Chop Chop (23 page)

“Stay here,” said my mother. She put me in a pew at the back and went off toward the priest. They talked together in low tones. Concerned, he held his robe of deep tropical green away from the bank of candles. Shadows of a tree reached through the stained glass behind.

“Is it a fatal disease?” I heard him say.

On the walls about him, scenes from the crucifixion.

Jesus is stripped of his garments.

Jesus falls the third time.

“But you must let us know when and we shall pray for him,” said the priest.

Only then did I realize how sick Sam was. So sick, in fact, that my mother and the priest were going to talk to god about it. But something about the way the priest said it rankled me—so casual, as if talking to a higher power were the same as brushing your teeth or cleaning your room. It stripped a lot of magic from the enterprise. I was furious with the priest for that. Here was my mother, ashen with worry, begging him for a miracle, and this scoundrel was waving her implorations away—“Sure, sure!”—as if it were nothing. I'm not sure what my mother thought about it. She's had a lot of practice obscuring these things.

The prayers did not work. Sam walked ever slower. After the second transfusion the footpaths and backwaters were out of the question. His bike bloomed with rust. Again they changed his blood, but Sam was weak from all the secret wars beneath his skin. Bed was the only sure thing. Piles of blankets, and the unnatural sight of my father attending. Cold palms, sour sheets, windows closed to keep the heat, color fading from the cheeks. Too frail to
wipe away the nosebleeds. Stay rested, your loving brother will bring you bowls of soup.

That was my only task. The single thing I was asked to do for Sam. And yet I failed, even in that. I could not understand why my brother would not pull himself together. I felt so ashamed that he had let himself be overcome, that he had allowed this thing to become bigger than him. The boy in front of me was a toothless impersonation of my brother. An insult to the idea of him. This was why I did what I did. Not because I was jealous of him, though he was the better son. No, it was done out of love. I was very young, I know, young and stupid, but I know this much. When I brought him up those bowls of soup I left them on his bedside table a little too far away from him—because I wanted him to get better. Reach for it yourself, that bowl was saying. Have a little strength. If you want it, take it. And if you do, then I'll know you've been hamming up this illness all along. I'll take it as a sign that you're all right.

One day in high summer I came back into Sam's room to fetch the bowl and found the bed empty. For a second I actually wondered if my plan had worked; if he had thrown back the sheets and returned to health. Then I saw the leg sticking out from behind the bed. The angle of it all wrong. I rushed forward, suddenly terrified. Sam lay on the floor between the bed and the bedside table in a heap of thin limbs. His face was turned toward the carpet. A nimbus of blood already framed it, creeping gently outward. I pulled him toward me and held his head in my hands and saw the dark torrent pouring from his nose, the wasps' nest again but worse, much worse. Around his mouth there was blood also. On the bedside table the bowl of soup sat untouched, still that little bit too far away, just as I had left it. Had he tried to reach for it? How else could he have fallen? Had I done this to him?

“What happened?” I cried. “What happened?”

I was desperate to know, mostly desperate to be exonerated. But whatever Sam knew he wasn't saying. He was breathing weakly, his eyes opening and closing, trying to choose what to focus on. I grabbed him under the arms and tried to hoist him up into the bed again as his limbs spooled unhelpfully beneath him. His sick body was slight enough that I could lift it, but his limbs were like cooked spaghetti, pulling the center of gravity with them. And all the while the blood kept running and running, pouring out of him, covering us both. In the end I wrestled him back into bed. I pulled the sheet back over him and dragged the soup bowl nearer in case anyone thought to notice. Then I called desperately for my parents.

My father was the first in. We watched together as the life ran from my brother. We stuffed his nose with tissue and wiped the blood from his mouth. My mother phoned the hospital. We did our best to save him, but he was too frail, too frail to stop his own blood leaving him. We could only watch. That hot summer day Sam died. My mother kept asking how he had fallen. She was repeating it like a mantra. My father said it didn't matter. He saw me standing on the fringes of our tragedy, so quiet and pale, and said we must not blame ourselves. He opened the windows in Sam's room, but there was no breeze to relieve us, only heat.

