but she cannot take it out.

Strange, she can’t guess how the pictures will flicker silently inside, against, and around her, always, nor how she will hold them in her hands — not the way a memory is held of an individual loved and lost, but held lightly between the fingers like playing cards from a deck, dealt for an unknown game.

She can’t love the people in the pictures; she does not know them. She can hate and fear the men with their bayonets. She can pity the tortured. But she cannot love. It is too painful to throw love like a rescue line to humans doomed to suffer, already dead and gone. She will remember forever, and yet never well enough, never with the particularity of love: these people whom her parents have come to save from suffering, who continue to be killed, whose killing will not end the suffering of others, whose torture and murder fall like drops of rain and vanish in the punishing sun.

Words. They scrape along her skin, enter, and the wound heals instantly. She appears unhurt. She does not suffer nightmares or wake in a cold sweat or fear for her life, because she does not believe it could happen to her.

That keeps her safe: belief that she is different, her family unique, marked out for protection by their skin colour and their citizenship and, yes, by their goodness, their rightness. So much of what she believes is wrong, but if it is never proven to be wrong, how will she ever know?

She hears her mother and Charlotte on the porch, talking, in disagreement, and she smoothes the loose sheet of paper, its story, its murdered and tortured, face down on the desktop.

Charlotte says, “All I’m asking is to get out into the
campo
, away from Managua. To do something that matters!”

Gloria says, “I trust Bram’s judgement.”

“You could put in a good word for me — please, say something to him,” says Charlotte.

“I could not,” says Gloria. “If he doesn’t think you should be in the
campo
, then you shouldn’t be in the
campo
.”

“I didn’t volunteer to hang around an office all day.”

Silence.

Charlotte: “Aren’t you bored, stuck in the house? With the kids? Left behind? Don’t you find it all very sexist? Misogynistic?”

Snort. “Charlotte, ask yourself, why do you want to go so badly?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Charlotte, I’ve been watching you. I’m warning you to be careful. That’s all: be careful. Take care. You are the one who will get hurt.”

Pause. Juliet sits down hard in the desk chair. It squeaks. She hears her mother walking towards her.

“Juliet, you are not supposed to be in here. Move it. Out.”

“You’re wrong,” says Charlotte, following. “About everything.”

“Oh God, that’s shit. Watch where you step.” Gloria bends just outside the office door and with a leaf scoops a curl of toddler poop off the porch tiles and tosses it under the front coconut palm. “Well, I hope I am,” she says to Charlotte. “That would be nice for a change.” And then she goes looking for Emmanuel, to wipe him clean.

Juliet feels an overwhelming urge: she wants to touch Charlotte, the edge of her skirt, the back of her hand, the feathery hairs on her arm. She slides closer, but is too shy.

“I don’t want you to go to the
campo
,” Juliet whispers.

Charlotte turns and gazes with eyes that see shape and form and shadow, but not Juliet. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, nameless, unreasoning,” she says.

The protestors from Ohio are leaving for the
campo
in the morning. For their send-off meal they will feast outdoors. Juliet, Keith, and Emmanuel walk with their mother to the field at the end of their street, which belongs to nobody. Littered grass is stamped flat under all these feet, and blankets are spread on muddy ground. The afternoon rains have come and gone. The cook stirs a giant pot of
indio viejo
, a traditional stew of cornmeal cooked over a fire, flecked with beef and tomatoes and seasoned with mint and bitter oranges.

It is growing dark, as it does here, early. Gloria points to the belt of Orion, faint and clear against the steady sky.

“What’s that hanging from his belt?”

Gloria says it’s a knife. A hunting knife.

Bram’s head and shoulders loom above the crowd. He is going to the
campo
too, and he seems removed from them, as if he has already left behind his family, and they him, as if they need no further goodbye. Juliet eats where she drops, close to Charlotte, who notices and wraps an arm around her, draws her into a circle of grown-up talk.

Marta walks among the group, gathering plates and utensils in a large plastic bin. The puppy stumbles behind, nipping at her heels.

Bram calls for song, and Gloria lifts her guitar and plays, joined by the pluck of banjo strings, the rattle of tambourines, and by Charlotte’s open throat:
Oh, woman, would you weep for me?

Voices swept together by darkness, satiation. Apart, they come together, in a faraway land, far away from home.

“Let’s dance!” Charlotte moves, she moves, she moves with the spirit, but Juliet hesitates. “Never hesitate. Start with your parts. Hold out your hand. Start with this one.”

A girl in parts.

One hand. One wrist. One elbow. One shoulder, two, and down the other arm and on, until piece by piece her entire body is in motion. Hips and knees and head and feet and guts, and who is watching? No one. Juliet is entwined, enmeshed with her own body. She is whole, she’s forgotten that her spirit is separate, because it isn’t, when she’s dancing.

Everyone is moving.

Charlotte, neck exposed, holding hands with Juliet’s father, swings him into a circular dance, pulling him towards Juliet so that she can join too. Juliet, right hand in her dad’s left, feeling his strong, thick fingers wrap and squeeze her own, thinks she will cry.

