Cities of Refuge (14 page)

She’s practically crying now. Waiting for the idiot tears, from fear and fatigue. It’s dark but the walls are teeming in the screen-light.

“I’m forgetting something,” she says. “There’s something I know I’m forgetting.”

T
he fire had been contained in the kitchen but the water had run through the floor and ruined a basement apartment so small that there was barely room for the three of them to work. The basement required full guttage. The carpets, ceilings, and walls had to be taken out, new drywall put up and painted. The insulation in the outer walls was soaked through and would freeze in the winter and lose its R-value and so had to be replaced. All objects in the kitchen would have to be hand-cleaned of soot, all surfaces on both floors sprayed with fungicide.

The insurance adjuster and Kevin came through and then went upstairs. As long as an inspector or adjuster was on-site the work crew wasn’t to talk to one another except about the work, and so they were left with their thoughts, and like the others, he supposed, Rodrigo thought about the end of the job and the next two days off. Though he was too young to do so, he thought often about sleep. And always he thought about women and what they wanted. A few nights ago he’d sat in a booth at a club with some Cuban girls and the one next to him had put her hand on his leg under the table and then slid it up and squeezed him until the thump in the music seemed to
come from his ribs while the whole time she and her friends traded stories about men who gave gifts and had money. It was a few minutes before they discovered he had nothing and stopped talking to him, even the one who’d been stroking him. What he wanted was a woman, sexy but not made up, who already had money and wanted to talk, not about herself too much, and not about him, but about the world between them, the city and its seasons or its low forgiving streets that felt narrow and open at once. And this world was right next to the possible world. And they would know not to sleep together right away, because it was different with them, and then in time they would have one another and it would all come at once, the sex and the love, so that they wouldn’t want to be apart. They’d take a trip to Niagara Falls where he’d still never been and have a stranger take their picture, and all around would be young people on honeymoons, but he’d make no comment about them, he’d just let her see and think, and then maybe in another few weeks, one afternoon, just after they’d had sex, he’d tell her he loved her and say nothing more, so that she’d ask about their future, and he’d tell her what he hoped for as if it had not come to him in the moment they’d met.

Kevin had now gone off to another site with the adjuster so Luis and Rodrigo went outside for a break. Over the sound of the negative-air machine Matt called out that he’d take his break later. Luis gave Rodrigo a cigarette. They stood in a small backyard. Matt had told them the neighbourhood was Italian and Portuguese, “Wops and Porkchops,” he’d said. Of these peoples Rodrigo knew only that because of soccer rivalries if he needed a favour from a Portuguese, he should say he was Brazilian but grew up in Colombia. If he needed something
from an Italian he should make it clear he wasn’t Brazilian. In this city, understanding the national grudges was like learning another strange tongue.

— These little places, said Luis. He looked out over the yards marked with wire fences. A few lattice trellises with grapes grown over, small gardens with herbs, tomatoes, red climbing roses. Luis pointed at a long, hanging fruit and said the English word for it. “Zucchini.” Rodrigo repeated it out of habit.

— We don’t want much, do we? Luis asked. A shitty house. With an ugly plant in the garden.

—You’ll buy one someday.

— And I’ll rent you the basement, huh? And you keep it down with the girls. He smiled. Luis had something to say, Rodrigo could tell, but he hadn’t found a way into it yet. Usually you looked at Luis and thought he saw only what was before him, nothing more, nothing less, but now and then he seemed to be seeing something other, as if lost in a thought or the near understanding of a bitter thing he’d always wondered at.

On the drive home that night Luis was silent. He liked to tell Rodrigo he was a brother to him, but he wasn’t really. Luis made a little too much of a show of his actions. What he really wanted, Rodrigo thought, was to clear his debt as fast as he could. Rosemary had helped him get his status and now he was paying her back.

