A Time of Miracles (2 page)

MY
oldest memories date back to 1992, when Gloria and I lived in the Complex with other refugee families. I don’t remember the name of the town. I am nearly seven. It is winter, and we no longer have electricity or heat because of the war.

There is a smell of laundry mingled with that of vinegar.

Women are gathered in the center of the courtyard, around a huge iron vat set above blazing logs. The skin on their bare arms is red up to the elbows. They speak and laugh loudly. As the laundry boils in the scum of our dirt, a cloud of steam rises, leaving a thick condensation on the window-panes of the floors above.

Farther away, under the canopy, creepy Sergei sharpens his razor.
Schlick, schlick, schlick
.

He calls us over, one by one.

“You! Come here!” he hollers.

Creepy Sergei doesn’t know our names. There are too
many kids in the Complex, and he drinks so heavily that his memory is completely shot. He just yells, “You,” as he points his razor at one of us. Nobody dares disobey him, because we’re terrified of his upturned eye and his flattened nose.

Before becoming a barber, creepy Sergei was a boxer, the best one in town, or so they say. But everything changed the day a high-strung Armenian knocked him out cold. It was before the war. According to Gloria, on that day Sergei had a brush with death. That makes him special now, and he deserves our respect. So when he points his razor at me, I dash under the canopy.

I sit on the three-legged stool, my back turned to him, my heart beating madly, and I lean my head back. Sergei’s razor cuts across my scalp, his strokes methodical, until all my hair falls to the ground. Then creepy Sergei dips a towel in a barrel of vinegar and rubs my head with it. My scalp stings. I whine. He pushes me from the stool.

“Go see your mother, little brat!” he says.

I stand up, my head shorn and filled with a vague pain, and I rush to snuggle in Gloria’s arms. She’s not my mother, but she’s all I have.

“Beautiful!” she exclaims as she runs her soapy hands over my skull.

I look up at her and she bends down to kiss my cheek. “You’re truly magnificent, Monsieur Blaise,” she adds.

I smile through my tears. I love it when she calls me “Mr. Blaise” in French, because no one else can understand.

“Now go and play, Koumaïl,” she says loudly. “You can see I’m busy!”

I dry my eyes and run off to join the group of shaved kids who are playing in the courtyard.

The laundry, the laughter, the razor, the vinegar … that’s how we wage war against lice, fleas, and all forms of parasites—including, according to Gloria, the most feared parasite of all, despair. Despair, she says, is more dangerous and more clever than the Armenian who knocked out Sergei. It is invisible and slips into everything. If you don’t fight against it, it nibbles at your soul. But how do you know you’ve caught a despair if you can’t even see it? I wonder. What do you do if even the razor can’t get rid of it? Gloria holds me tight against her chest when I ask her about this. She explains that she has a cure.

“As long as you stay close to me, nothing bad will happen to you, OK?”

“OK.”

THE
Complex is a group of three buildings that form a U around a courtyard. Gloria and I have a room on the second floor.

I can take six steps from one wall to another, going around the wood-burning stove. The wallpaper is coming loose, and behind it the paint is chipping. When I scratch the plaster with my nail, the bricks appear. The Complex is full of cracks—totally eaten away by the dampness that seeps up from the ground because it’s built near a river. It’s so rotten that it was supposed to be demolished, but the war stopped the bulldozers; now it’s our refuge, a good hiding place that protects us from the wind and the militia.

I’m very familiar with the wind: it blows down from the mountains as fast as an avalanche and rushes under doors to freeze you to the bone. But I have no idea what the militia is. All I know is that it scares me even more than Sergei’s upturned eye, and that everybody here has some reason to be wary of it. That’s why we’ve set up rotating shifts of
people who keep watch: night after night, teams of four take turns watching the entrance to the Complex. Kids can hang around only if the grown-ups allow them to.

I was told that if I see men wearing boots, if I see their leather jackets and their clubs, I’m supposed to rush into the courtyard and pull hard on the bell that’s suspended under the canopy.

There are three other times when we’re supposed to ring the bell with all our might:

Except under these circumstances, no one is to touch the bell. If you do, you’ll be immediately expelled from the Complex.

When I ask Gloria what the militia would do if it were to catch us, her face hardens and I regret my question.

