The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (66 page)

But the saving grace when matters got really bad, what she took out and unwrapped one at a time like rare precious objects, were the stories the man in the café had told her. They were some of the only things that buoyed her over those agonizing days. Sitting next to her mother’s bed in the hospice while the withered woman slept, Joanna would smile or close her eyes contentedly when she thought of the tales and anecdotes he had told her. Sometimes she got out her notebook and looked at what she had written down in there to remind her of their specific talks.

She didn’t know what it meant to drown in her own life but the sorrow she experienced during her mother’s final week brought her very close at times. What helped Joanna most was remembering and then concentrating hard on some of the funny, memorable, or beautiful things the man had described. They gave her back some balance; they reminded her that life can also be funny and splendid; not just pitiless and lead-colored as it was now.

Three days before she died, her mother finally opened her mouth and took the slim section of tangerine her daughter offered. She had not eaten anything for ages. The joy that surged in Joanna’s heart on seeing the food go in was huge.

But huge was not the word that came to her then; it was smallicious. What her mother had just done was wonderful, not small. Joanna hoped that small bit of tangerine tasted delicious. So maybe that was why the funny non-word came to her, stuck in her brain and wouldn’t go away.

Only later did she realize why smallicious owned that last great moment shared between them: Because in another time, her mother would have liked the word too. With her sensibilities she would have understood exactly what it meant. She and her daughter would have used it often when they talked to each other on the phone. Smallicious.

Watching her mother’s mouth chew slowly there at the very end, the man’s word was so strong in Joanna’s head that she almost said it out loud.

E
AMON REILLY WAS HANDSOME
and sloppy. He seemed to know everyone, even waitresses in restaurants. When he walked in the door, they beamed and began seriously flirting the minute he sat down at their table. I saw this happen several times at different places—restaurants or bars none of us had ever been to before. I asked if he knew these women but he always said no.

Eamon wore his heart on his sleeve and it worked. People cared about him even when he was being impossible, which was pretty often. He drove an old badly neglected Mercedes that was filthy inside and out. Whenever you rode in it, he had to move stuff off the passenger’s seat and throw it in the back. Sometimes you couldn’t believe what was there—a metal dowsing rod, a box of diapers (he was single), a jai alai
xistela,
or once a very intimately autographed, badly wrinkled photo of a famous movie actress. He wrote everything in block letters so precise that you might have guessed it came from a typewriter. He kept a detailed daily diary but no one ever saw what was in it, although he carried the book around with him everywhere. His love life was a constant disaster and we wondered why no woman ever stayed with him for very long.

He had recently been together with my girlfriend Ava for a couple of weeks. But she was no help when I finally got up the nerve to ask why she broke up with him. “We didn’t fit.”

“And?”

“And nothing. Some people just don’t fit together in certain configurations. There are people you can be good friends with, but if you turn it into lovers, you’re doomed. Because the mix is wrong or toxic or ... something. For me, Eamon is a good guy to hang around with but he wasn’t a good boyfriend.”

“Why?”

“What’s with all the ‘whys’? Are you suddenly seven years old again?” She narrowed her eyes, which is usually the sign a topic is closed and Ava doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. But this time was different. “Sit down.”

“What?”

“Sit down. I’m going to tell you a story. It’s kind of long.”

I did as I was told. When Ava tells you to do something, you do it because, well, because she’s Ava. The woman likes dessert, foreign politics, the truth, working in perilous situations, and wonder, not necessarily in that order. She’s a journalist who goes on assignment to extremely dangerous places around the world like Spinkai Raghzai, Pakistan or Sierra Leone. You see her on the TV news holding down her hair or helmet as a military helicopter takes off nearby, leaving her and a small camera crew in some forward armed outpost or ruined, smoking village that was attacked by rebels the night before. She is fearless, self-confident and impatient. She is also pregnant which is why she’s home these days. We’re pretty sure the child is mine but there is a chance that it might be Eamon’s.

