Cities of Refuge (20 page)

They swung in off Wellesley and turned into a system of lanes that connected the dozen or so towers. Ahead was an attempted piazza of shadowed concrete and blowing garbage. Rosemary found a parking spot with a view of a line of dumpsters – dumpsters were now a motif of Harold’s attentions. Between two of them several teenage boys were involved in some transaction. They turned and regarded Rosemary’s car and, as if on cue, dispersed without a word.

It was a show, Harold thought. The stylized way they broke, it gave them away as kids, performing.

“How many races did we scare off?” she asked.

“Race is a social construct. My colleagues tell me so.”

“How many, really? I see a couple of South Asians, a black kid, two whites.”

“It’s the national experiment. We’ve been blowing New York and London out of the water for years. The world gathers at our dumpsters.”

Rosemary removed some documents from under her seat, and then a plastic bag of something from the trunk. She walked, Harold followed. They passed an old man in an Afghani hat with a display of knock-off Persian carpets on the sidewalk that looked as if they’d been pulled from front stoops.

“Do you know how many people live here?” she asked.

“I’m guessing no one knows exactly.”

“That’s right. Even if we could settle on a definition of what constitutes living, there’d still be no fixed number.”

“Between birth and death, pretty much everything’s provisional.”

“You might believe that, but I’m just saying there are a lot of people here unofficially.”

“They’re here but they’re not here. They’re here in front of us but they’re not in the country.”

“Yes. Many of them.”

“And right now we’re going to visit some of these people who aren’t here.”

“Off the record,” she said. “Okay?”

In the world but not on the record. Globally, it was the largest category.

In a dim lobby they waited along with a young Indian or Pakistani couple for one of the three elevators to arrive. A full two minutes passed.

On the eighth floor Harold noticed that the corridors, though a little stale, looked well enough maintained. The smell of curry. The building was much like the city itself. The mix of races, histories, living side by side, affording incompatible myths. A crime-ridden, unpoliceable mistake of urban planning. Or a self-maintaining, multi-ethnic community, an asylum from any number of worlds gone wrong.

Small pools of light in each doorway. He thought of library carrels.

Rosemary knocked on two doors. At the first there was no answer. She slipped an envelope underneath. At the second she passed the plastic bag with unknown contents to the man who answered, introduced as Luis. In his thirties, likely, a little soft in the face. Luis affected a great delight at the bag and at meeting Harold. He told Rosemary she looked beautiful and asked
Harold if he didn’t agree. He couldn’t tell whether Luis was truly insincere or only seemed so in translation, but the man didn’t inspire Harold to say anything in Spanish.

They walked down two floors and made a last call. When Rosemary knocked and announced herself, they heard low voices and what Harold imagined to be urgent movements inside. A young African man opened the door. Deep in the room, two women at a table were looking at Harold with grave expressions.

“Jonathan, this is Harold. He’s helping me today.”

Jonathan was taking Harold’s presence very seriously.

“Hello, Harold.”

“Hello.”

Jonathan backed out of the doorway and Rosemary led them into the apartment.

It wasn’t well furnished, there was no television even, but a long window provided a clear view of the downtown and the lake and the islands. The floor was parquet.

Rosemary said hello to the women. They nodded at her. One woman was a little younger and she smiled at Harold. The older woman didn’t acknowledge him. They were sitting there with nothing between them, no newspaper or coffee. Harold couldn’t imagine what they’d been doing a minute ago.

Among the papers for Jonathan was a small envelope. He opened this before examining the documents, and turned his back to the two of them for a moment to look inside. Then he faced them again and nodded slowly to Rosemary.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Do you have those names for me?” she asked.

Jonathan went down the hallway. Harold thought he heard voices, and the older woman at the table began to speak as if to
cover them. She addressed Rosemary in rapid accented English mixed with some other language, and Rosemary asked the young woman to clarify. There was some back and forth before Jonathan returned. Harold understood that nothing had been conveyed.

Jonathan glanced at Harold as he handed Rosemary a paper with handwriting, which she folded and put away.