“Do you have to go to the
campo
, Dad? Do you have to?”

He can’t hear what Juliet’s asking over the music and the laughter. He smiles down at her, though he is breathing heavily. “Isn’t this something else?” he puffs, but he is ready to stop. He is a man of bulk and solidity, not made for whirling.

They are still holding hands, the three of them. Juliet is the first to let go, stranding them together, her father and Charlotte, but only for a blink. Their hands swing back and forth once and then they drop each other.

Bram says, “If you want, you can come along to the
campo
. Why not?”

Juliet thinks he is talking to her, and something leaps like a small furry animal inside her chest.

“Oh,” breathes Charlotte. “How can I thank you?”

Not Juliet. Charlotte. Charlotte can come with Bram to the
campo
. The small furry animal in Juliet’s chest curls around itself, a weight heavier than before.

Bram shrugs, smiles warmly. “We’ll keep you safe.”

“I’m going somewhere,” cries Charlotte. “We’re going somewhere!”

Charlotte grabs for Juliet’s hand and kisses it. Her cheeks shine wet in the firelight. She twirls Juliet like a ballerina. “Come. Let’s go!”

And now the two of them, Charlotte and Juliet, are on their way, together. Together, they are dancing away from Bram, who mops his brow with a handkerchief,
and from Gloria, whose fingers find rhythm no matter how asymmetrical. They are living, really living. They step lightly, delicately, weave invisibly over blankets and past backpacks, out beyond the forest of bodies lit by sparks, through deep and heavy grasses where the shadow of a tethered horse flickers in the dark, stamps its feet, and whickers soft and low.

“Oh!” breathes Charlotte, like they have passed into another world, like they may never find home again.

Maybe, thinks Juliet, we never will.

Her mother’s music drifts from the other side of the field, sending them off, and the sky is dusty with stars — the blackness of a sky unlit by electricity, a long-ago sky in which no planes could ever fly, from which no bombs could ever fall. Charlotte pulls Juliet by the hand, dreamily, two train cars rolling silently down a track.

Rolling, rolling, rolling, and we ain’t never coming back
.

Across Managua, election posters flutter, graffiti is sprayed, car windows are plastered with slogans, and beautiful murals are painted on walls in honour of the ruling Frente. For five years the country has waited to vote, and in two months — on November 4, 1984 — the people will go to the polls, observed by a legion of foreigners, including those from the Roots of Justice.

With a handful of volunteers, the Friesen family attends a massive rally held before the Palacio Nacional. The building is decrepit and magnificent, its huge white pillars faded grey and spotlit under a humid, porous sky. Daniel Ortega, the slender leader of the ruling party, appears onstage in his olive-green uniform, to a collective thrill.

Juliet and Keith raise their voices deliriously in the party’s official song: “
¡Luchamos, contra el yanqui, enemigo del humanidad!
” We will be victorious over the Yankee, enemy of humanity!

Juliet and Keith relish the shared joke: that they themselves are Yankees, enemies of humanity. Ha! They haven’t considered taking the words seriously. They haven’t considered that it might change them to straddle borders this way, that they might be forever altered, forever unable to choose a side, unable to respond to even the most obvious warning, so utterly confident, so utterly believing themselves to be who they are: multiplicities containing worlds, unpinned by definition, free.

Gloria’s sweet soprano caresses the notes like she’s attending a gospel tent meeting from her childhood, eyes half-closed, body swaying. But they aren’t here as supporters of a political party, says Bram. They come as observers, to experience, to soak it all in.

Fireworks explode in the black sky over the crumbling Palacio, a symbol no longer of exclusion but of a revolutionary nation struggling to define itself. Daniel Ortega wears military fatigues. Beside him is his brother Humberto, the Minister of Defence. The country is at war, and the military and the ruling party are as one.

Within the gathered throngs, smaller, fiercer firecrackers explode, cheap paper soaked in gunpowder and set alight by boys and men, whirling and popping and rising.

The crowds push and heave. Juliet begs to buy gum from one of the girls who duck and dart and shout with boxes displaying their goods tied around necks like little shelves — bare feet and tattered dresses, thin arms and legs and faces.

“No,” her mother says, and in the next instant she is parted from Juliet. The crowds are suddenly tightly packed, swelling, pushing against Juliet with a pressure as shocking and ruthless as a tidal wave. Juliet feels herself lifted off her feet and carried, breathless, in the wrong direction. She can’t see anyone she knows. The smell of body heat is oppressive. No one is watching out for her; no one is holding on.

She feels herself falling. She is slipping under, under the feet, under the weight, knocked to the dirt on her hands and knees. They will crush her without knowing what they’ve done.

Instinctively, Juliet protects her head with her forearms; she will be trampled in this position. But instead she is grabbed from behind, lifted by strong hands, wrenched free. Her armpit aches, and her shoulder, where he’s caught hold. Her father, Bram, bellying bodies aside, pins Juliet against his damp cotton shirt with one arm and with the other clears the way, forcing a path, relentless as a tank.