I’ve known Ava Malcolm twelve years and loved her for about eleven of them. During those years, she expressed virtually no interest in me, save for an occasional late night telephone call from unimaginable places like Ougadougou or Aleppo. The reception on these calls was invariably bad and scratchy. More often than not until the birth of satellite telephones, somewhere in the middle of these chats the line would suddenly go dead as if it had grown tired of our gabbing and wanted to go to sleep.

Later she admitted that for a while she thought I was gay. But when she came back from some assignment at the end of the world and saw I was living with Jan Schick, it put an end to my gay days in Ava Malcolm’s mind.

Poor Jan didn’t stand a chance. I always assumed I would only get to love Ava from a distance, be grateful for any time she gave me, and go on admiring this brave talented woman as she went about living her larger than life.

But then she got shot. The bitter irony is that it did not happen in some far-flung flyblown, 130 degree-in-the-shade hellhole where the bad guys rode in on animals instead of tanks. It happened at a convenience store four blocks from her NY apartment. A quick trip to the market for a bottle of red wine and a bag of Cheese Doodles coincided with a dunce named Leaky trying to rob his first store with a gun he later insisted went off accidentally, twice. One of those bullets nicked Ava’s shoulder. However since it came from a Glock “G36” subcompact pistol, being ‘nicked’ was an understatement. It probably would not have happened if she’d dropped to the floor like the rest of the people in the store as soon as Leaky started shouting. But Ava being Ava, she wanted to see what was going on, so she just stood there until the gun went off while pointed roughly in her direction.

She saw many terrible things in her years as a reporter, but had always escaped being hurt. Yet as is often the case with people who have been seriously injured, it traumatized her. When she got out of the hospital, she “traveled, screwed men, and hid for a year.” Her words.

“I came out of the hospital with my arm in a sling and my ass on fire. I was about 142% crazy—I’ll say that. I wanted to live life twice as hard afterwards: see twice as many things, and have as many men as I could. I’d come this close to dying and the only sure thing I learned from the experience was I wanted
more:
More life, more sex, more new places ...

“So I used up all the frequent flyer miles I’d accrued over the years in my job. When they were gone, I called in every favor I had due from people who could get me where I wanted to go in the world. I spent a lot of time in southwestern Russia because that area was like the new Wild West, what with all the oil money and exploration going on down there.

“It was in Baku that I met the Yit.”

This was typical Ava storytelling. On her TV reports she gave relevant information in perfect sound bytes and was crystal clear about it. Yet in person she often got so carried away telling you a story or personal anecdote that she overlooked the fact you might not know Baku or, like most people on planet earth, what a “Yit” was.

“Please explain the last two terms.”

“Azerbaijan,” she said impatiently. “Baku is the capital of Azerbaijan.”

“Okay, that’s Baku. What’s a Yit?”

“A djelloum.”

“What’s a jell-loom?”

“A Yit is another word for a djelloum—kind of like a fortune teller but more shaman-y. It’s a sort of combo fortuneteller and sage. But in Azerbaijan, women are djelloum, not men. Which is interesting because it’s a very macho, male oriented society otherwise.”

“Okay—Baku, and a Yit.”

She leaned over and kissed me on one side of my mouth. “I like how you stop me and ask for clarification. Most people just let me rattle on.”

“Proceed.”

“Okay. So at the end of the trip, I wanted to spend some time in Baku because one of my favorite novels,
ALI AND NINO,
takes place there. The book makes the city sound like one of the most romantic places on earth. It isn’t, but that’s beside the point.

“I was visiting a section called Sabunchu. My guide was Magsud, an Azeri fluent in English who we’d used before when I was there on assignment for the network. So I knew the guy pretty well. He knew the sort of things I liked and was interested in. This time because I wasn’t working, I hired him just to show me around.

“When we got to Sabunchu, Magsud said one of the most famous djelloum in Russia lived in that part of the city. Would I be interested in visiting her? Things like palmists, astrology, and tarot card readings are like crack for chicks. Seers, shamans, psychics—Lead us to ’em. So I said sure, I’d love to meet a Yit.