—

Excerpt from Ramilov's letters, no. 3: There are only three ways out of the Kanun's cycle of revenge.

The targeted man can spend the rest of his life in his house, where it is forbidden to murder him. Or he can retreat to a windowless “tower of refuge,” where he will climb a ladder to the first floor and then pull it up behind him, and where food and drink will be
left outside for as long as he stays. Finally, the avenger can refuse to avenge. He will be served coffee with a bullet in his cup wherever he goes, as a reminder of his cowardice and a sign of his disgrace.

—

Excerpt from Ramilov's letters, no. 4: Mating shortens life.

When I returned to work after the stabbing and the visit home, Harmony came straight up and hugged me, knocking the breath clean out of me. She was so relieved I was all right. The same girl who once pushed my bleeding form aside because I was blocking the mustard, now relieved I was all right. This was an improvement, no question. A worldly betterment not to be ignored.

“It was only a matter of time before something like that happened,” she said with great seriousness. “You were lucky to get out alive.”

For a second I wondered if she knew the truth of it.

“A pair of arseholes,” she went on. “They deserve each other.”

Her understanding: I was the innocent caught between two warring devils.

“I like Ramilov,” I told her.

She looked at me and shook her head sadly.

“No,” she said.

I did like Ramilov, despite the terrible thing he did. Perhaps that's wrong of me, and I should now be trying to disown him. Is it possible to recognize someone's good deeds without tacitly condoning their bad ones? Though that night in the cell had twisted all my feelings, I still hoped to see him freed at the first opportunity. I decided not to push the point with Harmony, however. We were speaking; she was grateful to see me, relieved I was alive. This was the most important thing in the world right now. Why ruin it?

“If you ever need to talk to anyone,” she was saying.

This was an opportunity to be seized.

“I'd like that,” I said.

If she was surprised by my haste she didn't show it.

“But not here,” I told her. “Why don't we go to the park?”

“All right.” She smiled.

“Next Monday, then?” I asked. Excitement was wreaking havoc with the modulations of my voice and I was struggling to control it. “We can go for a walk.”

—

Excerpt from Ramilov's letters, no. 5: Know your chefs.

A very good rule. Some chefs want fussy presentation; some want simplicity. There is no ideal form of a dish. If you put heaven on a plate, someone will always complain that it's too salty or not salty enough. Some like the risotto to be liquid, almost soupy; others want it to stand up by itself. Some will chop the top of a monkey's head off when asked to; others will not. Some bring their world into the kitchen with them; others come from far away with their possessions in a duffel bag and a past they never tell.

In the police station holding cell Ramilov said he knew what he was doing, that I should let him handle it. I was too nice for prison, he said, making
nice
sound like a dirty word, but an ugly, bad-tempered, skull-looking bloke like him could have a fairly quiet time of it.

—

Excerpt from Ramilov's letters, no. 6: Justice in England is open to all—just like the Ritz.

I don't think this is one of Ramilov's, but he says it. The Fat Man has employed some very expensive lawyers who are demanding the maximum possible sentence for Ramilov. But Ramilov's
duty solicitor, an exhausted man of uneven stubble whose tie bears many greasy scales of justice, says they are unlikely to get it. There are mitigating circumstances, not to mention the small matter of why The Fat Man was trying to eat an ape in the first place. I am not filled with confidence. If this fellow misses bits of stubble on his face every morning, what else is he going to miss?

Of course there is a better reason for The Fat Man's lawyers to fail. That is the truth, though Ramilov will be furious with me for saying it.

He did not stab The Fat Man.

I did.