“A seven-year-old boy doesn’t need to know everything,” she tells me. “Just be satisfied following the rules, Koumaïl.”

I nod and go off to play with the others in the stairwell. Depending on our mood, the staircase becomes our fortress or our warship.

My playmates are Emil, Baksa, Rebeka, Tasmin, and Faïna. They are thin and lice-ridden, as supple as eels. Some speak Russian like me, others not, but children don’t need words to understand each other. We run until we’re out of breath. We sprint up and down the stairs. We hide in the
toilets, or behind the sheets that are drying on the roof, all the better to scare old Mrs. Hanska. Our laughter echoes throughout the Complex, from top to bottom, faster than any draft.

Gloria says that she likes to hear me laugh, that laughter is the most important thing in the world.

I like to hear Gloria laughing too. But Gloria also coughs, which I don’t like to hear. Coughing makes her turn purple, and she loses her breath; I have the impression that a great big dog is barking inside her chest. I’m no doctor, but it’s not hard to guess that her cough sounds deadly. What would happen if Gloria were to die? I worry.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk!” she says, and laughs when her coughing fit ends. “Don’t look so gloomy. You’re not burying me yet, Monsieur Blaise! You know very well that I’m as sturdy as the trees. Now come on, Koumaïl! Go and fetch us some water if you want to eat tonight!”

I hurry with the bucket to the hose in the courtyard. I’m always ready to help or to do somebody a favor because I’m in a rush to grow up. I sense that the world in which we live is hostile to children. I dream of the day when my legs will be long enough that I can run very fast, and when I will be strong enough to carry the khaki canvas bag that Gloria calls our “gear.”

Ever since we’ve lived in the Complex, the gear has been put away on a shelf just above the door. For the time being, it contains only the tin box where Gloria hides her secrets, and I am not allowed to open it.

Everything else we have is scattered in the room—our clothes, my green atlas, the blankets, the basic cooking
utensils, the stringless violin, the radio, and Vassili’s samovar to make tea. If I ever hear the bell ring, I know what to do: climb on a chair, grab the gear, and stuff it with our belongings as fast as I can. Sometimes I train mentally for this emergency—the chair, the gear, the belongings—and I imagine how the Complex will empty itself of its occupants as quickly as a draining bathtub. I ask Gloria what we would do next.

She shrugs. “Exactly what we’ve done so far, Koumaïl,” she says. “We will walk straight in front of us toward a new horizon.”

“OK.”

In the Complex everybody has a story to tell. Whether it’s about earthquakes, collapsed mines, jail terms, poker games in shady ports, childbirths, separations, or reunions. Even Old Max will tell you how he lost three of his fingers when he worked in a slaughterhouse. Everything is new to me; I ask endless questions and I learn fast, but no story fascinates me more than my own, especially when Gloria whispers it in my ear before I go to sleep at night.

“Again?” she asks while putting a log in the stove.

“Yes, again! Don’t leave anything out!” I say.

She sits on the bed. Her face moves in the flickering light of the stove. She pulls the lambskin blanket up to my nose.

“It was the end of summer, and I lived with my father, old Vassili, in his home,” she begins.

“The one who gave you the samovar?”

“Yes, Koumaïl. At that time Vassili owned the most
beautiful orchard in all of the Caucasus. You should have seen the apple trees, pear trees, apricot trees—acres upon acres covered with trees! With the river on one side and the railroad track on the other.”

“That’s where you used to walk with Zemzem!”

A fire lights up in Gloria’s eyes. “Hold on, you’re going too fast. I always tell things properly, in the right order, you know that.”

I take hold of one of her hands and keep quiet. I listen to my story. In the right order.

OLD
Vassili has a long, tapered mustache and wears a pair of suspenders solidly attached to his pants. When he smiles, his mustache tickles his ears, and when he raises his arms to the sky, the suspenders pull up his pants so high that you can see his hairy calves.

Vassili doesn’t smile often. Instead, several times a day, he raises his arms to the sky because life causes him so many worries. He yells at the whole world, but mostly at his workers.

“Hurry up, you bunch of clumsy toads! Easy with the peaches! Gentle with the apricots! And fix the truck before my anger strikes you like lightning!”

