At the Edge of Waking Read online

  He just breathed. She wondered if he was sleeping with his eyes open; if he was as starved for sleep as he was for food.

  “If you’re caught, they’ll kill me. And you’d be safer if I go.”

  “ ’s just a snoop,” he said. His words were so slurred that at first she could not understand him. “A snitch. They’re always being killed.” He made a visible effort, wiping his hand across his eyes before he looked at her again. “Eat something. You’ll be sick if you don’t.”

  She held the sandwich out to him. “You eat it. I couldn’t keep it down.”

  He got up and she was sorry she had offered: she had only wanted to shut him up, the way he clung to one thought was unnerving, but she didn’t want him to come so close. It was like feeding the bears at the zoo—she remembered that from her childhood—the dreadful mingling of pity and fear. He took the sandwich as neatly as the bears did, though with no hot breath across her hand, and sat back down on the chair to eat it.

  “If you let me go,” she said, “you wouldn’t have to risk coming here.”

  “It’s not a risk,” he said with his mouth full. There was as much soldier in him as priest. “This is the safest place I know.”

  That he had to kill a man, and run . . . ?

  “But I want to go,” she said, and for an instant was the little girl begging to leave the zoo and go home.

  He finished the last bit of the sandwich and sat as he had before, leaning forward, head bent, eyes looking through the floor. She could see him work his tongue around his mouth and swallow. He’s thirsty and doesn’t even know it, she thought, and drank some soup out of sympathetic reflex.

  “You can’t go yet,” he said, and for a moment she thought that was all he was going to say. But he made another effort, drawing himself upright and glancing at her before he let his gaze drift to a corner of the room. “I’m not keeping you here. But if you go now . . . your hair . . . I don’t have any clothes or papers for you yet.” Another effort. “If you go on the street like that you’ll be picked up immediately, and they’ll shoot you as soon as they know who you are. But if you wait a while . . . You need to grow out your hair, or they’ll ask questions no matter how good your papers are. And I can’t do that yet, the papers, it’s all too unsettled.”

  “When . . . ” she said, but she couldn’t finish. He was killing informers. She was afraid the answer would be Never.

  But he said, “Soon,” as if it didn’t really matter.

  He fell asleep in the chair. It was a straight-backed, armless, wooden chair, and she watched with a kind of fascination as he leaned forward, slowly, slowly, never quite bending at the waist, never quite falling to the floor. She sipped the cooling soup and stroked the stiff stubble on her scalp, and had a hard time thinking about the practicalities of her situation. He was so strange, and his presence so thoroughly filled the room. Su— the hospital’s voice said. He sat bolt upright and stared about him, his eyes fixed and wild, still mostly asleep. He terrified her. She slipped out of the cot and said softly, “Lie down. Lie down.”

  She wasn’t sure that he heard her, or even registered her presence, but he did lie down. He even took off his belt and holster and jacket, hanging them over the back of the chair, before he did. She stood in the corner watching him pull the blankets across his chest and fall instantly asleep again. After several minutes, she eased herself over to the chair, pulled her knees up against her chest, and watched him sleep. The buckle of his gun belt prodded her in the back.

  Ta— the voice said, and his eyelids twitched with his dreams.

  He left when it was still dark. When the light came she took his stash of books into the outer room and sat under the window, reading. Birds came and went in the abandoned courtyard, pigeons and sparrows that knew no seasons, browsing for food among the weeds. They made good companions for her; she was browsing more than reading, and his books were all pastoral novels, sunlit and serene. She could tell his favorite passages by the dog-ears and the cracks in the spine, and they were all panegyrics on the quiet beauties of the countryside. Pages of deep blankets of snow muffling the warm cottages; pages of burning autumn leaves and rustling bracken; pages of those first tender budding leaves of spring. She remembered him desperate for food and sleep, and thought of him now, desperate for this: escape, quiet, peace. Did they all, all those deadly men in their brown uniforms, long for this? Did every one of them—spying, threatening, killing—dream of lying down under a flowering hedgerow and sleeping with the music of the birds in his ears?