I
felt the anger rising up in me. I saw his intentions to hold Ramilov and Dave and my father, all of us, in fear forever. I heard that wicked mouth bring Sam into it. I let the footprint of history trample my better judgment. I clenched my fist around the cleaver as The Fat Man sneered. I buried it into his straining side. I never wanted to stab him, but he kept shouting and needling—“Be a good son. . . . Don't disappoint your poor old dad”—he made me do it. I laid him out. Monocle. Me. The commis. The fly. On the page, blood is a smooth cleft of a word with high, protecting sides. It is a word, like bed, that was meant for lying in. But as The Fat Man ran crimson at my feet I realized the word and the thing were not the same.

Ramilov made me promise not to tell. He insisted that prison was no place for a massive-faced youth such as I; he could not have it on his conscience. It had all happened so fast anyway, he went on, perhaps he had done it. But I remembered every frame of that last argument with The Fat Man even if Ramilov did not, and I knew what I had done. No matter, he said, sometimes there was a greater truth than fact, and I would have to take his word for it. He had ruined the Gloriana, as The Fat Man said, by leaving it out of the fridge overnight to fester. And he had phoned the Food Standards Authority the day of the dinner, an anonymous call, telling them they would find grounds for closure if they visited the restaurant. He had killed The Swan, he had hurt us all. Amends were called for. Though I could not see him from my cell his voice was
desperate, cracking as he spoke. It sounded a lot like he was crying, which was strange, as Ramilov was not the type to cry over a rotten turkey or a failed restaurant, and certainly not over any grief Bob might have incurred.

All that was by the by, I told him. I had stabbed The Fat Man, and I must pay for it. This was one responsibility I couldn't ignore. Ramilov gave a long exhalation of breath and was quiet awhile before he spoke again.

“You don't get it, do you?” he whispered sadly. “They've got a warrant out for my arrest in Leeds. All that stuff The Fat Man said about the girl—it's true.”

I could not hear it, not then. He had become a mentor to me. I could not rewrite him.

“No, Ramilov, you didn't.”

“She wasn't thirteen. . . . More like fifteen,” he pleaded. “And very mature for her age. I swear I thought she was older.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“Very soon these police officers are going to put all this together,” Ramilov continued, “and I'll be put away for a long time. I'm not walking out of here tomorrow, I know that. I deserve that. But you don't. . . . Only one of us has to go to prison. You could still be free.”

“I'm not going to let you take the blame for my crime,” I told him.

“You fucking idiot!” he shouted. “I'm not a good person! I've done shitty things all my life! I've never been good. I'm asking you. . . . I'm telling you. . . . Let me do something good.”

Spiritually, this argument caught me off guard. The force of his words, pushed through the bars of that holding cell, threw me, and I confess I eventually yielded to his demands. Ramilov made me promise not to tell a soul I did it, and I gave him my word.

But ever since I have been haunted by the idea of Ramilov in prison. Whatever crimes he may have committed, he is innocent of one. I worry about how the wardens treat him, about his cellmate's sense of humor. His letters are always terse, reasonably upbeat—I wonder what they hide. I think of that single night I spent behind bars: the hard bed, the locked door, the stainless steel toilet bowl, the absence of belts and shoelaces, your life around your ankles, the eyes at the door, the terrible weight. Above all, the shame. Night after night, who knows what that must do to a man?

And so, finally, my guilt has won out. Guilt, you understand, for letting another suffer for my actions, for always letting others suffer for my actions—not for any pain The Fat Man might have experienced. It would have been more poetic if that gross tyrant had been attacked by one of his dishes or burst an artery laughing at someone's misfortune, that's all I will concede. On that score I have no regrets (though late at night, when I am alone, I do still see the cleaver opening him up, scoring through the soft fat and flesh, and wish I could forget it). But serving justice to one has dealt injustice to another, and this is what piques my guilt. Ramilov would no doubt say that guilt is a selfish emotion, that he is not an innocent man, that justice steers its own course, and that he'll kill me himself when he gets out.

I have given the matter a lot of thought. To ruin a man's great redeeming statement might, I think, be more brutal than putting a cleaver in his guts. I am sorry if I have thwarted Ramilov's shot at absolution, but I could not leave the truth unsaid. This is my smart apology for a savage act. Whatever comes of this confession, I shall accept.