“Her name was Lamiya, which is Azeri for ‘educated.’ She lived in a small apartment in one of those soulless 1950’s, gray cement Communist public housing projects where you can easily get lost because every building looks exactly the same. I think there were two rooms in the place but we only saw the living room, which was dark even in the middle of the day. Lamiya sat on a couch. Next to it was a baby bassinet. The whole time we were there, she kept one hand inside the bassinet, as if she were touching the baby to keep it quiet.

“After we sat down, Lamiya asked Magsud if I knew about
lal bala,
which means the silent child. He said no. She told him to explain it to me before she went any further. Of course I didn’t understand them because they were speaking Azeri. But I did see him grimace when she finished, like it was going to be tough explaining this in a way that I’d comprehend.

“While Magsud explained
lal bala
to me, Lamiya kept her hand constantly inside the bassinet. I didn’t know why until later.” Ava stopped speaking and just stared at me for a few moments. I think she was gathering energy to go on to the difficult part.

“Now I’m going to tell you the story exactly as it happened. You can believe it or not, but just know that I do with all my heart because of what Lamiya told me about myself. Details and facts no one on earth could know but me.
No one,
do you understand? Not my parents, or my sister, no one. But Lamiya knew. She rattled off the most intimate things about me like she was reading them from a list.

“Let me first explain the silent child. According to legend, there are three of them in Russia at all times. When one dies, another is immediately born to replace it. It’s kind of like the succession of the Dalai Lama in Tibet: a silent child chooses its mother before it’s born.”

“What do you mean, before it’s born? Before the
child
is born?”

“Yes. Lamiya said she knew she’d have a silent child the moment she first sensed she was pregnant. So when hers was born, she wasn’t surprised or upset to see it.”

“Why would you be upset to see your own baby? Was there something wrong with it?”

Ava looked apprehensive, as if hesitant to tell what must be said next. “A silent child is not alive. I mean, it’s half alive—Half alive and half dead; it lives half in this world and half in the other too.”

“What ‘other world’?”

“The afterlife. The baby is half alive and half dead, as I said. It never ages. It lives a certain number of years; they never know how many it’ll be. That’s different for each child. The day it dies, it looks exactly the same as it did on the day it was born, although some of these children live for decades. It never moves, eats or breathes. It never opens its eyes or makes a sound. But its heart beats and most importantly, it’s an oracle.

“After she’s told you secret things about yourself that absolutely convinces you beyond all doubt that she’s genuine, you’re allowed to ask the mother two questions. You can ask anything—about the past, about the future, anything you want. As long as she’s touching her silent child, she will answer them. But you are only allowed to ask two.”

“What did you ask?”

Ava shook her head. “I won’t tell you. But part of—” she stopped, got up and walked to the window. I sat still, waiting for some sign about what to do—go to her, sit still, talk, or just keep quiet ...

Touching the window glass, she slid her fingers in a long arc across the condensation there. I could almost feel the cold wetness beneath my own fingertips. What she said next took me completely off guard.

“Did Eamon Reilly ever tell you about his past? About his childhood?”

“
Eamon
? What does he have to do with this?”

“A lot.” Ava began rubbing both hands back and forth very fast on the glass, as if trying to erase something. Then she turned to face me. “Just go with me on this—It’s all of a piece. Did you ever hear about his past?”

“No.”

“Eamon’s father was a pilot. He terrorized his family for years, beat them all up and did many other terrible things—a genuine sadist. One of his favorite tortures was to fly really low back and forth over their house in a small plane when he knew everyone was home. Eamon said it was so frightening that the kids and his mother used to all hide under the beds or in the cellar because they were sure one day he’d crash the plane into the house and kill them.”

“What happened to him?”

“Luckily the guy was also a drunk. He drove his car off a bridge one day and died.”

“Jesus! So that’s why Eamon has ... what,
issues
?”

“Yes. Once I got so fed up with the way he was behaving that I slapped him. Only then did he tell me some of the stories and details of his childhood. Finally I began to understand why he is the way he is. It doesn’t make him any less exasperating, but boy, with that background ...”