  Ho— said the voice. She had the feeling of someone reading over her shoulder and closed the book. Pity and fear, she thought. The poor bears in their cage must have suffered the same longing. A—

  “Hush,” she said.

  But the ghosts, if ghosts they were, only seemed to gain vigor, as though they drew energy from her presence, or from his coming and going. She heard with such perfect clarity the rattle and slosh of a janitor mopping the floor outside that she could not forbear from getting up and opening the door, as though she might catch him in the act. But there was no ghostly form, no shadow, no mist. Just the sound, and that cut off abruptly a moment later, as though that fragment of tape had run its course. There seemed no more point to it than there was to the bits of words that fell about her ears, and she had a sense, not of a haunting, but of random pieces of the past being shaken out of the walls like dead moths being shaken out of a spiderweb by a breeze.

  He came back and found her dozing over one of his books. She woke afraid, having felt him standing over her in her sleep. She looked up—he seemed immensely tall—and he bent and took the book out of her hands. All the other books were scattered around her on the dirty floor; she remembered something she had known once, that books, especially other people’s books, were to be treated with more respect. Like other people’s property, other people’s privacy. He stood there in his uniform that had no respect for either, and she looked up at him in her guilt and waited for the hammer to fall. But he only knelt and picked up the other books, one at a time, brushing off the covers and tucking them carefully in the crook of his arm. He was very close; she could see the lines at the corner of his eye, the knot of muscle in his jaw. “I’m sorry,” she said, and froze him with a touch on his arm.

  Where did it come from, that human impulse? It was like a relic from the past, a fossil from a former age. Maybe it was just another ghost of this place, another moth, dead and dry, shaken loose by the breeze of his passing. He picked up the last book and carried it with the rest into the inner room.

  He carried her food in his briefcase, and today she caught sight of the papers inside. What could they be about? she wondered. Whose life, whose captivity, whose death? But then she forgot about them at the wholly unexpected sight of an orange. An orange! It was a very orange orange, and even in the gloom of the windowless room it seemed to glow. The oils of the zest filled the air with a sharp, sweet scent as he peeled it. She watched his hands with close attention—she on the cot, he on the chair in the middle of the room—as he loosened the rind with his thumbs. It was a thick rind and it came away in three big sections that he fitted together like bowls and set beside him on the floor. Then he divided the orange, prying it into halves. He reached out to hand her one of these; she craned off the edge of the cot to receive it. He, who had probably seen many oranges over the years, ate his one section at a time, neatly, his eyes abstracted. She ate hers like a savage, biting into the whole half at once, filling her mouth with the juice. It stung the sores on her gums, but that wasn’t what brought tears to her eyes. She felt as though she had tasted nothing, smelled nothing, seen no color, for the whole term of her incarceration. When she was done she sucked the juice off her fingers, and tasted book-ink as well as orange.

  “Here,” he said.

  She looked up. He was offering her his last few sections of orange. She shied away, shook her head, confounded.

  “Take it,” he said. “I can always get anot
her.”

  She had thought he was feeding her, his captive, his chore. She had not thought they were sharing. She did not know how to respond.

  He got up and came over to put the sections in her hand. “You need it more than I do,” he said, and turned to the stove to heat up a tin of beans.

  “Why—” she said, and stopped to wonder why it had taken her so long to think of the question.

  He opened the tin, shook the beans into the pot, lit the stove.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  He put the pot on the stove, gave the beans a stir.

  “Why do you do this? You’re an officer. You killed men in your own service to save me. There must be a reason why.”

  “Because it needs to be done,” he said without turning.

  “But you joined the service. You must have applied, trained. You must have wanted to be an officer.”

  “And that’s why I need to do it.” He tapped the spoon against the side of the pot and turned to face her. “You haven’t asked me about your family.”

  This was clearly a riposte, a blow exchanged for her blow. It was well aimed. She dropped her gaze and turned her face away.

  “Your brother deserted, fled the country. Your father refused to do his part in your brother’s recapture, but they caught him anyway. He was shot trying to escape, or just shot, it makes no difference, and your father’s in jail. So you’d failed in your role, you see? You were supposed to buy their good behavior, and you failed. That’s why you were to be shot. It was a punishment for failure.”

