Knife Fight and Other Struggles (8 page)

You smell of piss. I wonder if you know that? I wonder how much you know, locked in that skull of yours? I can see you now, in your old hospital bed.

I can see the leather straps that McGill uses to keep you still . . . to keep you from harming yourself, or burning the place down, or harming him. You could still do a lot of harm—you were always a big girl. I remember how you held down that boy I took, down south, as you slid your thick thumb into his skull and sent me back to hell.

Even then you
stank
.

Are you in hell now? Trapped in that confused swamp of shit that fills your skull these days? Is there any hope you have left?

I’m on your bed now. You can feel me clambering over your fat leg. It’s not easy—I’m pushing this little one to its limits to make my way up your torso, over your sagging, spent teats, to your face—your rheumy, drooping eyes.

I want to make sure that you know. McGill is lost. You have no son. Really, as I’ve proven, you never fully did.

Now, my dear old friend, all the world is only you, and I.

We three ate lunch outside in the springtime. There was a picnic table under a small tree, well out of sight of the loading docks, and it is there we met: Viktor and Ruman and I. We had all come from the old country, the same old country, and I suppose that marked us . . . not in the same way, but as the same, all the same.

Viktor had not been there since he was a child, which was forty years ago, and had worked the warehouse for a decade. The mark was faint on him. Although I had been back more recently—a year earlier—for the solstice festival, I had felt like the alien there, walking the cobbled streets of Radejast alone, among the dancing virgins and the yowling monks in their woven-straw masks . . . the vendors who sold the long, blackened apple dolls of saints I could no longer name.

Ruman, now.

For him, the mark was fresh, for he had just arrived a year and some months ago. His family still lived at home in the smelting town in the southern mountains, waiting for word that he was established enough that they might also make their escape—and profitably join him here.

Maybe he shared his mark; infected us with it too. Maybe that mark pushed the others away from us: or drew us together, and so away from the others.

Maybe this, maybe that. We had a half hour for lunch, and on those fine days that were neither humid nor frigid, the sun only so high at noon, we spent it out of doors. We talked only a little. For truly, we had little in common between us, save our mother tongue and dimming recollections. The conversations we had during that time stand out like horsemen on a plain.

“I am thinking that I am going to be saved,” said Ruman one Tuesday in April. The sky was clouded over us. But Ruman was the greyer.

“What do you mean?” I asked, and Viktor interjected: “He means he’s going back to that church.”

Ruman shrugged and stirred his soup so the colour of beets deepened in it. “I must think of my soul,” he said.

“Shit, Ruman,” I said. “Don’t do it. Those ones will only rob you.”

“No, no,” said Viktor, “they will not rob you. When I came here, I tried a church like that one. No one robbed me. What I gave, I gave. How it went, it went. But I don’t think it saved me.”

Ruman looked up. “You are here, aren’t you?”

“Not because it saved me,” said Viktor.

“Well this is a different church,” said Ruman. “They have a great cross, visible from the motorway. The building is shaped five-sided. And they are all virgins, the women there. The unmarried ones, of course.”

“Ha! Now we come to it!” I said, and Ruman’s grey flesh went a deep red.

“Wife at home,” said Viktor, finger wagging, “wife at home.”

“I just think it’s time to be saved,” said Ruman. And that was the end of that conversation.

Ruman went back to the church.

Did that place save him? I saw no evidence that it had, as we gathered each day in the growing shade of our tree, at our table. Perhaps that is because he did not speak of it. But that was not the only thing. Ruman brought a little pamphlet that he set out one day—it had a painting of a brown-haired, blue-eyed Jesus, spreading his hands over a multitude of sinners, the light spreading around him as though it had substance.

But he displayed it almost with embarrassment, and when Viktor and I spared it only a glance before setting in to our sandwiches, he pulled it back to his lap with something like shame.

After that, the pamphlet was gone. And so we would eat, and sometimes Viktor would talk, I would answer, and in the end we would return to the shadow of the loading bay doors.

And as the days went by, I found I wondered with rather more urgency: did the church save Ruman?

He came to us a thin man, with the long face and dark brows of our kind, pale of flesh and bent of back. Was his colour any deeper, was there more certainty in his eyes as the days went on? Had he put flesh on in his time there? If anything, he seemed the opposite: thinner, his outer layers honed away.

But could I say? And as I considered that, I considered this: could I say how it was that I wondered so, after the health of Ruman’s frail soul?

As the summer deepened, we left the bench to the women from the front office who appreciated the sun more than we. Viktor was so unappreciative that he took the night shift, which he said he preferred in the heat of high summer. As for me—I hefted crates from shelf to belt, and soaked in the heat as it soaked me, and watched Ruman, as he did the same—thin, and bent, and strangely resolute.

And so it was one Thursday afternoon in July that I quietly spoke to Ruman, and the following Sunday, drove with him to church.