“Why do you bring this man?” It was the older woman. Her English was thick but confident.

“He needs to know what I do,” she explained. “Don’t worry, you’re safe.”

“Thank you,” said Jonathan.

The older woman got up from the table to watch them leave.

In the car again, Harold was still working over what he’d witnessed. There was no use asking. She would tell him or she wouldn’t.

“I don’t suppose you’ll let me in on that smile,” he said.

“It was the look on your face. You were trying to be a good sport and make sense of what was happening there, but your expression was of disapproval – I don’t know what’s happening here but I object to it.”

“At least it amused you. I’m not quite so naive as you imagine, you know.”

“And I’m not quite so humourless. You think of crusaders as humourless. What else?”

All right, then, he thought, let’s get personal.

“Likely in the aftermath of some trauma of your own.”

“Let’s say a nasty divorce.”

“Will we say that?”

“Yes, actually. But it’s distant now. And I have my humour intact.”

With a crooked smile she seemed to acknowledge a degree of construction in her outward self. In a serious world, she was a serious person, but with a sense of irony, even play. He didn’t buy it.

“You haven’t reassured me that you don’t harbour criminals.”

“Reassuring you wasn’t my intention.”

Without naming countries, she explained that the couple living with Jonathan and his wife were out of options. They’d applied for refugee status and been denied. They’d applied for help from certain organizations and been denied. They had no place to turn. The man sometimes got construction work but most crews wouldn’t hire him. And his English was bad.

“He was a member of the military. He wants refuge because he witnessed tortures and executions and he couldn’t stomach it and he went
AWOL
, and so now the military wants to torture him.”

“But nobody believes the story.”

“There’s not much evidence one way or another, but the Refugee Board and
GROUND
are of the opinion he likely participated in killings.”

“So why do you believe him if they don’t?”

“What if his story is true?”

“What if it isn’t? Suppose they got this one right.”

“Okay, let’s say they did. Are we then relieved of our obligations?”

Here was the resistance he’d been waiting for. Rosemary had people to protect and he wasn’t going to be allowed to threaten them. He would have it out with her, more directly than they’d
squared off over lunch that day, but just now he wanted to keep things civil. There was more to be won with civility. And anyway, he wanted more of her company.

“Do you drink? Do you have time for a drink?”

“So you can work up the courage to accuse me of something again?”

“Maybe.”

They headed south to King Street and found a faux British pub with Guinness on tap and cricket paddles on the wall, a place of the kind that survived on brokers at the market close and tourists after shows. They took seats at the bar, angling towards one another, and the moment their drinks came Rosemary excused herself.

Maybe she wanted him a little loose before they continued. How calculating was she? For some reason he thought it important to establish whether or not she had children. He had theories about how motherhood changed women by revealing to them the incapacities of men for intuitive empathy and selfless love. It was one of the beliefs he held privately, never to be stated. But he’d leave the question unasked or else they were going to knock themselves out trying to open angles on one another.

When his pint was only half gone he noticed a lassitude in his movements, a strain of fatigue that paid off in a keenness in the senses. The teak wainscotting behind the bottles along the bar. Most days you’d look but never see it. The relative weights of sounds in the distance. If you didn’t know steel on steel, would a streetcar seem metal or wind? The twenty-ton pitch of a breeze.

“Sorry.”

She briefly laid her hand on his shoulder as she passed by, a warm, surprise gesture, and took her position on the stool.

“In that apartment. The man in the back room. If he is a
killer, why do you feel an obligation to him? Do you think the country should open itself to every monster who can afford a plane ticket?”

“He’s not a monster. But maybe he was forced to take part in killing. The Lord commanded there be cities of refuge for the manslayer.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Among the Levitical cities, six were designated as cities of refuge.”

“Where the murderers lived.”

“Only those who killed without enmity and were subject to the laws of blood vengeance. They didn’t deserve to die, so they needed a place where they would be safe.”

“You don’t think there’s enmity between a soldier and the person he tortures and kills?”

“If there was, he wouldn’t be able to tell the story the way he does.”