Together they ride out of the crush. The edge of the crowd, the thin layer beyond which it disperses altogether, is as sudden as its invention. Juliet feels cool night air on her hot face.

“Thought we’d lost you,” is all Bram says. Instead of setting Juliet down, he swings her onto his shoulders. She feels younger than she is. Shyly, she lets her fingers brush his crinkly hair.

“What can you see from up there?” If he’s worried, his calm tone does not betray it.

Juliet points. There is her mother, pushing towards to the stage, her arms raised. Music blares over the loudspeakers. And here is Charlotte, quite near Juliet and Bram, looking for them, Emmanuel in her arms. Juliet waves and shouts, and relief washes Charlotte’s face clean as she comes towards them.

“What about Keith? Can you see Keith?” Bram asks.

Juliet can’t. They turn in a circle so that she can scan every direction, but she can’t see Keith.

“He’s with somebody,” says Bram. Their small group picks through the impromptu parking lot towards the white minibus, guarded by their driver, Israel Junior.

Juliet slides off her father’s shoulders. The crowds are thinning; the people are going home. One by one the other Roots of Justice volunteers find them, each with some small adventure to report, but Keith is with none of them.

Still Bram says, “He’s somewhere nearby,” and pats Juliet on the head, absently, a touch that chafes. She ducks and he glances at her in perplexity, his eyes distant, unfocused. Worried.

Gloria is the last to know. She’s running to meet them, her face shining: she touched the sleeve of Daniel Ortega, revolutionary hero! He leaned down from the stage to greet the people — no barriers, no bodyguards, no bulletproof vest.

“We can’t find Keith,” Charlotte interrupts.

“What? Where is he?”

“He can’t be far away,” says Bram.

Juliet feels the weight of her father’s palm pressing the top of her head as he says again: “He can’t be far.”

“Oh God.” Gloria claps her hands against her rib cage, her face drained of colour and suddenly still, frozen. “Kidnapped. Someone saw us, someone saw an opportunity. Oh God. What will they do to him?”

“Gloria.” Bram’s tone is stern. “We will find him. Yuri and Andrew are going around the perimeter of the crowd right now. No, don’t move, Gloria.” He catches her by the arm, but she yanks free. “Stay here. We can’t lose you too.”

“We have to tell someone,” she says. “The police, someone.”

“I’ll do that,” says Charlotte.

“Sit in the bus,” says Bram.

“Fuck you,” says Gloria. “You think we’re on the sidelines. But we’re in the middle of a fucking war.”

Keith has black hair. His skin tans easily, his eyes are nut brown. No one would guess him to be a gringo. He slips into a crowd and becomes any boy in a way that Juliet cannot become any girl. She envies her brother his malleability, his deftness at the art of reflection. Wherever he is right now, she knows he is not lonely: he’s squatting in the dirt lighting firecrackers with matches, or drinking a bag of pop offered for free by an admiring woman, or playing a game of street baseball with a stone and a stick and a rabble of boys.

He will saunter up, hand in hand with Yuri or Andrew, and shrug: What?

But if she were to slip away, if Juliet were to creep towards the Palacio to see the brass band playing right up close, to touch the nose of a horse, to hop onto the stage and declaim her favourite poem from
The Hobbit
 — what would happen to her? She knows the question is without validity. Everyone would see her coming; they would whisper and point and stroke her hair to see if it’s real, and she’s not brave enough to go.

On top of the minibus, Israel Junior, the driver, jumps up and down with excitement.

“Oh!” Gloria sees them and she runs, her jaw and fists unclenched, her hair unfurling like a flag in her wake: Yuri and Keith.

What?

———

As they pull out of the parking lot, Gloria turns in her seat and tells all of them, but Juliet especially; “I know I said some things that sounded bad. Did they scare you? I’m sorry if they did. Were you afraid too? I was so upset and worried, it was like I’d lost my mind. Do you understand?”

Juliet nods yes.

Her mother does not ask for forgiveness. She sums up what has happened, rolls down the window, and lets it blow away, like that.

Keith’s leg rests next to Juliet’s on the plastic seat, bumping up and down as Israel Junior negotiates potholes and ruts and stray pigs. It is a just a leg, like her own, and she couldn’t say anything more than that in explanation, looking down on it: so close to hers, so warm, so irritating.

Juliet pinches Keith.

He stares at her and she stares back, blank faced, almost as surprised as he is, and he has to — he pinches her thigh in return — so she has to — she pinches again. Hard, her nails digging. She will leave a mark.
Hey!
Whispered. He punches her arm. She kicks his ankle. He pulls her hair while she digs her nails into his brown thigh.

Neither will let go. Breathing through their mouths.

They hold on in silence, hidden in the back of the minibus from all but Israel Junior, who watches them in the rear-view mirror, sees them carrying a rage that can go nowhere but here, caught, pinned together as the dark city spins past and warm air washes like incense through open windows and the grown-ups talk about who will win, and who should, and what their roles as impartial observers might be.