The Radiant City (17 page)

“But what?”

“It’s well, it’s sort of lonely.”

“Yeah, you could see it that way. Although the light brings something in, don’t you think?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Too bad,” he says gently. The breeze shifts direction and the damp, truffle-y smell of the crypt floats around them.

“You all right, Anthony?”

“Thought I’d beaten down my old ways. All that anger.” He sighs. “What do you think about Suzi and Jack?”

“I’m not sure. I think she might be good for him.”

“I wonder who’s going to be good for us, Matt? Who are we going to be good
for
?” Anthony walks away then, just like that, and the place where he stood feels empty, a vacant spot in the shape of his body.

“Sorry,” says Anthony.

He says the word frequently because he and Saida often collide in the small kitchen. At first this upset her, flustered her, and she flapped tea towels at him to keep him at bay. Now, after more than a week of having him at Chez Elias, it has become something of a joke.

“Your feet,” says Saida.

“Sorry,” he says and looks down to see whose path he is blocking.

“Move back,” says Saida, and she ducks in front of him for reach a plate while he presses up against the counter behind him.

“Sorry,” he says.

“Watch out,” she says, and she swerves around him with a tray of glasses as he chops tomatoes on the big wooden board.

“Sorry,” he says, and now she smiles at him.

She finds him funny, the big black man. Several days after their first meeting he appeared at the café with a plastic container of delicious roast pumpkin soup. The day after that he appeared again, this time with a grated apple tart. The next day, embarrassed by yet another offering—stuffed cèpe mushrooms this time—she had said, “You must stop. Our customers will begin wanting your food instead of ours.”

“Might be to your advantage to put me to work then, don’t you think?”

“Why don’t you chop those onions for me?” And he had. Which is how it began. She had been unsure about him at first, but now she does not know what she would do without him. He is never late. He works with great concentration and enjoyment. He loves the food, loves everything about the restaurant, even the mundane chores like cleaning up and stacking dishes, which he arranges beautifully. It took some time for him to understand the way things work. He doesn’t make connections like other people. He is unable, for example, to look at a menu and then find the corresponding item in the display case. However, once he knows the name of something he never forgets it. He learns in some mysterious way of his own, and her explanations do not help, and so she leaves him to puzzle things out in his own way. What he lacks in associative ability, however, he makes up for in observational skills. His comments about customers make her laugh, particularly since they are delivered in a deeply serious voice.

“Maybe her pantyhose’s too short,” he says about woman who refuses to smile and takes tiny mincing steps.

“I think he’s afraid no one will listen to him,” about a businessman who speaks far too loudly on his cell phone.

Altogether, he is a good employee, and since he works for free—well, for food that he mostly cooks himself—she is well pleased. The only problem is that now Ramzi feels he can do less. This morning, when Ramzi declined to show up at all, Saida decided Anthony would work only three days a week—she would be happy to have him there every day, but she fears if she agreed to that Ramzi would stop coming in completely. Even before Anthony came to them, Ramzi worked less and less, his eyes fixed more firmly on the horizon every morning. There are nights he does not come home and Saida is sure there is a woman somewhere.

If once she thought her brother would help in raising her son, she no longer thinks so. Her son has become even more guarded, at least toward her, and she is frightened. She suspects he has a secret life somewhere that does not include her. And in the back of her mind a bulky shadow appears. He stopped talking about the big man Jack so easily. Too easily, perhaps. She has asked Matthew if he thinks Joseph sees Jack. He says he does not think so but she is not convinced. And so she turns to Anthony at times, since there is no one else, really, for her to talk to. Her father is frailer with every day and the doctors say there is nothing to be done, that he is old and tired, and they shrug in a way that makes her want to pinch them. She cannot burden him more.

“Hey, there’s Joseph,” says Anthony, as he chops parsley. Saida wonders if thinking about her son has drawn him to her.

Saida looks up as he comes into the restaurant. His feet are so big in those sneakers. The laces are untied. She is sure he will trip but says nothing because he has already informed her that this is the style.

“Whattttzzzzuuuuup?” Joseph says and Anthony laughs. This is also a style, apparently, something from an American television commercial.

“Are you hungry?” she says.

“Sure
. Chawarma
?”

“Cut it yourself,” and she hands him a plate.

“Anthony, listen to this.” He pulls the little silver disks that act as headphones from around his neck and puts one up against Anthony’s ear. “Listen. Who is it?” he says, grinning.

Anthony listens for a minute, and then smiles. “Easy. That’s Ice-T. ‘Cop Killer.’”

“Ah, you’re too good!”

“Cop killer?” Saida’s hand rises involuntarily. “Who is a cop killer?”

“Nobody. It’s the name of a song.”

“That’s terrible.”

“It’s political,” says Joseph. “Right?”

“Well, since I used to be a cop, I don’t know how down I am with the sentiment.”

This talk baffles Saida. “How was school?”

Joseph wags his head back and forth.

“What is that? Yes and no? Good and bad?”

“Okay.” He heaps his plate with marinated lamb.

“You have homework?”

“Not much.”

“You must go to the only school in Paris that gives no homework.”

“I didn’t say I don’t have any. I said I didn’t have much.”

“So, what do you have?”

He sits at the counter and shovels food into his mouth, his arm wrapped around the plate, as though he’s afraid someone will steal it. “Some biology.”