“The Review Board didn’t find his storytelling so convincing. Maybe you’re just …”

“A bleeding heart? As I’ve told you, the board and I aren’t judging the same thing.”

The Lord commanded
. Harold couldn’t trust anyone who’d begin a sentence this way. If he’d tried to picture such a person, she wouldn’t have been wearing a hockey sweater.

“There’s a rumour,” he said. “Women have gone missing recently. Women in this sphere of yours. An Eritrean, a Kurd, and a Russian.”

“Sounds like the start of a joke.”

“Maybe they came through
GROUND
. Maybe the attacker met them where he met Kim.”

“Where did you hear this?”

“It’s out there.”

She closed her hands into half fists and pushed her nearly full pint glass slightly forward like so many stacks of poker chips.

“This is the world we’ve made. Lurid stories are self-generating. They form out of dozens of other stories, some of them true, some not. The pieces break off and recombine.”

“Well this one grew legs. It stood up and made the rounds.”

The lights dimmed.

“These women don’t exist, Harold.”

“They don’t? You know this?”

“They do, but not those three. The story’s true in general but not in particular. The rumour would have you believe they’re being murdered. But if it’s true, then it only happens after we send them back where they came from.”

All of Rosemary’s stakes were in invisible things, her god, the
invisibilia
, her foreigners who didn’t officially exist. Apparently her devotions had made her a great reader of others, and the more you looked at her, the more she saw in you. Yet he couldn’t help but look at her. Her face, her mouth. He wanted to reach out and touch her neck, to feel her hair on the back of his hand, a gesture from his past he’d made once or twice to make himself understood, though it had conveyed only his need, not his meaning.

“Take a thousand people in dire circumstances,” she said. “We take them in, a kind of miracle to them, and support them only enough until they begin to see that they can’t really escape their past here, and many can’t ever have a future. And so they begin to rot. Or we reject them and send them running, with no hope even of basic security. Even if by some sheer luck they get ahead,
they get work and make money and have families, even when they find one hospital that will take care of them, and will bill them but won’t collect, and they find a school for their kids, even then they’re still not safe. There’s every chance that they might be caught and sent back, and so lose even more than they did when they came in the first place. Now they’re in the position of losing their families.” Loud laughter burst from another table. She waited it out, then continued. “And all their hope lies in the possibility of a change in the laws. But nothing happens unless someone tells a single compelling story, usually involving some rare case, between categories, and it hits the news, and pressures form around it, and a minister finds himself under siege, and then maybe a bill or some amendment gets put forward, and it passes or not. But either way, the thousands who aren’t between categories still suffer, hopeless in a new place. They simply exist. Do you understand when I say they exist?”

Her eyes had been steadfast on him the whole time. It was part of the schooling.

“I guess I do.”

“And so rumours of killers, women murdered, they’re not just lurid, giving the citizens what they want. Violent stories. They’re a way of pretending to look without seeing. They allow people to think they’ve recognized a problem, without doing anything about it. They make things worse. They’re loathsome. They’re wicked.”

Her voice was level.

“But people do disappear,” he said.

“Yes. They get detained and deported, they leave on a bus for Montreal, they move to a new neighbourhood, change their friends.”

“My concern, Rosemary, is that you aren’t open to certain thoughts, certain signs. That you’ve got too much invested in your faith in these people. And now even when you’re presented with my reasonable concerns, you aren’t hearing them.”

“I understand them. But on this matter of dangerous foreign-born predators, we each think the other is dead wrong. You should know that I’ve already been through these questions.”

She told him that not so many years ago she’d become close to a young Guatemalan woman, a successful refugee claimant who used to come to the church. She smiled a lot and learned English in daily sessions of Bible study that Rosemary led. One day the study group read of the translation of Elijah, who ascended on a whirlwind to heaven without dying. The young woman – her name was Mariela Cendes – had stated her belief that her own father, who had disappeared in the time of the death squads, had also gained heaven without dying. Then one mid-June day she herself went missing. Her clothes, all her possessions, were still in her room. There was no reason to think she had chosen to go elsewhere.