“Why now?” I asked him.
“We’re leaving this evening,” he said. “Joseph has other villages he wants to conquer.”
“And where do I go?”
He pointed to the man, who appeared to be whispering something important to one of the donkeys.
“He has someplace safe to take you. Stay there. Rest. Get strong, and then go east. I’ve heard it’s quiet there. Whatever you do, don’t come back. Also, don’t go south; I hear there are problems there.”
“And north?”
“Not so good. There are more problems.”
“And what will you do?”
He threw his arm around my shoulder. He pointed straight ahead and then slowly moved his finger from left to right, drawing an imaginary line across the horizon.
“There is nothing else out there for me except this?”
We had more we wanted to say — there were apologies that should have been made, forgiveness to have been granted — but the village was waking up, despite the late night. We could smell the charcoal burning in the gardens and hear people in the street. Joseph was certainly up by now.
“How long will you be gone?” I asked him.
“Joseph says it should be over in two days. He says there will be no resistance.”
It was the wrong question to ask when saying goodbye. The talk of war turned him. He snapped back into form.
“Enough of this,” he said.
He held out his hand. I shook it. He took a bundle of notes from his pocket and gave it to the man. They talked between themselves for a few seconds, and then Isaac gave him a pat on the back of his head. Before walking away, he said, “One donkey is yours if you want to keep it.”
Isaac turned south, back to the hotel, while I headed west, along the same path the man and his boy had come from. One of the small wonders of village life was how quickly nature reclaimed its dominance, as if the life of a town was little more than a minor disturbance to an otherwise wild world. After a few minutes of walking, there was hardly any sound other than that of birds; by the time we had traveled a half-mile, the trees had all but swallowed the footpath we were on. We walked for more than an hour, until we reached a clearing where maybe a dozen thatch-roofed huts stood a few feet apart from one another, each surrounded by a wooden fence to pen in the chickens, and the children when the adults were away. It was the idyllic corner of the world I had been hoping to find, and though that vision was little more than the fantasy of someone desperate for refuge, I was determined to preserve it for as long as possible. I knew it wouldn’t last; even if there wasn’t a war on the horizon, if I stayed long enough I’d find all the petty complaints and frustrations of life here just as easily I had found them in the capital and in my own childhood home. But there wasn’t much time anyway: Joseph’s soldiers were going to take the next city that evening, which meant many of them would leave within the hour. If they won, they would return within the next few days; if they were slaughtered, the army would finish the rest of them, holed up at the hotel. In either case, it was only a matter of time before nothing was safe.
During the three days I lived in that enclave, I learned there was pleasure to be found in anonymity. Of the forty-five people that I was certain lived there most of the year, all knew only one thing about me — that I was hiding and had the money to pay not to be found. I told the man who escorted me to the village my real name, the one given to me at birth. Both he and his son laughed when they tried to pronounce it, and each had his own variation. We had a few common words among us, which took all the pressure off the silence and left me happily wordless. By the time we arrived at the clearing, my name had been transformed into Daniel — a Biblically familiar name among the devoutly Christian people who lived there. I enjoyed hearing the children say it. It sounded like a song. They were the ones who spoke to me most often. They watched me closely the first day I was there, seemingly incapable of exhausting their interest in me and in the pleasure they took in saying “Hello, Daniel,” or “Okay, Daniel,” every time I moved so much as an inch.
I stayed in a thatch-roofed hut next to where the man and his son lived with a much older woman whom I took to be the man’s mother or grandmother. Unlike in most villages I knew, women were scarce here, not men. Among the few there, most were in the last half of their lives. There were dozens of children, however, both girls and boys, so the loss of women was clearly recent. It was easy enough to guess what might have happened, but I refused to think too long on it. I wanted silence, and that was what I had been given.
That first night alone, I had to contend with knowing Isaac was out there fighting. Initially, I found myself praying for his safe return, but I cut that thought short as well; his win could only be the product of someone else’s loss, and the same held true the other way. Before sleeping, I settled on a simple enough prayer, made without fealty to any faith or cause: Have mercy on them all.
HELEN
My mother waved goodbye to us from the porch, with one hand on the screen door. She watched as Isaac and I got into the car, and was still standing outside as I steered us back onto the road. She waited until we were out of sight before letting go of the door. I knew that she would take either the wicker chair at the far end of the porch, or the rocking chair that sat in the middle. Whichever one she chose, she would remain there for hours. This was what she always did. We rarely had guests, and when they did come, she would walk them to their car and remain on the porch a while longer, as if she wasn’t sure they were really gone, or was reluctant to go back into the house because they were. When I looked back and saw her still on the porch, I knew she would stay out there longer than normal, wondering if she had lost me, and if she had, how much longer she could bear living in such an empty house by herself.
I worried that I was being too quiet now that Isaac and I were alone again, but when I looked over he seemed equally removed, his gaze fixed on the soy fields outside his window. When we reached a red light, he asked if it was hard for my mother to live in such a big house. He didn’t say she was alone, or lonely, but that was implied; he didn’t say “big house,” either. He referred to it as a house with so many rooms, as if it wasn’t the scale that mattered but the way the space had been divided. I wasn’t listening closely enough to understand the distinction at the time, but I knew he had chosen those words for a reason.
The simple answer to his question was yes, but I was unwilling to admit that. Her loneliness had multiple strains; as her daughter, I knew each and every one, and tended to them from a distance.
“Why would it be hard? She’s very comfortable. She has everything she needs, and I still live there.”
Comfort wasn’t the point, though, and it was meaningless to claim to Isaac that I lived there.
“You are right. Forget what I said.”
When we neared downtown, I told Isaac I wanted to make a brief detour to visit an old client. I had thought of Rose as soon as I had thought of Chicago, but never with the intention of visiting her. Like my mother, she lived alone, but she was much older and had far less space. At least a month had gone by since I had last spoken to her, more since I had gone to her house.
“You can wait in the car this time,” I said. “It will only take a few minutes. She’s an old woman. She’s not comfortable with strangers.”
I imagined finding Rose sitting on her couch, gracefully looking through old photos when I arrived. She would tell me that all was fine, her health and her home, and I would tell her that I was on my way now to Chicago with a man I loved, and that, in honor of her, we would stay at the Knickerbocker Hotel, perhaps in the same room that Al Capone had once lived in.