  She stared at him and cried, “But is that really how they think?”

  “Of course.” He turned back to stir the beans.

  She went on staring at the brown expanse of his back. “So why don’t you think that way?” she said at last.

  “But I do think that way,” he said. “Everywhere but here, I do. That’s why they won’t catch me, you see. Because I’m loyal everywhere but here.”

  With nothing to say, she ate the rest of the orange.

  They shared the pot of beans, she eating from the mug with the spoon, he, from the bowl with scraps of bread. He washed everything in the sink in the lavatory, then made a pot of instant coffee with the rusty tap water. And then he just sat in the spare wooden chair, being disloyal.

  The scream came again, loud and intimate and bitten off as before, and she woke knowing that was what had awakened her, though she had only heard it in her sleep. She had told herself that the ghosts could not frighten her, but now she lay in a knot of blankets with her heart beating fast and her lungs starved for air. He had left her at twilight, and when she opened her eyes and saw the faint light filtering through from the outer room she thought he had just gone. But no, she had been asleep for hours, she could remember her dreams. Go— the voice said, and she remembered her brother was dead.

  Part of the hospital had been burned—she supposed that was why it had been condemned—and sometimes she heard the insinuating whisper of the long-dead flames. She heard them now, and felt a roughness in her throat, and was compelled to get up and make sure it was only a ghost-fire, not a real one. She was alive enough to feel a horror of burning. She had got only as far as the outer room when the sound stopped. Ru— the voice said in her ear. Sick and groggy from the hurried awakening, she shuffled on cold feet to the window. Dawn was just starting to lighten the air, and it seemed as though only the air was brightening; the sky and the well of the courtyard were black. While she stood there, pulling at a blanket so that it hung more evenly about her shoulders and thinking that her sore throat must be the beginning of a cold, a light appeared in one of the windows across the way. It illuminated nothing but the filthy glass of the window, made a fleeting lighthouse sweep and was gone. So that was where he got in, she thought. And then she thought: suppose it was not he? Suppose he had been followed? Suppose he had betrayed her.

  The corridor was pitch black once she had turned the first corner. She thought with longing of the open wards upstairs, the wide hallway that led from one end of the wing to the other. This floor was a maze, a convolution of the dark. Li— said the voice in her ear, and she had a moment of panic that she could not get away, even from this. Her groping hand found a doorjamb, a doorknob. She opened the door—it whispered across the gritty floor—and crept inside the lightless room.

  She forgot what she was afraid of. Hiding seemed to make its own reasons, its own fear. She huddled inside the door, listening, as she scarcely had before, to the hospital’s emptiness. A single step outside the door, the distant dripping of a rusted pipe, a child’s voice raised in complaint and cut off, always cut off. The rattle of a curtain drawn on its metal rings, she knew the sound, a worn curtain drawn briskly, brusquely, to hide the gruesome procedure, the suffering, the corpse. She knew the sound, and knew that it was with her in the room, behind her in the dark.

  A rusted flake of the past, a nothing, a ghost. She turned, with her back pressed to the door so as not to lose her bearings—in the perfect darkness there was no direction, no distance, no boundaries to the room. If it was a room. It was as dark as the inside of her skull. And the haunting did not stop with that sound, the harsh scrape of curtain-rings on a metal rod. There was the intermittent whine of breath, caught in pain and released in a whimper that tries not to be heard, a thin, stifled ah! And other breathing, harsher, the breath of exertion. And other sounds, damp sounds, and a soft, muffled crunch, the sound of kitchen shears severing a chicken’s wing.

  She turned back to the door and fumbled it open, stepped out into the equally black hall. One step, and she was enveloped, immersed, in the folds of a curtain. Ah—! said the voice, and the curtain, thin and damp, pressed close to her face, her mouth, and her arms, even her shins. She jerked back. It clung. She put out her hands, prying away from her mouth and nose, feeling the impossible pressure, the restraint. She pushed hard, made her fingers into claws, and tore through, and ran in the dark to the open door of the room and the window that was growing light, and found him waiting for her there.