They pulled into the parking lot of a mall and drove to the far north side. Matt was there in his truck, talking on a cellphone. Then they all stood at the back of Matt’s truck and sorted through the stolen things. Luis got out a blanket and laid it on the tailgate and put a few things on it and wrapped them up and put them behind the seat. A glass bowl. A level. A pair of lock-cutters. Kevin
might have known that they took things from the houses now and then, nothing expensive, or that would be missed, but things that might have been lost to fire or water. He didn’t yet know that Matt and Luis were stealing from him.

Into downtown now, Luis drove south along Yonge through all the lights of the stores and the people crossing without warning from side to side, the way they did in Cartagena, but this was not Cartagena, not without the horses and tanks, the stone and sky, the deadly troubles. They turned down a smaller street and ran west for a few blocks and pulled over to the curb. Luis reached under his seat and pulled out an open bottle of rum. He took a drink and passed it over and Rodrigo took a drink.

Luis said he wanted to tell Rodrigo something and made him promise not to repeat it. He said that the woman Rodrigo knew as Maria was not his wife but his wife’s sister. Her name was Teresa. She was here illegally, but soon she would have a place of her own because Maria would come to live with him. No one knew this except Rosemary, who was arranging things for him.

The story was no surprise to Rodrigo, really, but he wondered what story Teresa had told Rosemary. Maybe she said she’d killed someone, maybe her husband in self-defence. Maybe she’d smuggled drugs to pay for an operation. Rodrigo wished Rosemary wouldn’t believe every made-up story because it cheapened his own true one. And yet Maria, or rather Teresa, had always been good to him, and he wanted it all to work out for her too.

Luis talked then about what it was like to live with his wife’s sister. Rodrigo had wondered why she let him go out to the clubs and be with other women. There was never any trouble from her, it seemed. Luis said that when he didn’t come home at night he used the same excuse that Rodrigo did with Rosemary,
that he’d had work, but Teresa knew it wasn’t always true, and he felt bad for her and for Maria. But he was a man and what was he to do?

He took another drink.

— Do you know the English word “standing”? It means
posicion
and
prestigio
. All things claim their place by standing there. And here we are, in this huge, empty country. What right does anyone have to move a man off the place he stands on the earth? He shook his head. These fucking Canadians. Fuck them. I used to know a pipefitter from the Amazon named Gerry. When it was a bad day at work, or someone was treated unfairly, Gerry used to do this with his hands.

Luis propped the bottle between his legs and held his hands before him, palm up.

— He’d say, “We live right here. We take something in hand, and fit it one thing to another in the way that makes sense.”

He let his hands drop. He passed Rodrigo the bottle and then waited until he had it back before continuing.

— Matt’s going to get caught. Kevin might fire all of us, or he might call the police. I can’t get arrested any more than you can. They won’t find the tools but they could charge me with helping you. You can’t work with him anymore, Rodrigo. You need a new job. I’ll tell Rosemary when I drop you off.

They said nothing the rest of the drive, and when he got to the house, Rodrigo went straight downstairs and took a shower while Luis and Rosemary talked. When he came out, she came down and said she’d find him another job soon and he nodded and she left him alone.

There was a dirt path through high grasses he used to walk along at home. When he was sixteen his girl would come to
meet him and they’d go into the grass and make love. He carried a cheap pistol in his belt for protection because the land was between the territories of three gangs who worked for three drug rivals, though most of the time they just shot at one another from a distance and then sometimes, not often, some boys would be dead.

The grass was high. They could hear people walking out on the road. Her name was Taliana and she asked him to be slow with her. They never talked when they were in the grass. They were in danger and talking could give you away.

I
t’s morning. It’s late afternoon. The early light is growing in the room. The room is dark. A young couple in white sheets sleeps in their bed on the floor of the gallery, in high-contrast resolution. The camera there must look down from the ceiling, from where the image here is projected. The room is in Tehran. The gallery is in Toronto. The film is ninety minutes long.

From 2001. It’s called
Sleepers
.

Kim could hear the Persian traffic picking up outside their window. The couple hadn’t quite moved yet.