Workers bustle about until Vassili curls his mustache and rubs his ulcerated stomach, gripped by his next worry.

Fortunately, Vassili has a beautiful wife, Liuba, who he says is like honey on the rough tongue of life. She has given him six children. Six! Gloria is the only girl.

At night, in the wooden house, the family gathers to
sing, to eat meat patties, and to drink tea from the samovar. They sit in a circle on the rug, the smaller ones between their mother’s legs, the older ones around Vassili. Gloria is always to his left.

“One of these days,” Vassili explains to his sons, “what I own will be yours. Not only the bounty of this land, with its miraculous fruit, but also the headaches that come with it. All of it will be yours! Good riddance! As for me, I’ll finally get to rest. You won’t hear me grumble anymore, and my stomach won’t bother me again.”

Then he turns toward Gloria. “For you it will be different. You will have a choice.”

Gloria frowns. “What do you mean? What choice?” she wants to know.

“You’re my only daughter,” Vassili answers. “If you want this house, it will be yours. But I suspect that you will want to leave.”

Gloria looks at her brothers: Fotia and Oleg, with their broad shoulders; Anatoly, who squints behind his thick glasses; Iefrem, whose hair is curlier than a lamb’s; and Dobromir, with his angelic smile. She looks at Liuba, her mother, who hides her face under the thickness of her black hair. She looks at the ornamentally painted furniture in the house, the rugs, the lamps that cast luminous circles on the walls. Outside she can hear the rustle of the orchard in the night wind. Why isn’t there a place for her in this paradise? she wonders.

“You’re wrong, Vassili. I don’t want to leave!” she says.

To prove it, every day Gloria gathers her hair under a kerchief and does the same thing as her brothers: she slips
on a pair of overalls and goes to work in the orchard. She learns how to take care of the trees, to protect them from parasites, to cover them with nets to keep the birds from picking at their fruit. At harvesttime she’s the first one to climb the ladders, a sack around her neck, the first one to tumble down and run to the truck to unload kilos of apples in the tipper.

She grows up. She becomes as strong as Fotia, her eldest brother, and as tough as Oleg, the second-oldest one.

At sixteen she learns to drive the trucks.

At seventeen she knows how to fix engines and to oil pistons as well as any of Vassili’s other workers. In the evening, her arms dirty with grease, she sits on her father’s left side, her hair undone, as beautiful as a wild plant.

“I don’t want to leave,” she tells him again. “Why do you say I’m different?”

Vassili pulls on his suspenders to make them snap, which means that he doesn’t want to answer.

Yet one day Gloria understands that she isn’t like her brothers. It’s the day she meets Zemzem, at the end of the line of apricot trees, near the railroad track.

Zemzem arrives in a truck with seasonal workers hired by Vassili. There are many of them—young, poor, and dust-covered—but there’s something different about Zemzem. It’s hard to pinpoint—almost as if he has a sun shining above his head. Right away Gloria notices him, and she nearly falls from the ladder when he looks back at her.

At noon she doesn’t mingle with the fruit pickers the way she usually does. She needs to walk and think. Besides, she isn’t hungry. She takes off along the railroad tracks.

When she turns around, Zemzem is there, behind her.

“I saw you take off without bringing any water,” he says. “It’s not good to stay in the sun without drinking.” He hands her his flask. “Here you go.”

Gloria suddenly sits down on one of the railroad ties. She feels dizzy.

“You see?” Zemzem smiles. “You’re exhausted!”

Gloria takes the water. Her cheeks are burning.

“I saw you working,” Zemzem goes on. “Very impressive! You pick fruit faster than anyone else.”

Gloria is unable to utter a single word. They say this is what happens when you fall in love. But all of a sudden the tracks shake.

“The train!” she shouts.

She pushes Zemzem off to the side, where they fall on top of each other.

When the train shoots past them, they’re caught in a swirl of hot, metallic air. Gloria’s heart beats in rhythm with the train,
tack-a-tack-tack, tack-a-tack-tack
. It’s the most beautiful day of her life.

Every day after, they meet at noon by the tracks. They balance themselves on the rails, pretending to be tightrope walkers, and make bets on the promptness of the express train. The train is old and temperamental, but usually at lunchtime they can hear it coming.