  The lavatory had no mirror, but she knew, by the change of texture under her palms, that her hair was growing in. No longer than his, perhaps, but the stiff stubble had changed to a close cap of fur. Too short still, and she knew they would be looking for her, but how long . . . ? She asked him: “How long will I have to stay here?”

  “It isn’t safe yet. They’re looking hard, because of the men who were killed.”

  The men he had killed.

  He seemed to have recognized the quality of her hunger, and had brought her an apple and a thick-skinned winter carrot, which he cut into thin, uniform slices with a large pocket knife. She had not forgotten the day he had come with blood on his hands, and watched his hands, the knife, with a chill under her skin. But she could smell the apple like a draft from the pages of one of his books.

  “You must have other safe houses,” she said, forcing her gaze away. “Your friends . . . ”

  “Friends?” He pronounced the word oddly, as though it were new to him.

  “Your organization.”

  He did not look up, though the apple was sliced and pared, the carrot cut into fingers thinner than hers. Misgiving shook her.

  “You said . . . you had a system. You said . . . an organization . . . ”

  He wiped the knife, folded it and put it away.

  “Well, don’t you? Someone to get me a, a wig, and clothes, and—papers—you said—”

  He looked at her at last. “I can find those things. When they are not watching me so closely.”

  A white flame ignited in her skull. “You don’t have any friends, do you?”

  He looked away, stood with his empty hands at his sides.

  “Do you? No organization, no system. Just you, hiding in this room.”

  He had a statue’s eyes, cold and blind. “I signed the order,” he said.

  The order . . . for her rescue? She couldn’t make sense of it, of him. The white flame guttered
into confusion.

  “I signed the order,” he said, “and then I came here. To think. It’s the only place safe enough to think in. And I thought: it’s supposed to be a hospital. I thought: it’s supposed to be for healing the sick, for giving peace to the troubled. And I thought: death is a kind of peace. But still, I thought. Still. I can’t help but think there are other kinds of peace. And it wasn’t your fault, in the end. Your brother, your father. It wasn’t your fault they didn’t care enough in the end. So then I came to wish it was undone. And I did what I could, to undo it.”

  She sat in silence, piecing together the meaning of all this. The order, she thought. The order he had signed was to have her killed. And the hospital he was talking about wasn’t this one, but the one in which she had been a prisoner. Peace to the troubled. This place, those books. Peace to the troubled. He was insane.

  She hardly knew whether the pity she felt was for him or herself, but it was as intense in this moment as grief.

  “But you can still help me,” she said, more in response to this last realization than to what he had said. “You can still get me clothes, and papers. You can still . . . ” Her voice failed on a breath of tears. “You can still . . . let me go.”

  “It isn’t safe yet,” he said, and stirred, the statue come back to some semblance of life. “Not yet. Maybe in the spring.”

  Spring, she thought, when the tender leaves were budding in the pastoral woods, in some chapter of a book.

  “That would be . . . nice,” she said raggedly, carefully. “Maybe then we . . . could go into the country. When the flowers are blooming. In the spring.”

  His face softened, the strain in his body eased. He smiled—but it was as though his mouth was unaware of the blank despair in his eyes, the collapse of his mind. He turned and placed the apple and carrot slices in the bowl.

  “Here,” he said. “It will do you good.”

  She took the bowl, and coughed.

  Country Mothers’ Sons

  Now we live on the edge of the bombed quarter of the Parish of St. Quatain in the City of Mondevalcón. The buildings are crooked here, tall tenements shoved awry by the bomb blasts and scorched by the fires. At home in our valleys we whitewashed the houses every spring, even the poorest of us, brightening away the winter’s soot. Here, for all the rent we pay, the landlords say they are too poor to paint, and we live in a dark gray soot-streaked world, leaning away from the wind and the dirty rain. Spring comes as weeds sprouting in the empty lots where no one has yet begun to build. Build what? We are outside the rumors, we who only moved here after the war. My village was only a hundred miles away, but I am a foreigner here. Stubbornly, like most of us, I am still in my heart a native of my village; I only happen to live in this alien place.