Ruman lived in a house in the eastern suburbs, where he rented a room of his own and shared a bathroom and kitchen with five other men. Too many men in the house, and everyone knew it. Ordinarily, he would take a bus from there, after walking ten minutes through twists of the subdivision to the bus stop at the main road—the neighbours’ eyes burning his back as he came and went. His very home was an affront to them.

I didn’t pity him. Three years ago, I lived in a place just as bad, and these days, I lived in an apartment only a little better. I had a car but it was old and forever breaking down; and I’m not sure my life was much improved by having it. But I could tell he was grateful for the lift.

“I thought you might not come,” he said as we pulled away from the house.

“Why not?”

“I thought you were afraid,” he said.

“Afraid?”

“Like Viktor,” he said. “Men from dark places . . . they fear the Light.”

“Men from dark places fear the dark,” I said, and he snorted.

The church was fifteen minutes away from Ruman’s house, in an industrial park like the one in which we worked. And Ruman was right; you could see the cross from the highway. It climbed over the structure on a steel lattice, and at night you could see it would light up. It would glow blue, Ruman explained as I shifted lanes to get off the highway. Why was it called the Good News Happening Congregation, I wondered as we drove past the driveway, looking for a spot on the road. Good News Happening Congregation was stamped out in moveable letters on a sign-board mounted on wheels. Ruman had no proper answer for that.

We crossed a wide parking lot and approached a large bank of glass doors. There were a great many people clustered inside, and more moving in and out. When the doors opened, a burble of music and conversation and laughter drifted out. I speculated that we might be late and worried at the consequences.

“Will the virgins be angry?” I asked, but Ruman straight-facedly reassured me: “This is how it always is.”

He took me through the door and led me inside.

There is a cathedral in the middle of Radejast. It addresses the approaching pilgrim as a fist of granite and slate and limestone, lifting black iron bells and arches and gargoyles to touch the dangled teat of the soot-cloud that ever hangs low over the land. Within: a forest of stone pillars, some carved with the likenesses of Radejast’s saints, some simply chiselled with the mark of its venerable religion—all surrounding the dome, so high and wide that when emerging from the pillars I stumbled beneath it, madly fearful that gravity might suddenly reverse, fling me from the floor, and smash me against the curved mosaics above the whispering gallery.

The Good News Happening Congregation’s hall was larger than Radejast’s cathedral by half: a great circular space beneath a peaked roof, lit from high, clear windows on every side. Behind the pulpit stood a crucifix with a painted sculpture of Jesus Christ bound to it, bright lines of blood trickling down his slender limbs from the crown of thorns he wore. Altogether, it was half-again taller than any similar icon in Radejast.

Surrounding the pulpit, curved rows of folding chairs radiated outward across a floor of polished concrete. Ruman craned his neck in a certain direction and waved. When I looked there, I saw a woman with short blonde hair, a deep tan, beckoning us over. We moved to join her and what turned out to be a group of five more.

“That,” explained Ruman as we made our way down the aisle, “is Cheryl and her friends. But I do not know all their names still,” he added, embarrassed.

“I will introduce myself, then.”

“Thank you.”

“Are they—?”

Ruman cut in. “Stop talking about the virgins. I don’t know.”

But Ruman was wrong. I was not set to mock him, make implications about his wandering attentions, remind him of his wife, as Viktor had that day. Stepping into this vast space, breathing the fresh-scrubbed scent of these pilgrims, I only thought to ask: Are they good people? Because looking across their faces, all of their faces—they seemed like good people to me.

“Well hello there, sleepyhead,” said Cheryl, as we moved to the seats that she and her friends were saving. “Is this your friend?”

I introduced myself and held out my hand, and Cheryl took it in both of hers. “I am sorry we are late,” I said. “My fault.”

“Oh goodness,” said Cheryl. “You’re not late at all. You got Ruman here early.”

“Cheryl’s just saying that Ruman could use some sleep,” said one of the others—black hair and heavyset in a print dress. “Look at the rings under his eyes.” Ruman snorted, half-smiled and looked away.

“I’m Rose,” she said, and added: “God Bless.”

Ruman said “God Bless,” and I said so too, and for the first time of many that morning, we all eight of us joined hands and said it again together.

The morning service went on for some hours. There was singing and some talk from the tall, dark-haired pastor of the congregation, and of course some reading from the Bible. And then came a break, wherein everybody else introduced themselves. There was Rose’s daughter, Lisa; and Mary and Lottie, sisters to one another; and Carrie, who knew Cheryl from high school and had been married to Cheryl’s high school sweetheart until two years ago when he had left Carrie, the city, and the Lord. Both Cheryl and Carrie piously insisted they prayed daily for him. Yet they laughed when I wondered what exactly they prayed their God should do with one such as he.

“You are
bad
,” said Carrie, and Cheryl gave my forearm a gentle slap and shifted so her shoulder rested against mine. I felt a pang—for was I not a guest of Ruman, who had introduced me to these women? It is true that he had a wife in the old country, was bound to her in the ways of our people, and so he could lay no claim to any of these women here. Yet in the riot of our lusts, how often do we heed reason and ignore that deeper voice, speaking to us as it does through the ages?