Sadaf’s friend, a woman named Namjeh, had left her here. She’d greeted her by saying, “Sadaf says you’re very Canadian,” and Kim had to wonder how she’d been represented. She wondered if Namjeh was one of those to whom Sadaf had lent her story for the Immigration and Refugee Board.

When Kim stepped out of the curtained space into the main gallery, Sadaf was waiting for her and thanked her for agreeing to come. She was all casual elegance. A narrow-waisted shirt jacket
and grey pants. Close-toed sandals. The single clip in her hair. All her flourishes were Western. Western or secular or maybe just smart looking, at a good price.

She came forward and kissed Kim on both cheeks, seeming very unlike the woman she’d been. While they walked out and along the street, she even managed small talk, chatting about the neighbourhoods they passed through, a consignment shop, a convenience store advertising dry cleaning and a fax machine, laughing at the remains of a bad parking job, breezing past cops on foot patrol, trying to make sense of a belt of heavy black letters misspelling a title on a rep cinema’s marquee, into the roil of Chinatown, where she stopped at every stand in fascination. Kim read into the simple courtesy of these exchanges evidence of conferred mercy. The Sadaf she’d known months ago, the intense, possibly paranoid woman on the run in an open foreign city, this creature had finally been given some rest. As reinventions went, the new Sadaf made less sense for her breezy ordinariness. She was not an ordinary woman. But the transformation was hopeful, and Kim felt a powerful need to be with it, whatever it meant.

The walk was full of invitations to sense. They passed a naked mannequin in a window, a tailor’s tape coiled on the sidewalk. They headed to the apartment of a friend of Sadaf’s, the open third floor of a huge house on a street fronted by a narrow boulevard. The absent friend was never named. The walls presented an incoherent mix of old snapshots of Namjeh with others in foreign settings, intricate Persian designs without figures, David Milne and Emily Carr posters, and framed texts in three or four languages. The only one in English was untitled. Kim couldn’t tell whether it was a stanza or complete in itself:

They sat on a back deck overlooking a long yard – every house had one, as did the houses on the next street. Taken together, the mostly unfenced yards made you think you were miles away. Old maples, sculpted gardens, grape trellises, juncos and house sparrows. They looked over the quiet scene, drinking herbal tea.

She learned that Namjeh owned the gallery and carried most of the rent in the downtown apartment the two women shared. Was it friendship or economic need that brought them together? Sexual orientation? Why weren’t they sharing tea at the women’s apartment? She tried to remember what she knew about lesbianism and Islamic cultures. Nothing came to mind.

She asked about the poem. Sadaf smiled.

“My friend put up this poem for English visitors. The Sufi mystic Rumi, from the thirteen century. The English know Rumi from Madonna. She knows about the whole world.” Sadaf laughed at Madonna. Kim had never seen her laugh.

And her English ran truer, Kim thought. Even her physical bearing had changed to something looser, more articulate. Kim had tried to rehearse her main questions but didn’t know how to begin into them. How do you think about … ? What have you lost? Have you always carried … ? When if ever did you stop feeling isolated by memory? Do you allow yourself to form such questions? Do you think a woman loses something even in asking them?

Sadaf asked Kim if she was still working at
GROUND
and the museum. She said only no and fell silent. Sadaf looked at her directly, briefly, and then continued speaking about her own life over the past months, the places she’d lived, the jobs she’d had, her friendship with Namjeh, the politics at home, the streak of conservatism in secular Iran, a kind woman who’d given her skirts of her own making.

“You’re not in hiding anymore. Do you still feel you’re in danger?”

“Hiding and danger go together. I disappear from the trouble when I have my real life. When I walk around. When I have the work at the gallery. No one looks for me in the gallery. No one pays attention.”

Yes they do, Kim thought. Sadaf was someone you noticed, no matter what clothes she wore or which room she was in. But she looked worldly, not illegal. Her cosmopolitanism was now her disguise. And yet it might also be a difficulty. Most men and women would find her attractive, but the smart ones would be wary. The very fact of her being here meant she knew more about their world than they did about hers. Knowing half the story was enough to keep them away. It was a problem that Kim had thought about in recent months.