“Sit up, Joseph. You look like a gorilla. That’s all?”

“I did the rest.”

“Let me see.”

He sighs and regards her from the great distance of long suffering. “I left it at a friend’s house.”

Saida folds her arms. “Why would you do that?”

“
Imma,”
he rolls his eyes, which she chooses to ignore. “Pierre lives close to the school. I stop there sometimes on the way home and leave books there. You know we have no lockers at school. The books are heavy.”

“I don’t want you to do this. You know I want to see your homework. If the books are too heavy for a delicate boy like you, we can get you one of those carts the old ladies use to bring their groceries home. There, you see, I am smart too. I have come up with a good solution, yes?”

“Right.” Finished with his food, he carries the plate to the dishwasher.

“Rinse it,” Saida says. “I want you to get your books now, from this boy’s house. I want to see your homework.”

“I can’t now. I have to go.”

“What do you mean you have to go? You have to go where?”

“I’m meeting a guy.”

“What guy?”

She can see him thinking, licking the bulge in his lip, searching for a plausible lie. It is so like him not to have something prepared. Her heart contracts with love. “Some guys. We’re going to play soccer.”

“Soccer can wait.”

“I have to go.” Joseph puts his arms around her and kisses her on the top of the head. “I’ll show you later. I promise.”

“Joseph, do not patronize me,” she says in Arabic. “I will not have it.”

“I won’t be late,” he calls. “See you later, Anthony.”

“See you.” Anthony picks up Joseph’s plate from beside the sink where he left it and puts it in the dishwasher.

Saida slaps her cleaning rag against the counter, and then goes to the door and watches her son. At the corner, two boys meet up with him and they go through some sort of hand-shaking ritual, all fists and thumbs and sliding palms. She faintly recognizes the boys
. Are they not the boys she caught with Joseph in the apartment smoking dope?
One of them, the larger one who wears a bandana around his shaved head, passes something to Joseph that he quickly puts in his pocket, and then they split up again. Joseph looks back, checking to see if he is watched. Saida ducks her head inside.
Silly boy! You should have looked before!
When she peeks again a moment later, he has disappeared. She turns and finds Anthony watching her
.

“He’s okay,” says Anthony. “He’s a teenager.”

“This is normal in America? That a boy can do as he pleases at only sixteen, without any thought to his family? To his studies?”

“Teenagers are a pain in the butt the world over, I guess.”

“You think he’s going to play soccer?”

“He said he was. You don’t believe him?”

She wants to tell Anthony what she has seen, ask him what it means. But it is family business, and already too many people are involved in her family. Again, it twitches, a hulking shape, dark in the corner of her mind. “He’s spending time with that man, Jack, isn’t he?”

“Oh. I don’t know. Jack’s got a lady now. And the job at the hostel. I think he’s pretty busy.”

“I hope you’re right,” says Saida.

“Matthew, pick up the phone. Pick up the phone. Pick up the phone. Pick up the phone. Pick up the phone.” Brent speaks so quickly into the machine sounds like a scat singer.

Matthew listens to the messages. The phone has rung six times in the two hours since noon. All of them Brent. He must have risen before dawn and vowed to make harassing Matthew his sole purpose for the day. As Matthew contemplates ripping the phone out of the wall, it rings again. He considers not answering it, but knows Brent will not give up.

“Hello,” he says.

“Where have you been? I haven’t heard from you in three weeks and you promised me you would check in every week.”

“What’s up?”

“What’s up? I’ll tell you what’s up. Publisher says if they don’t see a manuscript before Christmas the deal is off and you have to give back the advance. Which means you are screwed. Screwed. Do you get this?”

“Absolutely.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“You are driving me fucking nuts! I’m gonna have a fucking coronary right here on the phone.”

“I’ve got some stuff.”

“Read me some.”

“You want me to read you something? Now?”

“I do not believe you have anything. I believe you are lying to me. So prove me wrong. I love for people to prove me wrong. Make me happy. Read me, I don’t know, three-four pages.”

“Hang on.” Matthew goes to the desk, pulls out some pages and brings them back to the phone. “Ready?”

“Am I ready, he says. Funny man.”

Sarajevo. Josh, Philip and I sat in Camila’s kitchen trying to ignore the incessant barking of Camila’s dog standing just outside the door, legs splayed, neck thrusting, nearly choking on its tether. The sandy mixed-breed brute had gone crazy from the long months of gunfire and explosions, and lost its ability to differentiate between sounds that foretold danger and normal street noise. It just barked, all day, all night, relieved only by short periods of calm when it collapsed in a quivering heap, worn out by vigilance. Camila thought it would stop soon, because its throat was so raw. Flecks of blood spattered its muzzle now and she felt that in a day or two its vocal chords would blow out completely. She didn’t have the heart to shoot the dog who had, she insisted, a hero’s heart, and so we lived with the racket.

Josh, a photojournalist, was a short, wiry Londoner with a deep resonant voice that didn’t match his blond, elfin face. I had worked with Josh before and was happy to be with him in Sarajevo. He was funny and smart and never seemed to panic or be affected by the dread that sometimes overcame me. Philip was also a Brit, from Guilford, with a shaved head and homemade tattoos on his arms. He chewed at the sides of his nails and spit bits of dried skin on the floor.